Global Labour Journal

Hardship in Nigeria: Popular Resistance and State Repression

Baba Aye — 2024-09-30

Kenya’s Protests Herald a New Age of Anti-Austerity Youth Politics

Monicah Gachuki — 2024-10-01

Beyond the Fields: Solidarity Narratives and Coalition Building in the Fair Food Movement

Phillip Hough — 2024-09-30

This paper extends scholarship on emerging sources of worker power in the 21^st century through an examination of the solidarity activism of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), an agricultural worker-led human rights organisation that advocates for Fair Food policies. The successes of the CIW are unexpected, since Florida’s migrant workers lack the traditional sources of worker power that bolstered the labour struggles of the 20^th century. Through in-depth interviews and a survey of student-farmworker activists, we extend scholarship rooted in the power resources approach to analyse the societal forms of power – both discursive and coalitional – that the CIW has developed in their efforts to harness broad social support from actors beyond the fields. We demonstrate how CIW coalitions are sustained through solidarity narratives that clarify the stakes for student allies and the discursive frames that motivate their activism.

Double Precarisation of Labour and Social Reproduction: Zambian Mineworkers’ Experience of Electricity Pricing

James Musonda — 2024-09-30

This article explores how increases in electricity tariffs for mining companies and domestic consumers affect the lives of Zambian mineworkers. It shows that, on the one hand, mining companies retrench workers, citing falling rates of profit, in a context in which unions are weak and workers have limited recourse, meaning loss of employment and uncertainty. On the other hand, given their low wages, the withdrawal of company social benefits, wage inflation and high indebtedness, increasing tariffs undermine mineworkers’ ability to meet their cost of living. In addition, it leads to conflicts about the efficient use of electricity at household level, increasing use of dirty fuels and vulnerability to criminality. This article argues that, for mineworkers, electricity tariff increases lead to a double precarisation – of labour and reproduction. The article draws on ethnographic field research conducted between 2015 and 2023 in two mining communities and two underground mine sites on the Zambian Copperbelt.

Can Social Dialogue be Transformational in a Socially Polarised Brazil? Labour Relations under the Third Lula Administration

Jana Silverman — 2024-09-30

Faced with a heterogeneous governing coalition and an unstable geopolitical scenario, the new Lula government is confronting many challenges to successfully enacting the social, economic and political reforms it promised during the 2022 presidential campaign. On the labour front, the current government has already made strides in rolling back some of the most regressive policies implemented during the Temer and Bolsonaro administrations that negated the possibility of real minimum wage increases and hobbled labour inspectors combatting modern-day slave labour. However, due to conflicting class interests, it will be more difficult to revoke key elements of the regressive 2017 labour law reform, which introduced new forms of precarious contracting, restricted access to the labour justice system, and curtailed union financing. This article will present a balance to date of the tripartite efforts to build and enact a pro-worker labour relations reform. We argue that the employers’ group’s path-dependent expectations to maintain many aspects of the previous labour law reform, together with labour’s diffuse support in the legislative branch, makes a more thorough-going reform that is advantageous for workers less likely to be implemented in the current conjuncture.

Review of Gerry Rodgers, Roberto Véras de Oliviera and Janine Rodgers (2023) Unequal Development and Labour in Brazil.

Stephen Pursey — 2024-09-30

Review of Marcel van der Linden and Nicole Mayer-Ahuja (editors) (2023) Power at Work – A Global Perspective on Control and Resistance.

Thomas Klikauer — 2024-09-30

Review of Pablo Pérez Ahumada (2023) Building Power to Shape Labor Policy.

Francisca Gutiérrez-Crocco — 2024-09-30