“Hope makes life meaningful”—a picture with that sentence in the top right corner was about the only decorative piece in the modest house that two automobile workers in Pimpri-Chinchwad, the industrial city adjacent to Pune, inhabited. The picture shows a nice and big house in European style with a pink roof and a large garden around it, set against a mountain landscape that could be the Alps. The picture is cheesy and a cheap mass product, but it symbolised something for these two workers. One of them had translated into English during interviews I conducted with other workers while doing field research. He died about one year after I concluded field research in the Pune area on 26 March 2015 under unclear circumstances. His dead body was found close to a railway track in an area where we had often met. He and other workers had tried to organise an independent trade union at the Mahindra & Mahindra utility vehicles factory in Chakan for a considerable amount of time and they and a labour lawyer had been arrested for about two months in late spring 2014. He was one of the most vocal workers and was not afraid of confrontation. It is to him that I devote this book.
This picture reminds us of something: The stream of warmth that Ernst Bloch (1991) talks about, being an aspect of the labour movement and the Left—something that runs against reducing workers to leading a ‘heroic struggle’ and sacrificing their individual and legitimate needs. These notions of idols and heroism are necessary and recurring elements of the ideology and history of subaltern movements, of their remembrance of the struggle of past generations (Benjamin 1974, Thesis 12),1 but they can also quickly turn into a bourgeois type of pathos. The simple notion of hope that is alluded to in this picture is aligned with an attitude that resists any mystification or notions of sacrifice for the greater good, recognising aspirations that are often rather hidden or erased by romantic notions of the humility of the poor, but in the first place hinting at the simple need and desire for a calm and secure life. A sympathetic romanticism of progressive academics towards the ‘other’ and the ‘poor’ stretches out to notions such as ‘wildcat’ strikes that often hide more than they explain. It is interesting that in Portuguese as in German language wildcat strikes are simply called ‘wild’ strikes (selvagem in Portuguese, wild in German). Selva in Portuguese is the word for the jungle, the wilderness—and one of the four strike movements that are dealt with in this book was taking place in the midst of the Amazon jungle.
The analyses in this book are dealing with what is often called wildcat strikes, and exactly aim to get away from the romantic notion attached to this concept and rather sport a ‘reckless’ form of recognising these acts of resistance. ‘Reckless’ means in this context analysis and reckless criticism, a turn away from declarations that workers are ‘heroic’ and better than others, somehow of a natural goodwill, a bit naïve and simple, but also clever in their own way. Instead of these mythical notions of good intentions that have been all too often present in left-oriented labour history and labour studies, this research aims to break with these supposedly sympathetic but occluding distance and to engage instead in a thorough analysis of weaknesses and strengths, a not less sympathetic but politically motivated distance. Only an approach to research in social sciences that takes the subjects it deals with seriously—which includes subjecting them to valid criticism—advances our understanding of the present nature of capitalism and pays due respect to these subjects. Only with a sober type of analysis can we devise strategies aimed at dissolving the violent, oppressive and irrational logic of organising human society that is the nature of early twenty-first-century capitalism. One of the steps towards this is to understand and analyse forms of popular organisation that often remain invisible. This is part and parcel of understanding the real movement of society. Mythical notions about ‘wild’ strikes tend to obscure the challenges and problems in favour of romanticisation and heroism.
This book investigates mass strikes and social movements in India and Brazil, focusing on the forms of organisation and cross-movement cooperation that erupted in the period between 2010 and 2014. The bases for this investigation are four cases: two in the Indian automobile sector and two in the Brazilian construction sector. These sectors displayed the strikes that attracted most of the public debate in this period, and these strikes occurred in central sectors of the economy that showed considerable growth at that time. Since hitherto established trade unions had no big stakes in those strikes, the central research question is what types of organisation facilitated those strikes, and which types of organisation and coordination did emerge in the course of those strikes. Corresponding with the results of my field research, I claim that conventional industrial relations theory and its focus on unions, employers and the state, modelled with correspondence to experiences in core countries, have to be put on their head: Only a theory of strikes that goes beyond a focus on trade unions and the workplace will be able to grasp the forms of labour conflict that affect the majority of the world population, and the global working class, which lives in non-core countries. The problem statement thus comes with the requirement to formulate a new theory of strikes that is able to understand the forms of popular organisation and coordination that occur in non-core countries. In order to organise this research question more systematically, I will follow three guiding questions in this book:
- 1.Which organisational forms emerged in the mass strikes that are studied in this book?
- 2.Which social constellations and problems find their expression in those organisational forms?
- 3.What was the significance of the spatial dimension for the trajectory of the strikes and the forms of organisations?
India and Brazil as part of the countries grouped into the BRICS category have been—together with China and South Africa—the national territories with some of the most militant labour struggles in the period after the global financial crisis in the late 2000s, and their governments were dominated by centre-left parties in the period covered by this investigation (2010–2014). Curiously, in both countries, those centre-left parties did not try to draw popular support from those strikes, but rather sidelined and ignored them, and exercised considerable repression against striking workers. The significance of both countries for the group of emerging economies and their political commonalities warrant a comparison. Yet, this investigation does not follow the method of a comparison of single countries as isolated phenomena, but it is indebted to the methodology of incorporated comparison (McMichael 1990): This means that the incidents of conflict are seen as coconstituting the global conjuncture of which they form a part. We can thus claim that their common characteristics across continents provide insight into the global conjuncture of labour conflicts in this period.
The grievances that gave rise to the strike movements in India and Brazil that are at the centre of this book were the conditions of labour in these emerging economies. In spite of a general (statistical) rise of living standards in both countries, the majority of workers in India and Brazil do not earn a living wage and are facing new threats and insecurities with subcontracting, agency work and tertiarisation that are linking up with older and consisting structures of insecurity like health risks at work and incomplete wage payments. One initial motivation for this book were analyses during the early years of the financial crisis in the late 2000s that draw a picture of the BRICS states as the more stable and sustainable type of capitalism. The famous analysis of Ian Bremmer (2009) of the infamous consulting company McKinsey on BRICS state capitalism being more robust than Western financialised capitalism facing the subprime financial crisis did not fail to inspire left-leaning academics (Bresser-Pereira 2010; Schmalz and Ebenau 2011; May 2013). Since some of these publications were written or published during the time of massive confrontations of workers with the state in China, South Africa, India and Brazil, I noticed an unsettling ignorance of these contradictions in some of this research that revived Third-Worldist nostalgia without taking into account the violent nature of the BRICS regimes. On the other hand, research on the wave of global social unrest around 2011, often comparing those movements to the struggles that took place around the year 1968, tended to focus on street demonstrations in Egypt, Tunisia, Europe, Turkey, India and Brazil and excluded strikes and workers’ movements from the picture although the latter were more consistent in their mobilisations and spread to many more countries than streets protests and occupations of squares (Castells 2012; Mason 2012; Della Porta and Mattoni 2015). Over time, the strikes in China and South Africa since 2010 received considerable attention from academic researchers (Kan 2011; Friedman 2012; Chan and Hui 2012; Butollo and Ten Brink 2012; Chen 2013; Bond and Mottiar 2013; Alexander 2013). This was not the case with strikes that occurred in India and Brazil at the same period, which received extensive coverage in the respective national media but were not dealt with in research and publications outside of their country of origin (Rodrigues 2012; Véras 2013, 2014; Campos 2016; PUDR 2013; Pratap 2017), and only rarely in comparative approaches across countries (Nowak 2015, 2016).
The motivation to look at strikes in one sector in each country—the automobile sector in India, and the construction sector in Brazil—stems from the fact that these were the sectors with the most militant and violent conflicts that dominated media attention and public debate in the respective national frameworks in the given period. Plus, those strikes occurred in central sectors of those national economies that saw considerable growth in this period. They were also part of a larger global strike wave that extended across a time span of several years, from 2010 to 2014, thus they were embedded into a larger scenario of protests at and beyond workplaces. Both criteria allow to speak of them as ‘mass strikes’ (Luxemburg 1906, 140ff; Nowak and Gallas 2014).
Since these strikes were the ones with the biggest amount of media attention in those countries and the ones with the most offensive means of confrontation—arson to workplace premises as one of the main tactics, besides blocking employers’ access to the workplace—I assume that these section...