Solidarity and collective action: comment on waterman

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Notes

Cf. Adkin, ‘Ecology and Labour;’ Dreiling, Solidarity and Contention; Clawson, The Next Upsurge.

Neumann, ‘Out of Step;’ Shepard and Hayduk, From ACT UP to the WTO.

Kelly, Rethinking Industrial Relations; Kimeldorf, Battling for American Labor.

Silver, Forces of Labor.

Bonacich, ‘Pulling the Plug;’ Olney, ‘On the Waterfront.’

Piven and Cloward, ‘New Strategies.’

Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition.

Lenz, ‘Globalization, Gender and Work.’

Cf. Unifem, Progress of the World's Women, 30.

Cf. UNDP, Human Development Report, 63.

Thompson, Beyond the Frontier, 100.

Haupt, ‘Why the History of the Working-Class Movement?’ See also Dubofsky, ‘Give Us that Old Time Labor History.’ The essays and comments in the Fall 1994 special issue of International Labor and Working-Class History stress the issue of labor history's diminishing appeal, and bear such titles as ‘Signs of Crisis, Fin-de-Siecle Doldrums, or Middle Age?’ ‘Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Neither Crisis nor Stasis,’ ‘Intellectual Crisis or Paradigm Shift?’ ‘History's Noncrisis,’ and ‘Labor History: Out of Vogue?’—and are by such leading scholars as Ira Katznelson, Lizabeth Cohen, David Montgomery, Anson Rabinbach, Louise Tilly, and Sean Wilentz. International Labor and Working-Class History 46 (Fall 1994): 7–92.

Haupt, ‘Why the History of the Working-Class Movement?’ 6–7.

Ibid.

Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 97.

Dubofsky, Hard Work, 3–4.

Slichter, quoted in Brody, Workers in Industrial America, 194–95.

Quoted in Brody, Workers in Industrial America, 176.

See Forrant, ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place.’

Forrant, ‘The International Association of Machinists.’

For examples of this kind of work see Weinbaum, To Move a Mountain; Shipler, The Working Poor; Boo, ‘The Churn.’ For a powerful literary account of life along the Mexico–US border which gets at how lives change as jobs sprout wheels, see Newman, The Fountain at the Center of the World. Two other works of fiction, one old, one new, shine a fierce light on how the global economy affects working people. These are: Sembene Ousmane, God's Bits of Wood, with its focus on a 1947–48 railway workers’ strike in West Africa, and Abani, Graceland, set in Nigeria in the late 1970s and 1980s as structural adjustment begins to affect daily life in Africa.

For a discussion of the GE case see Konzelmann et al., ‘Work Systems, Corporate Strategy and Global Markets.’

Forrant, ‘The International Association of Machinists,’ 130.

Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class, ch. 3.

Fraad et al., Bringing It All Back Home.

Good wages and work conditions along with workers’ control over their life on the job are perfectly consistent with their class exploitation. One of the goals of Marx's Capital was to differentiate between the former non-class parts of capitalism and the class part so that each can be shown to impact upon the other. For example, in US and European forms of capitalism, a sustained rise in labor productivity over decades can so cheapen the value (measured in Marx's social labor terms) of wage goods that it more than offsets a sustained rise in real wages for workers. Hence the rate of class exploitation rises.

Resnick and Wolff, ‘Exploitation, Consumption, and the Uniqueness of US Capitalism.’