Precarious work and workers resistance: reframing labour for the 21st century

Abstract

Interpretations of global labor in the age of neoliberal capitalism urgently demands robust and critical historical and comparative analysis. For decades, research on labor collective organization has focused almost exclusively on workers collectively employed on a stable basis in industrial settings or in the public sector, defended by collective bargaining, represented by trade unions and inserted within relatively stable systems of industrial relations. This view, however, it has always failed to take into account the transformative potentialities of that vast, rich, and meaningful array of “precarious” work experiences and relations that allow the production and re-production of capital as a whole.