New Forms and Expressions of Conflict at Work

G. Gall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137304483
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Emprendimiento

This collection analyses new forms and expressions of conflict at work under capitalism. Using theoretical and empirical approaches, it demonstrates an underlying historical continuity to new forms and expressions of conflict at work and a path dependency by country and culture.

1

Introduction – Themes, Concepts and Propositions

Gregor Gall

This collection of chapters on new forms and expressions of conflict at work came about as a result of an intermittent series of thoughts about, reflections upon and responses to reports in the popular and specialist media and discussions during teaching transnational employment relations. Continually, it seemed – if only on an anecdotal and sporadic basis – that forms of conflict about work and employment in and around the workplace were recurring and re-occurring. Yet at the same time, and most obviously with regard to the strike and its apparently declining usage, it also seemed paradoxically that workers in the developed economies of the global north were not engaging in the kind of innovations in (other) forms of tactics and weapons of collective conflict expression that might have been expected given the decline in strikes. The most obvious sectors this pertained to were those of private services where emotional and aesthetic labour have become paramount and, more generally, where the use of information technology is now central to the production, distribution and exchange of goods, services and information. The importance of emotional and aesthetic labour may be regarded as having provided a new foundation upon which worker resistance could rest – such as the smile strike. Similarly, the centrality of information technology may be considered as provided a basis for the acting out of cyber-wars against employers, if not a return to old-fashioned forms of sabotage. And so it seems, on the one hand, many of the old ways of making conflict by workers persist. In this sense, there continues to be a manifest quantitative dimension to the expression of conflict. But, on the other hand, and given the decline of the old ways, there seems to be a gap in the qualitative dimension, whereby new ways of organising work and employment under capitalism do not appear to be bringing forth new ways of workers making conflict. These notions of method displacement, method adaptation and method innovation permeated the aforementioned thoughts and discussions. Consequently, the initiative was taken to provide an extended consideration of some of these issues by drawing upon the work and understanding of a number of academics.

Various implicit propositions underlie many of the chapters. The first is that in examining ‘new’ forms of conflict at work within and under capitalism, there is likely to be little that is fundamentally new in the sense of never before having occurred. This should not come as particularly surprising or shocking for the reason that not only is capitalism not a new system of organising economy and society, but the very continuation of this socio-economic system (despite periods of war, revolution and depression) is likely to give rise to a continuity of responses from wage-labourers in the forms of conflict at work. The second is that as capitalism is now a more globalised system of organising society than ever before, the prospect exists that forms of conflict at work over the terms of wage labour may be variations and replications of already well-established themes. In this sense, we may view forms of conflict as new in that they have been a) used by particular groups of workers for the first time in one particular part of the world, and b) rediscovered by different groups of workers for the first time in a long time. Collectively then, the forms are re-occurring phenomena but now on a global scale. The third is that some minor innovation within existing forms should be anticipated for the way in which capital has globalised itself, and the way it organises and re-organises itself – sometimes in response to challenges from labour – may find its match in the way labour organises itself and responds to capital. This would be to anticipate new spatial and temporal dimensions of labour conflict rather than new forms of labour conflict per se. The fourth is that, because capitalism has not – for a number of reasons – become truly standardised and uniform in the way it operates on this ever more global scale, different countries and regions may retain something of their own particularities, specificities and idiosyncrasies by virtue of varying political and legal cultures and structures, and these will impact upon and influence forms of labour conflict. Consequently, while a tendency towards convergence of forms of labour conflict may be apparent, continuity of difference and divergence are also possible and probable. The final implicit proposition is that if workers’ collective power in the workplace has waned, then it is likely – with the fundamental source of antagonism in work remaining under capitalism – that the organising locus moves to outside the workplace and into areas of public space. This is premised on the desire to avoid de facto acquiescence in the terms of exploitation by finding a more external means of contesting them. All the five propositions are articulated deliberately as propositions – and not hypotheses – not only because they underlie the chapters rather than exist as being established to then be consciously tested in search of a null hypothesis or not, but because the data to test them does not often exist (and cannot be created to do so).

These propositions can be summarised thus – little is fundamentally new; variations take place on already established themes; minor innovation takes place within existing forms; varying political cultures impact upon forms of conflict; and extra-workplace conflict may be a new locus. There is anecdotal evidence that workers have not sought to reinvent the wheel of collectively withdrawing their willingness to work, nor to develop alternatives to it. What may make forms and expressions look ‘new’ is the context, way and frequency in which they are used as well as the way in which workers use them. A number of examples highlight this. Thus, one of the first recorded uses of transport workers working but not collecting fares as a form of industrial action took place in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. Without knowledge of that, the few cases of such action in recent times would seem to be radical innovations (particularly given their usage as part of alliances with members of the travelling public against austerity measures). Similarly, workplace occupations are far from being new. Indeed, the first modern occupation or ‘sit-down’ strike was recorded in 1906 at General Electric in the United States followed by usage in the 1930s in the same country and elsewhere in Italy (1919–1921) and Spain (1936). In this sense, we are locked into both ‘back to the future’ and ‘forward to the past’. The spate of bossnappings in France, however, does appear to have a more recent genesis. It suggests that genuine innovation as per the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in of 1971–1972 or the Lip clock factory work-in in France from 1973–1974 and 1976–1977 is rare – and the instance of the work-in has very seldom been repeated in the global north despite its potential purchase, nor has it evolved into something more potent like a community of work-ins acting as cooperatives. Put together, we can begin to understand why such various aforementioned actions are, in effect, often militant means being used for moderate ends (see Kelly 1996) where the militancy of the modus operandi takes centre stage and compels wider interest. The prevalence of the general strike as a form of generalised political – rather than economic – action which may or may not directly concern matters of work and employment dates back to its first use by the Chartists in Britain in 1842. Since then, it has been used in a diverse array of countries of the global north and south, and in western Europe its usage has increased in recent years (Gall 2013). Yet the deployment of the general strike seventeen times in Greece in a mere two years (2010 and 2011) may suggest that it is not the knockout blow that it might have been thought to be. This does not seem to be wholly dependent upon such actions being discontinuous, that is taken for one or two days, rather than being continuous.

However, and given that production, distribution and exchange remain necessarily highly integrated under globalised capitalism – and in horizontal and vertical as well as spatial and temporal ways – but that these systems are now also more fragile than ever before, this provides the potential lever for workers to not so much develop new tools as finesse old ones. But the opportunities afforded by lean and just-in-time supply chain systems, as well as the extent of the contracting out and outsourcing of activities so that individual companies provide key services to many other companies, do not appear to be being taken up. The strike by Ford workers in Britain in 1988 – which brought Ford production in other parts of Europe to a halt as a result of a just-in-time supply chain – does not seem to have become a template for others. Moreover, with the centrality of information technology, it seems the absence of a revival or re-appearance of widespread sabotage has become increasingly noticeable. This may be taken to suggest that the very rationale of this collection is ill-founded. Whatever the case, the situation demands that the salient questions are asked and investigated in order to generate analysis of what has happened and why, for the presence or absence of phenomenon warrant explanation.

Turning to the chapters themselves, Jacques Bélanger and Paul Edwards begin the collection by discussing the wider meaning of conflict at work as a phenomenon of contestation of the will and power of capital in the employment relationship. They then move to chart some of the issues that others examine in more depth and in particular contexts later in the collection. Following on from this, Robert Hebdon and Sung Chul Noh review the extant literature on conflict at work theory in order to advance our understanding in a more rounded, integrated and comprehensive manner. They then seek to deploy this in order to understand the relationship between different forms or methods of conflict making, laying particular emphasis on a processual perspective. Peter Fleming then provides a thought-provoking essay on workers’ responses to the ever more encompassing and ensnaring experience of capitalist work and employment. He is not concerned as much with flight as fight, and with alternatives to work outside capitalism as within it. These first three chapters form a foundation for a number of country- and issue-specific examinations.

In their chapter on Argentina, Maurizio Atzeni and Pablo Ghigliani document and explain how workplace assemblies and delegate committees have emerged in recent years as alternatives to the established unions, and it is these grassroots bodies which are the main protagonists in the taking of collective industrial action, and often quite radical action at that. Following this, Gregor Gall and Sheila Cohen show that in Britain, and notwithstanding the limitations of available data, there is little evidence to suggest that a displacement effect has taken place as the strike weapon has receded in frequency and not been replaced by other collective means of seeking to express and resolve collective grievances. In her chapter, Fang Lee Cooke surveys and analyses the emerging forms of conflict at work in China. In a situation where state ideology (and consequent legal regulation) did not envisage the need for – nor permit – the right to strike or independent forms of collective organisation (Au and Bai 2010), the forms of resistance have been varied and stratified along a number of axes. After this, Anne Alexander demonstrates that the rediscovery of the strike in Egypt has its roots in the wider political economy of the restructuring of capital and state. Again, the particular trajectory has common elements to those found elsewhere, but its distinctive spatial and temporal dimensions are very much related to changes in Egyptian society (see also Totonchi 2011). Sylvie Contrepois then presents a historical analysis of contemporary industrial conflicts in France in order to explain how and why these contemporary conflicts can be characterised as ‘radical’ compared with past struggles. In her study of Indonesia, Michele Ford explains that the use of different forms of violence by workers, especially the riot, reflects a particular dynamic combination of tradition of protest, high levels of labour exploitation, paucity of rights and under-developed institutionalisation. The corollary has been that workers are relatively open to the use of forms of political protest and activity (see Lane 2010) because certain avenues have been shut off, closed down or limited. In their chapter, Adam Mrozowicki and Małgorzata Maciejewska examine the resistance to the control of capital at the ‘bottom end’ of the labour market in Poland, where a burgeoning stratum of workers perform their labour under conditions of insecure employment and intensified work regimes. Although of a relatively modest depth and extent, the message emerging is that resistance is possible and not futile. Next, Jamie Doucette examines the origins, contours and dynamics of the use of self-immolation and suicide in South Korea as a tool in the struggle for social justice in the workplace. Alongside other tactics like occupation, the suicide tactic reflects much that is particular about South Korean society. Finally, Kim Moody examines why, in the United States, the strike weapon has experienced such considerable decline but has still not been trumped by other alternatives or substitutes. Hence, he returns to the issues of which contextual situations might see the renewal and arising of the strike weapon again.

The collection offers substantive, sometimes theoretical, insights into many of the salient issues about the contemporary nature of the forms and expressions of how workers ‘make conflict’ – or return the gesture – in the prosecution of their collective interests at work. What remains to be explored across a wider terrain and in more probing depth is the significance of these insights across the contexts of time and space. Some of this cannot be done until more time has elapsed in as much as the benefit of hindsight is required, but much else of this cannot be carried out until policy-makers and research funders discontinue their view that workers making conflict is dysfunctional, illegitimate and counter-productive.

References

Au, L-Y. and Bai, R. (2010) ‘Contemporary labor resistance in China, 1989–2009’ WorkingUSA: A Journal of Labor and Society, 13/4: 481–505.

Gall, G. (forthcoming) ‘Labour quiescence continued? Recent strike activity in Western Europe’ Economic and Industrial Democracy.

Kelly, J. (1996) ‘Union militancy and social partnership’ in P. Ackers, C. Smith and P. Smith (eds) The New Workplace and Trade Unionism: critical perspectives on work and organisation, Routledge, London, pp. 77–109.

Lane. M. (2010) ‘Indonesia and the fall of Suharto: proletarian politics in the ‘planet of slums’ era’ WorkingUSA: a journal of labor and society, 13/2: 185–200.

Totonchi, E. (2011) ‘Laboring a democratic spring: the past, present, and future of free trade unions in Egypt’ WorkingUSA: A Journal of Labor and Society, 14/3: 259–83.

2

Conflict and Contestation in the Contemporary World of Work: Theory and Perspectives

Jacques Bélanger and Paul Edwards

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the meaning of ‘conflict’ together with some tools of analysis. The word ‘conflict’ has two distinct senses, namely, underlying antagonisms or clashes of interests, and concrete actions such as strikes. This edited collection addresses primarily the latter, and our purpose here is not to rehearse theory on the former, though we do need to make one fundamental point (in the first section below). The aim, rather, is to lay out some themes in the understanding of conflict in its concrete sense and to suggest ways of tracing it back to more fundamental principles. To underline the focus on the concrete, we use the word contestation. This chapter performs five tasks. First, it defines the focus in terms of contestation. Second, it suggests one way to think about changing patterns of contestation, namely, the idea that it can have alternative forms. Third, it looks at another idea, that of shifts geographically and how we might think of these shifts in terms of the strategies of key actors. Fourth, it turns to the level of the workplace to consider some of the causal influences on patterns of contest. Finally, it illustrates these influences through the example of call centres. Tying these themes together is the idea of locating contestation in underlying causal processes within the organization of work.

Contestation, antagonism and resistance

Tilly (2004: ix) defined contestation as ‘how, when, where and why ordinary people make collective claims on public authorities, other holders of power, competitors, enemies, and objects of popular disapproval’. We follow this definition with delimitation, elaboration and justification. The delimitation is that we are interested in the employment relationship, rather than all areas in which subordinate groups can make claims on the powerful. Claims are most likely to be directed to employers. However, where the state plays a role in the terms of employment, action may be directed against it; protests in several countries against public pension reform would be an instance. The elaboration makes the fundamental point highlighted above. Contestation can be observed in many areas of social life, so what makes the employment relationship distinctive? The answer, rehearsed in many places (e.g. Thompson and Smith 2009), is that conflict in the sense of an organizing principle underlies the employment relationship. The term a ‘structured antagonism’ is often used to capture this idea, and sometimes traced back to its origin (Edwards 1986: 5). We are not concerned here with why such antagonism exists. But the fact of its existence has two crucial implications. First, it makes no sense to ask whether conflict has disappeared, for it necessarily underpins the organization of employment relationships. The more sensible question that informs this edited collection is what strategies employers and workers use to manage the antagonism and why contestation takes particular forms in particular times and places. Second, some scholars like to argue against what they see as a privileging of the capital–labour relation (e.g. Dick 2008). Their grounds for this are that ‘resistance’, as they term it, occurs in many spheres and not just this relation. It is true that resistance can be found in many places, but the employment relation is distinct because antagonism is inscribed into it. This allows us to ground contestation in a view of what that contestation is about, namely, the terms on which work effort is exchanged for pay and other rewards. The relation can be ‘privileged’ because of its distinct properties. This brings us to the justification, which is a second reason for privileging the employment relationship. The anthropologist Michael Brown (1996: 729) complained about the use of the term resistance: almost anything had come to be included as a form of ‘cultural resistance’ including ‘cross-dressing, tattooing, women’s fashions, dirty jokes and rock videos’. There is, thus, no definitional focus. Moreover, he went on, something that the observer chose to identify as resistance was elevated into a high-minded political action. This is to replace analysis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction – Themes, Concepts and Propositions
• 2 Conflict and Contestation in the Contemporary World of Work: Theory and Perspectives
• 3 A Theory of Workplace Conflict Development: From Grievances to Strikes
• 4 A Working Death? Contesting Life Itself in the Bio-Political Organization
• 5 The Re-Emergence of Workplace-Based Organization as the New Expression of Conflict in Argentina
• 6 The Collective Expression of Workplace Grievances in Britain
• 7 New Dynamics of Industrial Conflicts in China: Causes, Expressions and Resolution Alternatives
• 8 Egyptian Workers Rediscover the Strike
• 9 Direct Action in France: A New Phase in Labour–Capital Conflict
• 10 Violent Industrial Protest in Indonesia: Cultural Phenomenon or Legacy of an Authoritarian Past?
• 11 Conflicts at Work in Poland’s New Capitalism: Worker Resistance in a Flexible Work Regime
• 12 Minjung Tactics in a Post-Minjung Era? The Survival of Self-Immolation and Traumatic Forms of Labour Protest in South Korea
• 13 Striking Out in America: Is There an Alternative to the Strike?
• Index