Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy Series Editors Toby Carroll Department of Asian and International Studies City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong Paul Cammack Department of Asian and International Studies City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong Kelly Gerard School of Social Sciences The University of Western Australia Australia Darryl S. L. Jarvis Faculty of Liberal Arts and Social Science The Education University of Hong Kong Hong Kong Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy presents cutting edge, innovative research on the origins and impacts of public policy. Going beyond mainstream public policy debates, the series encourages heterodox and heterogeneous studies of sites of contestation, conflict and cooperation that explore policy processes and their consequences at the local, national, regional or global levels. 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International Advisory Board: Michael Howlett, Simon Fraser University, Canada; John Hobson, University of Sheffield, UK; Stuart Shields, University of Manchester, UK; Lee Jones, Queen Mary, University of London, UK; Kanishka Jayasuriya, Murdoch University, Australia; Shaun Breslin, University of Warwick, UK; Kevin Hewison, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Richard Stubbs, McMaster University, Canada; Dick Bryan, University of Sydney, Australia; Kun-chin Lin, University of Cambridge, UK; Apiwat Ratanawaraha, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand; Wil Hout, Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, The Netherlands; Penny Griffin, University of New South Wales, Australia; Philippe Zittoun, Science Po, Grenoble, France; Heng Yee Kuang, University of Tokyo; Heloise Weber, University of Queensland, Australia; Max Lane, Victoria University, Australia. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14465 Jörg Nowak Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India Popular Mobilisation in the Long Depression Jörg Nowak School of Politics and International Relations University of Nottingham Nottingham, UK ISSN 2524-7441 ISSN 2524-745X (electronic) Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy ISBN 978-3-030-05374-1 ISBN 978-3-030-05375-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05375-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966704 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks go to all the people I met while doing fieldwork which was a fantastic experience. It is impossible to name everybody who contributed but in order to just name a few people I want to mention in India Fabio Olivieri, Susana Barria, Marco, Kiran, Anshita, Nayan, Shyambir, Sheena Jain, Sher Singh, Carsten Krinn, Sanober Keshwaar, Vaishali Sareen, Vishnu, Sharit Bhowmik, Badam, Nikhil and N. Vasudevan; in Brazil Pedro, Adriano, Junior and Socorro in Fortaleza, David in Caucaia, Fred Melo, Rodrigo Linhares, Ana Paula Melli, Roberto Véras, Andreia Galvão, Cauê Campos, Ze Goutinho, Sergio Corrêa and Luzia. During the production of the book, Alexander Gallas, Toby Carroll, Frido Wenten, Huang Yu, Ralf Ruckus and Andreas Bieler were careful readers. Thanks for transcriptions of interviews go to Taiane Linhares, Hitesh Samdani, Shilpa Dahake, Harshad Subhash and Nupur Kulkarni. Special thanks go to Michael Roberts in helping out with graphic issues, and to Edel Moraes for working on the maps in this book. Invitations to talks at the Center for the Study of Social and Global Justice and the Institute of Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Nottingham ended up in inspiring debates during the process of writing and I want to thank Katharine Adeney and Andreas Bieler to provide opportunities to present my work there. Special thanks go to Andreas Bieler who assisted almost every step of the creation of this book. Another great big thank you goes to the persons who shared their time with me while I wrote the bigger part of this book in Nottingham: Diego Mariano, Kristiyan Peev, Marco Genovesi, Alex Serafimov, Kayhan Valadbaygi, Jon v vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Mansell, Jokubas Salyga, Carol Spary, Katharine Adeney, Tony Burns, Cecilia Goria and Chun-Yi Lee. I want to thank the Department of Politics and International Relations at University of Nottingham for crucial administrative support, primarily Wyn Rees, Ruth Davison, Rosemary McCabe and Graeme Docherty. The editors of the series Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy—Toby Carroll, Paul Cammack, Kelly Gerard and Darryl Jarvis— had an enormously important role to facilitate the publication of this book. Many thanks go to the team of Palgrave Macmillan, especially Jemima Warren and Oliver Foster, for their cooperation and careful editing. Oliver Foster did a wonderful job in realising my unorthodox idea for the book cover, and Ekrem Ekici, Toby Carroll and Timm Ebner provided invaluable advice for the cover design. The most special thanks go to Edel Moraes who accompanied the major part of my writing process while finishing her own academic work. She was and is a wonderful companion and lover and supported me throughout all the ups and downs of writing. Initial research in India and Brazil was facilitated by a postdoctoral scholarship of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) in cooperation with Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai and a research scholarship of the International Center Development and Decent Work at University of Kassel, and I am thankful to Christoph Scherrer, Birgit Felmeden and Indira Gartenberg in this context for crucial assistance and support. Finally, it was due to a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship of the European Commission for the project “Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India” that I was able to undertake the research for this project and to complete this book. EU DISCLAIMER This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 746345. CONTENTS 1 1 Introduction 2 A New Theory of Strikes: Moving Beyond Eurocentrism 25 3 The Political Economy of Mass Strikes in the Global Crisis 97 4 A Protracted Struggle: Strikes in the Automobile Sector in India 125 An Ascending Wave: Mass Strikes in the Brazilian Construction Sector 193 Conclusion 289 5 6 Index 317 ix ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jörg Nowak is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, UK. He works on labour in emerging economies, South-South development, logistics and infrastructure and Althusserian Marxism. xi LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 3.1 Map 4.1 Map 4.2 Map 5.1 Map 5.2 Emerging markets real GDP growth. (Source: IMF) Map of Haryana state, showing the location of earlier industrial centre Faridabad, Gurgaon (first Maruti factory), Manesar (second Maruti factory) and Kaithal where the Maruti workers are jailed Map of Maharashtra state, showing the location of Pune; PimpriChinchwad, where the older Akurdi plant is located, and Chakan, where the current Bajaj Auto assembly plant is located Map of the state of Ceará, showing the location of regional capital Fortaleza, Caucaia, where some of the interviewed workers lived; and Pecém where both construction sites are located Map of the state of Pará, showing the regional capital Belém; Altamira where the consortium and trade unions Sintapav-PA and Sinticma had their seat and a smaller part of the workers were housed; and the location of the construction site for Belo Monte 109 134 161 225 249 xiii CHAPTER 1 Introduction “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 Author(s) 2019 J. Nowak, Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India, Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05375-8_1 1 2 J. NOWAK 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 1 Thesis 12: “We need history, but we need it differently from the spoiled lazy-bones in the garden of knowledge.” —Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. The subject of historical cognition is the battling, oppressed class itself. In Marx it steps forwards as the final enslaved and avenging class, which carries out the work of emancipation in the name of generations of downtrodden to its conclusion. This consciousness, which for a short time made itself felt in the “Spartacus” [Spartacist splinter group, the forerunner to the German Communist Party], was objectionable to social democracy from the very beginning. In the course of three decades it succeeded in almost completely erasing the name of Blanqui, whose distant thunder [Erzklang] had made the preceding century tremble. It contented itself with assigning the working class the role of the saviour of future generations. It thereby severed the sinews of its greatest power. Through this schooling the class forgot its hate as much as its spirit of sacrifice. For both nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs.” INTRODUCTION 3 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? 4 J. NOWAK 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 INTRODUCTION 5 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 sections of the workforce comprise something as the fighting section, the vanguard if we speak in classical terms. Here, I follow a use of the term ‘vanguard’ that employs it for the group that is leading the most advanced and most offensive struggles. I grant here that it is hard to pin down who is part of this vanguard and who is not (e.g. why not agricultural workers or traditional and indigenous communities that are entangled in much more violent conflicts and often defend essential natural resources?). At this point, it is most important to underline that this understanding of vanguard does not see revolutionary organisations or networks as the vanguard as it is often understood. While obviously revolutionary networks 6 J. NOWAK are indispensable for certain areas of political work in achieving a successful revolution, the vanguard as the fighting section has different responsibilities and is as important—the major difference being the mass character of the vanguard (Faulkner et al. 2016).2 Two characteristics are standing out in the practices of the striking workers in Brazilian construction and Indian automobile factories: First, they developed new models of organisation that did not fit into the established patterns of how industrial workers organise in those countries. Second, they were not only attacked by public and private security forces, and by mafia gangs, but they themselves attacked the infrastructure and/ or parts of their workplaces as well as persons like managers, security guards and trade union leaders.3 The focus and leading question of this book are the new forms of organisation that workers found and created in those strikes. It is this issue that will lead us beyond a narrow focus on workers as the subjects of change or the workplace as the central place of conflict. Cooperation with other actors that do not organise as workers (although they are often workers in one sense or the other) has been constitutive for those new types of organisation in at least two of the four cases examined here. Thus, the dialectics of the specific type of action connected to the workplace (the strike) and its power resources (to block or impede production and profitmaking) with actors or social forms of organisation that emerge beyond the workplace are at the centre of this book. The fact that destruction of workplace premises and physical violence against superiors and other oppressive forces was one of the key characteristics of workers’ action in the wake of these strikes raises its own 2 It is interesting that two contemporary scholars of an explicitly anti-capitalist postcolonial or decolonial position emphasise that theoreticians and scholars should not understand themselves or act as a vanguard, but rather as allies to social movements (De Santos 2014, 44: Chandra 2016, 3). While both authors explain with a different emphasis what such a vanguard role of intellectuals would be or who exactly claims to assume such a position, both accounts differ significantly from my understanding of the vanguard consisting of those engaged in mass struggles. I will come back to the question of the role of researcher vis-à-vis the social actors—whose agency is the object of study in this book—later on in this introduction. 3 In Brazil, these tactics are often referred to as ‘quebra-quebra’ (destroy-destroy) or ‘quebrar e quemar’ (destroy and burn). For construction sites in Brazil, these tactics are not new at all, but their mass occurrence was unprecedented between the years 2011 and 2014. INTRODUCTION 7 questions and could be taken as symbolic for the specific historical and political conjuncture in which they occurred: Workers show that they have the power and motivation to physically destroy large parts of a workplace and physically hurt their adversaries. To state and analyse this is not identical with a celebration of violence—violence against adversaries and arson can as well be a sign or symptom of weakness as it can be the expression and show of strength, determination and organisational capacity. But in any case violent means of struggle cannot be ignored or sidelined, and will be subjected to the same ‘reckless’ analysis as all other forms of struggle. Another crucial aspect is the organisational forms that striking workers created, often in conjunction with other actors. The deviation or escape from the straitjacket of the type of trade union that emerged in Europe and North America after the First World War—and then became a global model—is significant, and is part of a larger global trend. It is often called the ‘traditional’ trade union model, but in effect the idea of national federations with industry-wide sections that agree to collective contracts only became consolidated in the 1920s and 1930s (Van der Linden and Thorpe 1990, 37), thus rather late in the history of trade unions and ‘combinations’ as similar associations have been called in the eighteenth century (Quinlan 2017). For the sake of clarity I will call this model ‘corporatist trade unionism’.4 In the current conjuncture, we are witnessing a variety of new models of popular organisation worldwide. In fact, many of those resemble older ones or already existing models that have been less visible earlier on. One analytical tool to get access to the social dynamics of proletarian and subaltern organisation are the notions of ‘space’ and ‘place’ as they have been used by economic geography and more recently by labour geography. ‘Space’ is usually seen as the social macrodynamic that is associated with globalisation and the action of capital, while ‘place’ is conceived as the logic of the local that might run against or with the larger dynamic of space (Massey 1984; Ellem and Shields 1999). The analyses in this book will show that such a juxtaposition is not always useful and too dichotomic, reproducing an image of capital being ‘global’ and workers and 4 This is inspired by Antonio Gramsci who uses the term ‘corporatist unions’ for those trade unions that focus to improve the wages and conditions of work within the given conditions of society (2000, 92ff). 8 J. NOWAK poor communities as being restricted to act ‘local’. Neethi P. has demonstrated in her insightful and excellent analyses how local capital plays a key role in securing and reproducing global value chains, going beyond a dichotomic ascription of space and place to certain kinds of actors (2016, 202). That space and place cannot be understood as objective, structural conditions devoid of any agency, that is, as the background in front of which (or the stage on which) the actors play their scenes and perform their roles, is one of the central tenets of this book. Following the insights of strategic-relational state theory that structures are the crystallisation of past strategies (Jessop 1985, 359),5 we can put this insight to use for the analysis of spatial relations as well; that is, spatial dimensions are actors by themselves—in a similar vein as Gilles Deleuze analysed the filmmaking of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet: The two filmmakers show in their film Lothringen the landscape of the said region and read from accounts of the resistance against German occupation around 1905. The landscape becomes an actor, since the past history inscribed itself into the geological layers: Analysing the spatial nature of history, Deleuze recounts the writings of Jean-Claude Bonnet, who sees a “telluric, geological, geophysical sequence (…) where the landscape is given to be read as place of inscription of struggles, empty theatre of operations” (Bonnet 1977, 3; see also Deleuze 1989, 246). Thus, certain spaces and places are linked up with historic struggles: “History is inseparable from the earth [terre], struggle is underground [sous terre], (…) To grasp an event is to connect the silent layers of earth which make up its true continuity, or which inscribe it in the class struggle” (Deleuze 1989, 254f). Thus, one important thesis in this work is that political traditions (past victories, defeats, compromises, etc.) are inscribed into certain spaces and places, and this inscription has an enormous effect on trajectories of struggle and forms of popular organisation. This means that the trajectory of 5 Struggles are inscribed into structures; thus their action is mediated/filtered by this inscription: “To sum up, popular struggles are inscribed in the institutional materiality of the State, even though they are not concluded in it, it is a materiality that carries the traces of these muted and multiform struggles” (Poulantzas 1980, 144). Nonetheless, struggles in general (which includes the struggle of the bourgeoisie) have primacy over structures; thus change and conflict are primary vis-à-vis the status quo and consensus: “In their material basis, struggles always have primacy over the institutions-apparatuses of power (especially the State), even though they are invariably inscribed within their field” (ibid., 149; see also 133, 143). INTRODUCTION 9 strikes and labour conflicts can only be understood if the way a spatial unit is embedded into a political tradition is part of the analysis.6 The question regarding new forms of organisation is implicitly also asking for seeds of new larger political models on the Left which are desperately missing. The collective resistance of billions of people against their conditions of work is bound up with hope—but there remains an enormous difficulty to establish sustainable betterments for the mass of poor people globally. And there is a crucial lack of common and transversal organisations, of political alternatives to global neoliberalism and of models of fundamental change. Older forms of popular organisation and the models of change aligned with them like the mass party and the trade union federation seem to be exhausted, and it is not clear at all how they can be revitalised in a sustainable fashion, or if at all. It seems likely that new types of organisation have to be created. But after having witnessed the enormous fragmentation of popular organisations, especially after leftwing parties like the Workers’ Party in Brazil and the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) have lent themselves to cooptation and collusion with big capital after serving and/or participating in various national and regional governments, considerable doubts have to be raised if one can just bet on the recent emergence of new forms of popular organisation and hope for better outcomes this time. In other words, more comprehensive strategies are needed beyond the reemergence of grassroots resistance which is a necessary step, but only the first one among several others. The new forms of popular organisation arising during mass strikes in India and Brazil are at the centre of this book—in this way, this book is first of all a contribution to the question on how to analyse forms of popular organisation which encompasses both industrial relations and social 6 I apply the notion of structures consisting in the inscription of struggles and social relations to the spatial dimension, inspired by Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state: “(…) the State is through and through constituted-divided by class contradictions. (…) Class contradictions are the very stuff of the State: they are present in its material framework and pattern its organization; while the State’s policy is the result of their functioning within the State” (1980, 132). These citations make clear that to speak of structuralism is not at all adequate in this case: Structures are understood as aspects of agency, pointing far beyond the endless debates about structure versus agency in bourgeois sociology. It is the merit of Bob Jessop (2007) that he developed this notion of Poulantzas’ theory into the strategic-relational account of social formations. 10 J. NOWAK movement research. It responds to the question with an inventory of forms of popular organisation that emerged in the first years after the global financial crisis in the late 2000s and saw the largest participation in terms of numbers of protesters: strikes and labour conflicts. Of course, this inventory cannot at all claim to be representative due to the small number of four case studies. But these cases can be conceived as conflicts that coconstituted the conjuncture in which they arose (McMichael 1990), also due to the fact that those strikes occurred in central sectors of the respective national economies. Communism, “the real movement which abolishes the current state of things” (Marx and Engels 1845, 49), consists first of all in the deed, in action, in the simple fact of popular organisation. I contend that the forms of organisation that workers find will also tell us something about the structures of domination that they are facing. The shape, type and trajectory of social conflicts is a lens that allows us to access, to read the global conjuncture that we are facing. This does not allow us in any way to refrain from a political-economic analysis of domination, but the type of conflicts that unfold often hint at the contradictions involved in a larger constellation that all actors in a conflict are facing. Nevertheless, a long-term political strategy does not only require action as conflict but also requires other types of action like reflection, education and communication—and this book aims to contribute to the latter ones. Reflection, education and communication are no neutral processes of scientific representation, and they often take place within asymmetrically organised institutions. Also, processes of the creation of popular knowledge do not take place outside of ideological domination. This requires a reflection about the location of the knowledge produced in this book, located in the ideological state apparatus of a public university and funded by a supranational state agency, the European Commission. The location of theory and academic analysis employed in this book is aligned to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called “rearguard theories” (2014, 44): “theoretical work that follows and shares the practices of the social movements very closely” (ibid.), evaluating, comparing and contextualising, “bringing in complexity when actions seem rushed and unreflective and simplicity when action seems self-paralyzed by reflection” (ibid.). The role of the researcher and of theory construction is thus rather one of an adviser or ally but also of providing visibility for certain processes of popular organisation and popular construction of knowledge. In this, this book follows the general “imperative to go South and learn from the South, though not from the imperial South (which reproduces in INTRODUCTION 11 the South the logic of the North taken as universal) but rather from the anti-imperial South” (2014, 42). The geographical location of ‘South’ is rather used as a social category by Santos and it is this meaning that I will adopt here—the anti-Eurocentric perspective followed in this book is thus rather one that adopts the position that presumably universal Northern perspectives have to be put on their feet by making recourse to the political reality and political experience of the majority of the world population. This includes on the one hand to start with the perspective of an ecology of knowledges (2014, 188): The knowledge of the popular actors, in this case the strikers and other social movement actors, is taken as seriously as the theoretical and academic instruments to organise this book: “it is imperative to start an intercultural dialogue and translation among different critical knowledges and practices: South-centric and North-centric, popular and scientific, religious and secular, female and male, urban and rural and so forth” (42). These questions of dialogue and translation also concern the role of the researcher vis-à-vis the social actors whose agency is the object of study in this work. This issue has been of considerable importance for subaltern and postcolonial studies in the past 15 years. When Santos proposes that authors should rather engage in rearguard theories that reconstruct and communicate the experiences and achievements of social movements (2014, 44), he objects against scholars laying out a plan regarding which actors should follow which course of action—Santos rather thinks that social movements should constitute themselves as actors and delineate tactics and strategies, while scholars should only systematise, compare and advise on these actions. But given the fact that social movements themselves continuously produce intellectuals and scholars, the line dividing scholars and movement actors is not so easy to draw and a strict distinction between activists and intellectuals falls back behind Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of the organic intellectual—who is not primarily the engaged scholar but rather for example the teacher, religious authority or medical expert in a poor community or working class district (Gramsci 1971a, 4). Uday Chandra (2017) highlights that Ranajit Guha’s pioneering work for the project of Subaltern Studies, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983/1999), as well as the work of Guha’s critic Vivek Chibber (2013) rely on the assumption of a universal actor: the resisting subject. The vanguardism of certain academic research consists for Chandra in rather subsuming social actors under this 12 J. NOWAK category of the resisting subject than engaging into “a deeper social-scientific understanding of (…) resistance or subalternity” (2017, 601). Thus, in Chandra’s view, both Guha and Chibber subsume the empirical actions of the subjects they do research on to the political-theoretical categories employed by them beforehand. For Chandra, the alternative consists in affording a closer look at the specific contradictions and political conjunctures that these subjects face and are involved in—and, one could argue, in this way Guha and Chibber necessarily fail to perceive decisive aspects of the life-world and political challenges these subjects come up against, which would then inhibit them to give useful political advice.7 Instead, Chandra proposes “an ethics and politics of listening” (ibid.): He distinguishes an etic perspective that projects certain principles onto empirical subjects from an emic perspective that investigates thoroughly and in detail their social context, historical trajectories, systems of meaning and so on. Guha, while claiming to assume an emic perspective, still reproduces an etic one according to Chandra: “the encapsulation of every detail of tribal rebellion into a prior conceptual framework in which the politics of the resisting subject mirrors the radical politics of the historian” (2017, 603). This moment of encapsulation in Guha’s work implicitly entails the notion that “the tribal-subaltern cannot speak but most be spoken for” (ibid.), giving rise to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s later critique of the subaltern studies’ relationship to its objects of research (1988; see also Green 2002). Chandra highlights that “the resisting subject in ethnographic studies (…) invariably turns out to be fuzzy and divided (…) and its politics may be ambivalent or contradictory” (2017, 604). Thus, I adhere to Chandra’s insistence on thickness, complexity, contextualism and realism in what I term a ‘reckless’ but nonetheless sympathetic analysis earlier. The analyses in this book might nonetheless run the risk of identification with the subjects or an imposition of a political-theoretical framework. The person of the researcher is never a neutral one, and the researcher’s own perspective and context will inevitably form part of the enterprise. But at least the reflection about this relationship between the researcher and the activities of the objects of research—in their role as subjects—might serve as a guard 7 More specifically, Chandra asserts that James Scott (1976) and Guha ascribe in a universalising manner to rural uprisings in Asia that they were of an anti-colonial nature—a claim that Chandra investigates in detail in other works and against which he raises considerable and quite convincing doubts (Chandra 2016). INTRODUCTION 13 and warning sign against an overly blunt imposition of theoretical and political frameworks on the density and thickness of everyday social relations of conflict. Paradoxically, then, the critical distance towards the activities of these subjects acts as one (but not the only) of several safeguards against an imposition of the researcher’s general claims on the subjects and social interactions that form the object of research. As Guha’s example shows, celebratory accounts of resisting subjects can quickly turn into ‘etic’ perspectives in which an outside agenda comes to dominate. Nonetheless, it will remain the specific role of the intellectual “to support and formulate general conclusions and theories” (Green 2002, 8) on the basis of particular and specific cases, keeping in mind that the academic scholar and the intellectual are not identical, and that some of the most important intellectuals continually reside outside of academic institutions and/or emerge from social movements. The political intellectual, academic or not, will inevitably get involved into the realm of representation. For Antonio Gramsci, intellectual leadership cannot be avoided when there is political action, which is one of the landmarks of Gramsci’s adherence to Leninism, albeit a ‘Western Leninism’ so to speak (Gramsci 1971b, 57; Green 2002, 20; Riley 2011). But the crucial question here is to what extent progressive intellectuals remain embedded into and informed about the challenges and actual problems that social movements face, and to what extent concerns of grassroots activists reach the intellectual leaderships—which is also an issue that concerns social movements internally, and not exclusively the relationship between social movements and academic intellectuals. Social movements are as ambiguous and non-innocent as every other actor, and to perceive them as being completely separate from academic scholarship would be an unrealistic endeavour. And, the question of representation will inevitably come up within social movements themselves: Movements regularly strive to represent a certain social group, community, neighbourhood and so on, and the question of legitimate leadership remains a permanent and at times conflictive issue inside of social movements. Thus, one can conclude that representation is rather an issue to be dealt with than one that can be entirely avoided. But it is for sure a landmark of progressive and left politics to permanently question types and forms of representation and to not take them for granted, since representation is inevitably tied up with domination. In consequence, this concern will extend to academic scholarship—engaged scholars will inevitably assume some form of representation, even if they might in some cases rather represent a political idea than a certain constituency. Thus, the 14 J. NOWAK role of representation that scholars assume has to be put in question permanently. For a new theory of strikes this results first of all in questioning the established forms of the representation of workers, but also the assumption that scholars are able to ‘better’ represent or know what workers need or want than anyone else. It rather is one of the crucial endeavours of this book to widen the perspective and to grasp the forms or aspects of labour resistance that are not captured by established perspectives of industrial relations, social movement and labour studies scholars. Two blind spots that have to be overcome in this respect are the focus on trade unions as actors in the field of labour, and the focus on the workplace as the place of organisation and mobilisation of labour. While both should not be discarded completely, I call for a decentring of these limits of perspective: Given that the bulk of the global working class today lives in countries in which trade unions only organise a small minority of workers (e.g., as in India), and in which the biggest industrial workforce on the globe, the working class in the People’s Republic of China, does not have proper trade unions altogether, one has to acknowledge that the vast majority of labour conflicts is taking place without any involvement of trade unions. The workplace as such has always been embedded in relations of neighbourhoods, local communities, religious and caste divisions, family relations, divisions of labour in the household and so forth, and this embeddedness of the workplace has regained visibility in the past years with the emergence of research on labour geography and on community unionism (Kelly 2013; Holgate 2015). As I will show in the next chapter, both moments of decentring are not completely novel to scholarship on labour, but they have not yet been employed systematically in order to renew labour studies and a theory of strikes in a way that takes into account the reality of global capitalism in the twenty-first century. This movement of decentring is not proposed as an aim in itself, but is deemed useful in order to allow visibility to hitherto neglected or unacknowledged phenomena that have existed for a long time but made themselves increasingly heard with the recent shifts towards authoritarian capitalism and the hollowing out of social-democratic forms of representation. Santos uses the term ‘sociology of absences’ for a method that aims to increase or enable the visibility of certain social practices: “This consists INTRODUCTION 15 of an inquiry that aims to explain that what does not exist is in fact actively produced as non-existent, that is, a noncredible alternative to what exists” (171f). A good number of the social practices analysed in this book would not be visible or remain non-existent if analysed with a focus on trade unions and workplaces. As mentioned before, the term ‘wildcat strike’ that is often used to refer to some of those phenomena is leaving much of that what actually happens in the dark rather than allowing to have a thorough look at it, and thus I will refrain from using this term in most parts of this book. “In the ‘most spontaneous’ movement it is simply the case that the elements of ‘conscious leadership’ cannot be checked, have left no reliable document” (Gramsci 1971b, 196). This work is rather interested in who organised that movement and how, than to classify anything as spontaneous.8 1.1 On the Structure Of thiS BOOk Chapter 2 lays the ground for a new theory of strikes, employing a broader perspective that goes beyond the workplace and the trade union as the central ‘places’ of mobilisation and organisation of workers. A review of earlier theories on strikes that emerged during the high tide of corporatist trade unionism shows that the traditional industrial relations approach did not survive without having been thoroughly questioned. Nonetheless, the classical approach—focused on employers, unions and the state—could maintain its dominance over the field despite the pioneer work of Richard Hyman and P.K. Edwards who dismantled classical industrial relations theory. An alternative tradition is recovered with reference to Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of mass strikes, a line of research that broke with Eurocentrism already in 1906, and claims that the most developed forms of popular resistance spring up in late developing countries. Several approaches in social movement studies contribute aspects to studies of strikes that were sidelined in much of industrial relations and labour studies and had an enormous influence on the literature on social movement unionism that took its political influence from labour and popular movements in Brazil, South Korea, South Africa and the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s. Two omissions in the literature are remarkable here: 8 “Pure spontaneity does not exist” (Gramsci 1971b, 196). 16 J. NOWAK First, social movement research never tried to incorporate in its theorising the challenge that those Southern labour movements posed for the distinction between old and new social movements, a central tenet of social movement theory. Second, the literature on social movement unionism hardly engaged with Rosa Luxemburg’s approach although it covers the phenomena that this literature captured like no other (see Webster 1981 for a notable exception). These omissions are tackled in the second chapter, and the widely ignored Brazilian literature on the strikes in the 1970s and 1980s turns out to draw on Luxemburg’s theory. This recapturing of past debates is not a philological exercise but provides elements for a theory of strikes that engages in a wider perspective, including social reproduction, neighbourhood mobilisations and broader political issues. While the literature on social movement unionism theorised the experiences of joint workplace and popular mobilisations in the 1970s and 1980s, the approach of labour geography since the late 1990s conceives workers as spatial actors. This move was both inspired by economic geography in the 1980s and 1990s, already looking beyond a focus on the workplace, and responses of workers to globalising capital. Although labour geography focused much on industrial workers in the beginning, it soon became a conceptual tool, at times combined with an analysis of global production networks, that allows to embed working class resistance into its wider social environment. This intensive rerun through different approaches to analyse strikes is then used as a basis in order to construct a theoretical approach that allows to analyse the spatial patterns of mass strikes. While the implications of this new theory of strikes go beyond a focus on mass strikes, its application is here focused on mass strikes which are at the centre of this book. Since mass strikes extend over a national territory without a central coordination, they are usually assumed to be chaotic and amorphous, but in fact they exhibit certain spatial patterns that can be analysed. Consequently, I distinguish between three forms of mass strikes in terms of organisational form and goals: demonstrative mass strikes, centrally coordinated fighting mass strikes and worker-led fighting mass strikes. It is important to note that these differences in form do not make any qualification regarding the political quality of those strikes, as strikes are often judged politically according to their organisational form. Additionally, I distinguish between three patterns of diffusion that occur in mass strikes: (a) sectoral copycat strikes, (b) national cross-sectoral mass strikes and (c) regional mass strikes. INTRODUCTION 17 On a more general level, the new theory of strikes establishes five levels of analysis: (1) How are workplace conflicts articulated with class relations beyond the workplace and with non-class relations? (2) To which extent do common experiences between workers and other popular actors emerge in the course of strikes? (3) Which relationship between formal and informal types of organisation and mobilisation does exist? (4) Which role do political traditions inscribed in spaces and places, the migration of traditions and the forms of reproduction of labour play for popular mobilisations? (5) Which spatial patterns of strikes can be detected and to what extent are they rooted in sectoral or regional dynamics? Chapter 3 locates the case studies on India and Brazil in the short- to mid-term conjuncture in which they occurred: The global restructuring of production on the basis of outsourcing and arm’s-length manufacturing and the relocation of production to low-wage countries form the basis for the large-scale industrial conflicts that emerged in the Global South. But not all of them, and hardly any of my case studies, represent the classical case of production in poor countries for Western consumers. Thus, important qualifications have to be made to the classic models of the production of cell phones, clothing and food in low-wage countries (Smith 2016)— nonetheless imperialist capital does play a direct or indirect role in most of the case studies. Unequal exchange does play a role beyond the sector of consumer products. A second element of the conjuncture is the extension and consolidation of the precarious and informal labour regime in the past 15 years. This subsection systematises crucial qualifications made in the more recent literature, alleging that one can hardly speak of informal and precarious ‘sectors’, but rather of informality and precariousness as processes and characteristics that are dispersed throughout the world of work (Breman and van der Linden 2014). In line with this, it is hard to distinguish a precariat from the rest of the working classes. A third qualification of the conjuncture is made via the recourse to patterns of strike waves across the history of capitalism and its connection with Kondratieff cycles in order to locate the recent global strike wave between 2010 and 2014 in long-term tendencies (Cronin 1979). Assuming this scheme of the long run of things can be applied, the last global strike wave occurred at the end of a Kondratieff cycle. The enigma that this is the first global strike wave that does not witness the rise of a new generation of trade union organisations remains to be solved. 18 J. NOWAK In Chap. 4, two case studies from the Indian automobile industry are analysed in detail. The conflicts at India’s market leader in car passenger production, Maruti Suzuki, dominated by Japanese capital, made considerable headlines in 2011 and 2012: One manager died during the conflict, and 148 workers remained in jail without being sentenced for more than three years. This conflict shows how the harsh working conditions and the intransigence of management led to considerable frustration, but also how automobile workers were able to create vast networks and new organisations in the face of severe repression. The conflict started at the workplace, located in the Gurgaon belt around New Delhi, and spread out to several levels of social organisation and different spatial scales. While the conflict at Maruti Suzuki had its hot period in 2011 and 2012, followed by mobilisations around union elections, imprisonment of workers and the sentence against workers in 2017, the fifty-day-long strike at Bajaj Auto, India’s second biggest motorcycle producer, took place in mid-2013. This strike, too, like the one at Maruti, erupted in a newly founded factory with many contract workers. It took a different trajectory, with a stronger focus on the industrial region in Pimpri-Chinchwad but nonetheless displays similarities to the earlier conflict at Maruti: Permanent workers could improve their wages significantly while the wage gap between them and contract workers increased. In Chap. 5, two case studies of strikes in Brazilian construction deal with two typical locations: dam construction in the Amazon hinterland, and industrial construction in a coastal area. The strikes in Pecém between 2011 and 2014 evolved in an interplay between official union mobilisation and strikes organised by workers. As in many strikes in Brazilian construction, arson and property destruction was an integral part of mobilisations, and the effort to use Korean workers as strike breakers led to bigger clashes with police in the last of the larger strikes in Pecém. The strikes at Belo Monte Dam, one of the biggest hydroelectric projects worldwide, occurred in an extremely repressive context, seeing various interventions and permanent presence of the national guard. But the contested industrial project also came with new allies: Dissident unions and militant workers worked together with the anti-dam movements in the region and could ameliorate the conditions at the construction site. INTRODUCTION 19 In the conclusion (Chap. 6), I situate the strikes in the larger picture: They were a response to the global crisis in the late 2000s but did not lead to fundamental political or economic changes. The short-term responses were countermobilisations and a shift to right-wing governments in India and Brazil, but the wave of strikes carried on and could not be broken. Thus, the political evaluation is ambivalent: Those strikes were an important step to establish a new generation of militant workers in non-core countries,9 but they did not come with a larger advance of popular forces given the overall scenario of a surge of right-wing authoritarianism. 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Urbana: University of Illinois Press. INTRODUCTION 23 Van der Linden, M., & Thorpe, W. (1990). Aufstieg und Niedergang des revolutionären Syndikalismus. 1999, 5(3), 9–38. Véras, R. (2013). Suape em Construcao, peões em luta: o novo desenvolvimento e os conflitos do trabalho. Caderno CRH, 26(68), 233–252. Véras, R. (2014). Brasil em obras, peões em luta, sindicatos surpreendidos. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais [Online], 103. https://doi.org/10.4000/rccs.5559. Webster, E. (1981). ‘Stay-Aways’ and the Black Working Class: Evaluating a Strategy. Labour Capital and Society, 14(1), 10–38. CHAPTER 2 A New Theory of Strikes: Moving Beyond Eurocentrism To conceive of a new theory of strikes is a contribution to class theory since strikes are one of the most significant forms of action through which classes are constituted as collective actors. The strikes in Brazil and India that this book explores are part of a larger—indeed global—cycle of struggles that started in 2010, and which included street demonstrations, strikes, food riots and other forms of protest (Silver 2014, 59f). A certain resurgence of labour conflicts in terms of man-days lost and the total number of strikes could be noticed already during the 2000s in the emerging economies of South Africa, China, India and Brazil, but those numbers spiked significantly in the years after 2010 in all these countries (Silver 2014). I conceive of these strikes as a rather early phase of a new formation of the working classes in the emerging economies. A theory of strikes is a theory about the working class in action, thus it is rather about the classfor-itself than about the class-in-itself (Lukacs 2000; Neilson 2017). What has been coined as the class-for-itself, the conscious and active working class so to say, is always a process of building and creating consciousness, mobilisation and organisation. There can be no endpoint of this process (i.e. when the working class ‘finally’ realises to be the class-for-itself) other than the abolishment of capitalism itself, and thus the abolishment of all classes, most importantly of the capitalist class, but, even more crucial, the abolishment of the social relations that are at the basis of capitalism. The theory of strikes that will be constructed in this chapter focuses on the forms of organisation that facilitate strikes and emerge from them. The © The Author(s) 2019 J. Nowak, Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India, Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05375-8_2 25 26 J. NOWAK broad concept of class relations that is implied in this theory will also have consequences for the question of organisation. There is a general consensus among Marxists that the class composition, that is, the level of technological development and the sectoral and economic structure in a given social formation, will have effects on the types of organisation of workers. Operaist authors tend to frame this as the relationship between technical class composition and political class composition (Wright 2002; Trott 2017). The proposition I make here is quite simple: if any specific relation between capital and labour is embedded in a multiplicity of class relations and non-class relations, then all these will also have an effect on the types of organisation of strikers. To take an example: if most workers in a particular enterprise live in one neighbourhood, then neighbourhood associations might play an important role for a strike. It is here that the question of location and place comes in: spatial relations will be of enormous importance for the resources at disposal for workers, and they are a crucial issue for managements, too (P. 2016, 190). Resources are understood in a broad sense here and consist mainly in the social contacts that workers have. These can be family and communal bonds, neighbourhood contacts, political or social organisations, knowledge of a region or neighbourhood or relations to family members in other regions or countries. Spatial proximity or spatial fragmentation in terms of habitational areas and places of work is a crucial factor. Thus, the first point that I make here is that a theory of strikes that looks at forms of workers’ organisation has to take into account those social relations that strikers maintain outside of their workplace and that these might have a considerable impact on their forms of organisation. The second issue at stake for a new theory of strikes can be boiled down to this: theories of strikes after the Second World War were predominantly formulated by scholars in core capitalist countries and so they tended to focus on trade unions as actors. This was due to the domination of a certain type of trade unionism in this period and geographical area which I call corporatist trade unionism. Its characteristics are a focus on collective bargaining, social policies and distribution, that is, property relations and an effective participation of workers in decisions about investment are off topic. The ‘normalisation’ of this model did not only result in the export of many of its features to non-core countries, but also led to a Eurocentric bias in theories on strikes that often take this model of corporatist unionism for granted. A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 27 Today, the largest part of the working class and of industrial production is located in what is often called the Global South, that is, in newly industrialising countries, and in most of these countries trade unions play often a minor role, and at least a different role.1 The centre of industrial production worldwide, the People’s Republic of China, does not dispose of a proper trade union organisation, but rather the state apparatus of the AllChina Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) that does not organise strikes. In India, one of the bigger emerging industrial centres, 3.2 per cent of the total workforce is organised in trade unions (Van der Linden 2015, 17). Taken together, the population of those two countries alone comprises 2.7 billion people, about 36 per cent of the world population in 2015. This diminished impact of the role of trade unions for strikes and workplace conflicts could be observed in the global wave of strikes that emerged since 2010 in a number of countries like Egypt, the People’s Republic of China, India, Brazil and South Africa: in many of those large conflicts and mass strikes, trade unions played a minor role or no role at all. In order to take account of the new context of class conflict on a global level—already thoroughly analysed in the general labour studies and industrial relations literature (Fröbel et al. 1980; Harris 1986; Smith 2016; ILO 2015; Ness 2016)—theories of strikes have to be amended, too, which is still a desiderate. On a theoretical level, I propose to replace the formula of class-in-itself and class-for-itself that remains linked to a Hegelian problematic shaped by Georg Lukacs’ interpretation (2000) with the duality of class constitution and class formation. Ellen Meiksins Wood (1982) derives these useful concepts from the work of E.P. Thompson (1963). Classes are objectively constituted by a mode of production since the “relations of production distribute people into class situations” (Meiksins Wood 1982, 49). Class formations then grow out of a process of struggle as people deal with these class situations. “It is in this sense that class struggle precedes class” 1 In 1975, workers in non-core countries formed 50 per cent of the global industrial workforce, and the percentage went up steeply since then; see Smith 2016, 103. There are different estimations on union density on a global level. The International Centre for Trade Union Rights assumes that 13 per cent of the global workforce is unionised (2005). A more recent study of the International Trade Union Confederation (2014) claims 200 million unionised workers out of a workforce of 2.9 billion which would amount to a global union density of 7 per cent (see also van der Linden 2015, 17ff). This number does (obviously) not include the 230 million members of the ACFTU in the People’s Republic of China. 28 J. NOWAK (ibid.).2 Thus, the structural determination of the relations of production creates similar situations and experiences which then might give rise to processes of class formation. The crucial point of Thompson’s historical analysis is that he is able to show how a diversity of actors, like factory workers, domestic workers and artisans, form a more or less united working class with a shared identity despite their different experiences and living conditions (1963, 887ff). This assemblage of different layers of the popular classes, based on a “unifying experience (…) the intensification of exploitation” (Meiksins Wood 1982, 55), is an important element of the approach developed here. Communities of popular classes are not based on every single person in this community being a waged worker, since they are composed of children, old and sick people, small shopkeepers, doctors and so on. They all become part of the process of class formation in one way or another if such a process takes place. This also means that other places of organisation and mobilisation than the workplace play a crucial role for this process, such as the neighbourhood, the family, religious associations, sports clubs and village communities. Taking the idea further, I adopt the novel definition of the working class developed by Marcel van der Linden that conceives of this class as consisting not only of the formally ‘free wage labourer’ but also of semi-free labour, slave labour, debt bondage or self-employment. The common denominator for the working class would then be “coerced commodification of their labour power” (Van der Linden 2008, 34). There are different forms in which capital exercises dominance over labour processes and a broad definition of the working class is necessary in order to grasp those forms. Given the variety of situations of exploitation, there will be a large variety of 2 Although Meiksins Wood distinguishes her position from the one of Louis Althusser, claiming that he denies agency to the working class (1982, 65), their positions converge on the key issues that concern us here: “it is therefore the class struggle, which constitutes the division into classes. (…) You must therefore begin with the class struggle if you want to understand class division (…)” (Althusser 1973, 82). Althusser distinguishes between class struggle as the motor of history (class constitution) and the fact that it is the masses who make history (class formation), while subordinating class formation to the more fundamental process of class constitution (ibid.): “That means that the revolutionary power of the masses comes precisely from the class struggle” (ibid.). While it is the masses that act, their power is based on the specific dynamics of social change in capitalism. Thus, while there is a motor of history, the anti-teleological notion here is that the outcome of this history is open and not pre-determined, and it is in this vein that Althusser claims that history is a “process without a Subject or Goal(s)” (1973, 139). A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 29 immediate needs and mid-term demands of these workers, but also a broader common interest. “This is why, rather than rigidly defining workers as those who work for a wage, we need to retain the notion of the working class as a distinctive social relation, in this case a relation to capital” (McNally 2013, 13). Thus, a new theory of strikes has to respond to and capture the actual state of the working class and how it is aligned with specific forms of activity and organisation, that is, its new and more recent characteristics of which I mention only a few here: the global network of sites of production, trade, transport and sale; the shrinking proportion of industrial workers with regard to the total number of workers; robotisation; Asia as the workshop of the world; informalisation and precarisation. Such a theory also has to register the social, political and economic processes that accompany and condition the restructuring of employment relations, as many of these processes contribute to the reproduction of the working classes, both in the sense of creating new proletarians and in the sense of deepening the dependence on wage labour: land grabs and the onward march of the resource frontier; ecological collapse, food crises and water crises; the real estate market as a new site of accumulation and the housing crisis. It will be shown in later parts of this book how these aspects impinge themselves on the trajectory of strikes and the composition of strikers. David Harvey has pointed at the fact that accumulation by dispossession comprises of one of the mechanisms of capital that includes capital-labour relations but also relies on the violent appropriation of land and nature (2016, 245ff, 270f). The housing and real estate business, land grabs and mineral extraction, and intellectual property rights exploit labour power and are at the same time in many cases presuppositions, or conditions of surplus production. Processes of accumulation by dispossession supply investors with raw materials, land and knowledge. These processes are crucially related to the emergence of working classes since some of these processes consist in the disappropriation of independent producers from their means of production, so they become dependent on being hired as wage labourers. Accumulation by dispossession produces proletarians, human beings without their own means of reproduction, except for the temporary sale of their labour power. At the same time, there are numerous other social processes that create proletarians, that is, changes in agrarian markets and technology, climate change or ecological disasters that motivate parts of the rural population to migrate to urban settlements or to other rural areas and to seek for work or independent production in a new environment. 30 J. NOWAK Thus, we witness a close connection between processes of the dissolution of communities that do not work as wage labourers, the industrialisation of agricultural work, land grabs and environmental pollution by extractive industries, and ecological processes. Capitalist development tends to produce more proletarians (Marx 1867a, chapter 25). These processes leave their marks on the lives of workers, not only in the objective-material sense, but also in terms of their subjective identification and their social links and networks. Thus, both the grievances that are articulated in strikes and the resources and ideas that workers resort to in their activities stem in part from these processes of proletarianisation and dispossession. In order to grasp this interdependence between on the one hand capital and labour in the process of surplus production, and on the other hand other forms of capitalist relations like self-employment, independent production, unwaged work, forced labour, property and real estate investment, as well as non-class processes as family relations, ethnic and race relations, religious hierarchies, caste hierarchies and gender relations, I refer to David Neilson’s “second generation neo-Marxist approach”: he regards the relationship between capital and labour as the generative mechanism of class relations (2017, 11ff). Neilson aims to integrate what he calls non-class group effects (nationality, gender, ethnicity, religion) into class analysis since they cannot be clearly separated from class effects in empirical reality—and he acknowledges the coexistence of other generative mechanisms with the relation between capital and labour. Neilson nonetheless proposes a common descriptive project based on the analysis of the capitalist mode of production as “the material core of social life” (11) and the “social relations that define how this material process is organised” (ibid.). He underlines that while class relations are anchored in the production of surplus value, the aspects of distribution, consumption and social reproduction are key relays for the way class relations develop. Plus, class relations are mediated by and actively shape and transform gender and family relations as well as relations between national, caste or religious communities and identifications. Since these relations are all part and parcel of class formation, I argue that a theory of strikes will have to include these moments, and it cannot remain focused on economic, sectoral or workplace issues—since the immediate labour-capital relations, other forms of capitalist relations and non-class processes are all interdependent, we have to grasp processes of A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 31 class formation at the level of the social formation as a whole and not in a compartmentalised form in the ‘economic’ realm. Some of these processes have a stronger presence in emerging economies than in countries that have been industrialised earlier on. It does make a difference if 47 per cent of the national labour force works in agriculture like in India, or if it is only 1.4 per cent as in Germany. Thus, the full proletarianisation in core countries is not the social reality of the majority of the world population, and not even of the majority of waged workers. Family members of waged workers might live from independent production, so the level of the household and of family and community subsistence has to be taken into account. Different theories of strikes reflect different conjunctures and constellations and are in addition influenced by the geographical location and research focus of the respective writers. It is important to note that we can nonetheless trace perspectives in most theories on strikes that look beyond the respective conjuncture or geographical area. The current conjuncture is marked by a sharp decline of the corporatist trade union model that got established after the First World War and started its slow but remarkable decline in the 1970s. This decline became much steeper in the twenty-first century, and more so after the global economic crisis since 2007. In the light of this, I claim that a new theory of strikes will have to extend its view beyond trade unions as forms of the organisation of workers and open the perspective in order to be able to analyse other types of organisation. This does not in any case mean that trade unions do not play a role anymore or that they would be no relevant objects of analysis for such a theory of strikes. In all four case studies examined in this book, trade unions do play a role, albeit very different ones, and they act together with or against other types of social actors as workplace organisation of workers, social movements, local associations and so on. The claim is that trade unions are often not the main actors in labour struggles, or often act together with other actors, and in many cases also act against the interests of a part of the workers. All these combinations and possibilities have to be taken into account. Thus, the claim that I make here is both a methodological and a conjunctural claim: a new theory of strikes has to take into account that there are important ‘places’ of mobilisation and organisation beyond the 32 J. NOWAK workplace and the trade union: family units, neighbourhoods, local communities and social movements and other types of associations play a role, as well as specific traditions and histories of struggles inscribed into a national territory, a region or a locality. This holds true independently of the historical era and geographic location. In addition, with the shift of much of the working class to countries in which corporatist trade unionism and trade unions in general do not play the same role as they did and do in capitalist core countries, a new theory of strikes that takes these social relations into account is necessary in order to be able to grasp the conditions and dynamics of strikes in non-core countries— “trade unions are no longer the principal institutions by which worker interests get represented (and never were in some parts of the world)” (Castree 2007, 857). I do not in any way claim that other accounts in labour or industrial relations research did not pay attention to these issues, but the consequences that have to be drawn from the nature of labour relations in noncore countries have not yet been systematised in a theory of strikes or industrial conflict. In this way this chapter aims to synthesise existing insights and incorporate them into a coherent theoretical framework. This new theory of strikes does also not claim that one or the other form of organisation of workers is better suited or more progressive, but it primarily claims that new theoretical concepts and methodological perspectives are necessary in order to be able to grasp the types of organisations involved in strikes today. Thus, this new theory of strikes intends to take an analytic perspective that broadens the view and analyses strikes on the level of the social formation, recognising differences of today’s global working class with respect to Fordist capitalism in core countries. Corresponding to the two main theses of this book—a theory of strikes has to take into account other places of mobilisation than the workplace, and other types of the organisation of workers than trade unions—the focus of this chapter is how existing theories address places and spaces of mobilisation and forms of the organisation of workers. This theory is not about the economic or social causes of strikes (Edwards 1979b), and also not about the macroeffects of strikes like the responses of governments (Korpi 1983), economic effects of strikes or the effects of strikes on workers’ consciousness (Kelly 1988, ch. 5). It is also not about patterns of strike activity in different countries and their determinants (Ross 1954; Korpi and Shalev 1979). These are questions that lie beyond this specific approach. A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 33 The four case studies in the later chapters do not have the status of representative examples that are supposed to prove that new types of organisations of workers are emerging on a significant scale. Such a thesis could only be validated or invalidated (if at all) with a large-scale survey which is not intended here. Instead, the case studies aim to provide insight into the dynamics of major mass strikes in emerging economies in the period after the global economic meltdown in 2007–2008, and they serve to demonstrate why the theory of strikes developed in this book is useful in order to grasp certain significant aspects of these and other contemporary strike movements. They also intend to show—based on the method of incorporated comparison (McMichael 1990)—how a specific global conjuncture emerged in the period of 2010–2014 in seemingly unrelated strikes and social conflicts, shaping the coming period of class conflict (see Sect. 3.3 of this book). This chapter consists of three parts: in the first part I will show how influential theories of strikes reflected the state of things in certain periods and geographical areas, and how far they perceived the limits of their respective approaches. I contend that these approaches already hint at another perspective on workers’ organisation, but that they fail to realise this alternative approach, and in the end remain stuck with a narrow industrial relations framework. This first part will look at the theories of Arthur Ross and Paul Hartman, writing during the high time of corporatist trade unionism in the 1950s and 1960s; at Richard Hyman’s approach that diagnoses the ambivalent nature of corporatist trade unionism in Europe and chronicles its decline; and at authors aligned with a labour process perspective. The second part will trace an alternative line of analysis of strikes that gives more space to forms of organisation beyond trade unions. It explores the approach of Rosa Luxemburg on mass strikes and draws a line to the research that emerged out of the analysis of labour unrest in Brazil, South Africa, the Philippines and South Korea during the 1970s and 1980s, in the course of which the term ‘social movement unionism’ was coined. The third part recapitulates how the approach of labour geography allows for a wider perspective on the forms of organisation of workers. In this way, this chapter starts with theories constructed at the high time of corporatist trade unionism which was marked by a focus on the workplace as place of mobilisation and the trade union as the main actor in strikes. This narrow focus was itself both a historical result and a geographical exception since it was based on labour relations in core capitalist 34 J. NOWAK countries. The later parts of this chapter will show how research started to incorporate other types of actors, and to reflect on social relations that differ from the ones typically encountered in core countries. Finally, the turn to the more recent literature on labour geography introduces methodologies that allow a broader vision including a variety of organisational forms and places of mobilisation. To sum up, the new theory of strikes developed in this chapter aims to take account of the fact that today a majority of workers live in non-core countries where trade unions are often marginalised and take on a different role than in core countries. This results in the challenge to construct a new theory of strikes in which trade unions are not the central type of organisation. Plus, the manifold forms of social organisation in which strikes are embedded have been neglected by industrial relations theory that is deeply impregnated by Western Fordism: other places of mobilisation than the workplace and their relevance for strikes have to be taken into account in a new theory of strikes that recognises that the relation between capital and labour is embedded into other aspects of class relations and into non-class relations. This challenge has not been met by earlier theories of strikes with a focus on the tripartite universe of trade unions, capital and the state. 2.1 Three ClassiCs of sTrike analysis In the course of the industrial revolution, a large variety of forms of organisation emerged in the working class movement. Trade union-like organisations already existed in the eighteenth century, often under the name ‘combinations’ (Irving 2017, 107; see also Quinlan 2017), and many trade unions had lines of continuity with earlier craft organisations and guilds. The classical trade union movement formed in the early nineteenth century in England and expanded rapidly across Europe in the second half of that century. It was only after the First World War that the type of the corporatist trade union with a focus on collective bargaining got firmly established in Europe, and in the USA this process was delayed until the 1940s (Brecher 1997, 301). This process coincided with the demise of revolutionary syndicalism as an alternative, anarchist current to corporatist trade unionism (Van der Linden and Thorpe 1990; Hyman 2001, 23). These changes reflected a changing class composition: syndicalism was based on casual, agricultural, construction and port workers, miners, railway employees and factory workers (Van der Linden and Thorpe 1990, A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 35 19–22). The transformation to production focused on the semi-skilled mass worker and a change of hiring and control techniques, enabling a tighter control by management, deprived syndicalism of its basis and led to the institutionalisation of collective bargaining (ibid., 23–27; Silver 2014, 51f). The three approaches presented in this subsection trace the rise, crisis and fall of the model of corporatist trade unionism. Due to the dominance of this model in those countries where researchers dominating the discipline stemmed from and did research on, much of industrial relations research in this period from the 1950s to the early 2000s revolves around the following central tenets: 1. Trade unions are seen as the main actors in strikes. 2. Coordinated trade union action is juxtaposed with ‘unorganised’ or spontaneous mobilisations. 3. The focus is on the workplace as locus of conflict. None of the theories presented here took all these three claims for granted, but they struggled and dealt with these assumptions to some extent. We will see how these claims provided specific challenges for industrial relations theorists. My claim is that a global view on strikes has to abandon all three claims. First, in a global perspective, in only a certain number of strikes, and probably not the majority (although this is hard to validate statistically), trade unions are the main actors. Second, so-called ‘spontaneous mobilisations’ are in fact not spontaneous in many instances, and very often trade union action is based on informal mobilisations. Thus, there is no strict line separating ‘unorganised’ from ‘organised’, ‘official’ from ‘unofficial’ or ‘trade union-led’ and ‘wildcat’ strikes. I rather will propose to drop these distinctions as strong claims since they rather mislead and prevent an analysis of how strikes are organised and unfold. Third, I contend that an analysis of strikes that takes other ‘places’ of mobilisation beyond the workplace into account will expand the view and is rather able to provide a more complete picture. The argumentation why these three counterclaims are valid will unfold within the chapter itself. 2.1.1 The Classic Line: Ross and Hartman The dominant theme of the industrial relations literature in the 1950s and 1960s is ‘the institutionalisation of conflict’ (Dahrendorf 1959; Lipset 36 J. NOWAK 1960). Trade unions had been recognised by employers and the state in much of Western Europe and North America and collective bargaining came to be seen as the preferred route for a more assimilated and moderate version of labour conflict. One of the first and very influential books that captured this new state of things was the collection Industrial conflict, edited by Arthur Kornhauser, Robert Dubin and Arthur M. Ross (1954). In his opening chapter, Ross sets out from the recent phenomenon that the business union monopolised the use of strikes in the USA, crowding out its historical competitors of syndicalist unionism and communist trade unionism (1954, 28, 30). He defines business unionism as “primary reliance upon collective bargaining and a belief in ‘industrial partnership’ under capitalism” (1954, 32). Ross sees the main merits of business unionism in a rationalisation of how strikes are conducted, a clear strategy of unions, discipline of union members and respect for contracts signed by the union, in contrast with allegedly more violent and unorderly strikes in earlier times. The main issue is located on the political terrain: “the most significant influence of business unionism has been to draw the revolutionary sting out of strikes” (ibid.). Instead of revolutionary aspirations the maintenance of the organisation, that is, the trade union itself, becomes the priority. Ross moves on to deepen his analysis of the institutionalisation of conflict in a follow-up publication with Paul T. Hartman (1960), based on data from fifteen countries.3 Early on in the book, the authors warn against the assumption that ‘newer countries’ would follow the same trajectory of labour relations as core countries. They note that in non-core countries anticolonialism and antiimperialism exerted a strong influence on strike movements: foreign capital was a preferred target of strikers, and after decolonisation trade unions have often been subsumed under national development plans or suppressed altogether. One of the main theses of the authors is the relative decline of strike activity in most core countries, especially regarding the duration of strikes. The general diagnosis of Ross/ Hartman is a decline of class antagonism due to decreasing poverty and higher consumption levels. 3 Ross and Hartman included in the study Germany, France, Great Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Italy, South Africa, India and Japan. A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 37 Regarding the three claims mentioned, Ross and Hartman underwrite all of them: Ross shows how trade unions became historically the main actors in strikes, and he underlines a dichotomy of unorganised and coordinated conflicts, relegating both phenomena to different phases of the working class movement. And, Ross and Hartman show how the workplace became historically the main locus of conflict with the establishment of business unions. But they hint at the prospect that state intervention will be a more preferable area of engagement for trade unions in the future (1960). Finally, it is important to consider that Ross/Hartman already conceived that their analyses are only relevant to a certain number of countries, and Ross subsequently turns his attention to none-core countries. He states: “the industrial relations policies which accompanied economic development in the older countries of the West are not fully adequate for the situation of the emerging nations” (1966, xix). This comes with a specific role for trade unions—“union members constitute only a small proportion of the labour force” (xiv)—and the largest chunk of union members are white-collar workers, often from the public sector or the government. 2.1.2 The Work of Richard Hyman: Dissecting Trade Unionism Richard Hyman starts to analyse trade unionism systematically from a Marxist perspective at a period when strikes in Western Europe see a resurgence, in the early 1970s. He asserts that trade unions have an ambivalent character, since they at the same time legitimise and destabilise capitalist social relations. With this, he follows earlier comments of Karl Marx who emphasises that trade unions are a school of struggle, but also criticises their narrow and sectional orientations (1867b, 192). Hyman’s basic point is that trade unionism as such has a dual nature, characterised by “a contradictory relationship between ‘movement’ and ‘organisation’” (2012, 158). This includes significant variation depending on the time period, the political context and the geographical location of actually existing trade unions. Both tendencies inherent in trade unionism will somehow make themselves felt in any specific trade union. Hyman’s research is focused on trade unions in Western Europe, thus his studies focus on a specific type of trade unionism that dominated in this geographical region for the period after the Second World War. It is the type of unionism that I call corporatist trade unionism in this book. Hyman uses another term, ‘political economism’: “I coined the term political 38 J. NOWAK economism to indicate that mainstream West European trade unionism engaged in politics primarily to secure a framework – full employment, rising real wages, an expansionary welfare state – which complemented and was often subordinated to its role in collective bargaining. In this sense, political activity did not fundamentally transcend the economism of ‘business unionism’. (…) Since the 1970s, for multiple reasons, this form of unionism no longer yields positive material outcomes” (2012, 159). Hyman’s sceptical assessment of trade unionism leads him to the conclusion that only the transformation of the economic structure would provide a solution for strikers, and that this does not come about by spontaneous strike activity—thus, any strike will not solve the problem that caused the strike in the first place. In addition, he reminds the reader that many forms of resistance to capitalism other than strikes have emerged, but that those have remained isolated from industrial conflicts so far (1972/1989, 177). Hyman identifies two main elements that contribute to the ambivalent nature of trade unions: bureaucratisation and the segmentation of the labour market. 1. Bureaucratisation: Hyman goes beyond an emphasis of the contradiction between the union rank and file and top union officials. He identifies bureaucratisation as a social relation that includes the general membership as well as union leaders, featuring as the core problem that corporatist unionism faces. In this process of bureaucratisation, solidarity is eroded by social relations inside of trade unions. One aspect of this is the structure of trade unions with limited democratic internal mechanisms (1975, 150). With reference to the UK, Hyman demonstrates that bureaucratisation of trade unions increased with the growth of the public sector and larger industrial companies since the 1960s and the entry of many white-collar workers in unions: the structure and work culture of the public sector and of multiplant corporations came with a more anonymous relationship between members and union officials (1978, 41). 2. Given that the labour market is segmented, usually along lines of gender hierarchies and national/ethnic divisions, but also along lines of skills, sectoral and regional divisions and so on, segmentation will inevitably have effects on the labour movement. Trade union policies are often dominated by the interests of certain parts A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 39 of the working class (Hyman 1989, 27). But while segmentation will have political effects, Hyman claims at the same time that certain groups of workers, for example, the semi-skilled mass worker, do not dispose of the same types of political behaviour across different national contexts: the political effects of segmentation are not determining, due to the large amount of mediating factors like the institutional context, political traditions and ideologies, gender, race and others (1978, 55)—“the dialectic between occupational character and collective consciousness and action is highly complex, and (…) a sophisticated multi-causal analysis is necessary” (1978, 68). This unevenness of how ‘objective conditions’ at the workplace translate into political behaviour will be even larger if national patterns in one continent are compared to national patterns on other continents—Hyman calls this “the unevenness of working-class experience” (1978, 65). Thus, an easy translation of technical into political class composition (if we apply the operaist concepts) runs the danger of an economistic simplification and tends to ignore the manifold mediations that an ‘emic’ and dense perspective claimed by Chandra would have to include (2017; see the introduction of this book). Hyman’s analysis of the trajectory of trade unionism in a core capitalist country points at the need to go beyond a trade union model that is primarily focused on the workplace and on industrial sectors. First, while Hyman claims that the high level of unofficial strikes in the UK came with a huge amount of sectionalism of workers and a fragmentation of strike strategies, he does not at all see centralism as a solution. Solutions would rather involve moving beyond the limits of corporatist trade unionism: “trade union activists must connect far more directly with wider social movements and social struggles. Trade unionists (…) have traditionally accepted (…) the capitalist fragmentation of social identity. ‘Work’ (…) is separate from home, from community, from culture, and has priority over all of these. Accordingly, the trade union struggle is the organising center of the class struggle” (Hyman 1972/1989, 236f). It is characteristic of this form of organisation of trade unions that their power comes nowhere near that of its adversaries (1989, 39). 40 J. NOWAK Second, Hyman underlines that the work of trade unions is based on informal social contacts on the level of the workplace (1975, 157). He goes so far to state that the formalisation of bargaining procedures was not only due to the initiative of managers, but that these “disarm and demobilise trade union members. (…) Only by a readiness to act ‘unofficially’ and ‘unconstitutionally’ can workers maintain a balance of power at all favourable to their own interests” (159). This basically means that independent workers’ activities outside of the formal channel of trade union organisation should at least complement what formal organisations do in order to not be bereft of any effective means of struggle.4 Third, while Hyman stresses that the strength of workers’ organisation lies in informal networks at the workplace, he looks at the downside that this “merely constitutes sectionalism at a higher level” (Hyman 1975, 170). Workplace organisation does not succeed to extend its influence beyond the given “structure of ownership and control” (173; see also Hoffmann 1971, 236). Any challenge to the bigger structures of domination involved would require a broader and more encompassing type of organisation than autonomous workplace collectives. Any political initiative beyond ‘political economism’ would necessitate an overall strategy, and a challenge to the ideological hegemony of capital—Hyman does not see any of this neither in the trade union organisations nor in workplace collectives (1975, 173ff). He underlines that trade unions cannot by themselves become agents of revolutionary change: “they can bargain within the society, but not transform it” (1989, 245). Nonetheless, due to Hyman, trade unions can in certain circumstances become part of revolutionary change, jointly with other popular organisations. A serious limit is that Hyman’s research essentially remains limited to trade unionism, although he diagnoses that the relationships between workplace struggles and other struggles are essential. For the neoliberal period, Hyman rather states a political and ideological disorientation among trade unions, and the death of political economism (2001, 173). The national focus of trade unions is described as “parochial” and limiting (ibid.), while the “traditional axes of union policy” (ibid.) like collective bargaining and the social market lost credibility. At the same time, “trade 4 “The rights acquired in strongly organised workplaces (…) have normally been won autonomously, rarely with the involvement of the outside union” (1975, 159), but “it would be wrong to treat this in isolation from the formal trade unions structure” (161). A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 41 unions seem condemned to act as mediators of transnational economic forces” (ibid.). We can derive important analytic tools and insights from Hyman’s analysis of strikes and trade unions: the problem of the segmentation of the labour force; the precarious and partial nature of representation that trade unions exercise in relation to the entire working class of a country; the inadequacy of autonomous workplace organisation for tackling larger issues like property relations and class domination; and the necessity of social mobilisation beyond the workplace and of larger overall strategies as a requisite for a more profound social transformation. In terms of the three claims central to strike research focused on corporatist unionism, Hyman is undermining some of those claims. He raises considerable doubts about an identity of interests of trade unions and workers, both in terms of sectional interests that might dominate unions, and in terms of an accommodative tendency of trade unions as such. Hyman puts into question the effectiveness of the very form of trade unionism for a profound shake-up of social relations of domination. Second, he emphasises that informal networks at the workplace and working class communities are decisive bases for trade union action, and he rejects any strict distinction between ‘spontaneous’ and ‘organised’ strikes. Third, Hyman identifies the tendencies of trade union policies to focus on ‘work’ and to regard this area as more important than other areas of class conflict. Indeed, he sees this tendency that isolates presumably ‘economic’ issues—which are in fact political—from other political issues as one of the central weaknesses of ‘political economism’. Concluding, Hyman confirms the three claims of mainstream industrial relations, but he deconstructs them by demonstrating that they are specific results of historical processes and underlines that these might not only change over time, but might also not apply to other world regions. The three claims of mainstream industrial relations research thus become problematic features of a specific type of unionism in Hyman’s account: they are put into perspective as contingent historical results. 2.1.3 Workers’ Forms of Organisation and the Labour Process: Michael Burawoy and Paul Edwards Michael Burawoy aims to show that the labour process and production apparatuses, that is, institutions that regulate production, exercise a key influence on industrial conflicts. The specific interest of Burawoy is in what 42 J. NOWAK he calls production apparatuses. He criticises Marx for not conceiving of such apparatuses that organise consent in the labour process, and he assumes that this lapse arises from the fact that the arena of consent in production was quite restricted in the nineteenth century. Burawoy distinguishes economic, political and ideological struggles. Thus conceived, the object of economic struggles is the effort bargain (how fast and hard workers work), the object of political struggles are the relations in production (the conditions of work in general), while only ideological struggles challenge the labour process itself since their object is the terrain of struggles (1979, 177). Burawoy builds up a conceptual matrix of institutions: politics within production sets limits on state intervention, and larger strike waves often have the effect of the state reconstructing production apparatuses. Curiously, Burawoy does not conceptualise trade unions or other workers’ organisations explicitly as production apparatuses, but he does so implicitly in his case study of copper mining in Zambia. What is interesting for us here is that Burawoy applies his schema to mining in Southern Africa, especially to his long-term case study on Zambia. In terms of the organisations of workers, Burawoy shows that the mining compound in the colonial period with its spatial concentration and isolation provided possibilities for worker mobilisation. The company had created cultural associations for the workers that they used as places of struggle: “In the absence of legitimate channels of protest and organs of industrial struggle, such as trade unions, these clandestine and subversive institutions were much more difficult to control” (1985, 230). After independence, black workers moved up into positions of the factory apparatus. These apparatuses had lost significance as the company did not want to provide influence to black employees which weakened the trade unions, too, while the workers at the shop floor had gained considerable control of the labour process. This situation led to an upsurge of strikes that were usually not supported by the trade union (unlike in the earlier colonial state), and subsequently oppressed by the postcolonial state that had nationalised the mines. Burawoy’s conclusion is very interesting: while a politicisation of factory struggles usually helped workers to attain their goals in the colonial period as a consequence of the colonial state’s “distinct autonomy from international capital” (243), workers were able to wring concessions in the postcolonial state through struggles that remained at the level of the factory, A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 43 but were losing out in conflicts as soon as the trade union, political party or government got involved (241). The background for this development is that the postcolonial state increasingly focused on attracting foreign investment so that the interests between mining companies and the state tended to coincide more neatly than they did in the colonial period (245). Burawoy’s example shows that the transformation of economic into political struggles does not in all contexts guarantee success for workers. His conclusion is that the “conquest of the apparatuses of production becomes meaningful only in conjunction with the conquest of the apparatuses of the state” (248). Thus, control of trade unions by workers can become meaningless if production apparatuses are weakened and the state intervenes to control production apparatuses, as in the example of postcolonial Zambia. Regarding the three main claims of mainstream industrial relations, Burawoy does not really address the first one (trade unions as the main actors in strikes) due to his lack of focus on types of organisations of workers. Pretty much the same goes for the second claim (trade union action juxtaposed with unorganised mobilisations)—but nonetheless Burawoy emphasises that informal organisation in the compound in Zambia came with certain positive features, pointing rather towards a continuum between formal and informal types of mobilisation. Burawoy’s contribution is highly significant for the third claim, since he shows how politics is embedded into but also emerges from the production process, and at the same time the state and its linkages to the production apparatuses assume a key role. Thus, different ‘places’ of mobilisation such as the compound or the trade union and state intervention on various levels are brought into research on strikes. I will now turn to the work of Paul Edwards who is anchored in a labour process approach, too. He identifies a structured antagonism of capital and labour as the basis of workplace conflicts. Edwards contradicts the claims of Ross (1954) and Kerr et al. (1973, 200, 212) that riots in the early working class movement were spontaneous outbursts. He points to Eric Hobsbawm’s (1964, 7) term “collective bargaining by riot”, which serves to underline that the Luddite revolts between 1811 and 1813 in England were well prepared, and not spontaneous or disorderly. Violence was deliberately used by skilled workers in order to build up pressure on employers. “Riots were not negative or disorganized” (Edwards 1986, 44 J. NOWAK 108).5 Against the grain of much industrial relations literature, Edwards argues against the central relevance of a formal organisation of workers in order to attain better conditions of work: he refers to evidence brought up by historical research of John Rule (1981, 152) and C.R. Dobson (1980, 17) that informal organisations of workers and customary rules exerted substantial control over the conditions of work in nineteenth-century England. Before the end of this section, I will come back to a gap in the literature surveyed here: the status of trade unions as organisations remains unclear to some extent. Hyman focuses on their political significance, but does not locate them very precisely within the institutional matrix of capitalist societies. Burawoy makes comments that suggest that unions are parts of the production apparatus, but he never includes trade unions explicitly into the definition of production apparatuses. It is at this point that I want to feature Josef Esser’s definition of trade unions as mass-integrative apparatuses (1982, 239) as a useful concept: in distinction to ideological apparatuses trade unions enjoy a much bigger autonomy towards the repressive apparatuses (see Althusser 1969). Trade unions are not mass-integrative apparatuses in all instances, but insofar as they both mobilise interests of workers and contain and filter them in a way that is compatible with the domination of capital. According to Joachim Hirsch, this specific mode of operation of trade unions results in a displacement of conflicts between workers and capital into the trade union as an institution itself (Hirsch 1976, 122f). Esser defines three specific features that qualify unions as mass-integrative apparatuses: (a) an organic link with the oppressed classes, (b) a transformation of the needs and wants of those classes into a form that conforms with capital, producing consent thereby, and (c) form and content of trade union policy contribute to the ideological hegemony of capitalism among the working class (1982, 241). In this way, trade unions become intermediary organisations between society and state (see MüllerJentsch 1985 for an approach similar to those of Hyman and Esser). This definition is much in line with Hyman’s conception of trade unions, but adds a more explicit consideration at the level of state theory. 5 See also in a similar vein: “More fundamentally, the idea that there is a clear distinction between organised and unorganised conflict is questionable” (Edwards 1979a, 96); “Ignorance of the importance of informal groups in industry led participants to concentrate on such false question as whether the strikes were spontaneous or planned” (1979b, 202). A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 2.1.4 45 Conclusion All three classic authors—Ross, Hyman and Burawoy—present a rather sceptical position with regard to rapid changes in the work environment, and they strongly emphasise that both workers and trade unions usually accommodate to the overall framework of social domination. The analysis of the rise and fall of the corporatist trade union hints at several issues that an initial focus on the workplace and on trade unions had to omit: the significance of informal networks for strikes, even when they are official and unionled, the relevance of the larger community for strike action and the effectivity of customary rules and craft organisations in establishing job control. In his analysis of trade unions in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, Hyman shows that macroeconomic changes have an impact on the forms of workers’ organisations, but underlines at the same time that there is not a unitary cause and effect relationship between a certain type of work organisation and production regime and the political orientation and organisational forms that workers will engage in. How these causes translate into effects will inevitably be mediated by existing structures such as trade unions, wider political traditions, national ideologies, gender relations and the type of industrialisation and sectoral composition. This then puts an easy translation of a technical class composition into a political class composition into question. Hyman’s analysis of bureaucratisation as a social relation in trade unionism has relevance beyond a focus on the established capitalist countries. He shows how bureaucratisation is linked up with certain tendencies in the macroeconomic development like the growth of public sector employment, but also the acceptance of a separation of political and economic activities, that is, in fact a limitation of the political activities that unions can engage in. The question of segmentation and which segment trade unions are representing might be even more relevant in countries with a low union density. Finally, the insight that autonomous workplace organisation of workers will not be able to tackle larger issues in society hints at the necessity to organise across and beyond workplaces if a less narrow type of politics is envisaged. In terms of the claims of established industrial relations studies on the role of trade unions and the workplace in strikes, we could witness a move from the celebration of business unions as a rational and modern solution to a sceptical evaluation in Hyman’s and Burawoy’s work that still puts unions centre stage for strikes, although with some qualifications, to the 46 J. NOWAK account of Edwards who is questioning the centrality of trade unions for industrial conflicts at least implicitly. The second claim of a dualism of official and unofficial strikes and mobilisations is held only by Ross in a strong manner, while both Hyman and Edwards question this distinction explicitly. The focus on the workplace as the locus of conflict and mobilisation is somewhat questioned by all accounts with a qualification of the state and state intervention as a crucial aspect, but other ‘places’ of popular mobilisation that are relevant for strikes are only mentioned briefly in Burawoy’s analysis of the factory compound under colonial rule in Zambia. In the next section, we will witness how an alternative line of research on strikes will question some of these claims of classical industrial relations theory in a more fundamental manner. 2.2 an alTernaTive line: Mass sTrikes, UnoffiCial sTrikes, soCial MoveMenT UnionisM While the theories in the first section of this chapter developed different perspectives on trade unions, but were focused on trade unions as main actors, the second part of this chapter will assess an alternative line of strike theories that exhibit a stronger focus on the activities of workers themselves. They put unions into perspective and question their centrality for the mobilisations of workers. This section will then also scoop in on the type of strikes that are at the centre of this book: mass strikes. At this point, it is necessary to underline the difference between a mass strike and a strike wave. A strike wave consists of a series of strikes over a longer period, sometimes several years, and mass strikes can form part of a strike wave or both can be identical. There are two important characteristics of a mass strike in distinction from a strike wave that Rosa Luxemburg identifies and that I claim are still useful criteria: first, mass strikes extend over a larger territory without any central coordination, that is, the spread of a mass strike is due to the initiative of the workers themselves, although some organised groups within the workforce might incentivise this spreading: but there is no central call or central coordination for this. Second, mass strikes affect the political life of a whole country (Luxemburg 1906, 140ff); they become a ‘political event’, characterised by widespread discussion in the media, by politicians and in the public as a whole. Both phenomena can be part of a strike wave, but not every strike wave relies primarily on a decentralised organisation of the workers themselves, and A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 47 there might be strike waves that do not have a substantial effect on public opinion.6 This section looks more closely at mass strikes since this type of strike was characteristic for many labour conflicts in the emerging economies in the wake of the global financial crisis in the early twenty-first century, and it exhibits certain characteristics that have not been examined yet in a systematic fashion in existing literature. The focus on workers’ organisation apart from unions and on the informal networks of workers that are often essential for the success of formal trade union action does not establish a neat distinction between the rank and file or informal organisation on the one side and trade unions or formal organisation on the other. In many cases both go together and play different roles (Woodward 1954), while tensions between grassroots organisation of workers and trade unions are a fundamental characteristic of workers’ mobilisations. Jonathan Zeitlin puts emphasis on those examples in which trade union leaderships encouraged a more radical course of action, while the membership opted for a moderate course (1989a). Another variant is the occurrence of sectionalism or exclusive solidarity of shop floor collectives against a more inclusive and universal course of the trade union leadership (see Jefferys 1946, 127, 166, 191–4; Weekes 1970, 41–53). The approach developed in this book does not aim to evaluate which type of organisation of workers is more effective, or which level of organisation should be privileged, but it claims that the plurality of types of organisation and the multiplicity of ‘places’ of mobilisation have to be included in any perspective that does not want to reproduce a narrow approach that stems from a certain period of time and 6 This differs from the definition given by John Kelly who claims that Luxemburg would qualify a strike wave only as a mass strike if it occurs “during periods of revolutionary struggle” (1988, 36). While such a definition cannot be found in Luxemburg’s work—contrary to the claim of Kelly—it also contradicts with Kelly’s own qualification that “mass strikes did not invariably pass over into political strikes, but only in ‘revolutionary situations’” (ibid., 37). Luxemburg clearly identifies the strikes in Rostov (Russia) in 1902 and in Belgium in the 1890s as mass strikes, and these strikes did not occur in a revolutionary situation. She also unmistakingly underlines, against Kautsky’s insinuations, that the mass strike has no immediate connection with a revolutionary overthrow: “Hat denn irgend jemand an eine plötzliche Einführung des Sozialismus durch den Massenstreik gedacht?” (Luxemburg 1909/10a, 360). Luxemburg characterises this immediate link between mass strike and revolution as the ‘anarchist spectre’ of the mass strike (ibid.); see also Nettl (1966, 152), Weick (1971, 145, 147), Hoffmann (1971, 239) and Haro (2008, 112) for a similar interpretation of Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike. 48 J. NOWAK a limited geographical area. It joins the qualification by Richard Price that a “paradigm of the institutional nexus of labour history [and labour studies, J.N.] (…) will lead to a drastic shrinking of the scope of the field (…) for the history of institutions is the history of the winners in history” (1989, 76). Price’s call, inspired by Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), is “to encompass the heterogeneity of labour’s experience in the family and community (national as well as local) in addition to the workplace” (Price 1989, 77). In other words, or in a different terminology, traditional industrial relations research counts trade unions, political parties and the state as relevant institutions for the study of industrial conflicts (see Zeitlin 1989b, 100f), while the approach developed here—inspired by Gramscian, Althusserian and feminist approaches— counts the family, the community, the neighbourhood and associations as institutions (or apparatuses) that are not less important than the ones recognised by Zeitlin (see Ackers 2002 for a neopluralist communitarian call to include family and community as dimensions of industrial relations research). These insights that have been more broadly discussed by scholars of social history did not make much leeway into research on strikes and labour studies more narrowly conceived, and are often absent from the more recent field of global labour studies. We will come back to this point later. 2.2.1 Rosa Luxemburg’s Account of Mass Strikes Rosa Luxemburg’s classic work The Mass Strike, the Political Parties and the Trade Unions is the first systematic account of mass strikes as a specific phenomenon distinguished from strikes in one workplace or sector. Luxemburg puts emphasis on the fact that mass strikes do not follow a ready-made path, thereby distancing herself from both the anarchist myth of “the general strike as a means of inaugurating the revolution” (1906, 112) and the bureaucratic engineers of the workers’ movement in German social democracy “who would, in the manner of a board of directors, put the mass strike in Germany on the calendar on an appointed day” (1906, 116). Instead, Luxemburg describes the mass strike as an outcome of specific social and political conditions, as a mass action that cannot be directed by political leaders: “If, therefore, the Russian Revolution teaches us anything, it teaches above all that the mass strike is not artificially ‘made’, not ‘decided’ at random, not ‘propagated’, but that it is a historical A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 49 phenomenon, which, at a given moment, results from social conditions with historical inevitability” (1906, 117). Luxemburg describes the mass strike as a tactic of the workers’ movement with five features: (1) Its forms are constantly changing. Sometimes mass strikes start with a political programme and end with purely economic demands, or they begin with demands related to the work situation and evolve into full-fledged political struggles (Luxemburg 1906, 127f, 144). Thereby, they cross the boundaries between the political and the economic. The strikes in Russia in 1905 combined the demands for political rights articulated in the strike movements in Belgium and in Sweden in 1902 with economic strikes. Luxemburg was eager to underline that mass strikes in a revolutionary period will have different characteristics from other mass strikes. She held that the mass strikes in Russia underwent modifications over the course of the year in 1905 and also from region to region: “the mass strike in Russia displays such a multiplicity of the most varied forms of action that it is altogether impossible to speak of ‘the’ mass strike, of an abstract schematic mass strike” (1906, 120). (2) Mass strikes disrupt political life and enter into the public debate. They can be described as strikes in which partial and economic demands lead to events that affect the political life of a whole country (1906, 140ff). (3) They have a mobilising aspect for the working class as a whole, as workers experience their collective power and receive a quick and groundbreaking form of political education in the course of these strikes (1906, 140; Hoffmann 1971, 243). A process of a general politicisation of the working class, of experiences in organisation and street combat is for Luxemburg the most important effect of mass strikes, “its mental sediment: the intellectual, cultural growth of the proletariat” (1906, 134; Bonilla 2010, 135).7 (4) Mass strikes flow from one part of 7 See the similar idea of Lenin, formulated in 1899: “Every strike brings thoughts of socialism very forcibly to the worker’s mind. (…) A strike teaches workers to understand what the strength of the employers and what the strength of the workers consists in. (…) Every strike reminds the workers that their position is not hopeless, that they are not alone.” But he also underlines the necessity for a broader political struggle: “Strikes are one of the ways in which the working class struggles for its emancipation, but they are not the only way; and if workers do not turn their attention to other means of conducting the struggle, they will slow down the growth and the successes of the working class. (…) From individual strikes the workers can and must go over (…) to a struggle of the entire working class for the emancipation of all who labour” (1899, 310ff). E.T. Hiller is like Luxemburg focusing on the mobilising and educating aspect of mass strikes: “Mass strikes invite retreat into the incalculable – the surge and emotion of a sympathetic group” (1928, 20); “The strike, though it bring no material 50 J. NOWAK the country to other parts without a proper central organisation (Luxemburg 1906, 120–29): several strike movements occur in a certain time span, constituting a strike wave, but without prior organisation or organic links between the strikers. (5) Mass strikes are not the final solution for the quest of the workers’ movement to conquer political power8: they too have to be transformed into another political strategy: “The role of the political mass strike alone is exhausted but at the same time, the transition of the mass strike into a general popular rising is not yet accomplished” (1906, 140). They are the product of a certain specific period and class composition, conditioned by concentration of capital (Luxemburg 1910, 470): “in reality the mass strike does not produce the revolution, but the revolution produces the mass strike” (1906, 142).9 In line with this, Isabel Maria Loureiro characterises Luxemburg’s approach by her emphasis on the “unity between historical necessity (…) and unexpected revolutionary action” (1997, 46; own translation). Luxemburg did not start to write about mass strikes under the influence of the Russian events of 1905, but in 1902 when workers in Belgium organised a general strike from below that lasted for five days (Luxemburg 1902a, b, c; see also Geras 1976, 117). It becomes clear from these early texts and a later one (Luxemburg 1910) that the concepts of mass strikes and general strikes have often been used synonymously in the contemporary debates. The term ‘general strike’ seemed to have a stronger connotation with the idea of the mid-nineteenth century to abolish capitalism for once in one big general strike which remained popular with much of the anarchist movement in the early twentieth century. Thus, the new term ‘mass strike’ served to distinguish the general strikes that occurred since the 1880s from the idea of a mythical general strike. Luxemburg qualifies both strikes that erupt from the grassroots of the workers and ones that are organised gain, is felt to be a triumph if it brings this sense of importance. (…) Success gets its value from the struggle, and victory is always glorious, even if it is not profitable” (22). 8 Walter Schluep underlines that revolutionary mass strikes would not be covered by labour law: “An industrial conflict aimed at destroying the whole economic system – in the form of permanent confrontation for example – is absolutely unjustifiable because it disrupts the very economic system from which it derives its legitimation. It cannot possibly be justified on the ground that a change in the economic order would inevitably affect (…) conditions in employment” (1974, 73). 9 See also Brecher (1997, 287): “Before the widespread development of industry and employees, there could be no mass strikes.” A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 51 from a party or trade union leadership as mass strikes. But she underlines that mass strikes that erupt from the proletarian mass itself tend to be more successful, while their success would also depend on a coherent tactical line of its leadership. In her first texts on mass strikes, “Der dritte Akt” (1902a) and “Das belgische Experiment” (1902b), she recaptures the evolvement of the mass strike in Belgium: starting with a successful strike for general suffrage of 30,000 workers in 1886, organised from below, it was followed in 1891 by a second successful strike of 125,000 workers organised by the Belgian workers’ party, and a third successful one of 250,000 workers in 1893. Each time the government conceded with reforms of the electoral system. The strike in 1902 was organised from below again, and this time it was called off by the Belgian workers’ party without having achieved any results which led Luxemburg to denounce a coalition of the party with the Liberals, derailing the strike. Luxemburg underlines two conditions for mass strikes to happen in Belgium, and not in Germany, France or England: the enormous industrial development in a small country in contrast with the fragmented development across regions in Germany and France is one aspect. Another aspect is the close relationship between the workers’ party and the trade union movement in Belgium, in contrast with the sectionalism of English trade unions and the lack of a pronounced socialist party in England (1902c, 238). On a more general level, Luxemburg underlines that it is only the threat of violence and unruliness that guarantees the success of a mass strike. Thus, if a mass strike is devoid of any threat of violence, it cannot be successful (ibid., 240–248). Thus, early on in her analysis of the mass strike, three elements stand out: spatial density of industrial areas, the political nature of the party-trade union relationship and violence or the threat of violence as a core element of mass strikes. With the mass strike during the Russian Revolution in 1905 a new phenomenon appeared, representing at the time the biggest strike movement that had been seen until this date. It was in response and as an evaluation of the Russian strikes that Luxemburg wrote her famous pamphlet on mass strikes (1906). She had travelled to Warsaw in December 1905 in order to participate in the final phase of the Russian Revolution (Poland and Warsaw comprised one of the centres of the yearlong uprising), was arrested in March 1906 in Poland and then left for Finland in August 1906, spending time with Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and other exiled leaders of Russian social democracy. It was in this period that she wrote her famous text, and she returned to Germany in September 52 J. NOWAK 1906 (Haro 2008, 109). There are two aspects of her analysis which have a special relevance for the perspective developed here: the organisational aspect of mass strikes, and the role of the working class in late developing countries which I will examine in the next two paragraphs. 2.2.1.1 Mass Strikes Mobilise Unorganised Workers and Encourage New Forms of Organisation Luxemburg claims that mass strikes expand the reach of the labour movement beyond its organised core: they draw new groups of workers into trade unions and political organisations, and in the case of Russia in 1905 the mass strikes led to the emergence of a huge number of trade unions in formerly non-unionised areas like postal and railway workers, domestic workers, technicians and artistic professions.10 The industrial working class in Russia set off the revolutionary movement in January 1905 and had been mobilised on and off since the late 1890s, and in the course of 1905 the movement expanded to both poorer and more well-off workers that had not been mobilised earlier, to significant parts of the military in the form of mutinies and to peasants in the form of revolts. Thus, Luxemburg’s claim is that organisation and mobilisation of the masses emerge from strikes and struggles, and that an already existing organisation is not a necessary precondition for a successful strike (1905b, 603).11 At the same time, there have to be some organised nuclei: “The resolution and determination of the workers also play a part and indeed the initiative and the wider direction naturally fall to the share of the organised and most enlightened kernel of the proletariat” (1906, 147). But the vanguard alone cannot resolve anything: “The plan of undertaking mass strikes as a serious political class action with organised workers only is absolutely hopeless. If the mass strike, or rather, mass strikes, and the mass struggle are to be successful they must become a real people’s movement, that is, the widest 10 Michael Hughes (2009, 119) claims that the 1905 strike of Ruhr miners in solidarity with the Russian Revolution drew many workers into the movement, leading to a rise of trade union membership. On the other hand, the collapse of the 1912 miners’ strike in Germany led to a decline of union membership. 11 “It is thus an entirely mechanical, undialectical conception that strong organisations always have to precede the struggle” (own translation), in the German original: “Es ist eben eine ganz mechanische, undialektische Auffassung, dass starke Organisationen dem Kampfe immer vorausgehen müssen” (Luxemburg 1905b, 603). A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 53 sections of the proletariat must be drawn into the fight” (158). Jeremy Brecher regards the overcoming of the segmentation of workers into different groups as one of the central features of mass strikes (1997, 303). It is exactly with this evaluation that Luxemburg was at odds with the leaders of the German trade unions. For her, an exclusive focus on already unionised workers would lead to weak struggles and a reproduction of existing divisions in the working class, most pronounced in early twentieth-century Germany since postal and railway workers were banned from striking and agricultural workers were extraordinary poor and disconnected from the overall labour movement: “The overestimate and the false estimate of the role of organisations in the class struggle of the proletariat is generally reinforced by the underestimate of the unorganised proletarian mass and of their political maturity” (Luxemburg 1906, 159). In addition to the emphasis on mobilising formally unorganised workers, Luxemburg emphasises the primacy of political organisation: the trade union movement would be focused on present needs or “immediate interests” (170), while the social-democratic struggle, more far reaching, concerns the “future interests of the labour movement” (ibid.). This clear hierarchy was at odds with the orientation of the German trade union leadership that favoured formal independence from the social-democratic party. Luxemburg explicitly denies the principle of an ‘equal authority’ of trade union and party and favours a subordination of the trade unions to the political line of the party. She then goes so far to call the “regular trade-union officialdom” (177) a “historically necessary evil” (ibid.) which turns into “obstacles to its further development at a certain stage of organisation and at a certain degree of ripeness of conditions” (ibid.). The counterargument of the social-democratic trade union leaders was that the much larger membership of the German unions in contrast to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) would lend them more weight. A widespread misperception of Luxemburg’s approach is that she would favour spontaneity over organisation: obviously mass strikes are organised, and often they are organised quite well, and it is the merit of Luxemburg to conceptualise this specific form and dynamic of organisation that occurs in mass strikes. Oskar Negt clarifies this point in emphasising that there immediate spontaneity does not exist, since any spontaneous behaviour of workers will always be mediated by workers’ organisations, even if they are minuscule or if a strike is directed against those organisations; furthermore, mass strikes are mediated by the organisation of production and 54 J. NOWAK employment relations (Negt 1974, 155). In this vein, Luxemburg underlines that the mass strikes in 1905 would not have been possible without the earlier phases of the labour movement in Russia, the first one characterised by small circles of workers, and the second one by purely economic strikes. Luxemburg confirms indeed that spontaneity played a “great party in all Russian mass strikes (…) be it as a driving force or as a restraining influence” (1906, 148). The important role of spontaneity is explained by her due to the speed of events during a revolution, thus it does not hold for all situations. For Luxemburg, the role of the political party of social democracy in a situation of generalised mobilisation will consist mainly in political leadership, and the consistency of this leadership will have a decisive effect on the confidence or confusion of the masses (149f).12 The inversion of the role of mass movement and political party is the decisive clue in her account: the masses become the leadership of the movement, and leaders are rather, as Luxemburg says, “transforming themselves into tools of the masses and transform the masses into a leader” (Luxemburg 1903/4a, 396, own translation; Pozzoli 1974, 15). Crucial for this understanding is the role of formally unorganised workers and other popular actors: while the political party and its theoreticians only have access to a minority of the working class, it is the political and social movement that is able to include broader parts of the population (ibid., 16). 2.2.1.2 The Role of the Working Class in Late Developing Social Formations The second aspect of Luxemburg’s approach I want to highlight concerns the class composition of the Russian social formation which led to specific characteristics of these revolts. These are important for us when we look at strikes in emerging economies in later chapters, Russia being an underdeveloped or late developing country in 1905. Luxemburg compares the constellation of class forces in Russia 1905 with the one in France and Germany in 1848 when the bourgeoisie led the 12 Lenin underlines in a letter written in November 1905 the significance of the workers’ councils (soviets) that emerged from the strikes. These councils united deputies of the strike committees that had been founded in workplaces. In his view, these organs should complement the political work of the party: “It seems to me that to lead the political struggle, both the Soviet (reorganised in a sense to be discussed forthwith) and the Party are, to an equal degree, absolutely necessary” (Lenin 1905, 21, emphasis in the original). A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 55 revolutionary movements. She claims that the Russian movement in 1905 is the first explicitly proletarian one, due to the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie that does not take a revolutionary role, and a radicalised urban intelligentsia with less firm links to the bourgeoisie, thus enabling the working class to become the main revolutionary actor in a bourgeois revolution without being subjected to the ideological influence of liberalism— and the economic and political mass strikes are the manifest expression of this situation (Luxemburg 1904/5, 479ff; Luxemburg 1905a, 514ff). Luxemburg concludes from this that Russia will not follow the course of development of Germany or other industrialised countries. The mass strike debate that erupted in Germany several times—in 1905/06, 1910 and 1912/13—was ultimately about the significance of the Russian Revolution in 1905 for Germany. Luxemburg claims that the mass strikes in Russia were not a backward phenomenon, but an image of the future, and thus indirectly raises the question of revolution in Germany. Luxemburg’s conclusions from the Russian mass strikes in 1905 led to a bitter confrontation with Karl Kautsky. He claims that mass strikes are useful in Russia, but not in Western Europe, due to the different conditions: the amorphous and primitive strikes in Russia would be, due to Kautsky, a product of the backwardness of Russia, and would have been without much success (1910, 164ff.).13 Luxemburg counters these claims not only with the contemporary evidence of mass strikes in Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Poland, Italy, Hungary and the USA (Luxemburg 1909/10b, 394, 404ff)—Germany saw a month-long solidarity strike of more than 200,000 workers in January 1905 in the Ruhr area as a response to the Russian events, and another mass strike in Hamburg in early 1906. More significant for us is the claim that it was not the economic 13 Nildo Viana (2010) underlines that real wages in Russia decreased in 1903 and 1904 between 20 and 25 per cent which provided one of the underlying causes of the revolution in 1905; see also Floyd (1969). The mass strikes in Russia in 1905 were successful in establishing much shorter working days, but much of the initial gains, that is, on shorter working hours, were reversed in 1906 when the revolution ebbed away. Nevertheless, Lenin shows in a review in 1912 that the wage hikes achieved in 1905 were not rolled back, and the level of real wages remained significantly higher after 1905: “The year 1905 improved the worker’s living standard to a degree that normally is attained during several decades” (1912, 258f). He also demonstrates in other publications that workers in big factories dominated the strike movements between 1895 and 1912, with the workers in the metal industry and the regions of Poland and St. Petersburg taking a leading role (Lenin 1910, 1913, 534ff). 56 J. NOWAK backwardness but the “advanced development of capitalism, modern industry and trade in Russia” (1909/10b, 399) that have to be regarded as facilitating the Russian mass strikes. Russia as a predominantly agrarian country faced the introduction of the most modern technologies of industrial production, similar to developments in emerging economies like India and Brazil today. Luxemburg thus conceives the forms of struggle arising in Russia as a precursor of developments in the West: the nature of uneven development leads to an inversion of the traditional schema that the most developed forms of class struggle would occur in the countries that industrialised earlier: “The present revolution realizes in the particular affairs of absolutist Russia the general results of international capitalist development, and appears not so much as the last successor of the old bourgeois revolutions as the forerunner of the new series of proletarian revolutions of the West. The most backward country of all, just because it has been so unpardonably late with its bourgeois revolution, shows ways and methods of further class struggles to the proletariat of Germany and the most advanced capitalist countries” (1906, 164f). Luxemburg’s claim was confirmed when political mass strikes and naval mutinies occurred in Germany in the summer of 1916 (55,000 strikers), April 1917 (250,000 strikers), August 1917 and in January 1918, paving the way for the revolution in November 1918. The strikes in January 1918 had been started by metal workers in Berlin, and mobilised 500,000 workers in Berlin, and many more in the rest of Germany. They were stopped by force after one week and had raised seven demands, of which six were political demands for democratisation and against the war (Bailey 1980, 160; Fuller 2015)—and the leadership of the German trade unions refused to back the strikes.14 The claim that Luxemburg had made came to be known as the ‘leapfrog’ effect (Nettl 1966, 156). It “implied that in some respects at least the Russian masses were in advance of their German brethren (…) the very idea of learning Russian lessons was greatly resented by the Germans, 14 A total of 50,000 strikers were subsequently conscripted into the army. Some authors claim that they were partly responsible for the mutinies in late 1918 that led to the revolution (Bailey 1980, 167). The metal workers who were at the forefront of the January 1918 strike had plans for an armed uprising in January 1919, and then contributed to the revolution that broke out two months earlier (Luban 2008, 25). In the aftermath of the revolution, a twoweek-long general strike occurred in March 1919, during which far more than 1000 people were killed, primarily by state security forces (Lange 2012). A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 57 (…) even by fellow radicals like Lebebour” (ibid., 158f). The decisive point here is that Russia jumped from feudalism to a proletarian revolution in defiance of stagist concepts, not only confronting the earlier industrialising countries with uncontemporaneity, but also being faced with unevenness inside: the contrast between industrialisation with advanced technology and a predominant peasant mass of the general population. In this way, the struggle for democracy becomes impregnated with a labour movement and a transition to socialism, however incomplete. 2.2.1.3 Interpretation Luxemburg’s account charts a form of action that is inevitably linked up with industrial production but also with conflicts in the public sector and in agriculture. Mass strikes continue until today and saw some spectacular examples occurring in the past years, that is, the successful strike of more than 100,000 garment workers in April 2015 in Bangalore, strikes of more than 200,000 tea plantation workers in Darjeeling in 2017 or the weeklong strike of more than 40,000 shoe workers in China at Yue Yuen factory in Dongguan. These are just some of the better known examples. Despite this and a resurgence of references to Luxemburg’s work on mass strikes (Bonilla 2010; Zemni et al. 2012), there has not been any extensive debate on how to analyse mass strikes. One of the few writers to engage with the mass strike is Edward Webster (1981) in his analysis of the ‘stayaways’, that is, national and regional general strikes, of the black working class in South Africa in the 1950s–1970s. The general strikes of the late 1950s and early 1960s were political mass strikes with a demonstrative character, not exceeding the length of one day. Some of them were organised from below, and others by trade union federations. Since just a small number of workers were organised in trade unions, these strikes faced the challenge to also organise delegates from neighbourhood communities (1981, 18). The only partially successful general strike in March 1961 ended with a ban of the most important resistance organisations African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), leading to a change in strategy towards armed resistance. The general strike resurged as a tactic used by the Soweto student movement only in 1976, leading to the largest strike in South Africa since 1945 with 500,000 workers involved (1981, 29). The strikes in 1976 lasted between three and five days, but also encountered limits since workers lost wages, and saw as a response again a ban of seventeen organisations in the following year (1981, 32). Webster sees the weakness of the Soweto political mass strikes in the fact that 58 J. NOWAK they did not introduce class content into popular resistance due to the lack of a solid base in the workplace. Thus, Webster sees the value of the political general strike in its demonstrative character, and sees workplace organisation as a necessary condition for a more determined strategy of resistance. Tony Cliff engages with the mass strike, too, and his analysis of various strike movements from the Swedish general strike in 1909 to the British general strike in 1926 through to the French strike in 1968 and the British miners’ strike in 1972 aims to distinguish between a bureaucratic mass strike and a rank-and-file mass strike, but does not develop a more analytical debate (1985). Luxemburg herself made references to the ‘prepared, methodical’ mass strike as a compromise solution (Luxemburg 1913, 202) when she examines the Belgian general strike in 1913 which Cliff also refers to. It emanates from Cliff’s analysis—focused entirely on strikes in Europe—that his distinction cannot be held up in a rigid way. While he classifies the general strike in France in 1968 as a rank-and-file mass strike, he emphasises that most workers went home and did not participate actively in the strike—most factories remained in the hands of cadres of the French Communist Party and the party-led trade union Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). Thus, every mass strike will have elements of organisation from ‘below’ and ‘above’. While for Luxemburg the generic mass strike erupts from below, the analytical gains from Cliff’s distinction remain limited. In the 2010s, three authors from Cliff’s current of Trotskyism discussed if the unsuccessful one-day general strike of public sector workers in the UK in November 2011 can be classified as a bureaucratic mass strike. While Sean Vernell (2013) and Dave Lyddon (2015) reject this qualification, Mark O’Brien (2014) affirms it. The validity or relevance of this claim does not interest us here. While every strike shows some rank-and-file activity, for O’Brien the significance of it in a specific strike is decisive. This is the position we will adopt here in order to define a mass strike: the decisive aspect is a certain amount of ‘leaderless resistance’, the diffusion of decentred initiatives that inspire each other which might include organising centres located in formal organisations as well as in informal networks. In a parallel debate, Jörg Nowak and Alexander Gallas (2014) analysed strikes in Western Europe with categories used by Luxemburg in her text on mass strikes in Russia: Luxemburg (1906) distinguishes—in line with many other authors of her time—four dimensions of strikes: the aim of a strike (political or economic), the extension of a strike (partial: sectoral, regional, local or general), the direction of a strike movement (defensive or offensive) and the form of a strike (demonstrative strike or A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 59 fighting strike). Nowak and Gallas characterise the wave of general strikes in Western Europe from 2010 to 2014 as predominantly political, defensive, demonstrative and general strikes (2014, 311f). The positive contribution of this debate is that the authors use an already established and transparent taxonomy, although it is surely a bit schematic. Luxemburg herself insists on the necessity of these and other conceptual distinctions of strikes. At the same time she stresses against Kautsky that these different forms cannot be kept apart from each other in a schematic way in real life (Luxemburg 1909/10a, 353). But even with these qualifications, the phenomenon of mass strikes, its dynamics, patterns and modes of organisation and communication lack a general theoretical framework in order to assess this specific kind of social movement. The exploration of spatial dynamics of mobilisation is a crucial aspect of a theory of mass strikes. Mass strikes often expand in a rapid manner across large geographical areas without the support of a central organisation and exhibit certain spatial patterns of mobilisation that facilitate and confine their scope of action. This will be dealt with in the next section. Spatial logics are in these cases related not just to local, regional or national spaces but also to economic sectors and industrial clusters as ‘spaces’ of mobilisation. At this point, I propose to establish three categories of mass strikes on the basis of the foregoing discussion: 1. Mass strikes that are organised in the form of one- or two-day long general demonstrative strikes. These might have rank-and-file mobilisations at its origin or might be entirely planned by the union leadership, or anything in between. This category would apply for the general strikes in Belgium between 1886 and 1913 or the general strike in Sweden in 1902, and to most of the general strikes in Europe in the wake of the financial crisis between 2010 and 2014. The one-day general strike of the UK public sector in 2011 would also fall into this category. I call them ‘demonstrative mass strikes’. 2. A second category is fighting mass strikes that see a significant amount of mass initiative, but have one or more clearly identifiable centres of coordination. They can be sectoral or general strikes, but are not limited to a certain period in advance. These are called by one or several national or sectoral union federations or unions like in the public sector strikes in South Africa in 2010 or in Brazil in 2012, or the French strikes against pension reform in 2010. The initiative 60 J. NOWAK of the workers and of other actors is a significant part of those strikes but there is one or several centres of organisation that can be identified clearly, in some cases also an alliance of several organisations as in the general strikes in the French Caribbean islands Guadeloupe and Martinique in 2009. I call those strikes ‘centrally coordinated fighting mass strikes’. 3. A third category which will be in the centre of this book can be sectoral or general strikes, and they do not go back to the initiative of a trade union and evolve by diffusion, without any clear organising centre, although trade unions might get involved at some point and to some extent. But the moment of self-organisation and contagion dominates. It is the moment that Lenin describes with reference to the 1905 revolution in Russia: “The organisations failed to keep pace with the growth and range of the movement” (Lenin 1906, 172, emphasis in the original). The mass strikes in Russia in 1905 as well as the strikes in Germany during the First World War come into this category. More contemporary examples would be the strikes in 2010 in China that erupted in one plant and then swept across regions and sectors, or the strikes in South African mines in 2012. All those strikes have organising centres and centres of initiative but none of them had unequivocal leadership over the entirety of those strikes. I call these strikes ‘worker-led fighting mass strikes’. None of those three types of mass strikes is regarded here as a higher or lower form, a more or less militant, effective or conscious form. These qualifications cannot mechanically be derived from the form of organisation since evaluations like that cannot be made in an isolated abstract way, but only with regard to the specific context and the political conjuncture. It has been the mistake of many strike analyses—from the institutionalist or the more rank and file or wildcat camp—to qualify the political quality of strikes with regard to how they are organised. This is rather mixing up different levels of analysis and avoids a more thorough and contextsensitive interpretation of the strikes in question. To qualify strikes politically depending on their type of organisation seems like using an easily visible signpost, but it is rather a trap of succumbing to a superficial, positivist and apolitical form of analysis that still bears much semblance with mainstream political sciences’ obsession with concepts that can be inserted into a table or graph. Thus, these categories are used as a descriptive device in A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 61 this book because of its focus on the forms of organisation that emerge from a certain form of mass strikes, that is, worker-led fighting strikes. Concluding, Luxemburg’s account runs counter to the assumptions of mainstream industrial relations theory: trade unions are not the main actors in the mass strikes she is analysing, and in Russia in 1905 unions emerge from mass strikes (and not the other way around). The actions of trade unions and of workers themselves are perceived as a continuum, and not as two different modes of action, and the participation of formally unorganised workers in mass strikes is seen as a crucial condition for the success of those strikes. Third, the workplace is seen as an important place of conflict, but the streets and the political level are seen as having the same importance, and mass strikes are perceived as being connected to peasant uprisings and mutinies in the army. The traditional schema is put upside down. 2.2.2 ‘Unofficial’ Strikes I will devote a shorter subsection to the literature on unofficial strikes since mass strikes are also unofficial strikes in some instances. Strike research since the 1970s increasingly recognises that the bulk of actual strikes even in core countries other than the UK—once famous for its large number of unofficial strikes—like Canada (Hebdon and Noh 2013, 42ff), Sweden (Fulcher 1973; Ingham 1974, 27) and the USA (Kuhn 1961; Fantasia 1983, 77) have been unofficial strikes for most of the postSecond World War period, often seen as the golden age of ‘pacified’ employment relations. These evaluations usually compare the number of strikes and not the days not worked or the number of strikers involved in official and unofficial strikes. However, the phenomenon of unofficial strikes went often unrecognised due to variation in national strike statistics, most of which do not count all unofficial strikes, depending on the length of the strike or the number of participants (see Dribbusch and Vandaele 2007 for an overview on strike statistics). It is not uncommon that official strikes are accompanied by nonunionised workers going on strike at the same time, thus a neat separation of official and unofficial strikes is hard to make. Also, it is quite common that strikes that begin as unofficial strikes are afterwards declared as legal and official by unions, or they transform into official strikes (Eldridge and Cameron 1968, 71). A common pattern is that unofficial strikers interact with a union that is negotiating outcomes based on unofficial strikes 62 J. NOWAK (Fantasia 1988, 116). Since mass strikes by definition mobilise large groups of workers, almost every type of mass strike will be to some extent an unofficial strike since they regularly mobilise non-unionised workers. What is relevant for us here is that many unofficial strikes are based on forms of informal organisation that are similar or identical to the organisational bases of worker-led fighting mass strikes. Many writers identify the work group as the basic unit for unofficial strikes (Eldridge and Cameron 1968, 90; Fantasia 1988, 108f). As would be expected, the question of spontaneity is addressed in the literature on unofficial strikes. Jerome Scott and George Homans underline in an early account: “it appears that in almost all instances a wildcat strike presupposes communication and a degree of informal group organization. The strike has some kind of leadership, usually from within the group, and the leaders do some kind of planning, if only but a few hours or minutes ahead. Whether this kind of behaviour is ‘spontaneous’ or ‘planned’ is a quibble” (1947, 283). Scott/ Homans interpret the “endless debate” (ibid.) about this issue as an indication of “ignorance of informal group behaviour” (ibid.). Our claim here is that this informal group behaviour is a crucial basis for most strikes, and has special relevance for worker-led fighting mass strikes. Rick Fantasia makes similar comments about forty years later: “In posing a dualism between spontaneity and the planned or rational calculation of collective action, the presence of the structured elements within spontaneous action may be missed” (1988, 111). Fantasia emphasises that the repertoires of unofficial strikes are shaped by institutional practices (1988, 230) and sees unofficial strikes being caused by official strikes losing the effects they had in earlier periods (ibid.). 2.2.3 Social Movement Theories Social movement theory emerged in the 1980s in Europe and North America with the aim to grasp the specificity of the new social movements in core countries. Important contributors to social movement theory emphasise a shift in new social movements from economic to cultural issues (Touraine 1985), and a focus on identity, autonomy and particularism, as opposed to the supposed attachment of the labour movement to interests, representation and universalism (Melucci 1980). This characterisation was only possible and seemingly adequate on the basis of two ideological manoeuvres: (1) the wide range of social movements outside of Western Europe and North America that were part of the global wave of A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 63 mobilisation in the 1960s and 1970s had to appear from sight, and (2) all elements of social movements inside of this geographical area that did not fit this schema of the shift to ‘cultural’ issues like the Third World solidarity movement, the protests against the Vietnam war—both at the cradle of new social movements—had to be glossed over. This extends also to the alternative currents in workplace struggles that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and the struggles of immigrant workers, covering features that are ascribed to old and new social movements alike. The methodology of social movement studies is primarily dominated by North American approaches. The most influential current is the resource mobilisation approach of Charles Tilly (1978), at the time coined in a Marxist vein, but primarily based on a rational-choice model. The focus on resources in social movement studies emerged in parallel with the power resources approach in labour studies (Korpi 1974, 1985) that shares a similar problem. Said differently, resource mobilisation theory makes a list of conditions for social movements to occur, but cannot explain why social movements often do not occur when these conditions are given, or why social movements emerge in places where those conditions are not present. This one-sided rational-choice approach was later accompanied by approaches analysing discourses (framing) and changes in the political structure (political opportunity structures).15 The larger context of political economy remained outside of the scope of social movement studies to a significant extent (see Della Porta 2017). Since empirical research about social movements revealed that structural conditions, discursive framings and conjunctural changes in the political context cannot explain why social movements and popular revolts erupt in oppressive and authoritarian settings, attention shifted to the phenomenon that specific cycles of mobilisation emerge due to economicpolitical conjunctures. Sidney Tarrow subsequently (1998/2011) introduced the notion of a ‘cycle of contention’. The concept was borrowed largely unacknowledged from the concept of ‘cycle of struggles’ that was used by Italian operaist authors since the 1970s (see Negri 1988). 15 Colin Barker, writing from a Marxist perspective, claims that he finds this concept-set useful, because of its allegedly “non-reductionist” (2011, 4) character, but criticises a “theory-practice disconnection” (6)—the theory is not interesting for activists—and a “structuralist objectivism” (ibid.) in how the concepts are used. I would rather claim that the concepts themselves limit the understanding of social movements. 64 J. NOWAK Tarrow sees the social networks below formal organisation as the key to movement dynamism (2011, 183). He identifies three main processes of mobilisation—campaigning, coalition formation and diffusion—that might be adaptable to mass strikes if we understand the concepts in a broader way. For the case of diffusion, which has a special relevance for mass strikes, Tarrow distinguishes three types: direct (personal contacts), indirect (media communication) and mediated (two unrelated groups are connected via a third one): “during cycles of contention, (…) newly mobilized actors are especially attentive to what others are doing” (192). Another aspect of cycles of contention is the shifting of scales: either local or regional issues are brought to the national level, or national issues are taken up at the local level. Yet, the weakness of Tarrow’s approach is that he is not able to locate social movements within the larger political economy of capitalism. He rather adopts the pluralist notion that “contentious politics forms around a number of axes of cleavage and conflict” (2011, 91) which is a truism and provides a rather vague idea about the socioeconomic conditions of collective action. There are alternative lines of research in social movement theory that help us to conceive of mass strikes as social movements, and move beyond a dichotomy between ‘interests’ and ‘culture’. We already mentioned E.P. Thompson earlier who emphasised the common experience of exploitation by different sections of the popular masses (1963). A corresponding current stems from scholars who undertake social movement analysis with reference to non-core countries. Sonia Alvarez and Arturo Escobar make the important qualification that culture is not a new issue that rose to prominence with new social movements, but rather a medium of struggles: “Culture mediates the movement from structural conditions to social and political action” (1992, 319). It is this formulation that allows accessing popular traditions as an aspect of struggles, a notion that escapes (new) social movement theory with its claim of a displacement of economic issues towards cultural ones. Culture thus embodies the common social experience and is a device of translating the experience of objective conditions that might lead to action of social movements and shape their perspective. In a similar vein, Gail Omvedt emphasises that anti-caste, farmers’, environmental and women’s movements in India in the 1970s and 1980s took increasingly recourse to “‘traditional’ or ‘populist’ symbols drawn from Indian tradition perhaps more than the ‘old’ workingclass movement has done” (1993, 300). Omvedt shows that these movements nonetheless contest capitalist domination. Thus, a Southern A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 65 perspective enables those social movement scholars to dismantle the separation of new and old social movements whose conceptual basis is largely derived from a focus on core countries. Only the exclusion of the manifold social movements that unfolded in parallel in non-core countries in the 1970s and 1980s with the so-called new social movements in core countries, and an exclusion of certain new social movements in core countries from consideration (i.e. migrant workers’ movements in Western Europe) could make the distinction of ‘culture’ and ‘interests’ intelligible. 2.2.3.1 Conclusion Social movement studies offer, despite its conceptual and empirical limitations, useful instruments for the analysis of mass strikes: the idea of cycles of contention comes with a more precise description of the different phases of mobilisation and demobilisation that evades the rational-choice model of resource mobilisation theory, and highlights the different types of diffusion that are typical for strike movements as for other social movements. This approach has been echoed by social movement scholars from the Global South that work with a less schematic understanding of the borders between ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ and which show how supposedly non-class movements address class issues both within and beyond the conflict of capital and labour. Another omission of social movement theory is the ignorance regarding labour movements in non-core countries that unfolded in parallel to ‘new’ social movements in the 1970s and 1980s. The literature on these will be addressed in the next section. 2.2.4 Social Movement Unionism One of the symptoms of the Eurocentric nature of social movement theories is their ignorance of the large-scale workers’ movements in non-core countries in the 1970s and 1980s. It is highly paradoxical that the debate about social movement unionism that took those workers’ movements as a starting point developed in parallel with (new) social movement theory. And, even more paradoxical, while these workers’ movements were largely ignored in social movement research, social movement theory itself had a prominent place in the debate on social movement unionism. Since the mid-1980s a group of scholars, primarily consisting of Peter Waterman, Edward Webster, Rob Lambert, Ronaldo Munck and Kim Scipes, introduced the concept of social movement unionism in order to grasp new forms that worker and social movement mobilisations took in 66 J. NOWAK Brazil, South Africa, South Korea and the Philippines. All these countries saw major labour unrest in authoritarian regimes in the 1970s and 1980s. Edward Webster showed in his seminal article (1987) how the level of unemployment and living conditions in townships and working class neighbourhoods in South Africa led to an engagement of militant shop floor unions in both community struggles and the struggle against apartheid. What began as an ad hoc alliance on a local level in the late 1970s (1987, 181) assumed a more systematic form in 1984 with a general strike in which factory workers, students and community organisations formed an alliance that mobilised 800,000 workers and 400,000 students (189). Webster underlines that this ‘community unionism’ led to many debates within the union movement: some industrial unions favoured an economistic focus on collective bargaining and wage issues. Another argument was that the focus on an intra-class alliance against the apartheid regime might lead away from working class hegemony and socialism (in hindsight a valid argument). But the declaration of a state of emergency in 1985 and 1986, the invasion of townships by the military and the civil war led by township youth against this invasion forced the newly founded trade union federation COSATU in 1985 to embrace the notion of a broader political struggle (191ff). Both the politicisation of the workplace and the powerful mobilisations outside of the workplace in the 1980s encouraged engaging in this social movement unionism. In a later text by Lambert and Webster, they define social movement unionism in more specific terms: “It is a form of union organisation that facilitates an active engagement in factory-based production politics and in community and state power issues” (1988, 21). They distinguish it both from orthodox collective bargaining unionism and from what they call ‘populist unionism’ which subordinates working class issues to a political elite, an experience made in many African countries after independence. But, unlike syndicalism, social movement unionism “does not negate the role of a political party, but rather asserts the need for a co-ordinating political body that is democratic” (ibid.). The authors underline that collective bargaining in South Africa in the 1980s did not come with wage hikes that prevented real wages from falling. The successes therefore were more in the areas of forms of mobilisation and the establishment of formal rights. The debate moved then to a rather conceptual plane: Lambert uses Castells’ approach of struggles on collective consumption—about transport, housing, social services and so on (see Castells 1977)—to provide social movement unionism with a theoretical context (Lambert 1989). A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 67 Kim Scipes contributes to the debate by highlighting the different role of trade unions in non-core countries: they tend to organise only a betteroff section of the working class, and thus are “quite often (…) seen as separating their members from the rest of the working people” (1992, 122). Thus, the first significant difference of social movement unionism would be the engagement of unions with non-union struggles of the working people in general. A second significant difference for Lambert (1989) and Scipes (1992) is “the transcendence of the bourgeois separation of politics and economics” (Lambert 1989, 129). Lambert emphasises that the containment of trade unions into the collective bargaining system effectively stabilises capitalism. Scipes in turn criticises Lambert for not having a broad understanding of working class action that goes beyond workplace politics: Lambert would only add working class movements to social movements, and not broaden the concept of class politics beyond economism (Scipes 1992, 131). Scipes also hints at how the intersection of racism, capitalism and sexism may lead to different relations and identities of the same worker depending on the situation she finds herself in (131f). For Scipes, the issue of multiple identities goes beyond a dualism of workplace and collective consumption issues that he finds in Lambert’s approach. Thus he calls for a more integrated approach that does not reproduce a perspective that separates labour movements and social movements. In line with this, Scipes himself defines social movement unionism as a form of unionism that seeks alliances with social movements on an equal basis. In this conception, the workplace is an important place for mobilisation, but social movement unionism does not place workplace politics as more significant than other social issues. The urge to go beyond a dualistic conception of labour and social movements will be taken up by the second wave of debate on social movement unionism (see below in this section). It has to be noted that the discussion on the strikes in the 1980s in Brazil itself remained largely unaffected by the debate led on social movement unionism which did not address the Brazilian case in depth. The debate in Brazil instead refers to the term ‘novo sindicalismo’ (new unionism) which keeps on being used for the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. On the theoretical level, Lambert and Webster (1988) refer rather to Hyman’s diagnosis of an ambivalence of unionism, and emphasise that in South Africa different currents of ‘workerism’—a social democratic one focused on economism, and a Leninist one focused on socialism and working class revolution—were sceptical towards social movement unionism. In 68 J. NOWAK contrast, Scipes and Waterman (1991) draw on social movement theory and a vaguely defined post-Marxism, and both tend to define social movement unionism as a third solution apart from social democracy and Leninism. In the early 2000s, after some more detailed research on the actual movements had been published (see Seidman 1994 on Brazil and South Africa; on South Africa: Friedman 1987; Maree 1987; Baskin 1991; Marx 1992; Adler et al. 1992; Kraak 1993; Adler and Webster 1995; on the Philippines: Hutchison 1992), the debate picked up again. Karl von Holdt notes “a high degree of ambiguity in the use of the term SMU” (2002, 285). Furthermore, he underlines that an omission of the first wave of debate was to neglect the relevance of collective identities acquired outside of the workplace for social movement unionism—such as cultural solidarities of migrant workers, and the national struggle against apartheid (see Scipes 2001 for a similar claim). Von Holdt understands these as “non-class collective identities” (2002, 286). His claim is highly relevant in underlining that social movement unionism did not just create alliances between different movements, but that different movements were not acting separately, but had in fact organic links. First, workplace struggles were struggles against apartheid since most supervisors were white: “The trade unions were part of a broader counter-hegemonic movement with insurrectionary strands” (287). Second, “shop stewards and ordinary members were active in community and youth organizations” (ibid.). Another issue that Von Holdt highlights are the tensions between urban workers and migrant workers who lived in hostels, based on his fieldwork in a large steel mill: the migrant workers saw solidarity as an obligation and imposed it with violence in the hostels, while urban workers were living with their family in townships and were less determined to struggle (289f). Due to similar tactics of violent confrontation with adversaries, migrant workers and the militant youth in the townships started to cooperate (291). Inside the steel factory, this militant dynamic and radicalisation resulted in violent confrontations between the migrant workers’ strike committee and the more moderate shop steward committee composed of urban workers. Thus, the example shows that different identifications and everyday practices of migrant and non-migrant workers in the same factory affected the general political and the workplace struggle, and could at times lead to severe frictions. The common denominator of the debate on social movement unionism were the similarities of labour movements and other social movements A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 69 that emerged roughly in the same period in Brazil, South Africa, South Korea and the Philippines in the context of struggle against authoritarian regimes. While these regimes relied initially on building a domestic industry, they later attracted a significant influx of foreign direct investment, leading to the growth of an industrial working class whose demands could not be managed in the framework of those regimes. The special nature of these labour movements was that new trade unions in all four countries concerned had organic links with other social movements, such as community and unemployed movements in South Africa, church groups, peace movements and women’s movements in South Korea; indigenous, peasant, church groups, squatters and women’s movements in Brazil; and armed insurgencies and peasant movements in the Philippines. All those workers’ movements were at the core of (successful) struggles against authoritarian regimes. Thus, it is legitimate to speak of a common phenomenon that erupted in parallel in those countries. The splits within the working class and between trade unions and other social movements did not come to the fore as long as the enormous violent repression of these regimes was taking hold. Subsequently those dictatorships fell—in 1985 in Brazil, 1986 in the Philippines, 1987 in South Korea and from 1990 to 1994 in South Africa. The neoliberal wave that swept across these countries in the 1990s manoeuvred the trade unions into the defensive, and the new political form of parliamentary democracy (combined with modified forms of violence and large-scale corruption) allowed enough space for the contradictions to be managed without the confrontations of the 1980s seeing a repetition. While the trajectory of the national economies saw enormous differences—that is, large-scale precarisation of work in South Korea from 1999 on in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, or a social-democratic reembedding of the market in Brazil in the 2000s after the neoliberal wave of deregulation and privatisation in the 1990s—in all those countries there was no continuity to the political conjuncture in the 1980s but rather a severe rupture. At the same time, the economic model did not see the profound transformations envisioned by social movement unionism in any of those countries. It is interesting and significant that Luxemburg’s analysis of mass strikes did at no point come into the debate on social movement unionism (apart from 1.5 pages in Munck 1988, 116f) since these were clearly revolutionary situations which explains the rapid diffusion of struggles and the mobilisation of various parts of society. In contrast, the Brazilian debate, 70 J. NOWAK which will be examined in the next section, made ample reference to Luxemburg’s work in analyses of strikes in the 1970s and 1980s. The Brazilian strikes in 1978–1980 in the automobile industry and the wave of strikes in the 1980s have been subsumed under the header of social movement unionism which went more or less unnoticed in the Brazilian debate. Inversely, the Brazilian debate has gone largely unnoticed outside of Latin America and Southern Europe, although the book of John Humphrey (1982) on the strikes in 1978/79 was published in English language by a famous publishing house. The early debate in Brazil revolved around the question if the automobile workers in the São Paulo region hold the role of a labour aristocracy vis-à-vis the workers in the more traditional industrial sectors (Almeida 1978). This claim was made in defence of the Vargas-era populist trade union laws established in the 1940s. Maria Hermínia Tavares de Almeida was concerned that the automobile workers would use their market power to get better results for themselves while leaving other sectors behind. This was denied by John Humphrey (1982) and Ricardo Antunes (1988). On the one hand, the workers in the Brazilian automobile industry lacked the characteristics of a labour aristocracy due to their low wages, long working hours of fifty-six hours a week, only one-third of them being skilled workers and the high turnover rates (Humphrey 1982, 143–146). On the other hand, Humphrey demonstrates that the demands of automobile workers to lead negotiations with employers without state intervention do not necessarily result in less state control of the workplace, since the factory committees aimed to enforce the largely ineffective factory inspections by the state (1982, 233–240). Humphrey argues that the auto workers acted as the vanguard of the working class by engaging in full confrontation with the state, but he also concedes that they could still turn into a workers’ aristocracy at some point in the future (240). He sees Almeida’s analysis as an application of segmentation theories that falls into technological determinism since it derives a political analysis from the fact of the “structural heterogeneity of industry” (ibid.). He is therefore sceptical about theories that derive specific patterns of struggle from the existence of mass workers. Although Humphrey concedes that automobile workers in various countries in the Americas held important roles in social transformation, “such struggles have taken on markedly different forms in different situations. (…) In each of these cases, both the forms of struggle adopted by the auto workers and the consequences have been quite distinct” (244). A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 71 Ricardo Antunes analyses other aspects of the mass strikes of 1978–1980, emphasising their spontaneous character, but also the changing degree of conscious leadership of those strikes by Lula (Luiz Inácio da Silva, then president of the metal workers’ union) and the metal workers union of São Bernardo: in March 1979, Lula proposed an alternative to the 120,000 striking workers who voted to continue the strike—Lula asked the membership to grant another round of negotiations which led to a moderate victory for workers. In contrast to this, the union adopted—due to Antunes—a cult of spontaneity during the strike in 1980, led by 300,000 workers, resulting in a lack of conscious leadership which led to a crashing defeat after forty-one days of strike (Antunes 1988, 94). For Antunes, the political mistake in 1980 consisted in assuming that a strike of the metal workers in the São Paulo region could make the government bow down, leading the unions not to consider the mobilisation of workers in other regions and sectors (169). He concludes on the basis of Luxemburg’s typology that it is important to distinguish between spontaneous action and spontaneistic politics (210). While the first is an important moment of mobilisation that has to be transformed into nonspontaneous action if it is supposed to have more long-lasting effects (197), the second is a politics that entirely relies on spontaneous action and hesitates to make advances in political education and the strategic use of popular power. 2.2.4.1 Conclusion Our analysis can, on the one hand, relegate these forms of labour and social movement unrest that are referenced as social movement unionism and novo sindicalismo for a specific time period of rapid industrialisation under oppressive labour regimes and political dictatorship. But apart from those specific contexts, the forms developed in this period continue to inspire debates about different types of union organisation and the strengths and weaknesses of an intense cooperation of trade unions and other social movements (see for some examples out of a large number of publications: Serdar 2015; Köhler and Calleja Jimenez 2015; Engeman 2015; Nowak 2017). Other than in the time of Rosa Luxemburg, when the mass strikes and military and peasant revolts in Russia lasted one year in 1905, we witness in Brazil, South Korea, South Africa and the Philippines a period of at least fifteen years of mobilisation in these countries (with some ups and downs), stretching roughly from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s—which provided more space for experimentation and different 72 J. NOWAK variations of coalitions. We could also tentatively apply Luxemburg’s dictum that it is in the apparently more backward countries that new and future models of mobilisation emerge. But, in order to come back to the initial proposal of this section: while trade unions continue to be centre stage in the research about social movement unionism, they act by definition in cooperation with other actors like church groups, student movements and neighbourhood movements. At times, social movement sections—like the left church groups in Brazil—had crucial significance for the struggle in the factories. During the period of social movement unionism the trade union action was based on spontaneous mobilisations, so there is clearly no strict distinction between formal and informal types of organisation. This starts to change during the neoliberal ‘normalisation’ in the 1990s in all countries concerned. Third, the workplace ceased to be the central locus of conflict in many occasions since the plane of action moved to the neighbourhood (as in the São Paulo strike in 1980), had as a central place the hostels and townships where buses left to the workplaces (South Africa) or when a whole industrial area was taken over by the armed working population such as in Gwangju in South Korea in 1980 (Park 2007; Cho 2009, 165). The activities and debate in the framework of social movement unionism thus are a contrast to corporatist unionism and the assumptions of mainstream industrial relations research. But it is important to keep in mind that in all countries concerned organisational forms resembling corporatist unionism got established since the 1990s (Webster 2008, 250), often under the influence of or modelled after unions in core countries. Another limitation is the strictly national orientation of the first (and original) version of social movement unionism (Dunn 2007, 137; Webster 2008, 250). 2.3 laboUr GeoGraphy Inspired by Marxist currents of critical geography (Harvey 1982; Smith 1984) and economic geography (Massey 1984), Andrew Herod developed the approach of labour geography. While economic geography focuses on how capital is shaping space, Herod introduces spatial agency of workers (1997). The crucial issue for us here is that the epistemological underpinnings of labour geography enable a perspective to grasp labour as a category or workers as a group in its entire social relations that go beyond a relationship between labour and capital, or between workers, unions, employers and the state as most industrial relations approaches would have A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 73 it. Herod sets out to provide attention to “workers as active geographical agents” (1997, 2) that “shape economic landscapes and uneven development” (1997, 1). As it is the case for capital, the agency of workers is restricted due to pre-existing social and political conditions (1997, 16), and labour is like capital establishing spatial fixes as a part of the overall dynamic of capitalist accumulation (1997, 17). Thus, solidarity of workers is conceived by Herod as a successful effort to establish a certain spatial fix (1997, 20). These spatial fixes can be established on a local or regional level as closed shops controlled by trade unions, or specific informal arrangements in local labour markets, or they can be formalised as national law that (if implemented effectively) might set certain limits to the exploitation of workers or establishes some guarantee of material reproduction beyond the dependence on capital. Beyond the notion of a spatial fix, Herod observes different levels of how space enters into the agency of workers. First, a spatially uneven labour law within national territories exerts influence on union strategies (Herod 1998, 6ff). This is originally derived from the US context with a highly localised application of labour law (see Clark 1988) but can also be related to a country like India where labour law sees considerable differences regarding legislation and implementation in the regional states. A national commodity market coexisting with a spatially heterogeneous labour market enables capital to flee from organised labour within the national territory (Johnston 1986). A second phenomenon is how the mobility of labour, that is, the travelling artisans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries or migration within or across national territories, is facilitating the transport of ideas and principles of workers’ organisation (Southall 1988). Before we proceed with those insights of labour geography that are specifically relevant for a new theory of strikes, some conceptual considerations have to be made. Scale, space and place are three central concepts in economic geography. Scale is understood as the spatial level of action (local, regional, national, global), space is often seen as related to capital investment, as mobility of capital across space, whereas place is ascribed to labour and to local communities that are less mobile than capital. The crucial insight of Henri Lefebvre (1991) for this literature is that space is not occupied or conquered by capitalism, but that capitalism develops by producing space. Spaces are created in a process of struggle and thus bear the marks of these processes. Crucial authors for labour geography contest the dualistic notion of aligning space and place to certain actors and show 74 J. NOWAK that capital is also place-based and immobile to a considerable extent (Jonas 1996). Jamie Peck (1996) as well as Bradon Ellem and John Shields (1999) demonstrate that space and place intersect in labour markets and that labour markets have specific local features. The supply of labour on these markets is highly dependent on the reproduction of labour power. Andrew Jonas coined the term ‘local labour control regime’ in order to capture strategies of capital that guarantee a combination of productive activities and the reproduction of labour in a locality (1996). Since globalisation entails the increased movement of supply chains across space, seeking the lowest wage levels available, one can argue “that globalization ascribes greater salience to the local, since firms, governments, and the public identify the specificity of localities as an element for deriving competitive advantage” (P. 2016, 17). Neethi P. applies these insights in her case studies on labour resistance in the state of Kerala, India. One of her central findings is that local capital is using the space created by global capital (ibid., 197). In the circumstances of arm’s-length outsourcing, today’s dominant form of foreign investment, it is then often local peripheral capital—itself under pressure by transnational companies—that is entering into confrontation with workers. Out of the vast literature on labour geography, we will now deepen the debate of two issues which are relevant to our focus on the forms of workers’ organisations emerging from mass strikes: the first issue refers to the relevance of spatially embedded traditions and cultures of the working class. The second concerns the fact that productive activities of workers (including services and other types of work) are embedded in relations of reproduction of the labour force and into patterns of consumption, and how this plays a role for the organisation of workers. 1. Debates in economic geography display different perspectives on the causes of regionally uneven strike participation. A case in point is the British miners’ strike in 1984. While some authors underline that economic differences and uneven wage levels had a role for regional union chapters joining the strike or not (Rees 1985), others see different regional political traditions as decisive (Sunley 1986). As the debate unfolded, it turned out that both aspects were important (Griffiths and Johnston 1991). That political traditions of the working class had a decisive impact on mobilisation became part of the general explanation. A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 75 During the 1990s, studies in economic geography started to move beyond an examination of how economic restructuring affected union traditions and working class organisation. It became obvious that this was not just a one-way process, since in some regions workers and unions retained their influence, while in others it decreased, while both types of regions experienced very similar economic processes. Jane Wills emphasises that local social relations and political traditions have a significant influence on how unions and workers respond to economic changes induced by employers (1996). Beyond a focus on local responses to larger strategies of capital, Wills emphasises that traditions of workers are shaped both locally and by external influence—thus there is no simple confrontation of ‘local’ working class traditions with global or national strategies of capital. Apart from national political events or changes in labour regulation, the migration of workers within or between countries or the mobility between workplaces leads to what Wills calls a “spatial translation of traditions” (1996, 357). But there is also often a transmission of ideas when conflicts in one location are taken up at another location, and this might be facilitated by reports in news media. Mobility of workers does not only transport traditions of militancy, but can also “bring to new places expectations of work standards and rights developed elsewhere” (Rainnie et al. 2010, 303). Wills also mentions with reference to Eric Hobsbawm’s work the “translation of ideas across space at times of particularly intense class conflict” (1996, 358): cycles of strikes intensify the transmission of ideas. Hobsbawm (1964, 127) claims that every major cycle of strikes comes “with decisive breaks in union traditions” (Wills 1996, 358). But Wills emphasises that demonstration effects—the failure of a major strike for example—can also be negative in discouraging other workers to take action (1998, 134). The examples here are legion from the British miners’ strike in the 1980s to the Bombay textile strike in 1982. But not every failure leads to demobilisation; the economic and political conjuncture plays a huge role here. The debate shows that in many instances there is a continuity of worker traditions over long periods (Sunley 1986), while other examples reveal a sudden uptick of mobilisation in regions without any tradition of struggle, or sudden downturns of mobilisation in established working class strongholds (Rees 1985). To conclude, traditions that 76 J. NOWAK are embedded into local places do play a role, but can be influenced by larger cycles of contention or cycles of demobilisation. 2. The second aspect of this debate concerns the relevance of the reproduction of labour power for working class communities and their struggles—this has been explored in debates on economic geography in the 1980s (Warde 1988), and then taken up in feminist approaches to labour geography. Alan Warde builds on Castells’ work on collective consumption as one dimension of the reproduction of labour power. Warde develops the concept of reproduction of labour power more explicitly. While Burawoy sees forms of reproduction of labour power, for example, by social security—guaranteed by the state or the company—as a crucial element of factory regimes, he did not look at other instances of this reproduction (Warde 1988, 79). Warde goes beyond Castells’ focus on urban struggles about collective consumption (housing, transport, health, education) and claims that struggles about the reproduction of labour power cut across various places of mobilisation: they can occur as workplace struggles, as gender struggles about household labour or as mobilisations about state provisions—and this list is by no means exhaustive (1988, 83). Levels of company provision, state provision, community and kinship networks and access to household labour all vary across spaces, for example “the conventions of patriarchy being, in important degrees, locally distinctive” (84). Warde distinguishes different modes of provision for the reproduction of labour power and analyses their interdependence: the gendered segregation of employment will affect the division of labour in the household; relations of domination at work, for example, between male supervisors and women workers, tend to be reproduced at home, and well-organised workplace communities tend to have networks of community provision outside of the workplace (ibid.). The emphasis of Warde’s analysis is on workplace relations having influence on non-workplace relations, which is surely too limited. Nonetheless, Warde also underlines structures and policies of the central state, and local political struggles, that is, about housing. Ellem and Shields take up those insights and the relevance of local labour markets in a more holistic view: they propose to consider the three spheres of production, reproduction of labour and consumption together as ‘the social relations of work’ (1999, 547). This resonates with the conception of Neilson (2017) that distinguishes A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 77 between the capital-labour relation as the core of capitalism and of capitalism as a broader field of social relations that maintain the capital-labour relation. Noel Castree makes a similar point when he urges not to focus on ‘employment’, but on ‘working people’ (2007, 859). This approach has also been applied to labour process research, with the claim that “understanding the labour process requires understanding that what occurs on the shop floor is shaped by what goes on outside of the factory or office gates, for the perpetual reconstitution of capital-labour relations is fundamentally shaped by the spatial contexts within which this occurs” (Rainnie et al. 2010, 299). Thus, shop floor realities have their own logic but cannot be properly understood in isolation from the social relations that are the conditions of the reproduction of the capital-labour relation itself. This is not only restricted to the reproduction of labour power, but also extends to the reproduction of social, political and legal relations that allow capitalist production to take place (Althusser 1969). Philip Kelly provides an excellent example of how this general perspective can be applied to a case study: he shows how industrial production in the province of Cavite in the Philippines, dominated by Japanese and South Korean capital, cannot be understood without looking at the broader changes in households and livelihoods: most factory workers in this province—predominantly female—are sustained by their family members due to the low wages in factories, while the bulk of household income stems from overseas workers, of which 84 per cent are male (Kelly 2013, 89). Thus in this case, it is households that provide subsidies for industrial workers. This demonstrates that any isolated analysis of the situation of those factory workers apart from their integration into the wider community would not grasp the most significant aspects of it. The case studies of P. (2016), conducted in the south of India, also illustrate this point very vividly: in three different economic sectors, the local community, families, church communities and state social programs are used both as labour market institutions and as places to exert control on workers. Capital can often not go around an engagement with these community spaces in order to recruit labour, that is, in the case of moral concerns of families regarding the employment of young women. It is only through tapping into the networks of these community institutions that capital gains access to 78 J. NOWAK local labour markets. At the same time, these community spaces provide room for resistance and counterstrategies of workers (P. 2016, 80f, 109, 152). It is significant that most of those case studies on the apparel, electronics and food-processing sector look at resistance in non-union forms of organisation. These two crucial aspects of worker mobilisation—the role of political traditions attached to certain places and spaces and the area and institutions of the reproduction of labour power as integral parts of the social relations of work and as potential sites of mobilisation—enable us to analyse crucial aspects of mass strikes. Local and regional political traditions have a thorough impact on the form, dynamic and intensity of mass strikes, and the wider environment in which a capital-labour relation is embedded provides for potential resources and additional places of mobilisation. Both the cultures and traditions of struggle and the wider social relations of work are the dimensions that enable us to grasp a mass strike at the level of the social formation, and not just at the level of the workplace or as a power struggle between employers, workers and the state, cutting off all other actors and dimensions as would have been done in mainstream industrial relations approaches. This perspective is necessary because by definition mass strikes will extend to some extent beyond workplaces, and the strength and extension of mass strikes will also be influenced by manifold local factors and other aspects that go beyond workplace issues. 2.4 The spaTial paTTerns of Mass sTrikes A third strand of debate in labour geography has been left out until now which concerns the question of how exactly the spatial agency of workers can be understood and theorised. Neil Coe and David Jordhus-Lier (2011, 221) claim that it would be a first useful step to embed workers’ agency into four contexts: global production networks, the state, community politics and labour market intermediaries. This would provide a clearer picture on the agency of workers. There has been some progress in all these areas since, especially with the debates on community unionism (JordhusLier 2013; Holgate 2015) and agency work (James and Vira 2012). Nonetheless, there has been almost no research on strike waves and mass strikes and their spatial dimension, apart from a first tentative approach (Nowak 2016). A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 79 Obviously, mass strikes have a spatial aspect in the rapid diffusion from one factory to another, and from one city or region to another. They are characterised by spatial limits and patterns of mobilisation. Based on examples we have dealt with in the previous section, I identify three types of spatial patterns of mass strikes (1) a first pattern is diffusion of a certain form of strike within one economic sector, which can also be termed as sectoral copycat strikes; (2) a second pattern is the diffusion of strikes, although not necessarily in the same form, from one economic sector to other sectors in the same national framework, which I call national crosssectoral mass strikes; and (3) the third pattern is the establishment of certain forms of strikes and the diffusion of experiences in one industrial region, but not to the national level, at times across sectors, in regional mass strikes. The first form of the sectoral copycat strike is usually determined by special political or economic conditions in a sector: this might be an offensive of the state to cut down jobs or wages in public sector employment or the situation of high labour demand in one sector which offers a good window of opportunity for offensive strikes. Strikes then remain focused on this sector and they might expand to a national scale. The second form of cross-sectoral national strikes is a type of mobilisation in which the spark flies from one to another sector due to a general political discontent or similar conditions across sectors that encourage cross-sectoral diffusion. The third form of a regional mass strike can be based on issues such as high regional inflation or a regional tradition of militancy. Another basis for regional mass strikes might be spatial unevenness across regions. What is missing in this distinction between three types of spatial patterns of mass strikes is a transnational pattern. There have been rare examples like the European general strike in 2012 that effectively took place only in Portugal, Spain and Greece and to a lesser extent in Italy, and it is a general characteristic of labour mobilisations that they largely take part on a national level. Another recent example for an exception would be parallel strike movements during the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. There have been transnational strike waves, but it is extremely rare that those mobilisations actively relate to one another. In the same vein, the bulk of the strike movements in the past years after the global financial crisis in the late 2000s took place during the same time without being connected to each other in a direct or indirect way. Thus, we are dealing with a cycle of contention, a cycle of struggles which cannot be seen as one mass strike since the actors usually do not know about another. It is this larger context 80 J. NOWAK which will be explored in the next chapter, providing the conjunctural context for the period of strikes that will be dealt with in this book. As a framework to analyse the processes of organisation and mobilisation that occur during such mass strikes, we build on the theories examined in this chapter. What we are trying to develop here aims to provide a contribution to a non-economistic Marxist approach to labour studies which is curiously absent in current debates. Important contributions to such an approach have been made in the past by Rosa Luxemburg, Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Richard Hyman, Richard Price and James Cronin, and their perspective was mainly confined to core countries. The enormous contribution of Beverly Silver (2003) to a Marxist approach to labour studies mainly addresses a macrolevel analysis, and does not say much about forms of organisation and mobilisation. While her work establishes a useful macro framework, it does not help us to analyse forms of organisation and mobilisation. Many current analyses of strikes and approaches to global labour studies replicate a version of the power resources approach that stems from an institutionalist rational-choice framework (Korpi 1974, 1985; Wright 2002; Brookes 2015; Schmalz et al. 2018; see the critique of Gallas 2018; Nowak 2018) which lacks the conceptual basis to address questions of mobilisation and organisation on the level of the social formation (for alternative approaches see Mosoetsa et al. 2016; Breman and van der Linden 2014; Swider 2015). The approach developed here aims to integrate earlier non-economistic insights of social history and labour history with new findings of research on labour conflicts that embed them into the wider social formation. 1. We first developed an approach that conceives of class relations as being anchored principally in the relation of labour and capital, but extending beyond workplace relations to a number of social relations such as housing and the real estate market, the possession of land and the displacement of independent producers, the destruction of natural resources that form the material basis of peasant households, to name just a few. These class relations are then articulated with a number of non-class relations like gender relations, family and kinship networks, ethnic and national communities and/or identifications, caste relations and some more. This articulation essentially consists in a mediation of class relations by non-class relations, and inversely non-class relations are integrated into class relations. This mutual penetration of class and non-class relations is at the root A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 81 source of the difficulty to theorise how both relate to another (see the various approaches starting from dual systems theory, unitary theory, triple oppression approaches and then moving to analyses of intersectionality, interdependence and social reproduction theory). For a theory of mass strikes as processes of class formation this means that non-class relations and class relations beyond the workplace will inevitably be an integral aspect of class formation. In Chaps. 4 and 5, we will enquire if and how non-class relations and which relations beyond the workplace had an influence on the processes of class formation that occurred with the mass strikes in India and Brazil. Specifically, it will be asked how these relations were decisive for the types of organisations that emerged in the wake of those strikes. 2. In E.P. Thompson’s account it is the unifying experience of class society or capitalism that unites different groups of workers, craftswomen and craftsmen and small shop owners (1963, 887f). This experience is based on the class constitution, the economic processes that have a similar but differentiated effect on different parts of the popular classes. Sonia Alvarez and Arturo Escobar (1992) locate ‘culture’ as this realm of experience. James Cronin understands it as workers’ attitudes and consciousness, mediating “the impact of structure on behaviour” (1979, 37), intervening between structure and organisation. In Chaps. 4 and 5, we will investigate if and how common experiences and cultural frameworks are aligned with attitudes and forms of consciousness that brought different groups together while the strikes in India and Brazil unfolded. We are especially interested in common experiences of workers and actors outside of the workplace. 3. The accounts of Hyman and Edwards provide crucial insights into the limits of trade unionism—and more specifically on corporatist unionism in Europe and North America after the Second World War. It is obvious that an established industrial relations approach suffers from an institutionalist bias: “We cannot understand work and employment unless we also have a theoretical understanding of the economy, of law, of politics, of education, of the community, of gender relations” (Hyman 2004, 267). A broader approach is able to shed light on the continuum between informal and formal types of organisation and mobilisation. 82 J. NOWAK On the one hand, many formal trade union actions rely on informal forms of workplace organisation. On the other hand, many types of informal organisation, like customs-based craft rules or non-union worker or popular organisations, can at times be equally or more effective than trade unions in job control and wage demands. There is not a clear hierarchy of forms of worker organisation, but rather a multiplicity, and the evaluation of forms of organisation is highly dependent on the specific context. A long-time thread of research recognises the work group as a crucial institution at the workplace (Scott and Homans 1947; Atleson 1973; Lyddon 1994). In a broader approach we can add several more institutions that go beyond the state-trade union-employer triad accepted by industrial relations research. In Chaps. 4 and 5, the focus will be on how informal and formal types of organisation were intertwined in mass strikes in Brazil and India and we will pay attention if we can identify other types of institutions than the state, employers and trade unions that were decisive for processes of organisation. 4. One of the theoretical challenges for a broader perspective on strikes and forms of organisations of workers is the fact that the labour process has a specific autonomy from other processes, but that it is also embedded into other social relations and institutions. Michael Burawoy tackles this problem and establishes a conceptual taxonomy for this embedded autonomy only to end up with the vague institutionalist notion of a factory regime (1985) that is conceived as either hegemonic or coercive or a mixture of both. We try to avoid this extension of institutionalist concepts to labour studies, and aim to apply the insights of critical geography to labour conflicts. These are, on the one hand, that certain political traditions are inscribed into localities, and thus are anchored both in workplaces and outside of workplaces in the wider social environment. This also includes the recognition that struggles and traditions travel either during mobilisations or through the movement of workers and capital from one location to another. On the other hand, the various forms of reproduction of labour power—and of the social relations of capitalism in general, that is, the conditions for the reproduction of the relations of production—are intimately connected with workplace dynamics. Thus, there is a double dimension of how workplace relations are embedded into the social formation. This will then A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 83 have consequences for an analysis of forms of workers’ organisation, since they draw on both the wider political traditions in a geographical region, and on the social relations that serve as a basis for the reproduction of labour power. We adapt here the concept of social relations of work of Ellem and Shields (1999, 547), consisting of the spheres of production, reproduction of labour and consumption as the basis for a broad perspective of processes of workers’ organisation. So while workplace mechanisms are relatively autonomous (Edwards 1990, 133), struggles in the workplace mediate effects from outside the capital-labour relation (ibid., 129): this can be non-class social hierarchies that get politicised in workplace struggles, or a general political climate that impinges on workplace mobilisations. We can conclude that specific features of the workplace such as production technology and workplace relations as well as the wider social environment of the community do play a role on how strikes unfold and how workers organise. Community networks are a crucial basis for the organisation of workers (Shorter and Tilly 1974, 10, 187; Cronin 1979, 27)—another factor outside of the workplace is larger economic and political events. Such a conceptualisation is then also at odds with the schematic assignment of a static ‘place’ to labour and the mobility of capital through ‘space’ in economic geography. Apart from the mobility of workers and the circulation of ideas, and the placeness of local labour markets, it is work itself that is becoming increasingly globalised. Andrew Jones proposes the concept of ‘global work’ in order to understand how working practices are constituted across many scales (2008, 14): apart from commuting and work-related travel, even assembly work that is taking place at the same factory every day is increasingly connected to various global locations, and IT connects different workplaces in a way that the actual labour process is often globalised although workers might not move through physical space (16). In Chaps. 4 and 5, we will analyse which role has been played by political traditions inscribed into spaces and places, and how forms of the reproduction of labour power, community networks and larger political events had a role for the emergence of the mass strikes in question. 5. For the specific spatial patterns of mass strikes, specificities of a sector, that is, workplace issues that link various workplaces in one 84 J. NOWAK industry, can be decisive. In a second type of pattern, the cross workplace issues in one sector can inspire similar actions in other sectors, so that a political identification on a national scale is unfolding. The third type of regional mass strikes unfolds on the regional scale due to economic and/or political issues in a specific region. We are hesitant to introduce a fourth possible transnational spatial pattern since there are transnational strike waves but no proper transnational mass strikes. This begs the question regarding the difference between strike waves and mass strikes since both might not go back to an organising centre. I would set as a criterion here that mass strikes go back to a diffusion of struggles that relies on a recognition and perception of other similar struggles, either through direct contacts, or through media, oral conversation or hearsay. In contradistinction to this, strike waves are marked by their contemporaneity in time, but the single strikes in a strike wave might emerge while being ignorant of one another—they go back to similar grievances but do not rely on diffusion. This means that ‘strike wave’ is the more general term and that there are indeed strike waves which rely on diffusion. Thus some strike waves can consist of mass strikes. A ‘mass strike’ is then a more specific phenomenon that essentially relies on diffusion— workers go on strike partly because other workers in the same sector/region/national state went on strike. These processes of diffusion exhibit certain spatial patterns that can be identified; that is, against the usual intuition that mass strikes are of an anomic and chaotic nature, we assume that they are highly structured activities. 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(2017). Operaismo and the Wicked Problem of Organisation. Journal of Labor and Society, 20(3), 307–324. Van der Linden, M. (2008). Workers of the World. Essays Toward a Global Labor History. Leiden: Brill. Van der Linden, M. (2015). The Crisis of the World’s Old Labour Movements. In A. Bieler, R. Erne, D. Golden, I. Helle, K. Kjeldstadli, T. Matos, & S. Stan (Eds.), Labour and Transnational Action in Times of Crisis (pp. 15–28). London: Rowman and Littlefield. Van der Linden, M., & Thorpe, W. (1990). Aufstieg und Niedergang des revolutionären Syndikalismus. 1999, 3, 9–38. Vernell, S. (2013, October 18). The Working Class, Trade Unions and the Left: The Contours of Resistance. International Socialism, 140. http://isj.org.uk/ the-working-class-trade-unions-and-the-left-the-contours-of-resistance/. Accessed 28 May 2018. Viana, N. (2010). A Revolução Russa de 1905 e os Conselhos Operários. Em Debate, 4, 42–58. Von Holdt, K. (2002). Social Movement Unionism: The Case of South Africa. Work, Employment and Society, 16(2), 283–304. A NEW THEORY OF STRIKES: MOVING BEYOND EUROCENTRISM 95 Warde, A. (1988). Industrial Restructuring, Local Politics and the Reproduction of Labour Power: Some Theoretical Considerations. Environment and Planning D, 6, 75–95. Waterman, P. (1991). Social-Movement Unionism: A New Model for a New World, Working Paper Series No. 110. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5130391_Social-movement_unionism_a_new_model_for_a_new_world. Accessed 26 Feb 2016. Webster, E. (1981). ‘Stay-Aways’ and the Black Working Class: Evaluating a Strategy. Labour Capital and Society, 14(1), 10–38. Webster, E. (1987). The Rise of Social-Movement Unionism: The Two Faces of the Black Trade Union Movement in South Africa. In P. Frankel, N. Pines, & M. Swilling (Eds.), State, Resistance and Change in South Africa (pp. 174–196). London: Croom Helm. Webster, E. (2008). Recasting Labour Studies in the Twenty-First Century. Labor Studies Journal, 33(3), 249–254. Weekes, B. C. M. (1970). The Amalgamated Society of Engineers, 1880–1914: A Story of Trade Union Government, Politics and Industrial Policy. PhD, University of Warwick. Weick, E. (1971). Theorien des Streiks. In D. Schneider (Ed.), Zur Theorie und Praxis des Streiks (pp. 97–154). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Wills, J. (1996). Geographies of Trade Unionism: Translating Traditions Across Space and Time. Antipode, 28(4), 352–378. Wills, J. (1998). Space, Place and Tradition in Working-Class Organization. In A. Herod (Ed.), Organizing the Landscape (pp. 129–158). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Woodward, J. (1954). The Dockworker: An Analysis of Conditions of Employment in the Port of Manchester. Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool. Wright, S. (2002). Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism. London: Pluto Press. Zeitlin, J. (1989a). ‘Rank and Filism’ in British Labour History: A Critique. International Review of Social History, XXXIV, 42–61. Zeitlin, J. (1989b). ‘Rank and Filism’ and Labour History: A Rejoinder to Price and Cronin. International Review of Social History, XXXIV, 89–102. Zemni, S., de Smet, B., & Bogaert, K. (2012). Luxemburg on Tahrir Square: Reading the Arab Revolutions with Rosa Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike. Antipode, 45(4), 888–907. CHAPTER 3 The Political Economy of Mass Strikes in the Global Crisis This chapter will detail the larger political economy that provides the context for the mass strikes in the period after the onset of the global crisis in 2007/2008. It situates the strikes in a long-term and a short-term perspective, and a combination of both: First, I will trace how global production and the global economy have transformed since the mid-1970s towards a system based on imperialism, global production networks, unequal exchange and a labour regime of informality-precarity. The global dispersion of supply chains and subcontractors allowed to escape lower rates of profit in core countries, resulting in the global quest for the lowest possible wage level. The continuity of relations of imperialism and different forms of unequal exchange provide for the political and economic conditions of this model of production organisation at the level of geopolitical economy (Desai 2013). It is this model of production that represents the long-term context for the mass strikes that erupted in the wake of the global economic crisis. Second, I will look at the short-term impact that the global economic crisis from 2007 on had on the emerging economies, and specifically on Brazil and India. Growth rates went down in the wake of the crisis, and conditions for industrial workers remained precarious despite growth in the sectors affected by strikes. Third, regarding a long-term perspective I will recall theories that investigate linkages between business cycles, long waves of economic development and strike waves and consider how and if these apply to the strike wave that is dealt with in this book. More specific, I locate the global strike wave from 2010 to 2014 at © The Author(s) 2019 J. Nowak, Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India, Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05375-8_3 97 98 J. NOWAK the end of a Kondratieff cycle which explains some of the difficulties of those strikes achieving a breakthrough, despite their massive mobilisations and achievements in some particular cases. The combination of these three different temporal perspectives allows to locate the strikes in (a) the long-term tendency of a rise of industrial production in non-core countries, the specific conditions of industrialisation in those countries with a proportionally larger reserve army and the predominance of precarious and informal work; (b) the short-term tendency of a slowdown of growth in emerging economies in the wake of the global economic crisis and the particular form of industrialisation as jobless and/or immiserising growth; and (c) the location of the global strike wave from 2010 to 2014 at the end of a Kondratieff cycle that began right after the Second World War. 3.1 The Rise of Global PRoducTion neTwoRks, unequal exchanGe and The infoRmaliTy-PRecaRiTy nexus The global dispersal and fragmentation of processes of production, service and research is a response to the rise of wages and crises of profitability that capital encountered in the 1960s and 1970s in the core states of capitalism. It builds on earlier structures of neocolonial and imperialist exploitation that largely relegated non-core countries to producers of raw materials and basic foodstuffs. After the Second World War, the automobile industry was among the first to engage in massive foreign direct investment (FDI), first moving investment from the USA to Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. Since the 1960s investment in automobile production in Latin America and South Africa increased, primarily by West German and US automobile companies (Silver 2003, 53ff). A second wave of globalisation of production relied less on FDI than on indigenous production of consumer products in Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and on electronic and automobile production in Japan, entering global consumer markets in the 1970s and 1980s. The extension of global chains of production to the People’s Republic of China since the 1990s, accelerating in the 2000s, and the integration of countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Turkey and India, and various special economic zones in Latin American countries into global THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MASS STRIKES IN THE GLOBAL CRISIS 99 production came with the now dominant model of arm’s-length manufacturing: multinational companies, predominantly based in core countries, outsource parts or all of their production to other companies in low-wage countries (Smith 2016, 79ff). This type of global organisation of production has been grasped since the late 1970s with different concepts, initially as the new international division of labour (Fröbel et al. 1980). This concept became a reference point for an extensive feminist literature analysing the key role of young female workers for the industrialisation in East and Southeast Asia (Lim 1978; Fernández-Kelly 1984; Grace 1990; Dangler 1994). Since the 1990s, another terminology entered the debate, evolving from the concept of global commodity chains (Gereffi 1994) to global value chains and finally to global production networks (Sturgeon 2001; Henderson et al. 2002). The problem with this literature is that it is centred on the firm and does not pay much attention to labour and the processes of unequal exchange that this global dispersal of production entails. While the concept of global production networks aims to include productionrelated services and actors like state institutions as key actors in the creation of those networks, it still reproduces the focus on the successful creation and realisation of value, that is, the perspective of capital (see Roy 2017 for a critique of the Schumpeterian concept of rent in those approaches). The key motive for the reorganisation of production on a global scale is lower wages in non-core countries. Theories of unequal exchange systematically analyse the relations between core and non-core countries since the 1970s, but there is considerable disagreement about the actual bases of this unequal exchange. The key assumption is that commodities that are produced in low-wage countries can be sold at a higher price in core countries so that much of the value of these commodities is appropriated by multinational companies in core countries, either by paying low prices to outsourced manufacturers or trading companies in non-core countries, or by paying low wages to workers in non-core countries, or both. The difference in the sales price in the core country and the costs of production in the non-core country (plus transport costs) is the basis of the unequal exchange that thus can occur at different stages in the process of production and trade (Amin 1974; Emmanuel 1972; Higginbottom 2010; Bieler 2013; Bieler and Morton 2014; Smith 2016). Apart from this main basis of unequal exchange, there are other aspects that reinforce it like transfer mispricing (tax evasion by underreporting of commodity prices or 100 J. NOWAK overreporting of expenses), tax evasion via investment in non-core countries through holding companies that are based in tax havens, tax breaks or exemptions that have been negotiated with governments or come with investment in special economic zones, and subsidies in land, infrastructure or other potential costs (Shaxson 2011; Smith 2016, 180). Samir Amin (1974) sees the basis for unequal exchange in the differences in productivity between core and non-core countries which would then result in lower wages (see Callinicos 2009; Milios and Sotiropoulos 2009 for a similar position). Given that there are plenty of examples, such as the automobile industry in India operating with the same technological level as automobile factories in core countries but with significantly lower wages, this claim does not seem to hold. It also implicitly accepts the mainstream definition of productivity which does not measure the productive output in terms of use value produced, but only in terms of monetary results, and thus is difficult to apply in this context (Smith 2016, 167ff). This includes explanations that see the basis of unequal exchange rooted in the quality of the organic composition of capital (Bettelheim 1972). While there are differences in the average productivity of labour between core and non-core countries, both in the mainstream sense of productivity and in the use-value-oriented understanding of productivity, they do not explain unequal exchange. John Smith argues in a convincing way that the rate of exploitation of capital is independent of the productivity of workers (2016, 240ff; see also Marx 1867, 137). This also means that the strategy of technological, that is, economic upgrading, does not necessarily come with higher wages and welfare, that is, with social upgrading (Posthuma and Nathan 2010; Gereffi and Güler 2010)—such a link between economic and social upgrading occurred historically only in a very small number of countries in exceptional circumstances (like Japan and South Korea, propped up by the USA in a Cold War context), or for very small workforces in poor countries (e.g. in some extractive or productive industries in Latin America and Africa). In contrast to explanations based on different levels of productivity, the work of Ruy Mauro Marini places emphasis on the superexploitation of the working class in non-core countries as the basis for unequal exchange. Superexploitation is defined by a wage sinking below the cost of reproduction of labour power, a phenomenon only hinted at by Karl Marx in the first and third volumes of Capital (1867, 511, 747f; 1894, 345). Marini underlines that slavery in not only the cotton fields of the USA but THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MASS STRIKES IN THE GLOBAL CRISIS 101 also the plantations in Brazil provided cheap raw material and food stuff to England as a basis for England’s industrialisation (1973, 140). The effects of superexploitation in Brazil were clearly discernible in the average life expectancy in the Brazilian Northeast—one of the main areas of the plantation economy—which was below thirty years in the 1950s (Furtado 1962, 47). Another characteristic of superexploitation is the provision of aspects of social reproduction outside of the market economy, for example, housing that is erected by workers in their spare time. Once superexploitation has taken hold it becomes a moral and political norm, although the productive basis of a country or sector might change. It is then only through changes in the national and international class relations that superexploitation can be abolished for a limited number of workers in non-core countries, but the phenomenon as such remains pervasive. Additional bases for superexploitation consist on the one hand in the availability of other sources of subsistence than wages for many workers in non-core countries, caught in the notion of semi-proletarianisation (Pun 2016, 67ff): “many wage earners are not ‘pure wage earners’ (…) but are involved in other than capitalist relations of production” (Bettelheim 1972, 287). This can also mean that their wage is subsidised by other family members, such as guest workers in the fishing industry that supply wages to families that subsidise factory workers in the Philippines (Kelly 2013)—this is for sure an extreme case but shows the variety of forms of subsistence. Thus, unequal exchange due to Marini (1973, 138ff) and Smith (2016, 216–219) is mainly based on the superexploitation of labour—a wage level below the value of labour power, accompanied by long working hours, unhealthy working conditions and environmental damage which often affect the communities that workers belong to. Unequal exchange is reinforced by the other mechanisms mentioned earlier.1 One of the conditions necessary for the maintenance of superexploitation is restrictions of the mobility of workers. Arghiri Emmanuel claims 1 The process of unequal exchange also means that the value of a shoe or mobile phone produced in a non-core country is mainly registered in the GDP of the country of sale which is in many cases a country with a higher wage level. This means that mainstream GDP numbers and also trade data rather omit this sort of value transfer and “are simply incapable of explaining the value capture” (Roy 2017, 34). 102 J. NOWAK that one of the conditions for unequal exchange is to be seen in the relative immobility of labour, “the assumption that the capital factor is mobile but the labor factor is immobile on the international plane” (1972, 267). Moderate increases in the migration of workers from low-wage to highwage countries since the 1990s have been met with harsher and more violent policies of immigration control by imperialist countries, taking into account thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean Sea since the early 2000s. In contrast to the comparatively low level of migration from South to North, Europe saw an outflow of 17 per cent of its population to other continents between 1850 and 1920, numbering seventy million emigrants (Smith 2016, 108–113).2 Thus, relative immobility of labour is a precondition for differential rates of exploitation (and thus different rates of profit) in core and non-core countries. Another aspect of unequal exchange is value transfer due to higher levels of technology: capitals with a higher level of technology “realize more profits than the surplus value individually generated by them” (Roy 2017, 44), and the inverse effect pertains to capitals with a lower level of technology. This aspect of value transfer is not linked to the cost of production but occurs on the market where value is transformed into prices. But this aspect should not be confused with what mainstream approaches call differences in productivity, although this notion catches some of the differences in the organic composition of capital, but misses out on others. One economic basis of this aspect of unequal exchange is a focus of some multinational companies on the control of research and development processes, planning, design and sale to customers/buyers, while other economic activities like assembly of products are outsourced as in the case of Apple products or much of garment production. Another model, practiced in the automobile industry, is the direct control of final assembly by the main company, but extensive outsourcing of the production of parts or certain processes (sometimes also in the form of in-house outsourcing on the premises of the main company). 2 The European model of industrialisation “was sustainable only through the safety valve allowed by the mass emigration to the Americas. It would be absolutely impossible for the countries of the periphery today – who make up 80 % of the world’s people, of which almost half are rural – to reproduce this model. They would need five or six Americas to be able to ‘catch up’ in the same way” (Amin 2014, 15). THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MASS STRIKES IN THE GLOBAL CRISIS 103 We have already mentioned accumulation by dispossession which represents another form of value transfer by patenting natural resources (biopiracy), and the appropriation of natural resources, knowledge and land (Harvey 2003). But this is by no means the primary form of value transfer as David Harvey claims (Higginbottom 2012/2013, 255, 264). Nonetheless, it continues to be a highly important area of investment and value creation and is a precondition for other forms of value transfer like FDI and arm’s-length manufacturing as it provides raw materials, land and knowledge for industrial production. The empirical background for the relevance of the theory of unequal exchange is that in 2010, “79 percent, or 541 million, of the world’s industrial workers lived in ‘less developed regions’, up from 34 percent in 1950 and 53 percent in 1980, compared to the 145 million industrial workers, or 21 percent of the total, who in 2010 lived in the imperialist countries” (Smith 2016, 101, see 103 for the generation and sources of those data). The ideal type for unequal exchange is production of a commodity in a non-core country and consumption in a core country. In our empirical case studies, we will face some deviations from this ideal type. And, we have to make several qualifications to those numbers: there are no estimates available at this point how many of those 541 million industrial workers in non-core countries produce for core countries, and we know from empirical evidence that some of them produce for consumption in both types of countries which makes the calculation more challenging. But we do know that Asia is today the centre of industrial production and that in 2006 67.5 per cent of the commodities produced in East Asia and India combined were exported to Europe and North America (Chang 2012, 24). This means that only 32.5 per cent of those products stay in the Asian region—and of those 32.5 per cent a considerable amount will be consumed in the core countries of Australia, Japan and South Korea. These numbers can only give some indication on the global distribution of labour and consumption and at least point to the fact that a considerable amount of those 541 million workers’ production will be consumed by individuals or companies in core countries. It is worth briefly considering the following cases addressed more substantively in the next two chapters: a company based in India that produces primarily motorcycles for the domestic market, an India-based company dominated by a Japanese multinational that produces primarily passenger cars for the Indian market, Brazilian construction companies that build a hydroelectric plant and dam in Brazil, a South Korean steel company that 104 J. NOWAK builds a steel plant in Brazil to be run jointly by a South Korean and a Brazilian company, and an Italian-Portuguese construction consortium that builds a power plant in Brazil, and this power plant will be run by a Brazilian company whose biggest shareholder is a German company. Thus, of those companies that saw the strikes that I will analyse in the next two chapters, none fits the model of the ideal type of unequal exchange: production or extraction in a non-core country for consumption in a core country. But in four of the five cases, imperialist capital does play a considerable role. This means that even beyond the amount of workers that are involved in production for core countries, we can also trace other forms in which imperialist capital is involved in the exploitation of workers in non-core countries. One of the specific phenomena of the global economy since the 2000s is that in some non-core countries there is a considerable expansion of production without a rise in wages. Phenomena like this are not completely new if seen in a mid-term perspective: Brazilian industry saw a massive expansion during the so-called Brazilian miracle from 1968 to 1974, and the state-directed wage policy of the military dictatorship blocked wages from rising in the automobile industry until the strike wave in 1978–1980 led to some wage hikes. But this was a purely political mechanism of wage restraint. Today we witness market mechanisms (supposedly purely economic, but instituted and maintained with political decisions) contributing at times to falling wages and rising inequality. Satyaki Roy highlights that “the countries that have suffered declining income shares are precisely those that have also experienced a high trade/ GDP ratio” (2017, 37). This widespread phenomenon has been captured with the concept of ‘immiserising growth’, “falling returns with increasing economic activity (…) reflected in a decline in the unit price of exports” (ibid.). While this phenomenon is more pronounced in cases of the assembly of imported inputs, we witness a similar tendency in the automotive industry in India: while the production output of this industry tripled between 2001 and 2012 from 1.3 to 4.1 million cars (OICA 2012), the real wage of workers in this sector dropped 18 per cent between April 2000 and March 2010, and wages as a percentage of net value added dropped from 28 to 15 per cent during the latter period (PUDR 2013, 8). 3.1.1 Immiserising Growth and the Restructuring of Work How is this possible? It is at this point that we come to the basis of the phenomenon of superexploitation at the level of the organisation of work. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MASS STRIKES IN THE GLOBAL CRISIS 105 At the heart of this process in the Indian automobile industry is a steep increase of contract workers that earn between 50 and 20 per cent of what permanent workers earn. At this point, we leave the example of this specific industry in order to turn to the labour regime of informality/precarity. Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden claim that the so-called standard employment model of Western Fordism was “an historical exception (…) which had a deep impact in a limited part of the world for a relatively short period of time” (2014, 920; see Munck 2013, 752 for a similar position). The norm in global capitalism is then “insecurity, informality or precariousness” (Breman and van der Linden 2014, 920). The central features of this regime are part-time and temporary work, low wages, subcontracting, self-employment, long work hours, lack of social security and lack of safe conditions of work. Breman and van der Linden claim that this regime has been dominant in non-core countries in the past 200 years, while it is advancing rapidly in core countries. Sarah Mosoetsa et al. build on this diagnosis and claim that the misconception of what was called standard employment being the geographical and historical exception also came with the idea that precarious and informal workers could not get organised and resist, so “that only legally recognized, unionized workers have the organizational capacity to engage in collective action” (2016, 6). The notion of standard employment thus displays a quite obvious core-centric bias, but one has to note that it served and continues to serve as a benchmark also for non-core countries despite being the exception (Amin 2008, xiv; Mayer-Ahuja 2017). Nonetheless, the global dominance of precarious and informal work requires a profound shift in the perspective on labour relations. Mosoetsa et al. (2016, 8) note a recurrent problem with the concept of informal work: first, it is only defined in a negative fashion and seems to imply that informal work is unregulated. In fact, there are manifold regulations of informal work (see Harriss-White 2003, 176–199 on caste as a corporatist setting in India; and Swider 2015, 8), and the challenge remains to uncover and identify these regulations. A second problem is that the concept of informality is often used in terms of an ‘informal sector’ or an ‘informal economy’ that is assumed to exist as a separate economic entity alongside the formal sector. This misconception is increasingly giving way to a conception that lays emphasis on informality as a condition that also pervades ‘formal’ employment (non-payment of wages, wage arrears, lack of state control of working conditions, lack of health and security standards). 106 J. NOWAK The notion of precarity comes with a similar problem, especially when precarity is seen as a deviation from the norm (Mosoetsa et al. 2016, 9) or as forming the basis for a special group of workers, at times called the precariat (Standing 2014; Saul 2014, chapter 5). Again, a perspective on precarity as a condition of work that affects different groups of workers to a different degree is more helpful in understanding contemporary processes than a definition of who exactly are ‘precarious workers’. In this light, I propose to talk about different degrees of formalisation of work and different degrees of precarity—a point made in many recent analyses. Bieler et al. underline that it is “not always easy to make clear distinctions between ‘informal’ and ‘formal work’” (2008a, 8). Thomas Barnes states: “There are relatively few instances that represent formal or informal employment in a ‘pure’ form. Many kinds of employment exhibit features of both endpoints in the continuum” (2012/2013, 149). Ronaldo Munck confirms this perspective: “There is not, to be sure, a dichotomy between the formal and informal economies but rather a continuum based on considerable synergies and grey overlapping areas” (2013, 755). Andrew Herod and Rob Lambert take a similar position, too, and therefore propose to speak of four dimensions of precarity: low earnings, a fragile social safety net, little regulatory protection and little influence on work arrangements (2016, 7). Sarah Swider underlines in this vein that “the boundaries between formal and informal employment have become blurrier” (2015, 7). She differentiates between forms of regulation of informal employment. These combine access to employment with a specific type of regulation. With this, Swider goes beyond a legalistic definition of employment relations. She distinguishes between mediated employment in the case of labour contractors, embedded employment in the case of social networks enabling access to employment and individualised employment in the case of street labour markets (2015, 9). These definitions are helpful since they show that informal work is not only a negatively defined residue category, and they are based on the social relations of the employment relationship and not on legal conditions. Coming back to the larger picture, the establishment of the informalityprecarity regime and the global extension of capitalism led to an increasing pauperisation of the world population. Amin estimates that right after the Second World War 25 per cent of the world population lived in an impoverished condition, while it was about 50 per cent in the mid-2000s (2008, xvif.). It has also been highlighted that “existing unions mainly organize THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MASS STRIKES IN THE GLOBAL CRISIS 107 core workers” (Bieler et al. 2008b, 268), that is, workers with a low amount of precarity and a high amount of formalisation if compared to the average worker. This comes with the danger that “trade unions may become the representatives of a labour aristocracy, which occupies privileged jobs in smaller and smaller parts of the economy” (Bieler and Lindberg 2011, 6). Thus, the question of which segment unions represent comes back to us again on the global level. Another way to represent this global situation of the working class is the reference to Marx’s theory of different elements of a relative surplus population in the first volume of Capital (Marx 1867, 695; see Viana 2006; Barnes 2012; Jha et al. 2018). This theory was extensively debated in the 1970s in Latin America in the context of rural-urban migration (see Munck 2013 for an overview), but was then eventually dropped for a while. Marx regards a relative surplus population as a permanent feature of capitalism. The central point that Praveen Jha et al. make regarding the basis of Marx’ theory is that “capitalist accumulation in peripheral social formations cannot have the same synergy with labour absorption dynamics as in the case of metropolitan countries” (2018). This means that peripheral social formations cannot have mass emigration to other continents to the same extent as European countries did—“to put it differently the balance between the active army and the reserve army in the two instances are dramatically different, with the weight of the latter being substantially higher in the case of the periphery” (2018).3 Mass emigration whose precondition was colonialism allowed to operate with a smaller reserve army when Europe was industrialised, thus the reserve army will represent a larger part of the working class in non-core countries than it did in core countries. This also means that the nature and function of the relative surplus population is different in non-core countries than it is in core countries, and Jha et al. add that the two groups of the economically active working class and the reserve army might be more difficult to distinguish in non-core countries. The take-home points from this section are the following: first, imperialist capital plays a specific role in the exploitation of workers, adding various forms of value transfer from non-core to core countries to the relationship between labour and capital that Marx described in Capital. 3 If the same percentage of the population would emigrate from the Global South as was emigrating from Europe between 1850 and 1920, this would amount to an emigration of 800 million people (Smith 2016, 180). 108 J. NOWAK But this does not always concern production of goods by non-core workers for consumption in core countries. Second, the focus of many unions on the permanent workforce leaves the majority of the global working class out of sight. A focus on informal and precarious work has to take into account that there are various forms of regulation of informal work and that both informality and precarity consist of various overlapping features that make a clear-cut division into two groups of workers difficult (i.e. informal and formal or precarious and non-precarious workers). Theories of a relative surplus population come back to the fact that a revamping of Western models of social integration will not work for the whole globe since the material and social bases of this integration are not given, that is, colonialism and mass emigration. Beyond these mid-term structural factors, there have been specific effects of the global economic crisis on the emerging economies which set the scene for the mass strikes in India and Brazil that are in the centre of this book. We will turn to this rather short-term context in the next section. 3.2 The effecT of The Global economic cRisis and The lonG Recession on emeRGinG economies The strikes that we look at in this book occurred in the wake of the global financial crisis in the early twenty-first century. The effects of this crisis on emerging economies have been interpreted in a variety of ways with often stark differences in emphasis. Early analyses from mainstream economists see the emerging economies as more stable than core countries and recommend state capitalism as an effective shelter against financialisation and its effects of volatility and insecurity (Bremmer 2009). More Keynesianinspired analyses diagnose a delinking of emerging economies from the financial volatility and instability affecting core countries since 2007 (Bresser-Pereira 2010; May 2013). While the BRICS states proved to be quite resilient in face of the immediate financial crisis in core countries, all of these countries saw lower growth rates in all years after 2008 (Roberts 2016, 186f). Growth remained significantly higher than in core countries, but was nonetheless affected by the lower overall demand and the longterm recession on the world market (Roberts 2017). Before we trace how the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries were affected by the crisis, let us recall what the preced- THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MASS STRIKES IN THE GLOBAL CRISIS 109 ing rise of the BRICS meant in terms of official numbers: in 2000, the BRIC countries without South Africa accounted for about 8 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP), while this amount rose to about 19 per cent in 2011 and 22 per cent in 2015 (19.5 and 23 per cent if South Africa is included) (Bishop 2016, 2f). The US GDP was 33 per cent of the global total in 2000, and 21.5 and 24 per cent in 2011 and 2015, a considerable decrease. But, as we have seen in the preceding section, this also means that much of labour-intensive and unhealthy production and environmental pollution has been outsourced to those countries, primarily to China which alone accounts for 15 per cent of global GDP. And, between 2011 and 2015 the share of Russia, Brazil and South Africa in global GDP went down from 3.6 to 2.5, from 2.6 to 1.6, and from 0.6 to 0.4 per cent—thus, the rise of the BRICS countries seems to be focused on India and China for this more recent period: China climbed from 10 to 15, and India from 2.5 to 3.1 per cent (ibid.). While countries like China and India came out with between 1 and 3 per cent less growth per year after economic recovery in 2010, Brazil has not returned to stable growth since the crisis (Fig. 3.1). The dependency of the Brazilian economy on the world market made itself felt. In most Fig. 3.1 Emerging markets real GDP growth. (Source: IMF) 110 J. NOWAK emerging economies the tumbling of commodity prices was accompanied with negative net capital flows and a drop in exports (Saad-Filho 2014, 67). In general, there proved to be a high synchronicity of business cycles of core and non-core countries and the thesis of a decoupling of emerging economies did not hold (Wälti 2012). There are two aspects to look at if we conceive of the position of the emerging economies in the post-crisis world: first, the economic developments in the narrow sense of the term, and, second, the position of the BRICS countries as the major industrial and most populated countries in the emerging world. Both aspects are, of course, intimately connected. For the first aspect, I will only briefly trace out how the crisis affected Brazil and India: In Brazil, GDP growth was on average 3.86 per cent from 2002 to 2007, and dropped to 3.57 per cent from 2008 to 2013, 2014 saw a flat growth of 0.5 per cent, and in 2015 and 2016 GDP shrank almost 4 per cent in both years (all numbers: World Bank). Thus, the slowdown due to the crisis was not as pronounced in Brazil in the first years, but accelerated from 2014 on, aggravated by and aggravating the political crisis in the country. The commodities boom in the 2000s allowed a real wage increase of 66 per cent, but from 2011 on the prices for key agricultural exports went down, and export profitability as a whole decreased 20 per cent compared with the best years in the early 2000s (Roberts 2016, 191). In 2014, the share of primary commodities in Brazilian exports exceeded 50 per cent, up from 28 per cent in the early 2000s, but at the same time prices of iron ore, soy and crude oil have fallen around 60–70 per cent between 2011 and 2015 (Anderson 2016). One core part of the economic strategy of the PT presidencies was to push investment via state lending so that government banks increased their share of loan capital from 30 to 50 per cent after 2006 (ibid). Nonetheless, since 2013, Brazil saw a sharp decline in manufacturing investment and exports (ibid.). In line with this development, the picture of overall economic growth tends to obscure a sharp decrease of the contribution of industry to national GDP, from 27.8 per cent in 1988 to 14.5 per cent in 2010 (Braga 2014, 211). At the same time, the percentage of exports in GDP rose from 8 to 12 between 1990 and 2016. Thus, while enjoying constant growth during the 2000s, the Brazilian economy got more focused on the production and export of primary commodities, but the prices of those commodities crashed in the wake of the crisis that began in 2007. There was no catch up in new areas of industrial production to compensate for this which led the country THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MASS STRIKES IN THE GLOBAL CRISIS 111 further and further into an economic crisis. The commodity supercycle in the 2000s turned into a commodity nightmare, and the years of the commodity boom had not been used sufficiently in order to build up other economic sectors as a counterweight. When the crisis hit and commodity prices crashed, the national economy lacked any safeguards to balance this and got exposed to its dependence on world market prices and the demand and trade patterns of Russia, China, Japan, Europe and North America. In India, growth rates were lower after the crisis, too—with 7.99 per cent average GDP growth between 2002 and 2007, but only 6.85 per cent between 2008 and 2013. Since 2014, growth in India saw an uptick to 7.50, 8.01 and 7.10 per cent in 2014, 2015 and 2016, but did not go back to the 9.29, 9.26 and 9.80 per cent growth it saw during three years in 2005, 2006 and 2007 (numbers: World Bank). The proportion of manufacturing in India’s GDP remains stable since about 1990, while the value-added amount of agriculture went down dramatically from 30 per cent in 1990 to 17 per cent in 2016. During the same period the percentage of exports in GDP rose quite steeply from 7 to 19 per cent (Roberts 2016, 199). Thus, growth rates in India have been much more stable than in Brazil, but nonetheless it led to largely jobless growth in the context of a growing population (Ehmke 2014). The long-term crisis in agriculture is a source for underused labour power entering the Indian job markets. Although exports increased dramatically and growth remains high, it is the agricultural crisis in India that contributed much to the jobless growth scenario since the 2000s, and at the same time it provides an overabundance of workers to the various layers of subcontracted entities in production at dismally low wages. Thus, in both countries growth did not collapse in the period 2008–2013, but it was lower as it was in the six-year period preceding the crisis, and the decrease of GDP growth accounted for more than 1 per cent in India. Thus, it is obvious that there was no decoupling of the BRICS countries from the crisis, but those effects were highly uneven— India returned to a high-growth path while Brazil weathered the early years of the crisis quite well and then faced a slump from 2014 on. Second, the BRICS countries unite about 41.3 per cent of the global population, 3.1 billion people. China, Brazil and India are among the ten biggest national global economies measured in nominal GDP. If GDP is calculated with purchasing power parity, Russia would also figure among the ten biggest national economies at the sixth position; in nominal terms it comes in at twelfth. The BRICS countries are often referred to as 112 J. NOWAK middle-income countries, which obscures the fact that the majority of the world’s poor population lives in those countries. The level of coherence of the BRICS bloc depends to a significant amount on the governments being in charge in the countries comprising the bloc, and it has become significantly looser with the tenure of Narendra Modi in India and the Michel Temer government in Brazil who are both ideologically closer to an alliance with the USA than with the People’s Republic of China. But independent of these variations in government, the BRICS never formulated an alternative project to the imperialist rule of the core countries, but rather aimed to gain trade advantages at the cost of core countries and thus remain highly dependent on markets of imperialist countries (Garcia and Bond 2015). This lack of an “ideological alternative to imperialism” (Prashad 2017, 2540, emphasis in the original; see also Bishop 2016, 6) means that the conflict between imperialist countries and the BRICS states is rather an “inter-capitalist conflict” with an inter-state dimension (Prashad 2017, 2541) and not a proper conflict between two geopolitical blocs. Another aspect that binds the crisis and the emerging economies together is that the possibility of outsourcing of production and services from core countries to low-wage countries is aligned with a lack of productive investment in core countries and a corresponding investment in financial markets and products. This link between outsourcing to lowwage countries and a lack of productivity increase in core countries has already been made by Charles Bettelheim: “we must not overlook the fact that the possibility of exploiting the cheap labour of the dominated countries, and of buying cheaply the products by these same countries, puts a relative break upon technical development in the advanced capitalist countries” (1972, 307). Smith highlights this connection in a similar way, underlining that the massive outsourcing of production to non-core countries figures as one of the causes and conditions for the global financial crisis that unfolded since 2007/2008 (2016, 279ff). Having located the economic situation of Brazil and India in the context of the recent crisis and established the conjuncture in which those strikes took place, we will take a look in the next section at how those strikes and the global strike wave from 2010 to 2014 of which they are a part are located in the long-term economic development of capitalism. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MASS STRIKES IN THE GLOBAL CRISIS 3.3 113 sTRikes and economic cycles There has been some amount of debate since the 1940s regarding how strikes are related to business cycles, with more systematic studies concluded by James Cronin (1979a, b) and Ernesto Screpanti (1984). The main claim is that larger strike waves occur at a certain point during a Kondratieff cycle. These cycles are supposed to take between sixty-four and seventy-two years (Roberts 2016, 232) and are international phenomena characterised by a synchronous movement of indicators like “real output, price levels, interest rates, (…) world trade and industrial output” (Screpanti 1984, 101). Screpanti claims that three big international strike waves occurred at the peak of a Kondratieff cycle: 1869–1875, 1910–1920 and 1968–1974. These strike waves stand out by their extension in geographical terms, and are “with the exception of what happened in 1885–91, the only international strike waves showing a duration longer than two years” (107, emphasis in the original). All of these strike waves were followed by a sudden and long-lasting decrease of strike action. Screpanti compares his results with the claims made by other scholars: Nikolai Kondratieff (1979) and Michelle Perrot (1974) claim that class struggle tends to get more intensive during long upswings, the first part of a Kondratieff cycle.4 Screpanti (1984, 111) confirms this, but disagrees with Kondratieff who claims that prosperity periods are favourable to major revolts—Screpanti rather sees moderate intensification of strike activity during upswings. Screpanti’s own claim is that major eruptions come at the end of an upswing, characterised by new vanguard groups and rank-and-file protagonism. He also suggests “that precisely these explosions put an end to the prosperity phases” (1984, 111), since wage hikes as the results of those strike waves have a severe impact on the rate of profit. John T. Dunlop (1948) and Gaston Imbert (1959) finally claim that major economic depressions are followed by periods of unrest. Screpanti holds that this cannot be confirmed in general, but that nonetheless some of the major strike waves apart from the three big international ones have in fact occurred during downswings, but the triggers for those are seen by him as specific to the respective national scene (Screpanti 4 James Cronin agrees in principle but underlines that he does not find any connection between strikes and economic upswing prior to 1850: “Then protest varied more closely with hardship, flaring up during years of high prices or industrial depression; and the most explosive situations arose when consumption and employment crises intersected” (1979a, 126). 114 J. NOWAK 1984, 112). He interprets them as a ‘revival’ phenomenon of weak strikes coming a few years after a strong strike wave. Cronin agrees to the phenomenon of an intensification of strike waves during upswings (and he also mentions the late 1880s as an exception), but qualifies that shortterm upswings during a larger upswing usually provide the opportunity to translate economic effects into action. A short-term upswing creates expectations among workers that are then subsequently disappointed (1979a, 136). Where then do we place the international strike wave from 2010 to 2014? We are facing the difficulty of identifying a Kondratieff cycle without having enough historical distance and data, and the additional difficulty that various analysts place the end of the current Kondratieff cycle at quite different periods—in 1998, 2010, 2018 or 2020 (Screpanti 1984; Allianz 2010; Roberts 2016; Kopala and Budden 2015; Quigley 2012). If we adopt Screpanti’s claim that the period of 1968–1974 marks the peak of the cycle that began in 1946, then the endpoint of that cycle would have been around 1998. This would then have meant a series of fragile revival strikes in the end of the 1970s and early 1980s (which actually occurred in Germany, the UK, Italy and France in this period, four of the five countries that were the main basis of Screpanti’s investigation). The strike wave between 2010 and 2014 would have occurred during the upswing of the next cycle, but it would make absolutely no sense to locate a major crisis and depression occurring ten years after the beginning of a new cycle (in 2008). Other authors argue that every Kondratieff wave concludes with an economic crisis, so they operate with a different periodization and in this case, assuming a Kondratieff cycle from 1949 to 2020, both the strike waves 1910–1920 and 1968–1974 would be placed in the summer period of Kondratieff cycles (the second part of an upswing), and the strike wave 2010–2014 would be placed in the winter period (and the strike waves 1869–1875 and 1885–1891 would be autumn and winter phenomena) (Quigley 2012). Christopher Quigley who takes his approach to periodization from the Long Wave Group, as well as Margret Kopala and John Budden (2015) and Michael Roberts (2016, 229) use a similar periodization of this cycle, placing the peak at around 1982. If strike analysis is not confined to the five countries used as a basis of analysis by Screpanti (Germany, Italy, France, the UK and the USA), but extended to emerging economies it makes sense to see an international strike wave culminating in the late 1970s and early 1980s with defensive strikes in core countries THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MASS STRIKES IN THE GLOBAL CRISIS 115 (Germany, the UK, Italy) and offensive strikes in emerging economies (Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Iran, India, the Minjung uprising in South Korea, the so-called International Monetary Fund (IMF) riots in Morocco, Egypt, Algeria) (see Silver 1991; Edwards 1992, 365 for this view). If we accept this periodization of a Kondratieff cycle from 1949 to 2015–2020, then the strike wave in the wake of the global financial crisis would be rather of the type that Dunlop described—unrest following a depression—and a major disruption at the peak of the next cycle can only be expected around 2040–2050. Such a view is also held by John Kelly who refutes Screpanti’s claim that strikes at the end of downswings would be caused by national specific circumstances. “An alternative view is that there are significant increases in strike frequency, workers involved and/or days lost at the end of long downswings, as capitalist economies move back into the upswing” (Kelly 1998, 89). But he also notes that these strike waves show more variability than the ones at the peak of Kondratieff cycles. We thus get a picture, confirming Kelly’s view, of major international strike waves at the end of Kondratieff upswings and minor international strike waves towards the end of downswings.5 It is emphasised by Cronin (1979a, 127, 137; 1979b, 17) and Kelly (1998, 89–94) that both major and minor international strike waves usually see a growth in union membership. This was obviously not the case during the strike wave of 2010–2014, and we will come back to the significance of this phenomenon later. In line with Screpanti’s claims is the distinction made by Harold Kerbo between movements of affluence and movements of crisis (1982, 654): movements of affluence come at good times (i.e. during an upswing phase), while movements of crisis see more collective violence in the early phase. Jeremy Brecher takes a similar stance regarding strikes during depressions: they are “often extremely bitter, but they are difficult to win” (1997, 287). Nonetheless, Brecher warns against the idea that intensive labour conflict will be an exclusive product of a specific part of the business cycle. Following this model, the strike wave from 2010 to 2014 would be placed at the end of a long downswing, and it comes with the unusual characteristic of witnessing a drop in union membership. This can point to 5 See also Cronin: “Strike waves appear to come toward the end of either phase of a ‘long wave’ during a short-term upswing” (1979b, 39). The only problem with Kelly’s view is that he adopts Kondratieff’s periodization which would have required a minor strike wave in the mid-1990s. He does not address this contradiction (1998, 83–89). 116 J. NOWAK an anomaly, or to the fact that new types of organisations are forming that are not covered by counting union members—or we are witnessing a serious crisis of the labour movement in general. In order to give some indications if we can claim that there was an international strike wave during the period of 2010–2014 we will look at numbers that are readily available. We can identify a clear pattern of a rise in strikes during this period in the following four emerging countries: in China a rise in the number of strikes between 2010 and 2015 (Smith and Pun 2018), in Brazil a rise in the number of strikes and man-days lost between 2010 and 2016 (see the various sources in Chap. 5), in Indonesia between 2009 and 2013 a rise in the number of strikes and workers involved (Panimbang and Mufakhir 2018, 26), and in South Africa a very high number of working days lost due to strikes in 2010 and 2014, a consistently high number of strikes between 2012 and 2015, and a high amount of wages lost due to strikes in 2012, 2013 and 2014 (Department of Labour 2015). Among these four emerging economies are China as the most populated country worldwide, Indonesia and Brazil come fourth and fifth globally in terms of population size, and South Africa in position number 30, or in terms of GDP measured in purchasing power parity these are the largest, eighth largest, ninth largest and thirty-first largest economies.6 But also some core countries show these characteristics in the given period: Canada (#38 in population, #18 in economic size) as a core country had unusually high numbers of workers involved in strikes from 2011 to 2013, and South Korea (#26 in population, #15 in economic size) from 2012 to 2014.7 In Spain (#27 in population, #16 in economic size) the days not worked per 1000 workers were unusually high in 2009, 2012 and 2013, mainly due to general strikes (www.ilo.org, Balbona and Begega 2017). The UK (#22 in population, #10 in economic size) displays a weaker pattern with an unusually high number of workers involved in two years only, 2011 and 2014. A more profound investigation into the nature of this global strike wave would have to look at data of the thirty most populated countries and the thirty biggest economies which is facing considerable challenges due to lack of data. But we can at least trace cer6 The data on country comparison regarding GDP (purchasing power parity) and population size relies on the CIA Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/rankorder/2001rank.html#ar; https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/ the-world-factbook/rankorder/2119rank.html#ar. Accessed 30 August 2018. 7 These data go back to the ILO strike statistics on https://www.ilo.org THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MASS STRIKES IN THE GLOBAL CRISIS 117 tain trends—and the countertrend that no such unequivocal rise in strikes occurred in core economies like Germany and the USA in the same period. 3.3.1 Strikes Waves and Comparative Research In my analysis of four case studies of strikes in Brazil and India I will rely on the method of incorporated comparison by Philip McMichael (1990). This method “progressively constructs a whole” (386) by comparing phenomena via their relation to a common context. In this methodology, the whole consists of its parts that are compared, and it does not presume a whole prior to the parts—in distinction to Wallerstein’s prior assumption of the world capitalist system as ultimate unit of comparison (1974). This means that apparently separate processes are conceived as components of a broader global conjuncture which will make itself felt in the particular contexts (McMichael 1990, 389). It follows then that units of comparison are not analytical points of departure as in conventional analytic comparisons, but “units of observation of systemic processes” (391). McMichael’s approach shares this perspective with world-system theory, but regards it as problematic that world-system theory equates the unit of analysis with the object of analysis since both figure as the world capitalist system. Rather than subordinating parts to a whole, McMichael proposes an emergent totality built on the analysis of parts of the whole. The whole is not discovered by observing how parts are conditioned by it and how the parts condition one another, but in the perspective of incorporated comparison “parts (…) reveal and realize the changing whole” (391). In this way, the unit of analysis is not identical to the empirical whole, and “the whole emerges through the action of its parts” (394). For the units of comparison this means that they “are comparable because they are historically connected and mutually conditioning”, forming in relation to one another “and in relation to the whole formed through their inter-relationship” (McMichael 2000, 671). Two modes of incorporated comparison are cross-time and cross-space comparison. This book engages in the latter, which “specifies a single conjuncture as combining particular spatially-located parts of a global configuration” (ibid.). In consequence, single instances or parts of the whole cannot be understood outside of a specific historical conjuncture. In this book, I chose various instances of a global strike wave as units of comparison. Global strike waves are crucial periods in which popular classes create new institutions and new forms of struggle in order to con- 118 J. NOWAK front the specific problems that come with a certain conjuncture. Cronin emphasises that strike waves are “marking the transitions between distinctive historical patterns of strike behaviour and determination” (1979b, 31). The uneven character of economic growth confronts workers with different problems at each major economic shift and stimulates a “‘remaking’ of their consciousness and forms of collective organisation every two or three decades” (38). Thus, strike waves manifest these new attitudes and strategies of workers “produced by the impact of ‘long waves’ of economic growth” (ibid.). Beyond this, Cronin conceives “the flashpoints of conflict as prisms through which to vie the structure and development of economy and society” (1979a, 120). He traces the history of strikes as an ascension during the nineteenth century, identifying the strike wave in the early 1870s as the consolidation of the strike “as the dominant form of social conflict in developed industrial society” (123). It is this role of the strike as the dominant form of social conflict that makes its analysis a potentially fruitful exercise—and this holds for the cycle of struggles between 2010 and 2014 that also saw street demonstrations, occupations of public squares and food riots as widespread phenomena, but still more countries saw strikes in the same period than they saw these other types of protest forms that often got more news coverage and attention from researchers than strikes did (see the analyses in Castells 2012; Mason 2012). The ubiquity of strikes at the same time seems to give rise to an attitude of ignoring strikes for the exact same reason. 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Applied Economics, 44(26), 3407–3419. CHAPTER 4 A Protracted Struggle: Strikes in the Automobile Sector in India So, practically, I mean we used to say it jokingly, stateless society has already come here. State is very selective. State is like a security force of the ruling class. For any other function the state does not exist. Rest all is anarchy.1 The automobile sector in India became one of the central sectors for the industrialisation drive of the country. The car passenger sector is the sixth biggest worldwide, and the two-wheeler sector the second biggest after China. Labour relations in this sector are characterised by a dualism that resembles work organisation in Japan and China, a majority of workers in the sector being temporary workers—in the specific form of contract workers that are employed by labour intermediaries and not by the principal company. The automobile sector in India is impregnated by companies that involve Japanese capital such as car passenger market leader Maruti Suzuki and twowheeler market leader Hero. Market leader for utility vehicles is the domestic company Mahindra and Mahindra Limited. Maruti Suzuki started as a public enterprise, became then a joint venture with the Suzuki Motor Corporation (SMC) and was effectively taken over by Suzuki in 2007. The joint-venture company Hero Honda was split in 2010, with Hero remaining the market 1 Interview with Ajit Abhyankar, District President of CITU (Centre of Indian Trade Unions), 27 December 2013, Pune. © The Author(s) 2019 J. Nowak, Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India, Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05375-8_4 125 126 J. NOWAK leader as a domestic company. Apart from joint ventures with original manufacturers, Japanese companies play an enormous role as first- and second-tier suppliers (D’Costa 2005; Barnes 2018). In this way, there is a considerable penetration of the industry with Japanese capital, above all in the car passenger industry where Maruti Suzuki has a market share of 40–45 per cent. The second biggest car passenger producer is South Korean multinational Hyundai with around 20 per cent market share. The Indian automobile industry saw a considerable amount of labour unrest since the 2000s, in parallel with the transformation of the sector, marked by the replacement of permanent workers in original manufacturers with an increasing amount of contract workers. This process of transformation started in the first Maruti factory in Gurgaon in 2000, and has since expanded into the sector (Becker-Ritterspach 2009; Barnes 2018). While labour conflicts in the 2000s were marked by considerable splits between permanent and contract workers, it was a crucial characteristic of the strikes and revolts in 2011 and 2012 at the second Maruti factory in Manesar that they saw a united action of both categories of workers. Conflicts at two-wheeler factories erupted since the mid-2000s, the most prominent being the violent police crackdown on workers at Honda Motorcycles in Manesar in 2005 and a strike of contract workers at the Hero Honda motorcycle factory in Gurgaon in 2006 (Sehgal 2005; GWN 2007). Several research papers and books on the Indian automobile industry have looked at its patterns of emergence and inter-industry organisation (Okada 2004; D’Costa 2005; Remesh 2017) and its integration into global production networks (Kerswell and Pratap 2015; Barnes 2018). Claims about an emerging trend towards an upgrading of work conditions in Indian automobile factories in the course of an increase of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the sector have been made recently by Ulrich Jürgens and Marin Krzywdzinski (2016). But since this research regarding India is based on scant evidence, and given an overwhelming consensus of all other researchers on opposite findings (Sinha 2017; Gartenberg 2017; Barnes 2018, 11), we cannot avoid to disregard the claim of Jürgens and Krzywdzinski on the Indian case. Thus, we chime in to the common diagnosis of a low road in labour relations in the Indian automobile industry, combined with high-technology production. This is much in line with the claim made in Chap. 3 that low wages in non-core countries cannot be explained with differences in productivity—which means vice versa that A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 127 technological upgrading does not automatically come with an upgrading of labour relations as has been repeatedly claimed against all existing empirical evidence in the upgrading literature (see e.g. Gereffi and Güler 2010, 118). There is a considerable body of literature on recent labour conflicts in the Indian automobile industry (Jha and Chakraborty 2014; Nowak 2014, 2016, 2017a; Burgmann 2016, 88–95; Miyamura 2016; Sinha 2017; Pratap 2017; Duvisac 2018; Barnes 2018). Most of these accounts focus on the dualism of the labour force and on the course of events during several conflicts. The actual forms of organisation of the workers during strikes and the alliances they formed are mentioned in some accounts (Pratap 2017), but not explored in detail; especially the links to other organisations and actors are usually only mentioned briefly, if at all. The geographical focus of almost all analyses of the Indian automobile industry is on the National Capital Region (NCR) around New Delhi, although the Chennai and Pune automobile clusters are as important as the NCR. Sara Duvisac (2018) integrates the automobile clusters in Chennai and the Gujarat region in her analysis and compares it with the NCR region, but her focus is confined to plant-based trade unions and does not consider the impact of regional specificities on the cooperation of workers with other actors. Tom Barnes (2018) emphasises that labour regimes in the Indian automobile industry are regionally specific, but he only provides comprehensive data on the NCR region. Satoshi Miyamura (2016) compares three regions, but across industrial sectors, and again only includes the automobile industry with an example of the NCR region. Indira Gartenberg (2017) takes a closer look at the Pune automobile cluster, with a focus on the lack of implementation of Global Framework Agreements in three German car passenger and supplier companies. Finally, almost no academic research has been done yet on conflicts in motorcycle factories in India. Thus, my research on forms of organisation of workers in the automobile industry and their alliances with other actors both in the NCR and in the Pune region, covering both the car passenger company Maruti Suzuki and the motorcycle and three-wheeler producer Bajaj Auto, covers new ground. Especially the comparison of mobilisations with similar characteristics across two regions promises to yield interesting results. The mobilisations at the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki occurred in 2011 and 2012, and the fifty-day strike at the Chakan plant of Bajaj Auto took place in 2013. Both mobilisations occurred in factories that have been located in new industrial areas as offshoots from the original mother plant, and both 128 J. NOWAK mother plants saw a reduction of the earlier workforce by voluntary retirement schemes (VRS) a few years ahead of the mobilisations. Thus, both plants had a comparably young workforce at the time of conflict with a high amount of contract workers, and they were both located in relatively new industrial areas. Apart from addressing this research gap, my contribution to this research field is to provide a larger perspective on how workers, social movement activists, labour lawyers and other organic experts interacted and how they saw the course of events, based on interviews I conducted between September 2013 and January 2014. The material in this chapter is organised along the general questions raised in the first two chapters: 1. We will enquire how non-class relations and relations beyond the workplace were related to the strikes in automobile factories. Especially the conflict at the Maruti Suzuki factory in Manesar saw a broad support from different layers of society, and numerous activities of workers were conducted in villages in Haryana, and in front of residences of ministers, and facilities where workers were jailed. The intervention of state security forces added another layer, and the imprisonment of workers and arbitrary court proceedings politicised the case further. In both conflicts at Maruti Suzuki and Bajaj Auto it were connections with workers from other factories that played a role for the trajectory of the conflicts. 2. How did common experiences of diverse groups who were drawn into the labour conflicts merge into a common perspective? Which political ideologies were mobilised and what were the common denominators between striking workers and other actors? In both conflicts, workers received supports by other actors that were not based on workplace organisation. 3. What kinds of linkages were given between formal and informal types of organisation? While trade unions played a considerable role in both conflicts, a representative structure emerging from the workplace was essential for the coordination of strikes, and alliances with non-strikers were often formed on an ad hoc basis or not in a strictly formalised manner. 4. We will take a closer look at the role of political traditions inscribed into spaces and places. The automobile industry in the NCR had seen a larger number of conflicts a few years before the labour unrest in the Manesar factory at Maruti Suzuki. In contrast, earlier conflicts A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 129 at Bajaj Auto took place in the 1970s and 1980s, and militant traditions in the Pune cluster seemed to be a more remote memory. Which role did the fact play that both companies are well known among the general public? 5. Are the conflicts in the Indian automobile industry a sectoral phenomenon, or do they reverberate with conflicts in other sectors, and do these patterns differ in both industrial clusters? What type of spatial pattern can we identify for those strikes? 6. What is the role of imperialist capital, which is evident in the case of Maruti Suzuki, while Bajaj Auto remains a domestic company? 7. How can we locate the conflicts in Indian automobile companies into the larger scenario of the political economy of the BRICS, the global strike wave between 2010 and 2014 and the volatility of the Indian national economy? 4.1 The AuTomobile SecTor And The indiAn economy The growth of the automobile sector in India since the 1980s was part of a larger drive of industrialisation and liberalisation of the economy that took off after the twenty-one-month emergency period from 1975 to 1977 and gained considerable momentum during the 1990s and 2000s. Industrialisation, especially the expansion of the production of consumer goods, responded to the consumption demands of the middle classes (D’Costa 2005; Becker-Ritterspach 2009, 405; Desai 2017, 71). Nonetheless, the manufacturing share of national income in India remains stable at around 16 per cent since 1980 until the late 2010s, thus it makes sense to say that India is not an industrial society at large (Basile 2013; Barnes 2018, 23). The government objective of state planning was effectively sabotaged since the early 1960s by significant pockets of the ruling classes which enabled a slow road to marketisation (Chibber 2014; Desai 2017, 64). Radhika Desai locates the turning point for the development of the Indian economy therefore in the late 1960s and not in the early 1990s as it is commonly done (2017, 65). The dominant castes were effectively able to block the state-planned land reform since the 1960s, and it is the long agricultural crisis since the late 1960s that provides a large number of underemployed workers to urban regions. But in any case the year 1991 130 J. NOWAK was a turning point in terms of the amount of FDI in India which rose from 5.3 billion to 141.9 billion rupees in the short time span between 1991 and 1994 (Bhattacherjee 2002, 321). This process of economic opening was accompanied by a decline in urban poverty and an increase in rural poverty, leading to a specific Indian form of semi-proletarianisation: unlike the internal migrants in China who get urbanised without a full set of citizen rights and entitlements to social security, rural migrants in India cannot even attain a situation in which they are able to find a stable level of livelihood in the cities: “A majority of the working classes now move constantly back and forth between agriculture and industry and services, as well as between regions and states. The number of seasonal casual migrant wage laborers is estimated to have risen to 100 million” (Corbridge and Shah 2013, 338). This is almost 10 per cent of the total population in India. What has been taking place since the 1990s, and then more pronounced during the 2000s, has been often termed as an “informalisation of the formal sector” (Papola 2013, 9; see also Miyamura 2016, 1923). Between 1999–2000 and 2009–2010 informal employment across all sectors increased from 91.5 to 91.9 per cent while the share of the informal sector in total employment decreased from 86 to 84 per cent during the same period (Papola 2013, 9). This seemingly contradictory tendency accounts for the increasing overlap of informal and formal work: “According to data from Annual Survey of Industries, contract labour constituted only 16% of all workers in organized manufacturing in 1999. It rose to 20 percent in 2000, 27 percent in 2004 and 33 percent in 2009–10” (CSO, various years) (ibid.). Between 1999 and 2004, non-agricultural employment attracted forty million new workers which all ended up in the informal sector (Jha 2008, 67). A study from the 1990s shows that only about 1 per cent of the members of national trade union federations come from the informal sector (Davala 1995). This points to the fact that trade unions in India only cover a tiny minority of all employees. This situation was partly established by Indian labour law. The Trade Union Act of 1926 stipulates that any group of seven workers will be able to form a union, but the process of union recognition is not regulated (Bhattacherjee 2002, 312). The later Industrial Disputes Act of 1947 only applies to the formal sector which is why employers commonly refuse to negotiate with informal or contract workers (Miyamura 2016, 1925). It is in this form that informal labour is regulated by labour law: the non-application of the Industrial Disputes A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 131 Act to contract workers is indeed a quite explicit form of state regulation. This is why it is erroneous to distinguish the formal and informal sector on the basis of regulation by the state (formal sector) or via social regulation (informal sector) as Barnes proposes (2018, 26). Instead, the Industrial Disputes Act does regulate informal labour formally by excluding it from its provisions, or restricting the provisions to ‘workmen’ who have to be employed for more than 240 days. Contract workers, in turn, are laid off after 240 days, often only to be employed a few days later again by the same contractor. Labour productivity in India saw a 7.5 per cent yearly growth between 1980/81 and 1988/89 (Ahluwalia 1992). It was during the same period in the 1980s that the influence of unions shrank and company-based unions and business unions without party affiliation gained ground (Jha 2008, 75)—real wages of workers in organised manufacturing rose at this time, but their total number decreased which reflected a first round of restructuring (Bhattacherjee 2002, 319; Jha 2008, 74). On the other hand, the wages of lower-paid workers went down during the 1980s. These tendencies display the ambivalent nature of company-based unions which were part of the process of establishing a stronger segmentation of the overall workforce. The rise in real wages of workers in formal manufacturing during the 1980s proved to be only temporary, since those wages fell about 11 per cent in the period from 1995–1996 to 2003–2004, reflecting the turn to a higher amount of contract workers (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2014). This is the general context for the rise of the automobile industry in the 1980s, represented by an almost fivefold increase of output in that decade (D’Costa 2005, 84). This decade was impregnated by, on the one hand, the emergence of Maruti Suzuki as industry leader, taking over all other earlier producers during that decade as a public company in a joint venture with Japanese multinational SMC. In the motorcycle sector the private domestic company Hero dominated the field in a joint venture with Japanese multinational Honda (the joint venture ended in 2010). While Honda is now second or third (depending on the year) biggest producer in the two-wheeler sector, Bajaj Auto as another private domestic company competes regularly with Honda for the second position, while domestic company Hero remains market leader. Mahindra and Tata are the biggest companies in the utility vehicles sector, both private and domestic, and both had joint ventures with Western companies in different periods. 132 J. NOWAK A second characteristic of the Indian automobile industry is the regional distribution of the three main automobile clusters: the NCR, the PuneChakan region and the Chennai region. These got established as part of regional shifts: Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai were the main industrial centres after independence (Miyamura 2016, 1924), and both Kolkata and Mumbai lost significance due to a flight of capital from unionised workforces. The NCR and the Pune cluster rose in the 1970s and 1980s as major industrial regions with different traditions of mobilisation. Regional diversity in labour law on state level is one of the factors, but not the only one that is relevant (D’Costa 2005, 114; Miyamura 2016, 1926). Before we take a closer look at the two case studies on Maruti Suzuki and Bajaj Auto, I will provide some numbers on the development of the automobile industry: in 2014, India took the sixth position as a national producer of passenger cars and commercial vehicles with an output of 3.8 million, claiming 4.3 per cent of the global market (China and the USA claim 26.4 and 13.0 per cent respectively). The motorcycle production is the second biggest worldwide after China with an output of 8.8 million vehicles in 2015–2016. The amount of exports in total automobile production is rising slowly, reaching 15 per cent in 2015–2016 (Barnes 2018, 36ff). The automobile industry constitutes 22 per cent of manufacturing GDP in India and 7 per cent of total GDP. It employs thirteen million people, which is about 7 per cent of total employment; and the automobile industry represents 4 per cent of exports and 39 per cent of total FDI inflows into the country (Bhattacharya et al. 2014, 50). The following subsections will look closely at two case studies, mainly based on fieldwork that I have conducted between September 2013 and January 2014, plus a few follow-up interviews, of which the latest was conducted in January 2018. In total, I conducted fifty-four interviews, of which thirteen were with full-time trade union officials; fourteen with labour lawyers, activists, academics and relatives of workers; and twentysix interviews were conducted with automobile workers. Of the interviews with workers, ten were conducted with dismissed or active workers of Maruti Suzuki, nine with workers from Bajaj Auto and seven with workers from other factories in the Pune-Chakan area (Volkswagen, Mahindra & Mahindra, and Tata). I will use citations of some of those interviews in order to give a voice to the actors, and to offer an impression of their perspective. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 4.2 133 mAruTi Suzuki Maruti started as a public sector company and entered into a joint venture with Japanese multinational SMC in 1982. At that point, the Indian state held 74 per cent of the company shares (Shirali 1984). During the 1980s, the company took over older automobile producers like Hindustan Motors and Premier Automobiles, and was established as a national champion with state support, boasting of a 62 per cent market share in 1990–1991 (Mohnot 2001). The Maruti factory in Gurgaon established the New Delhi region as an industrial centre and was the core for Gurgaon as a new industrial area besides the older centre Faridabad that is also part of Haryana state (see Map 4.1).2 While some researchers claim that the labour relations at Maruti pre-2000 were following the model of having one politically unaffiliated union (D’Costa 2005, 114), other researchers report that already in 1989 and 1990 a non-recognised contract workers union was conducting two strikes of nine and thirty-seven days (Annavajhula and Pratap 2012, 57), and one of my interviewees reported two different unions acting during the 1990s in Maruti Suzuki, of which one, the Maruti Udyog Employees Union (MUEU), could finally get registered during the United Front government (1996–1998).3 The background for the rise of Maruti was the growing demand of the Indian middle class to spend their incomes on consumer goods, and the Indian state responded to this demand with some delay (D’Costa 2005; BeckerRitterspach 2009). The SMC was building up its stake in Maruti during the 1990s, to 40 per cent in 1989 and 50 per cent in 1992 which led to a longer conflict with the Indian government (Becker-Ritterspach 2009, 407). In 1999, the first BJP-led government decided to sell the shares held by government. Finally, in 2007 Suzuki held a 54 per cent stake in the company and became a majority shareholder. A Volkswagen share of about 20 per cent in Maruti Suzuki is not mentioned in the academic literature, and remained confined to a brief period between 2009 and 2011 (Greimel 2015). The first huge conflict between workers and management erupted at Maruti in the year 2000—after the sale of the state shares was decided, but 2 See Amita Singh (2012) on the development of Gurgaon and the shrinking space for local self-government in its wake. 3 Interview with D.L. Sachdev, Secretary of AITUC (All India Trade Union Congress), 23 October 2013, New Delhi. 134 J. NOWAK Map 4.1 Map of Haryana state, showing the location of earlier industrial centre Faridabad, Gurgaon (first Maruti factory), Manesar (second Maruti factory) and Kaithal where the Maruti workers are jailed A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 135 not yet set in operation, management probably perceived that the BJP-led government would be a good window of opportunity to change the labour relations in Maruti. A large number of permanent workers were offered a ‘voluntary’ retirement scheme and was in fact forced to leave the company—this led to a months-long conflict with strikes, sit-ins and lockouts and ended with an all-out defeat of the workers (PUDR 2001). In the course of the events, the left-leaning union MUEU was removed from the company since its leaders were among the sacked workers, and a management-controlled union, the Maruti Udyog Kamgar Union (MUKU), was installed in the Gurgaon plant. From 2000 on, the number of permanent workers fell from 5770 to 3334 in 2004, and 1800 in 2007 (Becker-Ritterspach 2009, 413; Annavajhula and Pratap 2012, 52). At the same time, the number of contract workers increased significantly, from 2000 in 1984 to around 4000 in 2007. This means that in 2007 permanent workers represented only 30 per cent of the workforce at the Gurgaon plant of Maruti (Annavajhula and Pratap 2012, 52). During this period, from 2000 to 2007, Maruti Suzuki doubled the output of cars, from about 300,000 a year to 600,000, exports doubled from 20,000 to 40,000 a year and the after-tax profit tripled during that time. It is widely acknowledged in the literature that the change in employment structure in Maruti established a new model that was then adopted all over the industry. It is modelled on the Japanese model that operates with a high number of temporary workers since the 1960s (Johnson 1982, 12). The main Suzuki factory in Japan operated with 25 per cent permanent workers in the early 2010s, and trainees from the Indian factories and from other countries such as Thailand, Pakistan, Hungary and Indonesia were sent there for six-month-long training periods working on the production line, and thereby contributing to the cheaper temporary workforce (Annavajhula and Pratap 2012, 56). Of Suzuki’s total worldwide output, in 2013 50 per cent came from its Indian operations and these contributed 25 per cent to the sales revenue of the SMC (Business Standard 2013). 4.2.1 The Conflict in 2011 and 2012 In 2007, Maruti opened a new plant in Manesar in a 20-kilometre distance from the Gurgaon plant (see Map 4.1). Permanent workers represented only 15 per cent of the workforce, much in line with similar proportions at Ford India and Hyundai India at that time (Annavajhula and Pratap 2012, 52). Manesar had been the site of strikes of permanent and contract workers 136 J. NOWAK in 2005 and 2006 at Honda Motorcycles, another Japanese producer, and there the trade union of permanent workers, affiliated with AITUC (All India Trade Union Congress), was eager to enforce the division of the two categories of workers. This strike rose to prominence after police attacked a rally in July 2005, during which 800 workers were injured (Sehgal 2005; Wildcat 2008, 60ff). Another large motorcycle producer, Hero Honda, saw a strike of contract workers and an occupation of the factory in 2006: 3000–4000 workers remained in the factory for six days. The whole Gurgaon region saw a series of labour conflicts in this period, including, among others, labour unrest in 2008 at another Hero Plant in Dharuhera after which 993 workers were discharged (Jha and Chakraborty 2014, 16), and a strike at supplier company Rico Industries in 2009 that ended with the assassination of a worker by a death squad (Sehgal 2012, 15). The new Maruti factory in Manesar operated in 2012 with a total of 4300 workers, of which 1000 were permanent workers, 650 trainees and apprentices, and 2600 contract workers (PUDR 2013, 17f). Contract workers earned about 8000–9000 rupees, and permanent workers 15,000 rupees. It took only four years after start of production for a serious conflict to unfold. This occurred in a general scenario of growth, the manufacturing sector “grew at a high growth rate of 8.2% per annum between 2009–10 and 2011–12” (Rangarajan et al. 2014, 117). It was in early June 2011 that four workers of the Manesar factory registered a trade union at the Labour Commissioner in Chandigarh, the Maruti Suzuki Employees Union (MSEU). The twelve office bearers of the union had been elected in a general assembly of the workers a few weeks before.4 According to the Industrial Dispute Act, workers can register a union which will then be approved in forty-five days. In practice, this rule is consistently violated in Haryana state, and de facto the registration only goes ahead if it is approved by management. Thus, the office bearers of the union were sacked and the management distributed sheets urging the workers to join the union of the Gurgaon plant, the management-controlled MUKU. 4.2.1.1 2011: Two Strikes and One Lockout This move of management led to a rather spontaneous sit-in strike of about 3000 workers for about two weeks. Although the trade union could 4 Interview with Maruti Worker 3, 6 December 2013, Gurgaon. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 137 formally only be established as a representation of permanent workers, contract workers supported the action. The form of the sit-in strike was used earlier in the strike of contract workers at Hero Honda, and thus was already established in the Gurgaon cluster. The traditional form of strike in India is a rally and sit-in in front of the factory which is often ineffective since it allows management to hire new workers, and workers are quite often attacked by local strongmen or the police. The sit-in strike avoids both, and management is usually reluctant to send police into the factory since machinery can be damaged in case of scuffles. The grievances that led to the strike were about the treatment of contract workers; the very short breaks for drinking, eating and bathroom visits; health issues resulting from work speed and lack of toilet breaks; and the harsh policy about leave that led to enormous wage losses. This is reflected in statements of the workers: “Many of the strike that took place were as a revolt against the brutal working conditions and the work pressure. The wage was below the subsistence and if you look at the inflation and market rates of Gurgaon, it is very expensive area and it becomes very difficult to survive and run family at such low wage.”5 This description relates to the wages of permanent workers. The Attendance Allowance was a huge part of the overall wages, so that leave for sickness or in the case of a death in the family caused huge wage losses: “For one leave they used to cut Rs. 1800 and for two leaves it goes up to Rs. 3200.”6 Several workers underlined that in fact none of the permanent workers got 15.000 Rupees: “No one got in hand more than Rs. 8000–9000. If we used to get late by one second then it was considered as half day and on the other hand there was no extra pay for extra work which was all forcible work of two or four or six or eight hours. When the financial crisis was going on at that time all workers were forced to do overtime. And then they started paying Rs. 10 per hour for overtime. (…) But it was nothing. In one hour the production was of 100 cars.”7 The denigrating treatment was not just about pay but also about breaks and a general climate of abuse: “At 9 am we used to get seven and half minutes tea break and so you have to have your tea, snacks or whatever 5 Interview with Maruti Worker 9, 26 January 2014, Dadri Toi. Interview with Maruti Worker 7, 25 January 2014, Dadri Toi. 7 Interview with Maruti Worker 8, 25 January 2014, Dadri Toi. 6 138 J. NOWAK you have to do within that seven and half minutes. (…) Time was so less that workers had to carry the tea to the toilets. (…) The supervisors also used to make the workers do things for them like open the cap of water bottle.”8 During the strike the water supply was cut off by management after two days, and from then on other trade unions, the workers of the C shift who had remained outside, family members of the workers and people in the surrounding villages organised the food supply for the workers inside the factory. “The trade unions arranged the cooks and initially they provided the raw materials. But later on as the news spread in other villages as the workers are in a sense their sons, so they were providing and contributing the materials.”9 The bulk of the workers were from villages in Haryana, so most family members did not live further away than in a distance of two to five hours. “First, the Honda workers brought some food, and then we phoned room mates, friends, family members in the villages close by.”10 The strike was declared illegal on 10 June, and ended with an agreement that the trade union can be registered on 17 June. Eleven workers that were dismissed during the conflict were reinstated and the workers accepted to not receive wages for the strike days (Singh and Sawhney 2011, 12). The conflict lingered on since the union was denied registration on 26 July, some more workers were suspended and the remaining workers engaged in a slowdown. The management responded to this with a lockout at the end of August, demanding that workers who enter the factory should sign a paper promising good conduct. “It also prohibited them from singing during work, and ordered them to shave regularly when reporting for work and so on” (PUDR 2013, 24). During this period which extended over the whole month of September 2011, most workers held a rally in front of the gate, and the company hired 800 new contract workers to keep production running (ibid.; GWN 2011). Three other Suzuki factories and the supplier company Munjal Showa held separate strikes from mid-September on, demanding union recognition and wage increases (John 2012, 19). Finally, the workers at Maruti signed the declaration of good conduct, and thirty-three of fifty-seven workers that were 8 Interview with Maruti Worker 8. Interview with Maruti Worker 3. 10 Interview with Maruti Worker 5, 6 December 2013, Gurgaon. 9 A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 139 suspended or dismissed during this second phase of conflict were reinstated. Although things seemed settled for now, the management felt it had to impose order once more: when workers returned to work on 3 October 2011, about 1100 of the contract workers were not allowed to enter. It was claimed that they participated in protests outside of the factory gate during the lockout (John 2012, 20). This was the crucial test if permanent workers would stand up for the contract workers that had supported the first strike demanding recognition of the union of permanent workers, and they did. The permanent workers set an ultimatum to management that remained unanswered, so they went on another strike inside the factory on 7 October. “So there was a general body meeting (…) and representatives were proposing that as the contract workers were part of the strike so we have to support them and strike for them.”11 More than ten factories in the whole area, many of them suppliers to Maruti Suzuki, went on strike out of solidarity for one day, and the three other Suzuki factories in Manesar went on strike for two weeks until 21 October since the settlements that they had agreed upon in the month ahead were not enacted. Also in the three other Suzuki factories workers remained inside the factory. This affected production at the Maruti plant in Gurgaon which had to be stopped at 13 October. After about one week since the strike began, the Haryana High Court issued an order to end the occupations of the plants. Four thousand policemen entered the Manesar factory on 15 October—the workers avoided a confrontation, left the premises and assembled in front of the gate. The workers at the other Suzuki factories left the premises one day later. When the strike at the Manesar plant ended on 21 October, the management accepted the main demand that the contract workers could enter the plant again. But there was no agreement on union registration, and thirty workers were dismissed, among them the leaders of MSEU who were forced to leave the company and got compensated with comparably huge sums. During this period of two sit-in strikes and a lockout the MSEU was advised by other union leaders of AITUC, Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS) and Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) which had an established presence in the area. These unions also organised a solidarity committee and two bigger rallies during the sit-in strikes. This committee was based on a long-standing 11 Interview with Maruti Worker 3. 140 J. NOWAK representative body in this industrial cluster with thirteen members who are elected by factory-based unions and big federations. This body wielded considerable influence on the Gurgaon labour movement for years.12 During the period until October 2011, the MSEU was following the guidance of this body, and negotiations with management and the state authorities were also led by union leaders from this body. The simultaneous strike of almost twenty factories in October 2011 was not decided by this body, but rather based on coordination between unions at plant level, and most of these were affiliated to the national federation HMS. Nonetheless, those actions were not approved by the central leadership of HMS and led to tensions within the federation.13 After the events in October 2011, this committee lost relevance for the Maruti workers and many of them expressed disappointment since the solidarity committee had announced a general strike for the whole region in case the police would enter the occupied factories—but the general strike was never initiated and instead the negotiations ended with a forced sell-out of the leadership of MSEU. Workers felt deceived by the senior trade union leaders: None of the trade unions helped us fully. They supported us half heartedly. They just kept assuring us of help but practically did nothing. (…) Every trade union wanted us to work under them. Their stand was like if we are ready to work under them then and then only they will help us. This was not told directly but they hint us at that.14 Another worker said: Initially we did not know the character of these big trade unions, like HMS and AITUC. They supported us and we accepted their support. But later on, there were some compromises with the company and they were handled by these unions. Later on we could see the double game of these unions. (…) We think it is fine to have an independent trade union. The main unions want other trade unions to get affiliated to them. But they are not doing anything significant even for them. So it is better to stay independent.15 12 Interview with Activist 1, 8 February 2018, over telephone. Interview with Activist 1. 14 Interview with Maruti Worker 2, 5 December 2013, Gurgaon. 15 Interview with Maruti Worker 9. 13 A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 141 4.2.1.2 2012: Union Registration and a Factory Riot The new union at the Manesar plant could finally get registered as Maruti Suzuki Workers Union (MSWU) on 1 March 2012. In April, the MSWU presented a Charter of Demands focused on a reduction of the workload, an increase of the authorised days of leave, wage increases and an end of the contract system (PUDR 2013, 26). There was no substantial response from management after a dozen meetings with the union. Instead, in April and May 2012, seventy workers across all factory departments were dismissed on the pretext of having faked their qualification certificates and because of minor mistakes (GWN 2012). It was quite obvious that these dismissals were intended to get rid of workers identified as ‘troublemakers’. The management demanded that the union should accept the formation of a grievance and welfare committee before negotiations could move on—these committees are deliberative bodies with no real rights, introduced by the Haryana government after the Rico strike in 2009 as substitutes for union representation (Sehgal 2012, 14).16 A last round of talks had been held on 14 July, again without any results. The uprising on 18 July 2012 started with an argument around 10 am between a worker at the trim line and a supervisor. The supervisor maintained that he was slapped by the worker and the worker got suspended. This incident led to debates and meetings over the course of that day between union and management. The A-shift workers stayed inside the plant, while the B-Shift workers entered and continued production (Sehgal 2012, 13). One hundred policemen arrived in the plant at 3 pm. There are also several reports that bouncers in uniforms of contract workers were present. It is unclear who started physical attacks but around thirty workers and more than fifty management personnel got injured during the conflict (PUDR 2013, 26f). According to police and management reports, workers set parts of the offices on fire and the HR manager Awanish Dev died in the flames. The workers claim that 100–150 bouncers entered the factory during the second shift and started to beat up workers (Teltumbde 2012, 11).17 There are many open questions raised by the workers such as why the firefighters of the factory did not get active and why the surveillance cameras in the factory did not record anything.18 And why did the police not 16 Interview with Maruti Worker 2. Interview with Maruti Worker 2. 18 Interview with Maruti Worker 2. 17 142 J. NOWAK intervene in the conflict that only started around 7 pm, several hours after a large police contingent arrived? The MSWU tried to establish itself as a union that negotiates and attains results, so it was ready to make compromises, did not respond negatively to the dismissals in April and May 2012 and kept up communication with management. But the negotiating partner did not concede any space which led to the uprising on 18 July 2012. 4.2.1.3 The Aftermath The uprising led to the arbitrary dismissal of 1800 contract workers and 546 permanent workers. One hundred forty-eight workers were jailed in Kaithal in August 2012, most of whom have been released since 2015 (see Map 4.1 on p. 134). Of the 148 imprisoned workers, around 70 were contract workers, four apprentices, 52 permanent workers and 11 trainees.19 Thirteen of those workers were sentenced for murder in March 2017, and fourteen workers were sentenced for other charges. All other workers were acquitted in March 2017, but had been kept in jail for three years or more without any proof and without receiving proper compensation. The court case and the denial of bail were obviously intended as a showcase trial for unruly workers in general: the case is based on arbitrary arrests, fabricated evidence and implausible accusations (Nowak 2017b; MSWU 2017a; PUDR 2018). The MSWU launched an intensive campaign for the jailed workers after the incident (see Nowak 2016, 430f). After the uprising, the established unions distanced themselves from the MSWU that was under heavy repression, and various groups like students, intellectuals, small Maoist parties and peasant organisations from Haryana became important allies of the MSWU. D.L. Sachdev, one of the leaders of AITUC, who played a central role for the group of unions that had advised the MSEU in the first period between June and October 2011, put it like this: “So that way, after 18th July, after this fire incident where one senior officer was killed this whole movement has not been guided, I am not saying under control, it is an independent union. We don’t need it should be controlled but in a way it got detached from surrounding trade unions.”20 Sachdev termed it in a way that he 19 20 Interview with Activist 1. Interview with D.L. Sachdev. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 143 thought the movement of the workers had been ‘derailed’ by the new type of alliances that had been formed. Another response to the uprising beyond repression was that the management raised wages, but in a way that increased the salary gap between permanent and contract workers: the wages of permanent workers in the Manesar factory almost doubled from 15,000 to 30,000 rupees, and the new category of casual workers, directly employed by the company, received a small wage hike to 12,000 rupees. Contract workers remained at the level of 8000 rupees. The new composition of the workforce after the uprising was as such: 600–700 permanent workers, 800 contract workers and 240 casual workers (PUDR 2013, 18). A permanent presence of 600 policemen was established in the plant and maintained for more than 18 months.21 In 2014, the MSWU won the union elections in both the Manesar and the Gurgaon factory with a majority of 80 per cent. But it was only able to negotiate wage hikes for permanent workers. This led to a short strike of contract workers in the Manesar plant in September 2015 that was quickly ended by police. This strike saw support of the MSWU, and led subsequently to wage rises for contract workers. Five years after the uprising, the Manesar plant—that was amalgamated with the relatively small Suzuki Castings plant in late 2013—is operating with a higher number of permanent workers than in 2012 (1688), but still has a larger number of 2300 temporary workers, of which 1800 are casual workers, and about 500 are trainees (PUDR 2018, 11). The permanent workers have been removed further from the contract workers, in terms of both wages and work roles. In 2018, they earned around 50,000 rupees a month, while contract and casual workers earn between 12,000 and 20,000 rupees, and student trainees earn 10,000–12,000 rupees.22 Different sources confirm that the management is increasingly hiring workers from other states and far away areas since 2012, assuming that this will minimise the resources and social contacts available to workers (Jha and Chakravorty 2014, 15; PUDR 2018, 9). While in 2011–2012 about 60–70 per cent of the workforce were from the state of Haryana, in 2013–2014 60 per cent were migrants from other states (Miyamura 2016, 1935). Since 2012 the total number of all employees in both factories of Maruti (Manesar and Gurgaon) increased around 50 per cent, and the output of cars saw a 30 per cent rise from 1.2 21 22 Interview with Maruti Worker 3. Interview with Activist 1. 144 J. NOWAK million per year to 1.6 million per year. Significantly, during this period from 2011–2012 to 2016–2017 the profit increased more than threefold, while the employees’ income as a proportion of profit went down from 49 to 32 per cent (PUDR 2018, 6). One of the central demands of the MSWU was the abolition of contract labour in the Manesar plant. In this way, the union tried to adapt the situation in the factory to the legal requirements which are routinely bent in India. The legal situation is the following: the labour department, the labour inspector, labour officers and labour commissioners cannot act upon a complaint of a union or workers. These labour officials can only conciliate. If there is a failure of conciliation, the issue can go to court, and after the first instance in court—which means after three to four years— the losing party can go to the High Court and Supreme Court which will prolong the process further.23 For contract labour to be employed, the employer has to indicate a particular contractor, and indicate the number of workers and their duties. The contractor then has to receive a licence from the labour department. Based on this licence, the contractor may supply labour to the principal employer. But in theory, this contract labour cannot be employed for any task: The Contract Act also provides that this license can only be given to peripheral work like loading and unloading and housekeeping and all. But as per the Contract Labour Act they cannot give license to do work on assembly along with the regular workers. But in the name of housekeeping, loading and unloading, they take a license but actually they use the workers for this regular type of jobs. What is there now, if there is a violation of this, there is a provision in the act that you can make a complaint. The complaint again goes for the consideration before the State Labour Advisory Board. But unfortunately, for the last seven to eight years, there is no board created in the state of Haryana. (…) the statutory body does not exist.24 The same fact of the non-existence of this board was highlighted in an article by Rakhi Sehgal (2012, 14). In this way, there is no avenue for the workers or the trade union in Maruti Suzuki or other companies in Haryana to enforce the application of labour law by legal means. 23 24 Interview with D.L. Sachdev. Interview with D.L. Sachdev. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 4.2.2 145 The Forms of Organisation We will now take a closer look at the forms of organisation that emerged from the strike, since the course of events has been charted in the sections above. This will be done with a focus on the intersection of workplace issues with wider class issues and non-class issues, and the linkages between formal and informal types of organisation of workers. Political traditions inscribed into space will play a role, too. There are four levels regarding the forms of organisation that emerged from the strike: (1) the internal organisation of the trade union MSWU; (2) the alliances that emerged during the conflicts between 2011 and 2014 on the local and national levels; (3) the international networks; and (4) new organisations that emerged from the initial conflict. 4.2.2.1 The Internal Organisation of the Union The insights acquired into how the union MSWU organised itself internally is restricted to the period from 2011 to 2014 which has been covered by my field research. Initially, the twelve office bearers of the trade union were elected by a general meeting of workers a few weeks before June 2011. These representatives took the decisions during the first strike which came about “very sudden”.25 General body meetings were held regularly in which the union representatives proposed activities “and the worker’s agreement was taken into consideration. But ultimately decisions were passed through the representatives.”26 The difference between the decision-making of single plant unions and unions from federations is important to highlight here: while plant unions such as the MSWU are potentially tempted to stay focused on their own plant without taking into account other workers in other sectors or factories, it is the traditional structure of action of the larger union federations in India that precludes a control of union representatives by workers: in India negotiations with the management are often led by secretaries of union federations who are completely detached from the workers in the factory and not elected by them. The positive aspect of this traditional structure is that factory-based union representatives are impeded from developing narrow interests focused on their own plant and employees.27 25 Interview with Maruti Worker 3. Interview with Maruti Worker 3. 27 Interview with D.L. Sachdev. 26 146 J. NOWAK But the negative aspect of this structure is that the political line of central trade unions in India is imposed on employees in plants that might want to follow a different course of action. The structure of decision-making in the first phase of the MSEU during the two strikes in 2011 did not provide for a bottom-up decisionmaking structure in the wide sense: concerns and ideas of workers were taken into account, but it was not the general body meeting that took the decisions. To make the decision process more organised and consider more intensively the concerns of workers, each section of the factory was represented by a coordinator at a later stage: “The division was based on the area of work like the workers working in the paint shop, workers working on the assembly line etc. So the workers were divided to make the situation less chaotic and simpler to understand what the things the workers exactly wanted were.”28 So the coordinators had an important role in transmitting more clearly to the office bearers of the unions what the workers saw as important issues and demands. After October 2011, the workers organised the system of coordinators more tightly: they had one coordinator for each production line, and each of the six shops has eight to ten lines.29 This way, each coordinator represented around fifteen to thirty workers (GWN 2012; PUDR 2013, 26; KNS 2013). Only permanent workers could be line coordinators. Criticism had been voiced by some workers that the line coordinators sometimes did not work from the bottom up, but that they rather disseminated decisions of the union leadership to their units, especially after the conflict in October 2011 (GWN 2012). As a consequence, after October 2011 the general body meeting of workers gained significance in the decisionmaking process (GWN 2012; KNS 2013). After the uprising in 2012, the sacked workers formed the MSWU Provisional Committee, consisting of seven members. The union also had different subsections like a Legal Committee that deals with court matters and other specific committees. The former system of line coordinators was replaced by a system of district coordinators, organised around the districts where workers lived or grew up: there were six district committees in 28 29 Interview with Maruti Worker 2. Interview with Maruti Worker 10, 26 January 2014, Dadri Toi. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 147 total, four for various areas in Haryana, one for workers from Uttar Pradesh and one for those from Madhya Pradesh (KNS 2013).30 The internal structure of the union shows a tight relationship of shop floor and formal union organisation. Decision-making and dissemination of decisions of the union were based on the informal workplace organisation that got more and more formalised in time, but was not part of the official union structure. Later on, the territorial links of workers replaced the workplace-based organisation, hinting at the links between workers due to their trajectory of migration. 4.2.2.2 Alliances on the Local and National Levels For the first period of conflict during 2011, the MSWU was mainly allied with the unions HMS and AITUC that dominated the Gurgaon union committee. Later on, various organisations and groups aligned with the MSWU in alliances. On the one hand, there were several radical left and civil society organisations from New Delhi, students from Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University, and political groups in the Maoist tradition like Inqulabi Mazdoor Kendra (IMK) and Krantikari Naujawan Sabha (KNS). On the other hand, the agitation in the first half of 2013 that was focused on the jail in Kaithal (Haryana) where 148 Maruti workers were imprisoned, and the encircling of the residence of the Industry Minister of Haryana led to stronger links with actors in the state of Haryana. These were the Communist Party (Marxist) in Haryana, that probably offered the biggest amount of resources, the peasant organisation Jan Sangharsh Manch (JSM), and a large number of village leaders from Haryana—at one meeting in May 2013, eighty-four village leaders participated (MSWU 2013). In all periods, the families of the workers were engaged in various roles: hiding the workers from persecution, providing food during strikes and mobilising for events in the rural areas of Haryana. Two mothers of workers participated in a two-week-long foot march in January 2014 that went through different areas of Haryana and then to Gurgaon and New Delhi. The New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI) as a national union federation gave a more institutional form of support by providing labour lawyers, running some of the legal processes, and organising international contacts, and raising funds. NTUI had regular statements on its website, and its officers were adamant in not claiming to lead 30 Interview with Activist 1. 148 J. NOWAK the conflict as an organisation.31 Unlike the national federations AITUC and HMS, the NTUI does not have a significant presence in the Gurgaon industrial belt. In the industrial belt itself, there were various plant unions that got aligned with the MSWU over time. One continuous element was the support of plant unions affiliated to HMS, first of all the unions of the other Suzuki factories in Manesar. But there was no systematic support from HMS on the national level, and the activities of HMS unions in the Gurgaon belt were often disapproved by the national leadership. After thirty-one Maruti workers were convicted by court on 17 March 2017, about 100,000 workers in the Delhi region boycotted lunch and dinner, and the list of forty-one factories in this region whose unions supported the action gives an impression of the network that the MSWU was able to establish in this industrial cluster (see MSWU 2017b for the list; the last two unions are from another region). Thus, the support network of the Maruti workers on the local and regional levels had three elements: organisations and intellectuals based in New Delhi, organisations and families based in the non-industrial parts of Haryana, and workers and unions from the industrial belt itself. On top of this, there were several national days of mobilisation in more than fifteen states of India, mostly from independent unions, but also from subunits of some of the central trade union federations. These national days of action facilitated the emergence of a wider national network. The alliances struck by the MSWU built on links of the workers into the wider territory of the Delhi Capital Region and the state of Haryana: (a) the links of workers with their families in Haryana were extended into more formal alliances with village leaders and left-wing political organisations in Haryana, (b) political links with intellectuals, students and radical left organisations in New Delhi created a network of dissemination, support and exchange in a non-formalised way, (c) the common platforms of action with other workers’ groups and unions in the Gurgaon belt were on both formal and non-formal levels, and (d) the links with supporters in other states followed a similar network type of organisation. Thus, we can see that a multiplicity of types of organisations joined the struggle of the Maruti workers. Trade unions are one of the important 31 Interview with Gautam Mody, General Secretary of NTUI (New Trade Union Initiative), 27 January 2014, New Delhi. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 149 types of actors, while family networks and a variety of other political organisations were present, too. Formal and informal types of organisations go hand in hand. Four levels of spatial tradition were important: New Delhi, the Gurgaon cluster, Haryana state and the national alliances all over India. For New Delhi, student activism and the left political scene in New Delhi were political traditions that could be built on. In the Gurgaon cluster, the trajectory of factory struggles since the early 2000s was a reservoir that allowed for manifold alliances. In the case of the state of Haryana, the social embeddedness of migrant workers was a decisive factor, and the alliances at the national level were based on either a tradition of conflict in other factory settings, for example, the Hyundai workers in Chennai, or political connections via the NTUI to the trade union network in Mumbai, or other political linkages, for example, to Kolkata-based organisations. In this way, the different alliances built up around the conflict at the Maruti factory in Manesar went way beyond workplace-based networks and politics, and the mobilisation against state repression put the role of the state in industrial policies and a one-sided court and police system in focus. The activities of a large number of different actors thus created a larger perspective on Indian capitalism that went way beyond a focus on workplace issues. 4.2.2.3 The International Alliances There has been not much of international action during the strikes. During the second strike in October 2011, a campaign of the international trade union network Labour Start collected about 10,000 signatures in support. A second Labour Start campaign was organised by the global union federation IndustriALL in New Delhi in 2012 with the three demands of a judicial enquiry into the events of 18 July 2012, bail for the workers in jail and a reinstatement of the sacked workers. It acquired almost 10,000 signatures, too.32 There were two lines along which union officials in India made connections to Japanese unions that organise workers at the SMC. The first one was the effort of the New Delhi office of IndustriALL to address the main trade union representing workers of Suzuki in Japan regarding the conflict at the Manesar factory of Maruti Suzuki. The issue was raised at IndustriALL 32 Interview with Sudhersan Rao Sarde, Regional Secretary of IndustriALL for the South Asia Region, 9 December 2013, New Delhi. 150 J. NOWAK meetings and at meetings with the Japanese Federation of Suzuki Automobile Workers Unions (FSAWU) by Sudhersan Rao Sarde, South Asia representative of IndustriALL. As a second step, a Japanese union delegation visited India in October 2013 and spoke to some of the terminated Maruti workers.33 The FSAWU and the Japanese Council of Autoworkers (JAW) signed a call in favour of the workers at the Manesar factory as early as 16 June 2011—but no action was taken beyond verbal statements. A parallel line of contact to Japanese unions was provided by the NTUI to a minority union in Suzuki factories in Japan, Zenroren. Zenroren is the second biggest union federation in Japan with about 700,000 members (the biggest federation Rengo has about seven million members). Zenroren is not a recognised union at the SMC in Japan and it is organising precarious workers in this company.34 Representatives of Zenroren met the Maruti workers at the end of May 2013 for six days—this visit occurred in the framework of a fact-finding mission of the International Commission for Labor Rights (based in New York) which issued the report Merchants of Menace on the Maruti Suzuki conflict in June 2013. Zenroren representatives were also present at the Second General Assembly of NTUI in November 2013 in Aluva (Kerala) where they met again with Maruti workers.35 The report Merchants of Menace (ICLR 2013) and the fact-finding mission were initiated by the NTUI, and the NTUI was the only trade union from India that signed the report. Its president N. Vasudevan was a member of the group that created the report, alongside with members of the Delhi-based People’s Union of Democratic Rights (that has up to today published four extensive reports on Maruti between 2001 and 2018), the Japanese union Zenroren, the South African union federation COSATU and US university professor Immanuel Ness. As can be seen by these examples, there has been some international action around the Maruti struggle, but nonetheless it was not decisive for the outcome of the struggle and has been a delayed action coming after the course of events in most of the cases. None of the workers interviewed mentioned the international solidarity when asked about the most important support during the struggle. Some of the workers mentioned the 33 Interview with Sudhersan Rao Sarde. Interview with Gautam Mody. 35 Interview with Gautam Mody. 34 A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 151 contacts to Japanese unions or to militants from European countries that spoke to the workers since 2011, but these have been regarded as single incidents by the workers, not as a consistent course of international action around the case.36 On the other hand, it is remarkable that a number of the Maruti workers participated in two solidarity demonstrations in New Delhi that were held in support of striking miners in South Africa in the context of the Marikana massacre. These actions took place in August 2012 and in August 2013 and were attended each by around 150 protesters—one of the rallies had been held in front of the South African embassy in New Delhi.37 The international level adds a fifth spatial dimension to the alliances created by Maruti workers, but it is not by coincidence that this axis was the weakest of the different spatial levels of action. 4.2.2.4 New Organisations That Emerged from the Initial Conflict Since late 2013, several new organisations have formed with the participation of MSWU or based on activities of former Maruti workers. Since 2014, the MSWU has initiated a coalition of trade unions of four companies that are part of the Suzuki enterprise; this coalition is called Maruti Suzuki Mazdoor Sangh (MSMS). The four companies are the two Maruti Suzuki factories in Manesar and Gurgaon, Maruti Suzuki Powertrain in Manesar and Suzuki Motorcycles in Gurgaon. This structure enables a more formal coordination among unions and workers from these companies. The MSWU organised a larger workers’ convention in Gurgaon in November 2015 that saw a larger participation of unions and left organisations from the New Delhi areas and other states (MSWU 2015). A second organisation, the Workers Solidarity Center (Gurgaon) (WSC), was founded in late 2013 by former Maruti workers and supporters of the Maruti struggle. It supports strikes and mobilisations of workers in the wider Gurgaon belt. Since contract workers and other informal workers cannot be officially represented by unions, it is the aim of the centre to provide a space where those workers can engage. The centre managed to organise common rallies and workshops of striking workers from different factories several times since 2014, and most of these workers worked in electronics or automobile factories that are first-tier suppliers 36 Interview with Maruti Worker 3; Maruti Worker 7; Maruti Worker 10. Interview with Shyambir Shukla, Inqulabi Mazdoor Kendra (Revolutionary Workers’ Center), 25 October 2013, New Delhi. 37 152 J. NOWAK of domestic and foreign-based multinational companies. The WSC was also engaged in support of the strike of Honda workers in Tapukara in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan in early 2016. They faced a similar situation as the Maruti workers, fighting for the recognition of their union and suffering mass dismissals and police repression. A third organisation on the national level, the Mazdoor Adhikar Sangharsh Abhiyan (MASA), held its first convention in August 2016, at that point comprising fourteen unions and organisations. Organisations like the WSC and JSM form part of this national organisation, but also various organisations and trade unions from West Bengal, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and a number of other states. MASA is holding state-level and national conventions and engages in a coordination of different working class struggles that are independent from party-led trade unions. With this panorama, it becomes visible that the struggle of the workers at the Manesar plant incited various levels of alliances and organisation. The initial network with other actors in New Delhi as well as in Haryana state outside of the industrial belt emerged out of pure necessity when the MSWU was more or less abandoned by the central trade unions after the uprising and it faced a massive wave of repression and criminalisation. The dismissed workers and the MSWU made a virtue out of this situation and the union finally consolidated its situation by conquering almost all seats in the union elections in both assembly line factories in 2014 while their original leadership remained in jail. The international aspect of the network remained the most fleeting one, and did not get consolidated over time but rather vanished. The contacts on the regional level were facilitated by three aspects embedded in the spatial location: (1) the proximity of New Delhi as a centre of the intellectual and student left, and the relative proximity of Jawaharlal Nehru University to the industrial belt in Gurgaon, being located in the South of New Delhi. (2) The relatively high level of mobilisation of workers in the Gurgaon belt—although often fragmented—provided for many avenues of contact between different workers. The concentration of four plants of Suzuki in Manesar and Gurgaon and of various suppliers to Suzuki in Manesar provided for close contacts with workers of those factories. These workers got into contact in company buses and in the neighbourhoods and shared houses in the adjoining areas. (3) The fact that the majority of workers at the Manesar plant in Maruti came from rural areas in Haryana provided them with contacts in those A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 153 villages and also enabled them to mobilise in front of the jail in Kaithal—in a 200-kilometre distance from Manesar—and to organise a gherao (encircling) of the residence of the Minister of Industry of Haryana in Kaithal. It were these aspects that compensated for the fact that the industrial area of IMT (Industrial Model Town) Manesar, about 20 kilometres south of central Gurgaon, is a relatively isolated place and without much urban infrastructure close by. This was the exact reason—apart from cheaper land prices—why the new Maruti plant and many other factories were set up in Manesar. Management thought that the area is easier to control than the more densely populated Gurgaon. Instead, Manesar developed into one of the hotbeds of industrial unrest—which shows that if available counteracting socio-spatial links are used, workers in a relatively isolated area can indeed overcome spatial limits imposed by an industrial location. One of the traditions inscribed into this industrial cluster as a spatial unit were the mobilisations in Manesar before 2011 at Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India (HMSI), Denso, Napino Auto and Rico Auto—all sites in close proximity to the Maruti factory. The new organisations that emerged show various levels of expansion from the local to the regional and the national level—on all levels there has been an urge to establish a more tight organisation and coordination. First of all, it is significant that the unions of the different units of Suzuki now communicate in a formal body, the MSMS, in order to coordinate their actions, moving beyond the earlier ad hoc coordination. This was also enabled by the fact that the MSWU won the union elections in 2014 at the older Maruti plant at Gurgaon. The earlier union MUKU voiced verbal support regularly but was not seen as a reliable partner by the other unions at Suzuki plants. Thus, at least the focus on the single factory was superseded. But the focus on the representation of permanent workers, excluding contract workers from formal and legal representation, remains a problem of all those unions. The activities of the WSC span a wider area—already in late 2014, about one year after its foundation, it was able to organise joint rallies of workers of three factories that were on strike in the same period—automobile suppliers Asti Electronics and Munjal Kiriu as well as pharmaceutic company Baxter, which are all located in Manesar. Those activities not only saw the necessity to provide a forum for contract workers who are usually not able to join unions, but also aimed to expand the scope of action spatially since the industrial belt itself as well as labour unrest was expanding to areas more to the South and West—already in early 2014, a factory of auto supplier Shriram Pistons 154 J. NOWAK and Rings in Pathredi, 40 kilometres south of Manesar in Rajasthan state, was occupied for ten days (Sethi 2014). This supplier is delivering to six or seven automobile companies in India, to Honda factories in three different continents and to Renault and Ford factories in three European countries. The Honda Tapukhara plant that saw labour unrest in early 2016 is also located in the nearby area of Pathredi. In consequence, the initially local focus of WSC on Gurgaon and Manesar quickly became a more regional focus due to the expansion of industrial and strike activities in the wider region. Finally, the foundation of MASA in 2016 shows that some of the actors that came together in the solidarity for Maruti workers saw the necessity and possibility to establish a national platform of left unions and popular organisations independent from national party organisations. These three levels of new organisation respond to some of the earlier criticisms made by observers and supporters of the Maruti struggle. Maya John had warned against a naïve enthusiasm about the foundation of the new union at the Maruti plant already in January 2012, before the MSWU was even registered: “In reality, however, new unions emerging from spontaneous workers’ struggles are hardly autonomous from the form of politics which is characteristic of central trade unions” (John 2012, 19). While plant unions are independent of political trade-offs made by officials of the central trade unions, they might remain plant-centred which John saw confirmed in the parallel movements in various Suzuki factories in 2011 when all unions in four different plants were negotiating independently from each other about their specific concerns. John envisages an engagement across the whole industrial area with about 500 enterprises, transcending particular demands on union recognition in this or that plant with a larger focus on general demands on work hours and an end of contract work (ibid.). She also raises the problem that trade unions in India tend to reproduce the dualist labour system by finally agreeing to only represent permanent workers. But her claims are much based on stating a contradiction between the ‘betrayal’ of unions and the interests of the rank-and-file workers. But what if the rank-and-file workers would not differ much in their demands from the union leadership? It is obvious that rather political questions are at play here that are not only tied to the level of organisation on which they are articulated. John is suggesting platforms of workers that address the whole industrial belt and the WSC can be regarded as a first attempt to do exactly this. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 155 The internet blog Gurgaon Workers News (GWN) voiced similar criticism as John did. The authors of GWN interpret the uprising in July 2012 as the expression of an impasse: the Maruti workers were not able to expand their organisation beyond their own workplace but were also not willing to bow down to the management: “the riot was an expression of a certain impasse of workers collectivity, which over the 2011 to 2012 period remained largely confined to the Maruti Suzuki company” (GWN 2014). There are two issues that receive special attention on the pages of GWN—the relatively low gap between the wages of permanent and contract workers at the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki and the question of supply chains. The competitive advantage of Maruti, producing with high technology and a harsh work regime, witnessed its Achilles’ heel with the low wages for permanent workers at the Manesar plant and the fraternisation with contract workers, due to GWN. This situation had changed already in 2012 with the significant wage rise for permanent workers, and the gap has widened since then. The relatively low wages of permanent workers were one cost-cutting strategy of management, and it seems that it has proved to be too risky. Thus, the overall model of employment has not changed, but a tighter integration of permanent workers via higher wages seems to be the strategy chosen by management after the uprising in 2012 in order to avoid more labour unrest. The second issue of supply chains is as significant as the question of wage differences. GWN hints at the issue that the trade union activities tend to focus the attention on details of wage settlements and union recognition “while management took material steps to transform the productive cooperation of workers in order to undermine their subversive cooperation” (GWN 2012). The link between cooperation in the workplaces and the collective solidarity of workers is explored: the workers of Suzuki Powertrain had been the only suppliers of diesel engines to Maruti until October 2011, thus their strike effectively blocked part of the production at both Maruti assembly plants. Since October 2011 the Gurgaon plant of Maruti receives 350 engines daily from a Fiat factory in Maharashtra (ibid.). Thus, the authors of GWN call for an organisation and coordination of workers’ collective actions along the supply chains, effectively using the collective power of workers across several sectors and workplaces. 4.2.3 Conclusion Undoubtedly, the workers’ struggle at Maruti Suzuki in 2011 and 2012 and the mobilisations around the imprisonment of workers and the court 156 J. NOWAK case that followed all the way through until the verdict in 2017 (and thereafter) received an enormous amount of attention in India. This widespread attention was based on the fact that Maruti Suzuki is market leader in an important industry and also perceived as a trendsetter for employment relations in industrial production in India in general. The MSWU on the one hand avoided to get integrated into one of the central union federations, but it also did not become another plant union with a narrow focus on one factory. The MSMS as a coordination of unions across the Suzuki group transcends this crucial limit. Nonetheless, it could not retain the characteristic issue that distinguished the Maruti struggle: the unity of contract and permanent workers during the strikes. The MSWU and the other unions in the Suzuki enterprise were de facto accepting that they only represent the minority of the workforce. This can be seen as the decisive flaw of Indian trade unions in the context of a dualist labour system. This division was also leaving its traces in the immediate aftermath of the 2012 uprising: most contract workers lost contact to the MSWU and contract workers that remained in contact with the MSWU did not have a lot of contact with other contract workers either.38 The new organisations that emerged on enterprise, local-regional and national levels aim to establish a more tight coordination between workers and trade unions, but remain focused on workplace issues, albeit organisations of agricultural and service workers are part of MASA. A broader political agenda is addressed verbally but not yet transformed into action within WSJ and MASA. Links to non-workplace organisations are formed with the integration of urban Maoist groups like KNS and IMK into MASA, but only recently extended to other social movement organisations with grassroots work in neighbourhoods linking anti-caste mobilisation with labour mobilisation. If we look at the strikes and mobilisations of the Maruti Suzuki workers with the questions in mind that we posed at the beginning of this chapter, we can state the following: 1. Networks beyond workplace organisation entered the conflicts right from the beginning when other workers, friends and families supported the Maruti workers with food and water during their first occupation in June 2011. The workplace conflict depended on other social 38 Interview with Maruti Worker 1, 27 October 2013, Manesar. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 157 networks that workers had access to. In all three phases of the conflict, during the occupation in June 2011, the lockout in September 2011 and the second occupation in October 2011, the company relied on private and public security forces to evict workers from the plant and to orchestrate the lockout. The aftermath of the uprising, with a permanent police battalion on the premises in Manesar, and the imprisonment and court proceedings proved that Maruti Suzuki was incapable of operating production without the intervention of state violence. Thus, the repressive agencies of the state became essential to reproduce the class relation of production, while other agencies of the state that (potentially) regulate labour relations and mediate between workers and employers were largely ineffective and/or inactive. It is also in the repressive aspect that social relations beyond the workplace were essential for the power of employers to contain the mobilisation of workers. The engagement of a variety of different actors in support of the Maruti workers was another aspect how social relations beyond the workplace and non-class relations like family bonds, and village communities were relevant for the mobilisation of Maruti workers. The workplace conflict became a general social issue, also reflected in the huge publicity that the court case around the Maruti workers enjoyed in the mainstream news media. 2. Regarding common experiences of different actors, it is interesting that during the conflict at Maruti and around the court case a larger public engagement with the type of industrialisation in India emerged, while the more permanent day-to-day work around labour conflicts as it is done by MSMS, WSC and MASA remains mainly in the realm of trade union and labour mobilisation. WSC and MASA raise larger political questions, but their main political work remains focused on workplace issues. Thus, there were moments when a broader popular consciousness emerged among actors who support the strikers at Maruti, but it did not yet usher in a permanent political activity that would reflect this consciousness. 3. The question of the linkages between formal and informal types of mobilisation requires a differentiated response: while Maruti management tried to block the formation of an independent union, the MSWU engaged first with national union federations, the unions of other Maruti plants and unions of supplier companies, and then increasingly in looser and less formalised networks. These looser networks then gave rise to the emergence of various new formal 158 J. NOWAK organisations on different levels: the enterprise level, the localregional level and the national level. Thus, the courage to engage in looser networks beyond the plant led to an extension of the sphere of action on various levels and the creation of new types of institutions like the coordination of Suzuki unions of four plants, and the WSC as a regional coordination of militant workers beyond established union networks. 4. The Maruti case study demonstrates that political traditions inscribed into space could compensate for the spatial isolation of the Manesar plant. Although the location of the factory proved to be a challenge for a protracted struggle, it could be overcome and did not determine the trajectory of the conflict. This also goes for the relatively isolated location of Kaithal, where the workers were imprisoned. We thus have to distinguish various spatial aspects: (a) spatial isolation from networks and contacts in the sense of possibilities to erect physical barriers, (b) political traditions inscribed into a place and a region. The case study proves that (b) can succeed over (a), but it is obvious that the important position of the company in the national economy and the ensuing media attention played a role for the possibilities to activate the factors described as ‘political traditions’. The political traditions did consist not only in the earlier struggles of factory workers in the NCR region, and especially in Gurgaon and Manesar, but also in the links that workers maintained with villages in Haryana. It seems that the latter aspect was perceived by the management of Maruti that started to hire a majority of workers from other states after the conflict in 2012. Workers of a smaller and lessknown company will have to make more efforts to activate these traditions, but a large number of conflicts in smaller companies like Munjal Kiriu, Asti Electronics and Baxter Pharmaceuticals in the same industrial area shows that also those workers were able to raise some attention and support from outside the workplace, although not to the same extent as the Maruti workers did (Nayan 2014). 5. While the conflicts in the automobile sector dominated the dynamics in the Gurgaon cluster, they were not exclusively focused on that sector. Some factories of the electronics sector that saw a number of conflicts supplied to automobile companies, but were also supplying to companies from other sectors, and conflicts in the garment sector in Udyog Vihar, a part of Gurgaon, and in the pharmaceutical sector in Gurgaon contributed to the overall climate of industrial unrest. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 159 Thus, the conflicts in the Gurgaon cluster have a strong regional dynamic but also a sectoral dynamic since the automobile sector and suppliers connected to this sector saw the largest amount of conflicts since the early 2000s. We will address the issues of imperialist capital and the larger scenario of strikes (items 6 and 7) in the conclusion of this chapter. 4.3 bAjAj AuTo There are until now no academic studies devoted to conflicts in the motorcycle sector in India, despite it being the hotbed of industrial conflicts in the 2000s with the strikes at Honda Motorcycles and Hero Honda in 2005 and 2006 (GWN 2007). Plus, industrial conflicts in the Pune cluster have not received much attention from academic scholars in the past twenty years or so. Thus, this subsection aims to compensate these omissions to some extent, given that the Pune cluster has seen some revival of industrial action in the past ten years. Bajaj Auto started to produce scooters in 1964. The Bajaj family has been one of the established industrial aristocracies with historically tight links to the Congress Party, and the larger Bajaj conglomerate stretches across various branches. Political links with Congress got looser in the late 1960s when a family member joined the Congress (O) that split off from Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party. Until 1971, Bajaj Auto produced scooters in a joint venture with Italian company Piaggio, and Bajaj later developed its own scooter models (Paramal 1996, 99). Bajaj Auto produced in its Akurdi plant in Pimpri-Chinchwad, the industrial twin city with Pune. The government licences for production were extended successively from the late 1970s on. A second plant started production in 1985 in Waluj, close to Aurangabad, 250 kilometres northeast of Pune (Paramal 1996, 107). Until the early 1990s, Bajaj Auto was the undisputed market leader for two-wheelers in India, which were mainly scooters. Domestic company Hero partnered with the Japanese multinational Honda in 1984 for joint production in India and subsequently overtook Bajaj Auto in the late 1990s. Bajaj Auto responded, shifted to motorcycle production and could secure a steady second position in the two-wheeler sector, with a 25 per cent market share in the motorcycle segment in 2012. 160 J. NOWAK In June 1979, Bajaj Auto in Pimpri-Chinchwad had been the site of a violent confrontation between workers and police: two workers and a bystander were killed by police that fired twenty-nine shots after workers had burnt a police car and thrown stones and metal parts at the police force (Paramal 1996, 87ff).39 This was during the biggest strike wave in post-independence India that unfolded after the emergency had been lifted in 1977. In the following years, industrial relations at Bajaj Auto were largely peaceful apart from an eight-month lockout at the Waluj plant in 1987 (Paramal 1996, 89). Bajaj Auto inaugurated two more plants—one in Pantnagar in Uttarakhand in the very north of India in 2007, and in 1999 it opened a new plant in Chakan, 12 kilometres north of its original plant in Pimpri-Chinchwad which was downgraded to an R&D facility in 2007. Chakan is a village of 40,000 inhabitants and houses a special economic zone with about 750 factories. Bajaj Auto is today the biggest exporter of motorcycles in India, and the world’s largest producer of three-wheelers. In 2015–2016, the company sold 3.4 million motorcycles and about 900,000 three-wheelers (Barnes 2018, 58f). The entire Pune industrial area saw a decrease of industrial action after 1989. The Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company (Telco) strike in 1989 at one of the largest utility vehicles producers in India was a watershed moment, similar to the effects the Bombay textile strike in 1982 had for the labour movement in Mumbai. The Telco strike ended with the arrest of 6000 workers and dealt a blow to left-wing union action in the Pune belt for the next fifteen years at least (Iyer 1989).40 It is estimated that today around 200,000 automobile workers are employed in the whole industrial belt in and around Pune, primarily in smaller units (Das Gupta and Joshi 2013). 4.3.1 The Akurdi and Chakan Plants The Chakan plant started production in 1999 and focuses on more expensive motorcycles and three-wheelers; 60 per cent of production was 39 Interview with Manav Kamble, President of Maharashtra Labour Union, 6 January 2014, Pimpri-Chinchwad. 40 Interview with labour lawyer 1, 24 December 2013, Pimpri-Chinchwad; Interview with Manav Kamble. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 161 Map 4.2 Map of Maharashtra state, showing the location of Pune; PimpriChinchwad, where the older Akurdi plant is located, and Chakan, where the current Bajaj Auto assembly plant is located exported in 2013.41 The Chakan plant therefore had a similar role as the Manesar plant for Maruti: young workers were recruited, and a large amount of contract workers. As soon as the Chakan plant started operation, recruitment for the older plant in Pimpri-Chinchwad, commonly called the Akurdi plant, stopped (see Map 4.2). Since September 2007 a similar conflict unfolded at the Akurdi plant as had been seen at the Gurgaon plant in Maruti in 2000 and 2001: 2700 permanent workers were offered a ‘voluntary’ retirement scheme (VRS) which led to a sit-in strike of about 1600 workers for sixty-five days in front of the plant.42 Unlike the case with the Maruti company, the conflict ended with a more favourable 41 Interview with Dilip Pawar, President of VKKS (Vishwa Kalyan Kamgar Sangathan), 5 October 2013, Pimpri-Chinchwad. 42 Interview with Dilip Pawar. 162 J. NOWAK agreement: the workers, most of them in their forties or fifties, were being paid 10,000 rupees a month for the next ten years. Due to union sources it was the close links of company chairman Rajiv Bajaj to the Maharashtra government that facilitated an agreement in that period.43 The decisive difference to the Maruti case is that production in the older Akurdi plant was almost completely shut down after 2300 workers accepted the retirement scheme. This was possible because Bajaj Auto already had two other plants in operation in Waluj and Pantnagar. Four thousand workers in the Waluj plant were offered a VRS in October 2007 which suggests that a parallel process has unfolded in this plant (Menon 2007). It was in the course of the conflict at the Akurdi plant in 2007 that the present union at Bajaj Auto in Chakan, VKKS (Vishwa Kalyan Kamgar Sangathan, Global Welfare Workers Organisation), got established. It had started to work in the Akurdi plant in 2003, while a rightwing trade union close to Shiv Sena, Bharatiya Kamgar Sena (BKS, Indian Workers’ Army), was still officially representing workers at the Akurdi plant. BKS was not registered under the Trade Union Act in Maharashtra although it had signed collective contracts with Bajaj Auto in 1998 and 2003 (Memorandum of Settlement 1998; Memorandum of Settlement 2003). The Maharashtra Recognition of Trade Unions (MRTU) Act is handled pretty straightforward and union registration in Maharashtra is a much more transparent process than in Haryana.44 The change of unions occurred after VKKS could prove that the majority of workers had joined it which was confirmed in court in October 2007 when the conflict at the Akurdi plant was still on (Menon 2007).45 VKKS was established in the Chakan plant, too, in early 2010 (VKKS 2013). The motivation to shift the plant was explained by executive director Sanjiv Bajaj with the lack of tax benefits in Pimpri-Chinchwad where the Akurdi plant is located. Chakan is a special economic zone with tax benefits and the other two Bajaj plants in Waluj and Pantnagar enjoy tax benefits, too. 43 Interview with Dilip Pawar. Unions in Maharashtra can file for a registration under the MRTU Act six months after their formation. This will be decided by a court and usually does not take more than a few months. The management is then legally bound to negotiate with the union that is registered for this workplace; interview with Assistant at labour NGO, 22 December 2014, Pimpri-Chinchwad. 45 Interview with Bajaj Worker D, 9 January 2014, Pimpri-Chinchwad. 44 A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 163 VKKS negotiated a settlement for the workers at the Chakan plant in May 2010 which led to a considerable change in the working conditions. The twelve-hour shifts were broken down to nine-hour shifts (both including one hour for breaks).46 In order to be able to establish this change, VKKS agreed to a nine-year agreement which is unusual since three-year agreements are the standard in India. The settlement established a 12 per cent wage rise in the first year, and an 8 per cent rise for the next two years. It was agreed to renegotiate the terms of the settlement every three years. The union VKKS is part of two federations: first of a regional federation of more than eighty industrial unions, the Shramik Ekta Mahasangh (SEM), and on the national level it is member of the left and independent NTUI. The conflict at the Chakan plant was preceded by a strike at the Pantnagar plant in June 2012 that was led by the workers without any union involvement (Bhattacharya 2012). Workers had been promised a wage hike of 5000 rupees per month in the preceding year, but the company now offered only 1500 rupees. The workers at the Pantnagar plant had approached VKKS and a majority of them joined it which was later approved in court (Vasudevan 2013; VKKS 2013; Joshi 2013). Later on, the management in Pantnagar offered wage rises if workers would leave the union which was successful and another union was installed so that wages of permanent workers doubled from 10,000 to 20,000 rupees between 2012 and 2013 (Jair 2013).47 It was in this period that work rules in the Chakan plant were interpreted stricter and more than 100 workers were suspended because of minor issues (Vasudevan 2013; Pawar 2013; Shaw and Mathias 2013).48 One worker reported: “I was suspended because of laughing, singing a song, some minor stoppages and dancing activities. These claims are on my charge sheet.” This worker also complained in letters to the company about a lack of quality control in the company.49 Bajaj Auto filed a motion to deregister the union VKKS in 2012 which was not successful in court. In autumn 2012, Bajaj management started to raise the production targets in Chakan in a way that workers could not meet them, and subsequently 46 Interview with Bajaj Worker D; Interview with Dilip Pawar. Interview with Dilip Pawar; interview with Arvind Shrouti, Option Positive, 15 November 2013, Pimpri-Chinchwad; interview with Bajaj Worker G, 22 January 2014, Pimpri-Chinchwad. 48 Interview with Bajaj Worker C, 9 January 2014, Pimpri-Chinchwad. 49 Interview with Bajaj Worker G. 47 164 J. NOWAK management accused the workers of engaging in a slowdown of production which led to more suspensions and disciplinary actions (VKKS 2013).50 One of the interviewed workers denied that a proper slowdown was taking place: “There was less manpower, and they demanded more line speed, this did not work just for technical reasons, so it was not a slowdown.”51 That the Pantnagar incident played a role for work relations at the Chakan plant was also obvious from a statement that Rahul Bajaj, Managing Director of the company, gave to the press in this period, mentioning the president of VKKS, Dilip Pawar: “Pawar and his coterie of thugs are desperate to establish a power base after becoming outcasts when rejected at Akurdi, Pantnagar, and Aurangabad”52 (Sangani and Lijee 2013). In 2013, the Chakan factory had about 2000 workers, 920 permanent and around 1000 contract workers and trainees.53 The permanent workers earned at that time between 14,000 and 23,000 rupees, trainees earned 6000–8000 and contract workers 5000–6000 rupees. Fifty to 100 trainees and about 20 permanent workers were female at that time; all other workers were male.54 The average age of the workers in Chakan was around twenty-five, the oldest worker was thirty-five and the youngest nineteen years old.55 With this, the wage level and employment model were quite similar to other automobile factories in the region: Volkswagen India Ltd. in Chakan had 1800 permanent and 1800 temporary workers in this period, and permanent workers earned between 17,000 and 20,000 rupees; contract workers earned between 6000 and 12,000.56 In Mahindra & Mahindra in Chakan, 1800 permanent workers, 1500 office staff and 2000 temporary workers were employed; permanent workers earned 14,000 rupees, contract workers 6500–8000 rupees and trainees about 10,000 rupees including facilities.57 General Motors in Talegaon had 50 Interview with Bajaj Worker F, 10 January 2014, Pimpri-Chinchwad. Interview with Bajaj Worker C. 52 Dilip Pawar is the president of trade union VKKS, of workers at Bajaj in Chakan. 53 Interview with Dilip Pawar. 54 Interview with Dilip Pawar; interview with Bajaj Worker A, 8 January 2014, PimpriChinchwad; interview with Bajaj Worker G. 55 Interview with Bajaj Worker D. 56 Interview with Volkswagen Worker 1, 28 December 2013, Pimpri-Chinchwad; interview with Volkswagen Worker 2, 2 January 2014, Pimpri-Chinchwad. 57 Interview with Mahindra Worker 1, 28 December 2013, Chakan; interview with Mahindra Worker 2, 28 December 2013, Chakan; interview with Mahindra Worker 3, 2 January 2014, Pimpri-Chinchwad. 51 A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 165 about 1200 permanent workers, 500 office staff and 1000 temporary workers. Permanent workers earned 17,000–22,000 rupees, and temporary workers 5000–6000 rupees.58 The Chakan plant produced 3600 vehicles per day in two shifts, 3000 units of the Pulsar bike, 300 Avenger and 300 KTM bikes.59 The output per year was about 1.2 million units. Sixty per cent of the production went to more than 100 different countries.60 Sunday was the only free day in the week. Trainees and contract workers had to work longer hours, were often not allowed to drink water or go to the bathroom and were not covered by the collective agreement. “50 to 60 permanent workers suffer from kidney stones because they cannot go to the toilet regularly.”61 The training period was five to six months long, and contract workers usually stayed in the factory for seven months. While the trainees were included into facilities like company buses and canteen food, the contract workers were excluded from all these. “They don’t get even tea or food and they have no table or place in the factory to eat their food, they have to sit somewhere in the premises. (…) The Contract Labour Abolition Act says that contract workers have to get all the same facilities as other workers but nobody of the employers follows the law.”62 Like in Haryana state, the factory inspector will not engage in effective checks: “If there is an inspection, then the employer gives a holiday to the contract workers or the contract workers are not assigned for their normal tasks on that day. There is a lot of corruption involved, often the inspectors just don’t go to companies. The contract workers are not allowed to talk to the inspectors, otherwise they are sacked.”63 The Akurdi plant operated in 2013 with about 100 contract workers and about 600 mostly R&D staff.64 Engineers in R&D earned about 30,000–34,000 rupees. The plant in Waluj was the largest in 2013 with 58 Interview with Heman Bhoir, President of General Motors Employees Union Talegaon, 8 January 2014, Pimpri-Chinchwad. 59 Interview with Dilip Pawar. 60 Interview with Dilip Pawar; interview with Bajaj worker B, 9 January 2014, Pimpri-Chinchwad. 61 Interview with Dilip Pawar; similar statements have been made by Bajaj Worker B, and Bajaj Worker F. 62 Interview with Dilip Pawar. 63 Interview with labour lawyer 1. 64 Interview with Bajaj Worker H, 3 January 2014, Pimpri-Chinchwad. 166 J. NOWAK about 8000 workers in total, and the Pantnagar plant had 1200 permanent workers and more than 2000 temporary workers.65 4.3.2 The Strike at Bajaj When the time came to renegotiate the settlement in 2013 after three years, the management refused to do this which led the union to terminate it in March 2013. The union had demanded an overall raise of the wages of permanent workers to 25,000 rupees for the next three years, and it demanded equal working conditions, wages and facilities for the contract workers and equal wages for trainees.66 The Pune area had a yearly inflation of 10–11 per cent in the period from 2009 to 2011 (Shaw and Mathias 2013, 17). The timing was not favourable for a successful strike since production in May and June 2013 had been lowered to 2500 bikes daily due to low demand, and total sales of Bajaj Auto had dropped 14 per cent in June 2013 (Mumbai Mirror 2013; Nair 2013). Tens of thousands of contract workers had been laid off during this period in the entire region; for example, Mahindra & Mahindra terminated 1500 trainees, and General Motors had reduced production from 300 cars to eighty cars daily (Das Gupta and Joshi 2013).67 The strike at Bajaj Auto in Chakan lasted for fifty days from 25 June to 15 August 2013 and ended without any proper results. Only a year later, in August 2014, the union was able to achieve a settlement with a large wage rise for permanent workers of about 10,000 rupees. The union went on strike with the demand that employees should receive company shares for the value of one rupee. This demand created some misunderstandings in the press (see Shaw and Mathias 2013). It allowed the union to call a work stoppage (which is distinguished from a proper strike) since the management refused to negotiate about the demand for shares. If the union would have called for a wage demand and a revision of the settlement, the case would have had to go for conciliation first, and this would have delayed the process (Sangani and Lijee 2013). In this way, the demand for shares paved a way for the union to go on strike quickly, and it also allowed the union to raise the question of the participation of 65 Interview with Bajaj Worker G. Interview with Dilip Pawar. 67 Interview with Mahindra Worker 1; interview with Heman Bhoir. 66 A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 167 workers in the wealth created by them which is much in line with the philosophy of the regional union federation SEM (more on this later in this section). The union demanded 500 shares already in January 2013, with the value of one rupee, while the market value of one share was 1900 rupees. “According to the Factory Act, there is a right for a worker to demand a share. (…) This issue totally divided the public.”68 The strike had no immediate result, but both the union president and many other observers confirmed that the aim of the strike was a demonstration of the power of the union. The perception was that the management wanted to get rid of the VKKS union altogether after the Pantnagar incident. “The major outcome of the strike is that they have started talking, come forward for negotiations. Of 22 suspended workers, seven have been taken back, their inquiry has been terminated.”69 Dilip Pawar, president of VKKS, also reported in early October 2013 that the harassment of the workers had been much reduced and several workers still confirmed this in January 2014.70 The strike had been stopped since workers were losing wages which could not go on indefinitely. In addition, the period of the religious festivals was coming, with Diwali in early November as the high point and workers needed money to spend for the festivals.71 The workers held daily meetings during the strike where current events were discussed.72 Decisions were taken by the union president Dilip Pawar and the grievance committee. This had been already formed in 2010 by the more engaged workers, and its members were selected by deliberation among the workers.73 Other committees like a transport, canteen, welfare and safety committee had been constituted in the same way. Each committee had a member from each shop so that all committees had four or five members. The decision to end the strike was taken by all workers.74 The strike was mainly carried on by the permanent workers. There was contradictory information on the participation of the contract workers in the strike. Dilip Pawar claimed that some of the contract workers participated in the strike initially, but then went back to work after some time. 68 Interview with Dilip Pawar. Interview with Dilip Pawar. 70 Interview with Bajaj worker F. 71 Interview with Dilip Pawar. 72 Interview with Bajaj Worker F. 73 Interview with Bajaj Worker F. 74 Interview with Bajaj Worker F. 69 168 J. NOWAK According to different sources, the company contracted between 500 and 1500 trainees and contract workers to run production during the strike, of which 1000 allegedly slept inside the factory in order to be able to work long hours.75 During the strike, two workers had been picked up by police in their homes, allegedly for beating up contract workers that wanted to get into the plant during the strike. The two arrested workers were beaten by the police and then released after three days.76 Newspapers reported about fifteen arrests overall (Hindustan Times 2013). Interviewees confirmed that some of the striking workers stopped buses with contract workers or trainees and tried to convince them to join the strike which led to clashes with police.77 Police was also coming to the union office regularly during the strike and threatened the union president Dilip Pawar to raise charges against him. The union claimed that the contract workers were employed illegally since their employment was without the necessary licence. At the same time, contract workers were brought into the factory with police vans during the strike which Pawar saw as collusion of the police in illegal employment.78 In general, meetings of the workers were not held in front of the factory in Chakan. The management had sought a legal notice to ban all rallies within a 1-kilometre distance, and the workers met close to the old Akurdi plant on the premises of another trade union that is allied with AITUC.79 “The management also sits here and so we are visible for them (…) and in Chakan there is nothing, there is no place to go in the area.”80 The time off work during the strike was used for talks and education of the workers. SEM with its more than eighty member unions organised financial support for the workers on strike.81 During the strike, the Bajaj management claimed that it produced between 1500 and 2000 vehicles per day at Chakan instead of the usual 3600 per day, and that around 1000 Pulsar bikes were produced at the 75 Interview with Dilip Pawar; interview with Bajaj Worker A. Interview with Dilip Pawar. 77 Interview with Assistant 1; interview with Bajaj Worker I. 78 Interview with Dilip Pawar. 79 Interview with Dilip Pawar; interview with Bajaj Worker I; interview with Bajaj Worker C. 80 Interview Bajaj Worker C. 81 Interview with Assistant 1. 76 A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 169 Waluj plant during the strike. Nonetheless, management claimed in the media that the strike led to a production loss of 20,000 Pulsar bikes overall. The strike started on 24 June and it seems that no workers at all entered the factory on the first three days. On 27 June, management claimed that 100–200 workers returned to work (Sangani and Lijee 2013). The press reported about more than 1500 workers being on strike, which clearly exceeds the number of permanent workers. On 5 July, the trade union claimed that less than 500 workers maintained production which matches numbers given by management in the same period (LiveMint 2013). On 7 August, a newspaper reported that 924 workers were working, and 600 remained on strike, and workers provided similar numbers in interviews.82 One worker commented: “They got many people from rural areas without technical knowledge. Many bikes were damaged due to that. In the first 15–20 days after the strike we were only busy with repairing engines and vehicles.”83 In the last two weeks of the strike, management threatened to shift half of the production permanently to Waluj and to dismiss half of the workforce in Chakan (Mohile 2013). Comparisons of the mobilisation in Bajaj Auto with the events in Maruti Suzuki a year earlier were all over the news media reports. N. Vasudevan, then president of NTUI, compared the way both managements were acting in an announcement of the trade union under the heading “Bajaj Auto goes the Suzuki way” (Vasudevan 2013). A news report of the business daily Business Standard was titled: “We don’t want a situation like Manesar plant: Trade Union head on Bajaj Auto strike” (Joshi 2013). Dilip Pawar, president of the Bajaj trade union VKKS, advised workers and the media that he was not advocating violent means, but the hint to the Manesar plant of Suzuki was a hidden threat nonetheless: if management would not negotiate, things could spiral out of control. In addition, workers reported that there were bouncers in the factory on 21 June, a few days before the strike started.84 A comparison with the events at Maruti was made by workers, too: “the management wanted to create a Manesar situation. We were clever enough to avoid that.”85 82 Interview with Bajaj Worker A; interview with Bajaj Worker D. Interview with Bajaj Worker B. 84 Interview with Bajaj Worker B; interview with Bajaj Worker C. 85 Interview with Bajaj Worker C. 83 170 J. NOWAK 4.3.3 Support for the Strike from Outside Verbal support for the strike came from the head of the newly founded anti-corruption party Aam Aadmi Party (AAP, Party of the Common Man), Arvind Kejriwal, who spoke to the media about the legitimate demands of the workers at Bajaj Auto (The Hindu 2013). Maruti Bhatkar, as a long-standing local labour activist and the Pune coordinator of AAP supported the workers, addressed strike rallies and wrote a letter to the management.86 Anti-dam activist Medha Patkar was also voicing her support for the workers’ cause; she is well known all over India and hails from Maharashtra state.87 Patkar is the founder of the National Alliance of People’s Movements and has been the national coordinator of this organisation for a quite long time. Two workers mentioned that the IndustriALL regional secretary for South Asia gave a speech at a strike rally.88 According to several workers, it was union officials from NTUI, the IndustriALL secretary and the civil society organisation Lokayat that explained to the Bajaj workers what happened at Maruti.89 One worker regarded the support of activists from outside (which he called ‘social workers’ in his discourse) as the most important form of support for the strike: And social workers came to place where we held our meetings and encouraged us and tried to take our movement to society as society didn’t know what was happening in the plant and why the workers are fighting with the management. (…) The points we raised through stoppage reached the society through social workers. And if the society doesn’t know what is happening then they can’t support because we are also part of society and it is not different from us.90 The organisation Lokayat organised several activities around the strike. It is based in Pune and mobilises to a variety of issues like globalisation, multinational corporations in India, ecology, caste discrimination and gender equality. The name Lokayat is the name of the ancient school of Indian materialism that partly goes back to the philosophy of Gautama Buddha (500 BC). The organisation exists since 2004 and emerged from a split of a Maoist organisation. It turned 86 Interview with Bajaj Worker F; interview with Manav Kamble. Interview with Bajaj Worker D. 88 Interview with Bajaj Worker A; interview with Bajaj Worker F. 89 Interview with Bajaj Worker F; interview with Bajaj Worker G. 90 Interview with Bajaj Worker F. 87 A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 171 away from Maoist strategy which the interviewee termed as “We are the right party”.91 At the time of the interview in January 2014, Lokayat was lending support to the AAP but remained formally independent. It had about 100 activists who realised between fifteen and twenty public activities per week. During the period of the interview, Lokayat organised an event in Pune University called Rock for Environment with several student bands, focused on industrial pollution. The work of Lokayat is focused on poor populations in the city centre of Pune. Nonetheless, they engaged in the Bajaj strike that was taking place in Pimpri-Chinchwad—in a 20-kilometre distance from the centre of Pune.92 Lokayat went ahead with its cultural group to the Bajaj strike and did street plays and music pieces, they raised the Maruti issue in programmes at strike rallies and they were the main organisers of the big rally before the end of the strike.93 One aim of Lokayat in support of the strike at Bajaj was to agitate individual workers to become activists in their organisation. Although Lokayat does not engage in organising workers as workers in a trade union fashion, they felt it was difficult to work with the VKKS union, sensing that VKKS felt Lokayat could intrude into their area of work. There was some amount of disappointment with the interviewee of Lokayat that industrial workers in general, and the Bajaj workers and Dilip Pawar in specific, did not support other struggles. Especially the division between industrial and domestic workers was seen as a stark gap by the activist from Lokayat. Lokayat had mobilised together with a CITU-led trade union of public sector workers in December 2013 in Pune, just four months after the strike at Bajaj had ended, against plans for the privatisation of the public insurance company LIC (Life Insurance Corporation India), the largest insurance company in India94—and had hoped that at least union leaders connected to Bajaj would lend some support which did not materialise.95 91 Interview with Neeraj Jain, Lokayat, 23 January 2014, Pune. Interview with Neeraj Jain. 93 Interview with Neeraj Jain. 94 Workers at LIC earned about two to three times more than the permanent workers at Bajaj, between 40,000 and 60,000 rupees. 95 Interview with Neeraj Jain. 92 172 J. NOWAK 4.3.4 The Aftermath of the Bajaj Strike While workers initially reported a betterment of the work climate, suspensions and disciplinary measures started to become widespread again at the time of interviews conducted for this book in December 2013 and January 2014, just four months after the strike had ended. In February 2014, VKKS managed to close a wage agreement for the 130 workers at the Akurdi plant, and a few days later, on 16 February, union president Dilip Pawar threatened to go on hunger strike in order to protest against the suspensions at the Chakan plant. VKKS then announced the beginning of an unlimited strike first for 27 April 2014 and then for 14 May 2014, but decided to refrain from striking on short notice in both cases, thus this strike never took place. An agreement, retroactively effective from April 2013 on, was finally reached in August 2014 with wage rises between 10,000 and 11,500 rupees (NTUI 2014). This exceeds the 12 per cent in the first and 8 per cent in the following two years that were negotiated in the original agreement to a quite large extent. In 2016, the next revision of the nine-year agreement was due, and again Bajaj management refused to negotiate. Instead, management decided in October 2016 unilaterally to raise wages over three years in 2017, 2018 and 2019, adding 3300 rupees to monthly wages each year. The union demanded a new wage of 28,000 rupees for all permanent workers. Workers responded with hunger strikes on 2 October 2016 and 7 and 8 January 2017 which did not meet with success. It was only another hunger strike for four days, from 29 January to 2 February 2018 that finally led to an agreement between union and management at Bajaj Auto, including a maximum wage rise of 9500 rupees for senior employees, and accordingly lower wage rises for less senior workers (IndustriALL 2018b; Deshpande 2018). 4.3.5 VKKS and Shramik Ekta Mahasangh In this paragraph, I will take a closer look at the union VKKS and the federation SEM. SEM is getting consultancy by the organisation Option Positive, headed by Arvind Shrouti, a long-time left-wing activist and union official. The project to engage in a federation on a regional basis without any party affiliation is a novel project. Other than the WSC in the Gurgaon cluster SEM is focused on an institutionalist strategy, and acts in close cooperation with the global union federation IndustriALL. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 173 The political vision of SEM is a cooperative relation between unions and management, defined as co-management. The aim of SEM is that workers and the union run and own increasing parts of a company since the workers are the ones who produce wealth. It is basically an idea of selfmanagement that does not break with the established conception of enterprises and market relations, but that aims for workers and their unions to run enterprises and use market mechanisms for the general well-being of the population. SEM was founded in 2004, and it is affiliated to IndustriALL although it is not a national federation. At the national level, it is aligned with the left-wing NTUI which is astounding since NTUI usually rather displays a class-struggle-oriented strategy. Dilip Pawar is president of SEM, and at the same time president of VKKS, and he is one of the vice-presidents of the NTUI on the national level. The General Secretary of SEM at the time of my interviews was the president of the union of Thermax (Thermax Kamgar Sanghatana), Keshav Gholve.96 SEM unions are represented in the most important industrial companies in the Pune belt. Among the multinational companies are Volkswagen, General Motors, Bosch, Atlas Copco (Sweden), JCB (UK), Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, SKF (Sweden) and Fiat. Domestic companies in the Pune belt with unions from SEM are Tata Motors, Force Motors, Mahindra, Thermax and Premier. In total, SEM had about eighty member unions with 20,000 members in 2013. In an interview SEM and VKKS president Dilip Pawar underlined the philosophy behind his approach to trade unionism: “Because now the workers have been given a kind of sense that the company is more important than the management. Because the company is something that stands alone, the company is something different. (…) So one should take a look at the beneficiality of the company. How you can move into the mould of the company.”97 Pawar combined this statement with an example of a company in India that had been taken over by workers after it was closed down by the management. This approach includes that some of the unions in SEM do their own productivity studies and their own courses of technical education. One employee of Option Positive explains this approach: “How the industry is 96 97 Interview with Assistant 1. Interview with Dilip Pawar. 174 J. NOWAK being run, what are the essence of the industries like production, productivity, techniques, methods, work-studies. That is how we train the workers (…) Because you work, you create wealth. We make them conscious that you are contributing towards development of the country. It is not like that you are there for your own livelihood. We are making them conscious that you are also part of the whole economy.”98 One of the examples is that SEM counters corporate social responsibility with ‘Union Social Responsibility’: skilled workers offer technical training courses for free at public vocational education institutions: “So this batch of skilled workers will go to technical institutions like ITI99 and all that and give them their one day, say any holiday, to teach. (…) So like that, we are trying to build from various companies that this kind of team of the people will contribute one day each. So, in a month, you get 30 days from different companies.”100 While doing this, the union provides a service to other workers in education and also shows that it knows better how to organise education: “In ITIs, highly skilled things will not be taught. They (the workers) know by the experience.”101 Another part of this approach is that the union at engineering company Thermax in Pimpri-Chinchwad acquired a certification under ISO 90002008 for the work processes of the union. It has production committees at all levels and evaluates systematically how production is running with written records on a daily basis.102 These records are also being used when problems arise between workers and management about quality problems in production. Unjustified claims of management can be refuted, and it can be sorted out if workers make unjustified claims, too. The aim behind this is to enhance dialogue between the trade union and management and avoid unnecessary conflicts.103 This is called Union Information System: So that what is happening on shop floor and production process, how much material is produced, whether the material has come on time or not, whether the quality of material is proper or not (…) If they involve in this process, 98 Interview with Assistant 1. Industrial Training Institutes (ITI) are state-run engineering schools which automobile workers have to attend in order to get hired as production workers. 100 Interview with Assistant 1. 101 Interview with Assistant 1. 102 Interview with Assistant 1. 103 Interview with Assistant 1. 99 A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 175 they can demand. They have a stronger say. They can trap the management by saying that ‘See, whatever has happened in the production or quality of product, it’s always been dumped on the workers’. (…) In most of the cases what happens in India, the management says what you need to do is to go and work. It is our job to see whether it is quality material or not.104 A similar view is echoed by Arvind Shrouti, the head of Option Positive. He claimed in an interview that there are four types of union and management: progressive unions, conventional unions, progressive management and conventional management. Progressive management and progressive unions would have an orientation to cooperate in production. Progressive unions are not against creating wealth or profits. In fact they will help the company to do so, but their demand is they want a justified share in that wealth. The creation of more wealth should not be only for the employer and the executives of the company but should be distributed among the workers in a justified manner. Whereas the conventional unions will only ask for increased wages. (…) Whereas progressive unions will talk about the decisions of the company, profit of company, etc. Unfortunately there are very few progressive unions in the country right now. At least in Pune we are trying to develop this type of unions.105 Progressive management on the other hand will understand that it can enhance its profits via a cooperation with trade unions: “They will make a good profit if they have a proper co-ordination with union (…) So you can make clear distinctions between the true capitalists like Volkswagen and feudal people like Bajaj.” In this way, Shrouti recommends different strategies depending on the employer, since the behaviour of the employees would also be affected by the type of management. “For every disease the medicine should be different. So the German multinationals will require a different medicine, Swedish MNCs will require a different medicine, Maruti will require a different medicine. We cannot use the same strategy for everyone.”106 This pro-capitalist approach on self-management is for sure an original and innovative one that challenges management power in new ways. The success of this approach cannot be evaluated for unions of SEM in general 104 Interview with Assistant 1. Interview with Arvind Shrouti. 106 Interview with Arvind Shrouti. 105 176 J. NOWAK here, but only in relation to VKKS, the union of Bajaj Auto. The trajectory of the Bajaj strike shows that VKKS had enormous difficulties to implement the agreed revisions in the nine-year agreement, but it finally succeeded with respectable results in 2014. The delay of more than eighteen months to reach an agreement on the second revision, stretching from 2016 to 2018, shows that the agreement in 2014 did not lead to a sustainable change in the relations of management and trade union. A threat of SEM to engage in a regional mass strike with its member unions was announced in 2013 during the Bajaj Auto strike, but was never seriously prepared (LiveMint 2013). While the issue of wage rises for permanent workers has been addressed successfully, with the qualifications made above, another issue could not be resolved: SEM and VKKS do not organise contract workers in a significant fashion. In July 2014, an SEM union at French auto parts producer Plastic Omnium was able to attain equal wages of trainees and permanent workers, but no other such successes have been reported (IndustriALL 2014). In 2014, SEM announced the foundation of the Maharashtra Contract Workers Union—it remains to be seen if it will be able to make inroads into this area. 4.3.6 Conclusions The strike at Bajaj Auto in 2013 displays a lot of similarities with the conflict at Maruti Suzuki about a year earlier. The workforce was in the midtwenties which means it does not have family responsibilities, and most likely did not take many loans from the company yet (a very common occurrence since usually workers would not get loans from banks). This allows workers to act more courageously in the workplace, and this goes for both the Maruti and the Bajaj workers. Both factories are in new industrial areas and have been constructed close to older plants with a large amount of contract workers. The fact that Bajaj Auto started its Chakan plant already in 1999 can lead one to the suggestion that Maruti got the idea from Bajaj. On the other hand, Maruti did introduce a VRS first in 2000, while Bajaj Auto came up with it only in 2007 when the Chakan plant was running for a few years. Like in Maruti, the conflict in Bajaj resulted in a considerable wage hike for permanent workers, which means that the gap towards the wages of contract workers increased. The way the conflicts were led in Bajaj Auto was of a less confrontative nature, partly due to the general climate in A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 177 Pune which is less militant from the workers’ side. Union recognition at Bajaj Auto was not as challenging as it was in the Maruti company due to the more transparent legal situation in Maharashtra, but it was looming in the background and was seen by union president Dilip Pawar as the main issue of the strike in 2013. After an eighty-five-day-long strike at auto parts producers Bosch and Brembo in 2009—which are both smaller units—the strike at Bajaj Auto was the first longer strike of one of the major producers in the Pune industrial belt, and also remained so for the coming years. Other strikes in the Pune area in the years after 2013 were rather in the service sector, that is, by bus, taxi and rickshaw drivers, chemists and farmers. In parallel with the latest hunger strike at Bajaj Auto in January 2018, there was also a hunger strike of permanent workers at Volkswagen India. The Volkswagen plant is located close to the Bajaj plant in Chakan, and the Volkswagen Employees Union is also part of SEM (IndustriALL 2018a). Eleven union office bearers threatened to fast to death due to unresolved wage issues. One can assume that the parallel hunger strike of Bajaj and Volkswagen workers increased the pressure and had a positive effect on the agreement at Bajaj being concluded. These new examples also show that in contrast to earlier times when unions and workers thought that it was more favourable to assemble in densely populated Akurdi in order to be better prepared against attacks by police and strongmen, and to gain higher visibility in public, the later hunger strikes at Bajaj Auto and Volkswagen were held in Chakan itself in front of the factory gates. This might be due to the fact that the village areas around Chakan became a more vivid environment over time with the surge of more factories in the area—for example, a L’Oréal factory is right across the street from the gates of Bajaj. While the strike at Bajaj Auto in 2013 was a demonstration of union power, it did not seem to serve as a blueprint for further actions since the method of temporary limited hunger strikes—established in India in an equal way as strikes, but seen as a more ‘social partnership’ tactic due to its Gandhian leanings—was adopted in the years 2014–2018, and subsequently by the union at Volkswagen in 2018, too. The move of SEM to gather various plant unions in one regional federation is surely a progressive move, enabling a more coordinated form of action, uninhibited by party competition or competition between different union bodies. The large number of unions that joined SEM also seems to create a selfreinforcing effect, since in 2015 SEM already claimed to boast of 122 178 J. NOWAK member unions, an almost 50 per cent increase in affiliated unions (but only a 10 per cent rise in membership numbers) within two years (Bhosale 2015). The numbers indicate that many new member unions are in smaller companies. The stronghold of the federation SEM remains permanent workers in industry, a relatively privileged segment of the overall workforce. While the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the automobile industry in the Pune belt employ about 50 per cent contract workers, the amount of contract workers is much higher in other industrial factories in the region, both in supplier companies and in engineering companies like Swedish multinational Alfa Laval. The strategy of alliances that SEM unions and the VKKS engage in tends to be focused on an expansion of the own federation and on tight connections to IndustriALL. Although SEM is aligned to the NTUI, this national affiliation does not seem to play a significant role for the work of SEM since it has rarely been mentioned by interviewees, and is frequently absent from self-presentations of the union itself in contrast to the emphasis on being a member of IndustriALL (see the Facebook pages of VKKS and SEM or the PowerPoint presentation at an IndustriALL meeting in 2015: Bhosale 2015).107 Furthermore, broader alliances that had emerged temporarily during the Bajaj strike had not been pursued later, in contrast to the activities of the MSWU that aimed to maintain and expand links with other actors. On the other hand, one can say that the form of organisation of SEM and VKKS aims to adapt the specific feature of Pimpri-Chinchwad as an industrial town with about two million inhabitants, aiming to cover the permanent workers of most of the major companies in this area, and extending to new neighbouring industrial districts like Chakan (VW, Bajaj Auto, Mercedes-Benz, Bosch), and farther away areas like Ranjangaon in a 60-kilometre distance (Fiat) and Talegaon in a 25-kilometre distance (General Motors, JCB). These companies have considerable economic power and their workers can possibly exercise more power than workers in the lower-paid service sector. One of the pitfalls is that a successful mobilisation for wage hikes of permanent workers in industries will increase their wage gap towards contract workers in industry as well as their wage gap to the large majority of all other workers. We will now go through the five 107 VKKS: https://www.facebook.com/Vishwa-Kalyan-Kamgar-sangthana-Bajaj-Auto197156133771148/; SEM: https://www.facebook.com/Shramik-Ekta-Mahasangh239327459523499/ A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 179 levels of analysis established in Chap. 2 and apply them to the strike at Bajaj: 1. In the case of the Bajaj strike, the engagement of non-workplace actors occurred mainly during the strike, with intellectuals, social movement leaders, politicians and the activists of Lokayat supporting the strike through media statements, speeches or education activities. Since the strategy of VKKS was focused on negotiations with management behind closed doors, the union was not interested to maintain a high-profile publicity campaign that permanently engages with ‘outsiders’. In this way, it stuck to a more corporatist strategy. Police forces played a role during the strike, protecting strike breakers and exercising arrests against workers, but not to the large extent as it did in the Maruti conflict. In this way, non-class issues did not enter much into the conflict, and non-workplace issues had limited impact. 2. The focus on a corporatist strategy contributed to a lack of a larger common perspective of popular forces emerging from the strike at Bajaj Auto. A common perception of the conflict was limited to the period during which the strike was going on. 3. The close connections between informal workplace organisation with different committees and the official union structures of VKKS worked in a similar way as they did in MSWU. Different factory departments had a similar representation in decision-making bodies that informed the union decisions. Beyond the everyday contacts of workers from different factories that often live together in apartments and so have ample contacts with one another, there were no effective informal networks and much of the coordination was focused on SEM as a regional body. Similar to WSC, SEM saw the need to go beyond plant-level action, but with a different ideology that could be qualified as social-democratic self-management. Given that its bases are highly qualified permanent workers, its effectivity might be limited to a few companies where these principles can be established. The affiliation to IndustriALL confirms and aims to consolidate this institutionalist strategy, while the affiliation with NTUI is a kind of second leg on the national level. Although there was some engagement of NTUI in the Bajaj case, the output has been much lower compared to the Maruti case, although VKKS is a member union of NTUI and MSWU is not. 180 J. NOWAK 4. The case of the Bajaj strike proved again—like the case of Maruti in Manesar—that the relative spatial isolation of Chakan did not prevent to mobilise for a strike, but it were the lack of strong political traditions in the Pune cluster and the institutionalist strategy of SEM and VKKS that prevented larger networks to emerge from the strike. Although all interviewed workers at Bajaj Auto were from Maharashtra, there was no engagement with villagers as in the case of Maruti Suzuki. 5. Among the few conflicts in the Pune cluster in the past ten years most were in the automobile sector (Bosch, Brembo, Mahindra & Mahindra, Volkswagen, Premier, Force Motors, General Motors), but some were in other sectors (Alfa Laval, Pradeep Laminators). In those strikes, imperialist capital played a much smaller role than in the Gurgaon cluster; nonetheless German and US automobile companies saw some smaller conflicts. Thus, similar to the strikes in the Delhi region, we can identify a common pattern of labour unrest, dominated by companies in the automobile sector, while other industrial sectors do not show as much activity as the electronics, pharmaceutic and garment sector did in the Delhi region—these sectors are largely absent in the Pune cluster. 4.4 compAring mAruTi And bAjAj The examples of the strikes and mobilisations at Maruti Suzuki and Bajaj Auto show that the reorganisation of the industrial employment system since the early 2000s continued to see responses by both permanent and contract workers in the automobile industry. While permanent workers were able to better their working conditions, precarious workers like trainees, contract workers, temporary workers and interns did not see much improvement in their lives. The spatial strategy of automobile managers goes towards erecting new factories in less densely populated areas. One of the incentives for this strategy is to attract a younger workforce that starts with lower wages than older workers in established plants and to have a larger amount of contract workers. Another incentive is the notion of spatial control in newly industrialised areas where there are less residential neighbourhoods, food stalls, restaurants, small shops and so on that would contribute to a vivid street life as it exists in the older industrial centres like Gurgaon and Akurdi-Pimpri-Chinchwad. These aspects of spatial control in favour of capital do only last for a certain while, probably for five to ten years. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 181 The strikes in both factories display that workers overcame at least some of the spatial control strategies. VKKS and the Bajaj workers transcended the relative isolation in Mahalunge village in Chakan due to its connections with other trade unions via the federation SEM and the placing of its main meeting and rally point to the Akurdi area in Pimpri-Chinchwad where most of the workers live. Plus, their strike created enough attention to get various progressive intellectuals involved and to draw support from Pune-based organisation Lokayat. Similarly, the Maruti workers drew support from workers in adjoining villages despite the hostile attitudes of most shopkeepers and landlords, mobilised both unions in the industrial belt as well as various activists from New Delhi, and finally were also extending their networks into the interior of Haryana state, using their family connections and other networks in the villages where they grew up. But, while both industrial belts saw more conflicts flaring up in the years to come, both conflicts at Maruti and Bajaj remained the most significant so far in those industrial belts. Recent larger labour conflicts in India shifted to other regions and sectors like the garment workers uprising in Bangalore in April 2016, and the various large-scale mobilisations of workers on tea plantations and of farmers and agricultural workers in 2016 and 2017. Regarding the way the conflicts were unfolding in the two belts, specific regional traditions were a decisive influence. The Gurgaon belt saw a high amount of conflict since 2005, with bigger strikes following after one another at least until 2012. The Pune belt saw much less and more discontinuous strikes, of which only the Bosch-Brembo strike in 2009 and the Bajaj Auto strike in 2013 stand out. The higher level of conflict in the Gurgaon belt provided then for more vivid mobilisations that included solidarity strikes and frequent rallies of workers. Riots are not a rarity especially in the garment sector in Gurgaon, located in the Udyog Vihar district. This climate of mobilisation also encouraged more longer-lasting alliances to social movement activists. The ‘spatial tradition’ in the Pune belt comes with a less confrontative tradition, which is also fostered by the more labour-friendly process of union recognition in Maharashtra. The more traditional approach of VKKS comes with being embedded into the strategies of a larger federation, but with less alliances with other social movement actors. VKKS did not become a node in a political network as the MSWU did to some extent. The high amount of overall mobilisation in the automobile industry in India since the mid-2000s can be termed a strike wave that lasted from 182 J. NOWAK 2005 on to 2016. While there were no bigger, but a bunch of smaller, conflicts in the Gurgaon belt in 2013–2015, the Honda Tapukhara struggle in 2016 brought back a larger conflict to this belt, running in parallel with a conflict at Tata Motors in Gujarat. In 2014, the month-long lockout and strike at Toyota Kirloskar in Karnataka, a five-week-long strike at a larger Bosch plant in Bangalore with 3500 workers and in 2015 a lockout at another Bosch plant in Jaipur, Rajasthan, made headlines. In this way, the strikes in the Pune belt form part of this national strike wave, but are one of its less intensive poles in contrast to the Gurgaon belt as the most intensive one. The dynamic of almost all those struggles is plant-based, although the general climate in an industrial belt might have a considerable influence on the probability of workplace conflicts. But apart from general strikes, mobilisations mostly start at one plant and if connections are created then this is happening after a plant-based mobilisation has already occurred. Thus, there is no coordination behind the eruption of those strikes, which is why they can be categorised as workerled fighting mass strikes. There has been some scepticism of observers about the sustainability of those struggles: I don’t see any struggles going on. They are sporadic incidents. See, struggles require a leadership and leadership with a broader moral ethical perspective. It would be engulfed by the support of the society. Otherwise, there are spontaneous incidents. Incidents are not struggles. What happened in Maruti Suzuki is an incident. Incidents can be suppressed by the counter incidents. (…) So the incident reflects a lot of discontent, a lot of potency. There are atoms, but atoms do not have atomic power. It requires lot of work on that.108 We have to grant that this statement was made in late 2013, and it was not unlikely for the Maruti struggle to remain at the status of an ‘incident’. But I think the later developments that saw the emergence of three new organisations at different levels, that all had a historical connection to the conflict at the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki, elevate this incident beyond other such incidents. A striking difference between the strikes at Maruti and Bajaj was the different pre-history, but also the much more intensive combination of informal and formal types of organisation in the 108 Interview with Ajit Abhyankar. A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 183 case of the Maruti workers. The high amount of repression and the suffering of the jailed workers resulted in a much wider and more politicised network. The more institutionalist strategy of VKKS in Pune avoided an escalation and came with similar negotiation results as the MSWU. Both regional strategies seem to be non-compatible, and it is not by chance that the national organisation MASA does not report any members from the Pune cluster. As we have seen from the composition of the sector, Japanese capital plays a large role for both motorcycle and car passenger production in India, and more so in the Gurgaon cluster, extending to first-tier supplier companies. Of those supplier companies, a larger number is also supplying to Japanese, European and US capital in the automobile industry outside of India. Thus, there is a strong contradiction of automobile workers in India with imperialist capital. We will now come back to the seven levels of analysis introduced at the beginning of this chapter and draw conclusions from the findings for a theory of strikes: 1. The attention given to actors beyond the workplace and non-class relations allowed us to analyse the large network that got involved into the support of the Maruti workers. A similar network emerged during the strike at Bajaj Auto but was only relevant for the period of the strike itself. The relative success that the MSWU had at the level of the workplace, albeit only for permanent workers, was based on this network and the repercussion of the strike in the media. We can thus state that a focus on unions, employers and the state is insufficient to understand the dynamics that emerged during the strike at Bajaj Auto and in the course of the mobilisation around the Maruti workers for the whole period from 2011 to 2017. 2. While there emerged a common perspective when strikers and other actors cooperated, it was mainly focused on the issues of the strikers and did rarely combine the issues of strikers and the issues of those other actors, although the question of state repression against the Maruti workers raised larger questions about the judicial system in India. Thus, the class content that emerged from workplace mobilisation did not combine with a larger popular content of mobilisation. 3. In both strikes, formal union organisation was based on informal workplace organisation which confirms the approach to go beyond a strict distinction between both. Informal workplace organisation saved as a basis for decisions of the formal trade union leadership 184 J. NOWAK during both strikes. The informal organisation beyond the workplace had a much wider extension in the case of the Maruti strike and due to its initial isolation after the uprising in July 2012, the MSWU made extensive use of this network, while VKKS as the union of Bajaj Auto largely ignored less formal organisation after the strike and focused on the mobilisation within the federation SEM and some articulation with global union federation IndustriALL. Thus, we can conclude that informal workplace organisation proves as essential, and that informal networks beyond the workplace can be an important resource. The interesting fact here is that part of this informal network was then later transformed into new formal organisations at several levels, that is, at the level of a company-wide coordination, and at the level of regional and national organisations. 4. Regarding the analysis of spatial levels of mobilisation and organisation we can conclude that spatial isolation on the physical level is not a determining factor since it was overcome in both case studies that concerned workers in new, relatively isolated industrial areas. It is obvious that the legacy of a high amount of mobilisation in the Gurgaon cluster since the early 2000s came with a higher propensity of local actors to come out in support, through solidarity strikes, assemblies or street demonstrations. The spatial proximity of non-workplace actors as students and political activists in New Delhi did play a role to facilitate political support for the Maruti workers. Thus, there is no spatial determinism at work, but political traditions inscribed into certain places and spaces facilitate a broader popular mobilisation. 5. The mass strikes in the period of 2010–2014 were mainly focused on the automobile industry, and it was only after 2014 that meaningful mobilisations occurred in the steel industry, in the garment industry and in the agricultural sector, while mobilisations in the automobile sector did not cede completely but slowed down in comparison with the earlier period: the bigger strikes in the later period were the Toyota-Kirloskar strike in 2014, the strike at Honda in Tapukhara in 2016 and the strikes at Royal Enfield and Yamaha in the Chennai cluster in 2018. Thus, we can identify a national sectoral pattern of mass strikes in the automobile industry between 2010 and 2014 which is the period under investigation here, and it would be reasonable to set the beginning of this strike wave in the year 2005 when the strikes at HMSI began since they were followed by a quick succession of conflicts in other large companies of that sec- A PROTRACTED STRUGGLE: STRIKES IN THE AUTOMOBILE SECTOR… 185 tor. Thus, we can identify a strike wave that can be qualified as consisting of worker-led mass strikes due to the lack of a central coordination of those strikes. While the New Delhi cluster was clearly the most active, we can identify larger mobilisations of automobile workers in the Chennai cluster, in the Pune cluster and in other states like Gujarat and Karnataka for the period from 2005 to 2014. Thus, there are strong sectoral and spatial patterns in the national territory of India, but the post-2014 period witnesses a diffusion across sectors, increasingly including less-well-paid and female workers in comparison with mostly male workers at OEMs in the automobile industry. 6. We can trace similar forms of work organisation and conditions of work in both companies dominated by domestic and imperialist capital. For the automobile sector as a whole, the presence of Japanese and South Korean capital is remarkable, with the strongest presence in the subsector of car passenger production, and a considerable presence of Japanese, German and US companies in the first tier of suppliers. There is thus a high dependence on technological inputs by foreign companies and profits in the sector are largely controlled by multinational companies that are not based in India. Most production of OEMs is not for export, but for the Indian market. The issue of imperialist capital did not play a huge role in the mobilisations of workers itself since there are no stark differences for workers in factories with the participation of imperialist capital as compared to other factories. 7. The strikes in Indian automobile companies occurred during a phase of growth in the sector, accompanied by falling real wages due to the restructuring towards a higher amount of contract labour. In contrast to earlier periods, a prolonged series of growth in industries in developing countries did not come with wage rises (Silver 2003), but its opposite. This means that this pattern of relocation of industrial production to low-wage countries does not apply anymore, putting earlier strategies of mobilisation into question. 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Accessed 29 Jan 2019. Shaw, A., & Mathias, L. (2013). Bajaj Auto Workers’ Agitation. Withdrawal and Triumph. Economic and Political Weekly, XLVIII(38), 17–19. Shirali, R. V. R. (1984, January 16–19). The Dawning of the Maruti Era. Business World, 38–50. Silver, B. (2003). Forces of Labour. Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singh, A. (2005). Deliberate Democracy and Electoral Fallacy: The Logic of Coexistence. A Comparative Study of Two Globalizing Cities in India. In J. Jabes (Ed.), The Role of Public Administration in Alleviating Poverty and Improving Governance (pp. 206–229). Kuala Lumpur: Asian Development Bank. Singh, J., & Sawhney, N. (2011). Maruti Workers Speak About Their Strike. Economic and Political Weekly, XLVI(33), 12–13. Sinha, P. (2017). Trade Unions and Industrial Relations in the Car Industry in India. In R. Traub-Merz (Ed.), The Automotive Sector in Emerging Economies: Industrial Policies, Market Dynamics and Trade Unions (pp. 206–219). Berlin: Friedrich Ebert-Stiftung. Teltumbde, A. (2012). The ‘Maoists’ of Manesar. Economic and Political Weekly, XLVII(34), 10–11. The Hindu. (2013, July 8). Kejriwal Back Strike at Bajaj’s Auto Plant in Chakan. The Hindu. https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/kejriwalbacks-strike-at-bajajs-auto-plant-in-chakan/article20635101.ece. Accessed 24 Apr 2018. 192 J. NOWAK Vasudevan, N. (2013, July 1). Bajaj Auto Goes the Suzuki Way. http://ntui.org. in/media/item/bajaj-auto-goes-the-suzuki-way/. Accessed 24 Apr 2018. Vishwa Kalyan Kamgar Sanghatana (VKKS). (2013, June 25). Bajaj Auto Strike: Statement of Vishwa Kalyan Kamgar Sanghatana. http://hrblog.vivekvsp. com/2013/06/bajaj-auto-strike-statement-of-vishwa_5473.html. Accessed 23 Dec 2013. Wildcat. (2008). Gurgaon, Indien: Neue Stadt, neues Glück, neue Kämpfe? Beilage zur Wildcat 82, Herbst 2008. CHAPTER 5 An Ascending Wave: Mass Strikes in the Brazilian Construction Sector The Brazilian construction sector saw a wave of mass strikes since 2011 that extended into the year 2014. The high number of strikers—540,000 in 2011, 467,000 in 2012 and 420,000 in 2013 (numbers for 2014 are not yet available)—was accompanied by other remarkable features: most strikes have not been organised by trade unions but erupted from the rank and file and were often accompanied by large-scale rioting and property destruction. In this section, I will first provide the historical background of the recent strike wave. A second section introduces the economic and political framework of the Brazilian construction industry, and the working conditions and workers’ struggles in the 1970s and 1980s. A third section provides the context of the neodevelopmentalist regime in Brazil in the 2000s and the changes in the scenario of trade unionism during the presidencies of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016). The fourth section is devoted to the recent strike wave since 2011 and presents two case studies on the strikes in Pecém and Belo Monte. The fifth section concludes and summarises the results of the research. The information for the case studies is based on two field research trips to Brazil from July to October 2014 and from July to December 2018 during which seventy interviews with workers, trade union officials, social movement activists, lawyers, state officials and managers have been conducted. The material in this chapter is organised according to the more general and theoretical questions raised in the first two chapters: © The Author(s) 2019 J. Nowak, Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India, Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05375-8_5 193 194 J. NOWAK 1. We will enquire if and how non-class relations and which relations beyond the workplace had an influence on the processes of class formation that occurred with the mass strikes in construction. Obviously, the fact that in Belo Monte there was a more than thirtyyear-old regional protest movement mobilising against the dam with occupations of the construction site and other activities was a strong factor beyond the workplace. But also in the second construction site at Pecém we notice the intervention of human rights groups against repression against workers and tensions between Korean workers and managers and Brazilian workers entering the workplace dynamic. 2. We will investigate if and how far experiences of the diverse groups immersed in the conflicts around the strikes formed into a common perspective. This is obvious for a good part of the workers due to their common situation expressed in the joint action, but does this go beyond the workers? 3. Another angle of interpretation concerns the linkages between formal and informal types of organisation. The strikes in Brazilian construction were largely neither planned nor organised by the trade unions who hold sway over the sector, but nonetheless those trade unions held negotiations in the course of those strikes. We will also enquire if other types of institutions could be identified beyond the standard set of state, employers and trade unions that industrial relations mainstream approaches usually confine themselves to. The fact that most of the strikes in Brazilian construction after 2011 were not emanating from trade unions hints at other types of coordination. 4. We will enquire which role has been played by political traditions inscribed into space. The decade-long struggle against the dam in Belo Monte is an obvious example, but are there other additional factors? And we can also assume that at the site of the second case study specific political traditions played out in their own way, too. Did stronger community networks in the area around Belo Monte have an impact on the strikes? Did the prominence of the construction works themselves in the media have a positive or negative effect regarding the intervention of state actors into the conflicts? The fact that most construction workers are migrant workers whose families live far from their area of work must be taken into account, and in fact the question of holidays which enable visits to the workers’ families did play a key role. AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 195 5. We will analyse how far the strike wave in Brazilian construction was a mere sectoral mobilisation or if it coincided with larger trends in strike mobilisation. 6. The direct and indirect role of imperialist capital in the conflicts will be examined, given that one of the construction companies is part of the South Korean steel giant Posco, or the fact that the construction of the hydroelectric plant in Belo Monte might be focused on delivery of energy to foreign companies. 7. We will locate the strikes in question in the larger scenario of how the BRICS states have been affected by the global economic crisis and how those strikes are located with respects to the international strike wave between 2010 and 2014. 5.1 The hisTorical conTexT of The sTrikes in The consTrucTion indusTry The strike wave in construction since 2011 is the biggest since the strikes in the greater São Paulo region between 1978 and 1980 in the metal industry, above all the automobile sector, represented by foreign companies like General Motors and Volkswagen. The strikes in the São Paulo region contributed decisively to the end of the military dictatorship and the foundation of the Workers Party, Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and the trade union federation Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT). One of the few common features between both strike waves is that they were started by workers from the Northeast of Brazil. But while the bulk of the workers in the metal industry in São Paulo migrated from the Northeast to the Southeast of the country, the strikes in construction since 2011 took place predominantly in the Northeastern and Northern regions. As it was the case with the strikes in the metal industry in São Paulo in the late 1970s, it is not just the sheer number of strikers which is exceptional for the construction sector but the significance of these strikes as a rupture in political discourse which is the criterion that qualifies them as mass strikes (Nowak and Gallas 2014). During the strikes in the São Paulo region, the high point was during 1979 when these strikes expanded into the whole country and to many sectors, including four million workers during that year (DIEESE 1979; Abramo and da Silva 1988, 70). In the early 1990s there was a higher number of strike participants (14 million in 1990, and 16 million in 1991) than at the height of the last strike wave with about two million strikers in 2011 and 2013 each, but these were defensive strikes responding to neoliberal restructuring at that time. It is hardly an exception that defensive strikes 196 J. NOWAK draw a larger participation than offensive strikes which are perceived as a political rupture: it was the strikes from 1978 to 1980 which remained in the public memory and not the ones in the early 1990s with a higher participation in terms of numbers, because those strikes in the late 1970s changed the course of the country and ended a longer period of domination by yellow trade unions that were engineered by the military dictatorship. The strikes in the late 1970s started with smaller conflicts in factories of Scania, Maxwell, Mercedes-Benz and Ford Motors when the demand of a 20 per cent wage rise was articulated for the first time—it became central in the years to come (Antunes 1988, 19f). In May 1978 these strikes became a strike wave (ibid., 32) before they emerged into a general strike of the whole metal industry in 1979. It is a frequent occurrence that it is those strikes which are organised by the rank and file of workers that develop into mass strikes with historical significance. While the strikes in the ABC region stopped in 1980 due to the political circumstances—many leaders had been imprisoned and the trade union was dissolved—the strikes in construction became a recurrent phenomenon since 2011 over the course of several years, until 2014. 5.2 The developmenT of The Brazilian consTrucTion indusTry in The posT-War period At the end of the nineteenth century the Brazilian construction industry was dominated by foreign capital. It was since the 1930s that Brazilian companies slowly took over the market: during the regime of Getúlio Vargas most of the heavy construction was funded and initiated by the state that then contracted Brazilian private construction companies (Campos 2012, 63). This new pattern consolidated during the second half of the 1950s with the government of Juscelino Kubitschek (ibid.). The construction industry gained significance during that period due to a general upswing of industrial activity and the construction of the new capital city Brasilia (ibid., 65). After 1969, foreign companies had been banned to enter public construction, with only a few exceptions. 5.2.1 Political and Economic Features of the Brazilian Construction Industry The Brazilian construction industry is dominated by the ‘big five’ companies: Odebrecht, Camargo Corrêa, Andrade Gutierrez, OAS and Queiroz Galvão. Camargo Corrêa dominated the construction industry during the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. The company grew with the AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 197 construction of hydroelectric plants, based on its close connections to the regional state of São Paulo, and to the banks Banespa and Bradesco (Campos 2012, 95f). The company also cofinanced the repressive apparatus that had been developed to combat the armed resistance in the São Paulo area during military rule (ibid., 96). It made joint ventures with foreign capital, such as with Brown Boveri in 1979 and the French construction giant Suez in 2001. One of its projects was the construction of the controversial dam project in Tucuruí, in the state of Pará, during the 1980s, the immediate precursor to the Belo Monte Dam. The company has about 60,000 employees in twenty countries and has entered other sectors like textile and shoe manufacturing, petrochemicals, cement production and the metal industry. Competing with Camargo Corrêa for the position of the biggest construction company in Brazil is Odebrecht S.A. The company grew through its cooperation with the state-owned oil company Petrobras and moved to the top range of Brazilian constructors after 1973, constructing, among others, a nuclear plant, an airport and a navy port (Campos 2012, 113f). After 1974 it started to diversify with a heavy investment in petrochemicals and extended to other industries affiliated with construction like cement, concrete, refinement of wood and iron, mining and biofuels. In the 1990s it became Brazil’s biggest multinational in engineering. The company employs 120,000 workers in thirty countries. The third biggest company Andrade Gutierrez got big during the Kubitschek years and entered the top five of Brazilian construction companies since 1972, in the same period as Odebrecht. Its areas of activity have been focused on the building of roads, the underground train systems in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and the company also built an airport and a hydroelectric plant. It diversified its business, entering agrobusiness and mining in the mid-1970s, and since the 1990s it became a player in the energy business, too. The privatisations of state companies in the energy sector offered additional opportunities for growth. Its activities during the 1970s spread over several Latin American and African countries (Campos 2012, 106f). Of all Brazilian construction companies, Andrade Gutierrez has the highest number of employees and is active in the biggest number of countries: 223,000 employees in 40 countries. The company Queiroz Galvão has seen a later ascension, for this company’s cooperation with Petrobras was crucial for its slow growth during the dictatorship, and later it was the construction of roads and railways that had a high relevance for its position in the top five of Brazilian constructors. Queiroz Galvão entered this position during the late 1970s and 198 J. NOWAK early 1980s. It entered the refinery business in the framework of a close cooperation with Petrobras and constructed hydroelectric plants in Chile and Uruguay, and roads in Peru, Bolivia and Angola. In the 1980s the diversification got broader, and saw the company entering the steel industry and banking (Campos 2012, 112f.). Queiroz Galvão employs 40,000 employees. The engineering company OAS was the latest in its ascension to the top: it grew exponentially during the 1990s and 2000s (Campos 2012, 118f.); it has 55,000 employees in twenty countries. The structure and periods of ascension of these companies shed light on their position in Brazilian capitalism: (1) a first period of growth occurred for many of them during the investments made in the years of the rule of Kubitschek and they consolidated and expanded their position during military rule, primarily in the 1970s. (2) There is a big dependence on public investment, and thus a close relationship to the state: three main sectors of state-run companies have been essential for the growth of the big five: energy companies, the building of traffic infrastructure (roads, railways, airports, metro systems) and the state company Petrobras. (3) Many of these companies started to internationalise their activities, predominantly reaching out to Latin America and Africa. (4) Most of these companies diversified their activities and expanded into other sectors, both industrial and non-industrial, ranging from mining and textile production to steel companies, refineries, agrobusiness and the banking sector. Thus, public investment helped create huge multinational and multisectorial companies with a main base in construction between the 1950s and 1980s. During the 1990s some of these companies could extend their activities again, given that a wave of privatisations offered new incentives for investment which established another pattern of how state activities were crucial for the growth of huge private companies. Given the close relations between state agencies and construction companies, and the practices of politicians entering the direction of state companies, it is not by accident that the Brazilian construction companies were at the centre of a series of corruption scandals in the 2010s known under the rubric “Lava Jato” (Car Wash) that caused an ongoing major political and institutional crisis in the country. Due to the complexity of this corruption scandal that saw, among others, construction bosses Marcelo Odebrecht of Odebrecht S.A. and multibillionaire Eike Batista going to jail, I will not expand on it here. Its main events also took place after the period that is covered in this book (see Campos 2016b for a deeper insight). AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 5.2.2 199 Strikes, Workers and Conditions of Work in Construction During the Dictatorship The patterns of conditions of work and of workers’ protests in the construction industry that had been established during the dictatorship have been subject to a number of studies (Sousa 1978, 1994; Coutinho 1980; Klausmeyer 1988; Rocca 1991; Campos 2014). Similar patterns can be found in the current protests and their root causes. Real purchasing power of workers in Brazil was decreasing since 1964 year after year until 1974 due to repression against trade unions and workers and a model of superexploitation that included child labour and a huge amount of overtime (Gorender 1987). The strike wave of 1968 in the metal industry of São Paulo and the student protests in the same year saw as a response the closure of the Congress and the installation of an even more authoritarian regime (Véras 2011, 35). It was only after 1974 that a scarcity of labour power and rampant inflation led to an ascending wave of strikes until the end of the decade (Humphrey 1979, 90). In the construction sector the minimum wage was an important benchmark in the 1960s and 1970s, and most of the wages of workers hovered between one or two minimum wages. During the 1970s wages in the sector fell continuously (DIEESE 1978). The sector had a high turnaround of workers; about 80 per cent remained between one and two years on the same job (ibid.). A significant wage difference between the companies was an incentive for this high degree of rotation. For many rural workers, the construction sector was the first entry into employment in urban areas, and many of them came from the Northeast of the country (Coutinho 1980). In the 1970s 40 per cent of these workers had been illiterate or semi-illiterate (Rocca 1991). In the late 1970s a number of revolts took place in the construction sector, motivated by low-quality food causing sickness and intoxications, low-quality housing facilities, miserable hygienic conditions and bullying by security forces (Campos 2014, 69). One of the major causes for strikes and revolts was the high number of accidents. Brazil was the country with the highest number of accidents at work worldwide in the 1970s and the construction sector played a considerable role for that. According to official numbers, 4824 workers died in accidents in the year 1980 (Klausmeyer 1998; Campos 2014, 72), but the ILO counted 8892 deaths due to accidents at work for the same year (Rocca 1991). Specific sicknesses were also widespread among construction workers such as malnutrition, skin cancer, 200 J. NOWAK disturbances of the ear and intoxications due to the use of chemicals (Klausmeyer 1988; Campos 2014, 72). Preferably in more remote areas, prisoners were deployed for construction work (ibid., 70). Various revolts of construction workers who built the underground train system in Rio de Janeiro occurred since the late 1970s, accompanied by protests of commuters who protested against ticket fare increases (Valladares 1982; Mendonca and Fontes 1988). The biggest uprising in this period occurred at the construction site of the hydroelectric plant in Tucuruí in the Northern state of Pará in April 1980. Camargo Corrêa was the main company that conducted the second biggest construction site in the country at that time. In this remote area 25,000 workers were employed. After a fight with security personnel, the workers incensed two canteens, looted the supermarket and burnt down the security centre. After nine workers had been taken as prisoners and one worker had been shot in the belly by military police, the workers demanded a 100 per cent wage increase and improvements in the conditions of housing, transport and food (Campos 2014, 78f). 5.3 The socioeconomic conTexT in Brazil in The early TWenTy-firsT cenTury In this section, we will locate the strikes in the construction sector since 2011 in the specific conjuncture of the neodevelopmentalist regimes of the Lula and Rousseff presidencies. For this, we will first briefly describe the character of the neodevelopmentalist regime and then subsequently locate Brazilian trade unions in their relationship with this regime. 5.3.1 From Military Developmentalism Through Neoliberalism and to Neodevelopmentalism The larger context for the presidential terms of Lula and Dilma Rousseff between 2003 and 2016 was the earlier transition from a developmentalist regime dominated by the military to a post-authoritarian neoliberal regime. As we could detect with the evolvement of the construction industry, the Brazilian military dictatorship developed a domestic Brazilian industry in areas like construction, mining, and the petrochemical and steel industry with a conglomerate of public and private companies, and partly with the help of public investment programmes. Since the 1960s, there was a considerable increase in FDI, primarily of West German and US capital in AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 201 the automobile industry—and this led to the development of a working class that could not be controlled by the military developmental regime with its state-controlled form of wage deflation and repression of trade union activity, giving way to the gradual transition to democracy during the second half of the 1980s. The neoliberal regime was installed in the early 1990s with the presidencies of Fernando Collor de Mello, Itamar Franco and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. An earlier challenge of Lula to become president was defeated narrowly in 1989 which set the scene for a series of neoliberal reforms in the labour market, and a first wave of privatisations, primarily in large steel companies, energy and telecommunication companies and of mining giant Vale (Amann and Baer 2008; Trópia and De Souza 2018). The changes towards a more liberal and market-oriented political regime during the 1990s had an impact on the coalition governments led by PT during the 2000s. Due to those continuities with its liberal predecessors the presidencies of Lula and Rousseff have also been termed as ‘liberal neo-developmentalism’, a “hybrid made out of economically liberal policy goals and instruments (…) and policy goals and instruments that can be traced to the developmentalist tradition” (Ban 2013, 299, emphasis in the original). The term ‘neodevelopmentalism’ was first used by Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira (2003) and then used by a wide variety of policy actors and researchers. Cornel Ban defines the term as economic nationalism characterised by “the adoption of a development strategy that allows domestic firms to seize global economies of scale (…) and investment opportunities for domestic firms” (2013, 300). Thus, the core is a promotion of domestic capital within the framework of international competition: an ‘open’ economy is accepted and combined with industrial policies that support firms deemed as globally competitive (Kröger 2012, 888). One of the most important pillars is the funding of economic development by domestic savings (Ban 2013, 302), for example, through the development bank Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Economico e Social (BNDES) and through state pension funds and other sources. These financial sources were crucial for the state-led development drive, of which the construction projects dealt with in this chapter are a crucial component. Markus Kröger shows that this included, among others, the creation of national champions with help of BNDES such as paper pulp giant Fibra (2012, 888; Braga 2014, 213). The effect of this regime, an increase of concentration of capital, led Kröger to use the term ‘neomercantilism’ instead of neodevelopmentalism (ibid.). 202 J. NOWAK The neoliberal elements of neodevelopmentalism are price stability, inflation targeting and central bank independence (Vernengo 2006, 2011; Braga 2014, 207). This involved keeping interest rates high around 10 per cent which affects the working class negatively, but attracts capital inflows that drive up the national currency, reducing the competitiveness of Brazilian exports (Ban 2013, 304). Another continuity of the regime in the 2000s with earlier ones is the fact that rich people in Brazil pay much less tax than the general population (Melo et al. 2010). The measures at odds with neoliberal ideas were the state development programme PAC (a detailed account follows in Sect. 5.4.1), coming in its first phase with a surge in the domestic investment rate from 15.9 per cent in 2005 to 19 per cent in 2008 (Ban 2013, 305) and a surge in public sector employment (Morais and Saad-Filho 2011, 35–37). Other measures such as cash transfers to the poorest (in line with the Washington consensus), the surge of the minimum wage above inflation and the direct stimulus via state funding of investment (both not in line with the Washington consensus) did not violate fiscal stability; that is, they did not lead to deficits in the state budget. The government also departed from the neoliberal consensus in not privatising federal banks, and using three large federal banks to increase lending to domestic companies with lower interest rates (ILO 2011, 48f; Kröger 2012, 895). This allowed the government to spend without those measures appearing as a budget deficit and to reduce the debt owed to foreign creditors (Ban 2013, 308): the market share of foreign capital in Brazil was reduced almost by 50 per cent only between 2001 and 2006 (Fachada 2008). Another deviation from neoliberalism consisted in control over strategic sectors by maintaining Petrobras and Eletrobras as state companies, and keeping a major stake in the formerly public aerospace company Embraer. “According to some estimates, in 2011 up to 20 percent of Brazil’s listed companies (i.e. almost half of market capitalization on the stock of exchange) have the government among their top five shareholders” (Ban 2013, 314). Kröger concludes that the main aim of neodevelopmentalism is “to increase state clout in the international political economy, which allows greater security and expansion, and control over territories, and/or areas the mercantilists fear losing to competing economic actors, such as foreign states, transnational corporations and international non-governmental organisations” (2012, 889). He highlights specifically the fear to lose control over the Amazon to foreign capital. Especially after 2008, the government stepped up funding for BNDES, increasing its resources by US $120 AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 203 billion. Some large Brazilian corporations that had speculated in derivatives were bailed out in the wake of the crisis in exchange for equity stakes that went to BNDES (ibid.). In the area of labour relations, Brazil saw a considerable increase of the minimum wage and a surge in formal employment (and a decrease of informal employment) (Krein and Baltar 2013). Combined with the cash transfers, this led to a decrease of absolute poverty from 36 to 16 per cent of the population between 2003 and 2012. Overall, in the early 2010s, 60 per cent of all workers earned a maximum of 1.5 times the minimum wage (Braga 2014, 211). In the late 2000s, 30.5 out of 40 million labour contracts (out of about 100 million working people, of which many are selfemployed or do not have contracts) were open-ended which suggests some amount of rigidity (de Andrade Baltar et al. 2010, 19). But, firing regulations are very liberal, leading to an enormous amount of labour turnover of 36 per cent, and a turnover rate of 86 per cent for workers earning a maximum of 1.5 minimum wages (Braga 2014, 211). The overwhelming majority of the newly created 12 million jobs in the formal sector in the 2000s, 94 per cent, came with a maximum salary of 1.5 minimum wages (Pochmann 2012), and a considerable number of those new jobs replaced well-paid jobs earlier held by the middle class. Until the mid-1990s, newly created jobs were paid three to five times the minimum wage (Braga 2014, 211). Thus, the overall scenario is that on the one hand, extreme poverty was reduced substantively with cash transfers, and formal employment with a low wage has become more widespread at the cost of a reduction of middle-class employment and a restriction of social benefits for public sector workers. One could also say that general poverty has become more widespread, with a decisive reduction of absolute poverty, but also a reduction of middle-class social security. Corresponding to this, the GINI index in Brazil fell from 0.555 in 2004 to 0.491 in 2015 (IBGE 2015). Thus, the neodevelopmentalist regime situated itself in accepting global competition and macroeconomic discipline, but intervened into this scenario with an unorthodox role of public banks in funding investment and providing loans. The domestic banks and public pension funds played a considerable role in reducing the reliance on foreign banks. In addition, the state took on a role as owner and investor itself. The unorthodox surge in the minimum wage is accompanied by an enormous amount of labour turnover that increased in the 2000s. The high turnover is a form of employers evading responsibility for wage increases due to seniority and avoiding stable forms of employees’ representation at the workplace. With 204 J. NOWAK the surge in primary commodity exports in the 2000s, the Brazilian economy also remained dependent on external demand for a scenario of stable growth (Ban 2013, 321). Patricia Vieira Trópia and Davisson Cangussu de Souza see the basis of this class compromise in the realignment of the national bourgeoisie with the government, receding from the earlier exclusive focus of government policy on the interests of the financial bourgeoisie during the 1990s (2018, 48). However, this constellation dissolved piece by piece since 2011 when President Dilma Rousseff laid stronger emphasis on the developmental aspect of neodevelopmentalism, leading to labour unrest in the large construction sites and the public sector and to higher inflation. The neodevelopmentalist compromise came increasingly under attack from the working classes who aimed to break the glass ceiling of 1.5 times the minimum wage and registered that public services in health, education and transport did not improve; simultaneously the middle and upper classes became dissatisfied with Rousseff’s timid drive towards more state control of elite interests, for example, reduced interest rates, a price cap imposed on energy companies and strengthened public banks (Nowak 2016; Krein and Dias 2018, 208). This cocktail of frustration in the working classes and dissatisfaction of the middle and upper classes, albeit for different reasons, proved toxic, and the situation was fuelled by the deepening economic crisis of the Brazilian economy, forcing Rousseff to opt for ‘left austerity’ since 2014 (Nowak 2016) and finally paving the way to the right-wing parliamentary coup in 2016. 5.3.2 Changes in the Scenario of Brazilian Trade Unionism The democratic period after 1985 was impregnated by the dominance of CUT in the area of trade unionism. CUT was founded in 1983. As has been outlined in Chap. 2, CUT adopted a social-democratic and institutionalist strategy in the early 1990s and is closely allied to PT (Galvão 2014, 110). In 1991, the trade union federation Força Sindical was established as a conservative counterweight. It explicitly rejected the socialist ideology of CUT and presented itself as a ‘trade unionism of results’ and as an antidote to state bureaucracy and state involvement in the economy (Antunes and Batista da Silva 2015, 520; Trópia and De Souza 2018, 56). The basic structure of Brazilian trade union law, established in the Vargas era in the 1940s, remained unchanged until 2017: only one trade AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 205 union is responsible for one economic sector in one administrative unit (unicidade), and every worker in this sector is obliged to pay a day’s work every year to a state fund, of which some part then goes to the officially recognised trade unions. This means in turn that Brazilian trade unions can obtain funding without having many voluntary members if they are able to become a recognised trade union.1 The process of establishing the union which represents workers in a sector runs through elections by workers, but while the results are relevant for all workers, only the voluntary members are allowed to vote (Moreira Cardoso 2015, 496). This structure has also been qualified as sindicalismo de estado, state-trade unionism (Boito 1991). Due to the new trade union law established in 2008, the bigger trade unions which are recognised as central federations (since they organise more than 7 per cent of all unionised workers) get access to 10 per cent of the trade union fee according to their membership (that the unions declare themselves), while another 60 per cent of the fund is divided among 11,000 trade unions (ibid., 505; Ladosky et al. 2014, 66f; Galvão 2014, 111; Trópia and De Souza 2018, 52). This new law with its more transparent funding mechanisms had the effect of a fragmentation of representation, and led to a scenario of not two, but twelve, central trade union federations, of which six are recognised as central federations. In 2001, only 38 per cent of all trade unions belonged to one of the central ones; in 2015 this increased to 74 per cent—obviously motivated by getting access to the aforementioned funds (Moreira Cardoso 2015, 498). Of those workers, in 2015 31.7 per cent belonged to CUT, 10.7 per cent to Força Sindical, 10.4 per cent to CTB (Central dos Trabalhadores e Trabalhadoras do Brasil), 10.3 per cent to UGT (União Geral dos Trabalhadores), 7.7 per cent to NCST (Nova Central Sindical dos Trabalhadores) and 7.2 per cent to CSB (Central dos Sindicatos Brasileiros) (ibid.). A number of the new federations were split-offs from CUT, and thus CUT lost 600,000 members between 2001 and 2013 (ibid.). Among those are the CTB (allied to the PCdoB, Communist Party of Brazil) that lent support to the PT-led governments, the smaller This system has seen a fundamental change with the labour reform in 2016 which abolished the obligatory union fee, but maintained the feature of unicidade (one union for one sector in a certain territory). It was put into practice from November 2017 on (see in detail Véras 2018). 1 206 J. NOWAK left and oppositional trade union confederations Conlutas, created in 2004 (allied to the Leninist Party PSTU) and the Intersindical, created in 2006, allied to the left socialist party PSOL (Galvão 2014, 112; Galvão and Trópia 2014, 115ff). The split-offs of Intersindical and Conlutas from CUT were motivated by the lack of confrontation of CUT against the PT-led governments (ibid., 118). We will have a closer look at Conlutas here, due to its involvement in some of the strikes in construction that we deal with in this chapter. The bulk of the unions that are part of Conlutas are from the public sector, and they got disenchanted with CUT due to the low level of opposition that CUT displayed towards the cuts in social security for public sector workers that President Lula enacted in 2003, the first year of his presidency. Conlutas successfully organised construction workers in the urban sector of light construction in various regional states (Galvão and Trópia 2014, 115). In 2013, Conlutas as a rather small trade union had about 200,000 members, while Força Sindical had about one million, and CUT about 2.7 million members (Folha de São Paulo 2013). In terms of trade union density, Brazil saw a slight decrease from 30 per cent in 2005 to 28 per cent in 2015 (Krein and Dias 2017, 15f; it is important to note that there are quite different ways to calculate union density in Brazil, and thus quite different results; see Rodrigues 2015, 483). The overall profile of the workers represented in trade unions experienced quite dramatic changes since the 1990s: other than in 1992, men and women were in 2013 equally represented in the membership of trade unions overall, and agricultural workers have a stronger representation in comparison to other sectors. Since 1992, representation of workers decreased in urban areas from 23 to 15 per cent, and it increased in rural areas from 17 to 24 per cent (Rodrigues 2015, 484). But urban unionised workers are still in the majority with about 12 million members in 2013, while agricultural unionised workers counted 3.5 million members in that year (ibid.). The absolute number of trade union members is growing due to the increase of rural trade union members, but it grows slower than the absolute growth of the number of workers, resulting in a declining trade union density. While CUT is the strongest federation overall, Força Sindical is today the largest union federation in the private sector, primarily with a presence in the service sector. During the presidential mandates of Lula and the first mandate of Dilma Rousseff Força Sindical moved into a position of support of these governments, and managed to place one of their leaders in the Ministry of Labour in 2007 (Trópia and De Souza 2018). The presi- AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 207 dent of Força Sindical, Paulinho da Força, and his political party, Solidariedade, supported the election campaign of right-wing candidate Aécio Neves in 2014 and the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016, but the trade union as such was split on both issues.2 The decrease of trade union density does not come with a demise of industrial action in general: since 2004, there is a general uptick in strike activity (Boito and Marcelino 2011, 64; Galvão 2014, 103) and the years 2012 and 2013 have seen the highest number of strikes since the early 1990s (Linhares 2015)—numbers for 2016 suggest that this trend is still upwards (DIEESE 2017). The strike activity from 2004 to 2012 was dominated numerically by strikers in the public sector, while strikes in the private sector grew over time and took the lead in 2013 (Boito and Marcelino 2011, 66; Linhares 2015). The strikes in the 2000s were primarily offensive, in contrast to the defensive strikes in the 1990s. Since 2008, 80 per cent of sectoral negotiations led to wage increases above inflation; in 2012 these were even 95 per cent—results that were not at all attainable in the 1980s or 1990s, the presumed high time of Brazilian trade unionism (DIEESE 2015a). But, as Adalberto Moreira Cardoso underlines, the situation of Brazilian trade unions is perceived as being in crisis because they are not anymore in a situation to propose broader political projects (2015, 502), giving way to a pragmatic and instrumental approach. During the Lula governments, trade unionists were integrated into all areas of state institutions, for example, forty-four of the ninety-one federal deputies of PT that were elected in 2002 were trade unionists (Lucca 2011). Different authors reject the term ‘cooptation’ for this process since especially the CUT has been closely allied with PT for a long time (Moreira Cardoso 2015, 503; Trópia and De Souza 2018, 53), thus the term ‘integration into the state’ would be more adequate. But the crisis of the PT-led governments then in turn also affected Brazilian trade unionism, given its overall alliance with those governments. During the presidencies of Lula and Rousseff, many trade union leaders entered as managers into social security and pension funds. In March 2011, Rousseff established that representatives of labour unions will sit on 2 In May 2018, Paulinho da Força (Paulo Pereira da Silva is his real name) became target of an investigation on fraudulent registration of trade unions in the Ministry of Labour, and is currently banned from active political life for five years. The ongoing investigation led to the dismissal of Minister of Labour Helton Yamura on 5 July 2018. 208 J. NOWAK the board of medium and large state-owned companies (Ban 2013, 314). In the private sector, large public pension funds represent 18 per cent of GDP, and they are usually administered by trade union leaders. A larger portion of those pension funds was financing the state bank BNDES which responded to demands made by CUT since the late 1990s, regarding pension funds as instruments of economic development (Silva 2014, 157; Kröger 2012, 895). Thus, the neodevelopmental agenda itself is to a considerable extent administered and managed by trade union leaders, primarily from CUT and Força Sindical. This then in effect means that those trade union leaders are indirectly or directly managers of large construction projects, resulting in tensions with their role as trade union leaders vis-à-vis the construction workers. 5.4 sTrikes in The consTrucTion secTor BeTWeen 2011 and 2014 The strikes in the construction industry since 2011 gained considerable visibility in the media, due to the sheer numbers involved, and the significance of the industrial projects in which they occurred. The number of strikers was high: 540,000 in 2011 and 467,000 in 2012, and 420,000 in 2013. The number of hours not worked due to strikes in construction was comparably low before the strike wave started—576 in 2008, 1133 in 2009 and 1044 in 2010—and then rose steeply to 3537 in 2011, 4649 in 2012 and 5077 in 2013 (DIEESE 2009, 2012, 2015b). Plus, the number of strikes in construction increased from 10, 20 and 14 in 2008, 2009 and 2010 to 52, 62 and 128 in 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively (DIEESE 2009, 2012, 2015b). These numbers hint at longer strikes and repeated conflicts by the same workforce. Often the same workforce goes on strike several times due to the difficulties in enforcing gains that have been won in earlier strikes, since employers do not adhere to agreements made in situations of pressure and upheaval. The strikes in construction have to be located in the general scenario of labour struggles in those years in Brazil: 2013 was the year with the largest number of strikes (2050) between 1978 and 2013 (Linhares 2015, 1).3 3 In 2016, the number of strikes is even higher with 2093 strikes (DIEESE 2017). There is a data gap for the years 2014 and 2015 in the DIEESE database. Linhares, who is compiling related data for trade union research institute DIEESE, estimates that the amount of strikes in 2014 and 2015 will remain around 2000 strikes a year (2015, 1). AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 209 The number of hours not worked due to strikes went up from 86.921 in 2012 to 111.342 in 2013, also a record number.4 In his analysis of this extraordinary cycle of strikes, Rodrigo Linhares shows that the number of hours not worked across all sectors started to grow significantly in 2010, and then saw steep rises every year until 2013 (Linhares 2015, 2; DIEESE 2015b, 43). There also was a shift from the public to the private sector: whereas in 2011 59 per cent of all strikes were conducted by workers in the public sector, in 2012 53 per cent, and in 2013 54 per cent of all strikes occurred in the private sector (DIEESE 2015b, 2). But the number of hours not worked was still larger in the public sector, covering 75 per cent in 2012, and 69 per cent in 2013 (ibid., 3), and the largest group of strikers in the public sector were workers in education (Linhares 2015, 7). During this period, the largest amount of negotiations led to salary increases above inflation (87 per cent in 2011, 95 per cent in 2012 and 86 per cent in 2013) (ibid., 9). In 2011, strikes in construction represented 23 per cent of all strikes in the private sector, up from 7 per cent in 2010 (DIEESE 2013a). During 2012, much of the increase in strikes in the private sector was due to actions by metal workers, but the period 2012–2013 saw an increase of construction workers’ actions, jumping from 66 to 128 strikes, accompanied by an increase of strikes in transport (from 53 to 195 strikes) and in the tourism industry (from 19 to 92 strikes) (Linhares 2015, 4). Since the number of strikers in construction in 2013 was slightly lower than in 2012, the higher number of strikes hints at a diffusion of strikes into more and smaller workplaces. Thus, the strikes of construction workers are part of a larger strike wave that was encompassing almost all economic sectors, and they contribute to the historic surge of strike numbers in 2013, and presumably the two following years. 5.4.1 PAC and the Growth of the Construction Sector One of the central promises and projects of the governments since 2003 was the industrialisation of the North and the Northeast of the country 4 In 2016, also the hours not worked due to strikes increased again relative to 2013, to 140.214 (DIEESE 2017). 210 J. NOWAK where the medium income is about a third compared to the states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The basis for this plan was the programme for accelerated growth, Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC). PAC started in 2007, and found its successor in PAC 2 in 2010. PAC 1 saw an investment of €150 billion between 2007 and 2010; about half of this sum went into energy supply. PAC 2 had the triple volume, €500 billion (Zhouri 2010). The bulk of the PAC programmes is funded by stateowned enterprises like Petrobras and the Brazilian development bank BNDES. The programmes provide infrastructure for further industrialisation with the construction of highways and railway connections, hydroelectric plants in the Amazon areas and contribute to industrialisation with the erection of refineries, steel plants and petrochemical plants in the coastal areas. Due to the PAC programmes the Brazilian construction sector saw a steep growth. Already between 2002 and 2009 the growth of employment in construction was way ahead of the job growth in other sectors (Maia 2012, 228ff). In 2011 the construction sector was comprised of 7.8 million workers, 8.4 per cent of the total working population of Brazil (DIEESE 2013a, 7).5 The growth of the sector in the year 2010 was the biggest since 1986; it grew 11.6 per cent; in 2011 it were only 3.6 and in 2012 1.4 per cent which was still higher than total national growth (2.7 per cent in 2011, 0.9 per cent in 2012) (DIEESE 2013a, 7). Thus, it was not accidental that labour unrest exploded in early 2011 in the construction sector. Before we are looking at the strikes, the composition of the labour force in the construction sector will be evaluated: 42 per cent worked in 2012 as self-employed workers, 22 per cent in irregular employment and only 32 per cent were in regular employment which makes up for 64 per cent of construction workers in precarious conditions (DIEESE 2013a, 11f). But it was the regular employed workers which saw the biggest increase of 24.7 per cent as a subgroup from 2009 to 2011. But the number of self-employed workers grew 17.9 per cent in that period, too (ibid.). Seventy-five per cent 5 For the total number of construction workers, I relate to the numbers used by the trade union think tank DIEESE since they include also construction workers that work without formal employment or as self-employed workers. The numbers on construction workers provided by Maia (2012) and Do Monte et al. (2012) differ considerably amongst each other and are both considerably lower than the ones provided by DIEESE (2013a). AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 211 of the workers in construction earned below 800 reals a month in 2012; the average wage of all construction workers has been 761.27 real (DIEESE 2013a, 26).6 The average wage of the minority of regular workers is almost double with 1484.67 real (ibid., 16). Out of 7.8 million workers in construction in 2011, only 204.491 were female. Another aspect regarding the composition of the labour force is age: 40 per cent of the workers are in the age group of 40–59 years, more than in the total workforce, and two thirds are family fathers (DIEESE 2012, 3). The workforce in this sector has an unusual high percentage of workers with no more than basic education, the participation of black workers is higher than their average share in the regional states and the job rotation is much higher than in other sectors (ibid., 5, 10). Thus, older, black and less formally educated workers are overrepresented in the sector, and almost all of the workers are male. The bulk of the bigger strike movements in 2011 took place in the construction sites of the PAC programme. This subsector of heavy construction accounts for about a third of the total workforce in construction, while almost 50 per cent of construction workers are in urban construction, and the remaining 20 per cent work in the third subsector of specialised construction services. In the sector of heavy construction, wages of regular employed workers are about 30 per cent higher than in urban construction: 1943 real in the average as opposed to 1228 real (DIEESE 2013a, 34f). It is also the sector with the highest share of regular employed workers (DIEESE 2012, 9). But the average monthly wage of 1943 real tends to obscure big wage differences: while in the state of Ceará in the Northeast the average wage of regular workers in heavy construction has been 1484 real in 2011, it was 2313 real in the Northern state of Pará in the same year (DIEESE 2013a, 34f). 5.4.2 The Strike Movements The strike wave in 2011 started at smaller construction sites in the Northeastern state of Bahia in February; 80,000 workers went on strike during that month. It was in mid-March 2011 that the strike wave extended to the first PAC construction site, to Pecém close to Fortaleza in the state of Ceará, where about 6000 workers, many of them from the 6 The minimum wage in Brazil was at 620 real in 2012. 212 J. NOWAK state of Bahia, built a thermoelectric plant; this case is one among the case studies that we deal with in detail in this chapter. The strike was organised without support of the trade union, and workers burnt housing facilities. Within two days the strike wave extended to the construction site of the hydroelectric plant in Jirau in the remote state of Rondônia, in a 3800-kilometre distance from Pecém. The riots of the 20,000 workers in Jirau became a symbol for the labour conflicts in construction due to the vast destruction of housing and transport facilities, with around fifty buses and the offices and apartments of bosses and engineers going up in flames (Zibechi 2011).7 It was here that a Brazilian government used the national guard (Força Nacional)8 for the first time in order to suppress a strike and sent 600 soldiers.9 The strike extended to Santo Antonio in the same region three days later, on 18 March, where 15,000 workers were constructing another hydroelectric plant. On the same day, 34,000 workers in two neighbouring construction sites in Suape close to Recife at the Atlantic coast joined the strike wave, engaged in wide-scale rioting and were oppressed by the national guard, too (see de Rodrigues 2012 for an account on strikes in Suape; Véras 2013, 2014 for accounts of the strikes in Jirau, Santo Antonio and Suape; Campos 2016a for an account of the strikes in Jirau, Santo Antonio and Belo Monte). All in all, in the two months of February and March 2011 180,000 construction workers were on strike. In 2011, 5.6 per cent of all the hours lost due to strikes were in construction (in 2010 it was 2.3 per cent), and more than 25 per cent of all striking workers in that year came from the construction sector (DIEESE 2013b, 28). The average number of participants in a strike in the construction sector in 2011 has been 11,380 which shows the weight of the big construction sites. Seventy-one per cent of the strikes in construction in 2011 lasted until ten days, and only two extended beyond a month in duration (29). The quick extension of the strike wave to the whole national territory without any central organisation can be explained with two aspects that 7 An impression of the amount of arson and property destruction in Jirau is offered by the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ORnmAurbg (13 minutes). 8 The Força Nacional was created in 2004 by President Lula; it is under the direction of the Ministry of Justice. It was also used to contain protests against the Confederations Cup in Belo Horizonte in June 2013. 9 The military has been used quite regularly to break strikes in Brazil, for example, against steel workers in 1995. AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 213 reinforce one another: most of the construction workers are migrant workers that only work for the duration of one project (at the maximum); after that they often change both the employer and the local environment. It is normal to migrate between regional states in Brazil if one is a construction worker (Campos 2016a, 77ff). Due to the migration many workers have contacts throughout different regions of Brazil. The second aspect was the use of mobile phones for communication—text messages and since 2012 increasingly Facebook and other social networks have played a key role in distributing news about the strikes among workers.10 The problems and demands in the big construction sites were quite similar: low quality of food that often went along with intoxication of workers (problems with the food ranged at the top of the demands in 2011, DIEESE 2013a, 30), adverse housing and transport conditions, low wages, lack of medical assistance and a low frequency of holiday leave (usually every three months). The general lack of infrastructure had more significance in remote places in the Amazon areas, but also the semi-urban areas close to the Atlantic coast often did not provide for sufficient basic services, starting with medical assistance, and ranging from a lack of food provision to the availability of ATMs and other financial services. The official trade unions in the construction sites used the strikes as a basis for negotiations and most of the negotiations led to wage increases above inflation. In the bulk of the PAC construction sites workers were represented by unions that form part of the right-wing federation Força Sindical. Although the union federation has seen its foundation in the early 1990s in order to establish a more moderate counterpart to the CUT, some of its member unions like the Sintrapav-PA in the state of Pará operated under the same name during the military dictatorship. Trade unions allied to CUT represent construction workers only in a few of the big government projects—they ousted Força Sindical from representation in Jirau and Santo Antonio in 2011, acquired the representation of 10,000 workers in the industrial district in Três Lagoas in Mato Grosso do Sul in May 2013, and they are the official trade union for construction workers in the industrial complex COMPERJ close to Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, 10 Interviews with Reginaldo de Aguiar Silva, Economist at DIEESE Ceará, 21 July 2014, Fortaleza; Luiz Alberto Junquiera de Carvalho, journalist at CUT, 27 August 2014, São Paulo; Atnagoras Lopes, National Secretariat of Conlutas, 6 September 2014, Belém; Worker 1 at CCBM, 11 September 2014, Altamira. 214 J. NOWAK CUT represents urban construction workers in Vitória in Espírito Santo and in Curitiba in Rio Grande do Sul (see Table 5.1 on strikes in construction). The high number of strikers in the year 2011 goes partly back to an upsurge of strikes in the same workplaces as in February and March of that year: under the pressure of the huge strike wave employers gave in to concessions but then subsequently did not pay the wage increases that were agreed upon. These had to be enforced by renewed strikes. In 2012, there have been new strike movements at some of the areas that saw conflicts in the previous year: the strikes in Suape escalated into riots a second time in the summer of 2012 when the trade union representatives and the management were expelled by workers who pelted stones at them (Véras 2014).11 But there were also new locations of conflict, like the construction site at Belo Monte Dam in the state of Pará that saw strikes and rioting throughout 2012. A survey conducted by Fenatracop (Federação Nacional dos Trabalhadores nas Indústrias da Construção Pesada), the construction workers’ federation of Força Sindical, accounts for the geographic distribution of the strikes in 2012: they took place in nineteen out of twenty-seven regional states. Forty per cent of the striking workers were located in the Northeast of the country, and 48 per cent of the strikes occurred in heavy construction, 36 per cent in industrial assembly and only 15 per cent in urban construction. Thus, we can make a preliminary conclusion that the sector which saw the most spectacular mass strikes in the past years is one with a high amount of precarious labour and a workforce with low remuneration and a more basic education. But the strikes took primarily place in the subsector of heavy construction with a higher rate of regular contracts and comparably higher wages. At the same time, the subsector of heavy construction is characterised by huge agglomerations of workers ranging between 5000 and 35,000 workers in one project. The usual pattern of organisation for these big projects is that the infrastructure (doctors, banks, restaurants) is being constructed after the workers arrive at the construction sites. It is this situation that explains why many of the strikes in construction took place in the subsector of heavy construction: the problems with the lack of 11 A video of some of the events in August 2012, for example, workers setting buses on fire and police firing teargas at workers, can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mWkxUHsQtKs (10 minutes). AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 215 Table 5.1 Strikes in Brazilian construction 2010–2014 (with more than 3000 participants) Company, city, state Number of strikers UTE, Pecém, Ceará 3200 Suape, Petrochemical complex, Pernambuco 7000 São Luis, Maranhão, 90,000 different companies in urban construction Salvador de Bahia, Bahia, 80,000 six sites in urban construction Abreu e Lima, 4800 Petrochemical complex, Pernambuco UTE Pecém, Ceará 6000 UHE Jirau, Rondônia 22,000 UHE Santo Antonio 16,000 UHE São Domingos, Mato Grosso do Sul Suape, Petrochemical complex, Pernambuco Abreu e Lima, Petrochemical complex, Pernambuco Fortaleza, Ceará, different employers Cubatão, São Paulo, 18 companies for the construction of two refineries of Petrobras 3000 14,000 20,000 70,000 4500 Strike period Events and results 11–17 August Bonus for workers, one more 2010 holiday every ninety days, family members included in health plan 25 January to Riots, no results 14 February 2011 26 January to Wage increases 2 February 2011 2 February to 9.47 per cent wage increase 15 March 2011 7–16 One worker hit by police bullet, February no results, workers form 2011 commission 13–25 March 9.36 per cent wage increase 2011 15 March to Large-scale property destruction mid-April 2011 18 March to 5 per cent wage increase; five days mid-April of leave every three months; 2011 comprehensive health insurance 24–31 March Riots, arson and property 2011 destruction, eighty workers arrested 18–30 March 100 per cent bonus for overtime 2011 18–30 March 100 per cent bonus for overtime 2011 18 April to 2 May 2011 19–25 May 2011 Inner-city street blockades by workers, and clashes with police; 9.8 per cent wage increase and 10 per cent increase of salary-level categories 10 per cent wage increase, and three days of leave every three months (continued) 216 J. NOWAK Table 5.1 (continued) Company, city, state Number of strikers Strike period Events and results Suape and Abreu de Lima, Pernambuco Três Lagoas, Mato Grosso de Sul, several companies Different locations in Pernambuco, construction of train line Transnordestina Belém, Ananindeua, Marituba, Pará, different companies in urban construction Recife, Pernambuco, several employers in urban construction 30,000 2–5 August 2011 9–28 August 2011 11 per cent wage increase, holidays every ninety days Unclear results 3000 3 August 2011 No results, strike declared illegal 5000 6–15 September 2011 Street blockades of workers, and clashes with police; differentiated wage increases 5000 70,000 Comperj refinery, Rio de Janeiro 8500 Comperj refinery, Rio de Janeiro 10,000 São Luis, Maranhão, several employers in urban construction Maranhão, workers in housing programme Minha Casa, Minha Vida Teresina, Piauí, several employers in urban construction Três Lagoas, Mato Grosso do Sul, workers contracted by Eldorado Brasil de Celulose e Papel Comperj refinery, Rio de Janeiro 28,000 30,000 8000 8000 12,000 31 October to Street battles between police and 4 November strikers; 12 per cent wage increase, 2011 improved food provision and safety measures 7–18 Health plan for workers, and paid November holidays 2011 8–19 Demand of readmission of December thirty-five fired workers; issue 2011 remained unresolved 19 December 7.3 per cent wage increase 2011 to 18 January 2012 20 December 7.3 per cent wage increase 2011 to 18 January 2012 16–20 10 per cent wage increase; January 2012 improvements in food provision 25 January to 2 February 2012 Police shoot rubber bullets and sound bombs at workers; five days of leave every ninety days 10 February to 3 March 2012 No result (continued) AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 217 Table 5.1 (continued) Company, city, state Number of strikers Strike period Events and results Suape, Petrochemical complex, Pernambuco 10,000 Bonus payments for 2011 UHE Jirau, and UHE Santo Antonio, Rondônia Bahia, Petrobras oil platform São Roque do Paraguaçu UHE Belo Monte, Pará 20,000 17–23 February 2012 9 March to 2 April 2012 3000 20 March to 2 April 2012 7 per cent wage increase for salaries until 1500 reals, 5 per cent increase for higher salaries 10.5 per cent wage increase; higher compensation for overtime 8000 28 March to 5 April 2012 9 April to 9 May 2012 12–26 April 2012 Better infrastructure, bonus payments, health insurance 10.5 per cent wage increase, better holiday regulations 10.5 per cent wage increase; higher compensation for overtime 23 April to 5 May 2012 7–24 May 2012 No result, strike was banned Several workers arrested; no results 59,000 8 May to 5 June 2012 Differentiated wage increases across salary levels 18,000 14–25 May 2012 9 per cent wage increase 31 May to 25 June 2012 4–11 June 2012 Improvement in housing facilities for workers from outside 14.8 per cent wage increase for lower wage levels, and 10 per cent for all other workers No result Comperj refinery, Rio de 15,000 Janeiro Salvador de Bahia, Bahia, 30,000 300 sites in industrial construction UHE Belo Monte, Pará 7000 Vitória, Espírito Santo, several employers in urban construction Fortaleza, Ceará, about 650 sites in urban construction Cubatão, São Paulo, 30 employers in industrial construction Betim, Minas Gerais, refinery Regap Ceará, several employers in heavy construction 35,000 5000 8000 Suape, Petrochemical 8000 complex, Pernambuco Suape and Abreu e Lima, 51,000 petrochemical complex, Pernambuco 18–26 June 2012 1–16 August 2012 Riots against official trade union leaders, workers strike against contract approved by union; 70 per cent of strike days paid by employer (continued) 218 J. NOWAK Table 5.1 (continued) Company, city, state Number of strikers Belém, Ananindeua, 12,000 Marituba, Barcarena, Pará, different companies in urban construction Suape and Abreu e Lima, 54,000 petrochemical complex, Pernambuco Paulistana, Piauí, workers 3700 for the Transnordestina railway Espírito Santo, several 12,000 employers in urban construction UHE Belo Monte, Pará 14,000 Bahia, subcontracted workers of energy company COELBA Três Lagoas, Mato Grosso do Sul, workers of a Petrobras factory Teresina, Piauí, several employers in urban construction Comperj refinery, Rio de Janeiro 15,000 Maracana football stadium, Rio de Janeiro Maravilha Port, Rio de Janeiro UHE Jirau, UHE Santo Antonio, Rondônia UHE Belo Monte, Pará 3500 15,000 25,000 5500 3500 26,000 10,000 Strike period Events and results 4–20 September 2012 9.2 per cent wage increase for qualified workers, 8.5 per cent wage increase for supervisors 30 October to 22 November 2012 31 October to 20 November 2012 12 November to 14 December 2012 12–22 November 2012 New categorisation of workers in payment scales 19–24 November 2012 15–25 January 2013 28 January to 5 February 2013 8–19 February 2013 10.5 per cent wage increase 10 per cent increase of salary categories, better compensation for overtime Major rioting, five workers arrested, holidays every three months instead of six, 11 per cent wage increase 8.5 per cent wage increase Improvement of housing and transport facilities, mobile network 9 per cent wage increase 10 per cent wage increase for workers with a salary until 5000 reals, and 7 per cent increase for workers above this 11 per cent wage increase, 80 per cent bonus for overtime No result 18 February 2013 13 March to 12 April 2013 2–12 April 11 per cent wage increase 2013 5–9 April No results 2013 (continued) AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 219 Table 5.1 (continued) Company, city, state Campinas, São Paulo, airport Viracopos Cubatão, São Paulo Number of strikers Strike period Events and results 4000 30 April to 8 May 2013 Fourteen workers injured due to lack of work safety; 7 per cent wage increase 10 per cent wage increase 10,000 Sergipe, workers in urban 15,000 construction Paulínia, São Paulo, 10,000 workers at refinery Replan Mato Grosso do Sul, 15,000 various employers Três Lagoas, Mato 6000 Grosso do Sul, workers for Petrobras factory Guarulhos, São Paulo, OAS construction company at airport CSP, Pecém, Ceará 3000 4500 Cubatão, São Paulo, 4000 workers in industrial construction Belém, Ananindeua, 11,000 Marituba, Pará, different companies in urban construction São José dos Campos, 5800 São Paulo, subcontracted workers for refinery Revap CSP, Pecém, Ceará 4500 6–20 May 2013 13–29 May 2013 13–22 May 2013 9 per cent wage increase 10 per cent wage increase 5–12 June 2013 17 June to 3 July 2013 Workers mix up with street protests; 12 per cent wage increase Protest against isolated and subhuman housing facilities without mobile connection; the strike is declared illegal and workers set housing facilities on fire; two arrests and 119 dismissed workers 27 June 2013 Protest against night shifts and forced overtime; employer attended to demands 16 July to 8 Demand for respect of collective August 2013 contract by employer; employer promises to attend to running contract 5–22 August 9 per cent wage increase 2013 2–10 September 2013 9 per cent wage increase 23–25 September 2013 Overtime payments granted, fifty percent of dismissed workers reinstated 25–30 September 2013 Demand for 30 per cent bonus for dangerous working conditions; workers set fire to a canteen; no result (continued) 220 J. NOWAK Table 5.1 (continued) Company, city, state Paulínia, São Paulo, subcontracted workers for a refinery Pernambuco, workers in urban construction Campinas, São Paulo, workers for Viracopos airport Number of strikers 8000 55,000 6500 UHE Belo Monte, Pará 27,000 Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, employers in urban construction 90,000 Caruaru, Pernambuco, employers in urban construction CSP, Pecém, Ceará 4600 5000 Comperj, Rio de Janeiro 15,000 Triunfo, Rio Grande do Sul, subcontracted workers of Petroquimico do Sul Bahia, different companies in urban construction Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, different sites CSP, Pecém 3500 Fortaleza, Ceará, different companies in urban construction Strike period Events and results 3–21 October No results 2013 28 October to 1 November 2013 25–30 October 2013 9–29 November 2013 29 November to 15 December 2013 3–4 December 2013 15–31 January 2014 5 February to 17 March 2014 13–14 February 2013 10 per cent wage increase, higher compensation for overtime Work stoppage after one worker dies at an accident; employer promises improvement of work safety and food provision 11 per cent wage increase, 12 per cent increase of bonus Clashes of workers with police; 8.5 per cent wage increase 9 per cent wage increase Payment of delayed wages by employer Two workers are shot at by security forces; 9 per cent wage increase Improvement in transport facilities and food provision 35,000 24 March to 7 April 2014 8 per cent wage increase 5000 23 April to 2 May 2014 8 per cent wage increase 7000 5 June to 21 July 2014 23 June to 2 July 2014 Payment of transport period (horas in itinere) Workers attacked by military police on 25 June; 9 per cent wage increase. 15,000 (continued) AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 221 Table 5.1 (continued) Company, city, state Belém, Pará, different companies in urban construction CSP, Pecém, Ceará Number of strikers Strike period Events and results 8000 4–18 September 2014 6–8 October 2014 7 per cent wage increase 8000 Horas in itinere paid with 60 per cent bonus, and strike days for June–July 2014 paid by employer Sources: Véras (2013, 2014); labournet.de; DIEESE database, own research UHE = hydroelectric plant proper infrastructure were tantamount and workers gained a certain power due to their sheer number—and given the demand by employers for a continual supply of thousands of workers. A third aspect was the experiences with labour unrest that circulated as well: many workers in the Belo Monte Dam for example had been working previously in Jirau and experienced the strike movement there. The strike movements in construction were a national movement from below, but the strikes also had quite important regional characteristics. In order to provide for the interplay of the national and regional tendencies, I will present two case studies from my fieldwork in a more detailed way: the strikes at two construction sites in Pecém close to Fortaleza—the strike at a thermoelectric plant in March 2011, and a strike at the construction site of a steel plant of Korean multinational Posco in June and July 2014— and the strikes during the construction of the Belo Monte Dam in April and November 2012. 5.4.2.1 The Mesa Nacional A first response of the federal government to the surge of strikes in construction was to call out to trade unions and employers in order to establish a common framework for the government projects that ran under PAC, but it was open for public works outside of PAC, too. A working group was established already in April 2011, one month after the first big strike wave in construction, and after a number of meetings, the compromise was announced to the public in March 2012, valid until the end of 2014. Its official title is Compromisso Nacional para Aperfeiçoar as Condições de Trabalho na Indústria da Construção—National Accord for the Betterment 222 J. NOWAK of Working Conditions in the Construction Industry, but it was usually called Mesa Nacional de Construção (MNC). The MNC was modelled after a similar accord in the sugarcane industry that was instituted in 2008, and found the adhesion of 180 industrial units until 2012 (Unica 2012). The MNC was signed by the Minister of the Presidency, Gilberto Carvalho, employer organisations and the trade union federations CUT, Força Sindical, CTB, CGTB, NCST and UGT. The MNC established a framework of rules for working conditions, education of workers, recruitment and representation of workers. If the workforce in a construction unit exceeds 200 workers, the framework foresees one workers’ representative in a commission, and the size of the commission will have one more worker for every 500 additional workers employed, with a maximum of seven members in one commission. The members of the commission are supposed to be determined by the trade union responsible for the sector with a mandate of six months, and will enjoy protection against dismissal during this period (Carvalho 2012a). Conlutas joined the meetings at first, but did not sign the accord since they demanded that the members of commissions should be elected by workers and join protection against dismissal for a minimum of one year. Representatives of Conlutas also demanded that the participation for companies should not be voluntary but an obligation.12 A longer period of protection for members of the commission was also demanded by participants of DIEESE, the national trade union think tank.13 DIEESE was not a signatory of the MNC but gave advice during the meetings held. During the negotiations, the question of the representation of workers proved to be the most serious conflict between participants of the MNC, and the employers of urban construction were the fiercest opponents of any representation. CUT was also in favour of an election of the commission by the workers at the workplace. The issue was so contentious that another round of negotiations about the details of how commissions are installed had started right after the main document of MNC was finalised.14 Interview with Atnagoras Lopes. Interview with Reginaldo de Aguiar Silva. 14 Crystiane Leandro Peres from CUT participated in the process of implementation and negotiation about the MNC as assessor of the Secretariat of Employment Relations in CUT, a post she continued to hold at the time of the interview held on 27 August 2014, São Paulo. 12 13 AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 223 One of the core problems of MNC is that the implementation happens on an ad hoc basis if employers, unions or workers are willing to adhere. Crystiane Leandro Peres said in an interview that the control of an effective implementation would be the responsibility of the trade unions,15 while other experts emphasised that trade unions lack the resources to do this work.16 The accord was implemented in the construction sites of hydroelectric plants Jirau and Santo Antonio, the place of the first big riots in construction in 2011, in November 2012. The national president of CUT, Vagner Freitas, was present when the procedures for implementation were signed (Carvalho 2012a, b). A study of DIEESE estimates that 80,000 construction workers were covered by MNC in mid-2013 in twenty-four industrial projects of which only ten had installed workers commissions (2013c, 10, 13f). Of those ten commissions, three were in Jirau, one in Santo Antonio, and one in Teles Pires, thus half of them were in hydroelectric projects. All ten commissions together represented 40,000 workers, of which 34,000 worked in the hydroelectric plants (ibid., 18–20). The Mesa Nacional was not implemented in any of the three industrial projects covered in the case studies of this book. Various interviewees emphasised the lack of engagement of the government to implement the MNC.17 In the state of Ceará there was no adhesion to the MNC in any PAC project, and representatives of DIEESE urged the government to intervene in this regard, but the call remained unanswered.18 5.4.3 Industrial Development and the Construction Industry in the North and Northeast of Brazil The growth of the construction industry was more rapid in the regions of the North and the Northeast of Brazil than in other regions of the country. While the number of construction workers doubled in most Brazilian states in the period of 2000–2009, it more than doubled in the Northeast and almost tripled in the Northern region (Do Monte et al. 2012, 334). Interview with Crystiane Leandro Peres. Interview with Reginaldo de Aguiar Silva. 17 Interviews with Reginaldo de Aguiar Silva; Avelino Ganzer, 15 September 2014, Altamira; Raimundo Nonato Gomes, President of SINTEPAV-CE, 23 July 2014, Fortaleza. 18 Interview with Reginaldo de Aguiar Silva. 15 16 224 J. NOWAK This growth of the construction industry occurred in the context of a general industrial development of these two regions: industrial employment grew significantly in the Northeast from 663,942 workers in 2000 to 1,105,325 in 2009 (Fernandes et al. 2012, 292), and the industry in the Northeast and North was growing above the national medium between 2003 and 2009 (ibid., 301). The growth in the construction industry in both regions was significantly higher than the average growth in these regions—the growth of employment in construction in the North was around 21 per cent between 2005 and 2009, and 16.5 per cent in the Northeast (Do Monte et al. 2012, 337). 5.4.4 Strikes in Pecém in the State of Ceará The strikes in the construction industry that were taking place in Pecém—a village in a one-hour distance from the metropolitan area of Fortaleza with three million inhabitants (see Map 5.1)—were among the earliest and the latest in the current strike wave: the strike at the thermoelectric plant was the first one in one of the works of PAC in the strike wave in spring 2011—and in the summer of 2014 one of the two strike movements taking place during the football World Cup (the second one was in urban construction in Fortaleza) was taking place in Pecém, too—lasting more than a month. Before I will go into the particular strike movements, I will introduce the context of the state of Ceará. It has eight million inhabitants, of which almost 50 per cent live in the metropolitan area of the capital city, Fortaleza. The state does not have any significant industrial activity so far, apart from textile and shoe factories. The medium income is one of the lowest in Brazil, ranging in various years either in the lowest or second lowest position among all regional states. The overall growth in the state of Ceará has been more pronounced than the national average with a growth of the GDP at 8.5 per cent in 2008, 3.1 per cent in 2009 and 7.9 per cent in 2010 (Aparicio and de Quieroz 2012, 161, 168f). The growth of the construction sector in the state of Ceará was more pronounced than in other regional states in the Northeast—it grew more than 100 per cent in terms of workers employed, from 27,746 workers in 2000 to 58,435 workers in 2009 (Do Monte et al. 2012, 339). The creation of a new industrial area in the region of the village of Pecém was planned since the 1970s and as a first step the port was constructed between 1995 and 1999, and went operational in 2002 (Rodrigues AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 225 Map 5.1 Map of the state of Ceará, showing the location of regional capital Fortaleza, Caucaia, where some of the interviewed workers lived; and Pecém where both construction sites are located and Souza Filho 2007). The industrial port of Pecém has been seen as the first cornerstone for the development of the entire region, also due to its relative proximity to North America. The new industrial area in Pecém is 226 J. NOWAK a constant reference in newspapers and in election campaigns, and it is widely regarded as an important centre for future economic development in the state of Ceará. After the port, the construction of a thermoelectric plant between 2009 and 2013 was the first major private investment project in Pecém with a volume of 2 billion and 400 million real, and the regional state of Ceará planned to spend 9 million real for the governance and environmental monitoring of the project (Cearaportos 2009). 5.4.4.1 The Strikes at the Thermoelectric Plant UTE Pecém The energy companies EDP Energias do Brasil (a subsidiary of Portugal’s biggest energy provider with a 21 per cent minority stake by the Chinese state-owned Three Gorges Corporation) and MPX Energia S.A.19 (at the time owned by billionaire Eike Batista and with a large minority stake of German E.ON) contracted the consortium MABE for the construction of the thermoelectric plant, Usina Termelétrica Energia Pecém (UTE). Both energy companies have a 50 per cent stake in the coal-fired plant with a capacity of 720 Megawatt. The MABE consortium consisted of the Italian engineering and energy company Maire Tecnimont and Portuguese engineering company Efacec.20 The project was part of the PAC programme which grants state and federal tax incentives to private investment in the PAC framework (IDB 2009). Major equipment like boilers came from Efacec, German company Siemens and UK-located company Doosan Babcock, a subsidiary of South Korean Doosan Group since 2006 (IDB 2009, 3). Most coal for the plant is supposed to be shipped from Colombia through the nearby port in Pecém. The thermoelectric plant turned the state of Ceará from an importer of electric energy to an exporter. The operation of the plant is supposed to create 120 direct jobs (Assembleia 2011, 31). The construction took place in an area where a formerly unknown indigenous nation called Anacé settled, consisting of about 530 families, plus a similar number of non-indigenous inhabitants. A larger investigation undertaken before construction in 2008 notes that the planned relo19 MPX Energia S.A. was renamed Eneva in 2013. In the same year, E.ON acquired a larger stake in the company adding up to 36 per cent, which was later extended to 49 per cent. Today, Eneva is commonly seen as a subsidiary of German multinational E.ON. 20 The majority of the shares of Efacec were acquired in 2015 by Maltese company Winterfell Industries, a shell company owned by Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s then President José Eduardo dos Santos (Vella 2015). AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 227 cation area was quite unattractive in terms of soil and other conditions. It also elaborates that the threat of relocation reinforced the indigenous identity of the people in the settlements that had not seen the necessity to declare themselves as a separate nation before the industrial projects went underway (Meireles et al. 2012, 139f, 193).21 The recommendation of the Ministério Público Federal and the authors of the report is to stop any development plans in this area and to demarcate the territory of the Anacé—this recommendation had not been followed by the government of the state of Ceará (ibid., 261, 226). Several interviewees remarked that some of the displaced indigenous and non-indigenous people entered the workforce of the construction site; the relocation area was just opposite from the construction site stretching towards South.22 Two smaller strikes had taken place at the construction site in April and August 2010. On 9 August 2010, 3200 workers had gone on strike in order to claim the adherence of employers to the collective contract that had been signed in April of the same year. The workers had decided the strike in an assembly of the union Sintepav-CE, Sindicato dos Trabalhadores nas Indústrias da Construção de Estradas, Pavimentação e Obras de Terraplanagem em Geral no Estado do Ceará, after an ultimatum of ninety days to employers had run out. The company went to court, and the strike was declared illegal after three days on 12 August; nonetheless the workers maintained the strike until 17 August when a deal was struck between the union and the consortium, including a bonus for workers and one more day of leave. Even after the official end of the strike, 1500 workers kept on protesting and displayed their discomfort with the deal (Ximenes 2010; De Paula 2010). It was the third strike that started on 13 March 2011 which was the first of the whole series of strikes in public works of PAC that rolled across Brazil in the following months and years. The strike of about 6000 workers started from the grassroots of the workers and went on for twelve days.23 It was during the third day of the strike, on 15 March, that fifty striking workers burnt housing facilities of more than 500 workers and 21 Nonetheless, the Anacé had sent representatives to meetings of the organisations APOINME (Articulação dos Povos Indígenas no Nordeste, Minas Gerais e Espírito Santo) and COPICE (Coordenação dos Povos e Organizações Indígenas no Ceará), see Meireles et al. (2012, 139). 22 Interview with Maria do Soccoro Costa Rodrigues, historian, 22 July 2014, Fortaleza. 23 Interview with Raimundo Nonato Gomes. 228 J. NOWAK destroyed buses and cars in the area of São Gonçalo de Amarante, the village most close to the construction site. A manager of MPX was cited in the local press: “What has not been burned in the fire was destroyed with violence, including the sports facilities of the housing area”24 (Serpa 2011). The employer offered a wage hike of 6.5 per cent which was rejected by the workers. The trade union Sintepav-CE finally negotiated a wage hike of 9.36 per cent and a more favourable regulation for holidays. The results led to a hike of real wages by 3 per cent (Força Sindical 2011). One of the incidents that created publicity for the strike was that one of the strike leaders, fifty-two-year-old Antonio Manoel Lopes from the state of Maranhão, was imprisoned on 20 March for eighteen days with the charge of initiating the destruction of housing facilities. Lopes quickly became known under his nickname Lulinha, a reference to former union leader Lula. Lulinha had joined the construction site just two months ahead and had been living in one of the rooms that were burnt on March 15. He said in an interview with the local press that another worker called ‘Ronaldinho’ started the strike by agitating the workers, and that Lopes then joined a commission that had formed during the strike in order to take up negotiations (de Melo 2011). A solidarity committee that was organised by the Associacão 64/68 Anistia, a group of former political prisoners under the military dictatorship, paid a visit to the imprisoned worker on 3 April 2011. The committee consisted of thirteen persons, members of the Associacão 64/68 Anistia, leaders and deputies of left-wing parties including PT, a representative of the organisation of rural workers MST (Movimento de Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) and other social movement activists.25 The local bishop Dom Edmilson Cruz could not attend but spoke with Lopes on the phone during the visit. There were five others prison mandates against strikers which were not executed since those workers went missing. The written report about the visit produced by Associacão 64/68 Anistia notes the statements of workers about the housing conditions without air conditioners or ventilators, the lack of washing 24 Own translation, in the original: “o que não queimou no incêndio foi destruído a porretadas, inclusive a academia de ginástica do alojamento” (Ximenes 2011). 25 Document: Mario Albuquerque: Relatório da Visita ão Preso Político Antonio Manoel Lopes, 4 April 2011; interview with Mario Albuquerque, Associacão 64/68 Anistia, 8 October 2014, Fortaleza. AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 229 facilities and the insufficient and slow supply of food.26 Lopes was released on 7 April. Like any other major strike in Brazil, it went along with the dismissal of several hundred workers who were regarded as strike leaders. Dismissals during a strike are usually not a part of collective negotiations in the sector and juridical measures against dismissals are often only successful for a part of the workers.27 A strike of this size was a completely new phenomenon for the state of Ceará with its lack of big industry. Union representatives underlined that workers from other states that had previous experiences with strikes had started the movement; workers in Ceará were seen as inexperienced in strikes. Union officials estimated that half of the workers in the construction of UTE came from other regional states, about 30 per cent from the state of Bahia, 15 per cent from Rio Grande do Norte and 5 per cent from Rio de Janeiro.28 A collective agreement and the liberation of the imprisoned worker could be attained with the intervention of the Minister of Labour, Carlos Lupi, who joined the signing of the collective contract on 8 April 2011 (Força Sindical 2011).29 The agreement as published by the trade union shows that there were eleven wage levels, ranging from helpers (2.73 reals an hour, 600 reals a month) to welders (8.51 reals an hour, 1872 reals a month) (ibid.). The strike in Pecém in March 2011 was not the last one; the construction site of the thermoelectric plant saw thirteen strikes in total during four years, but it was the most decisive one. The agreement also came with the promise to install ventilators and washing facilities in the housing areas within thirty days, the payment of strike days and a differentiated regulaDocument: Mario Albuquerque: Relatório da Visita ão Preso Político Antonio Manoel Lopes, 4 April 2011. 27 Interviews with Reginaldo de Aguiar Silva; Worker Pecèm 13, 30 July 2014, Pecém. 28 Interview with Bruna Frazão, DIEESE, Subseção SINTEPAV-CE, 22 July 2014, Fortaleza; Worker Pecém 1, 23 July 2014, Pecém. 29 Carlos Lupi of the social-democratic party Partido Democrático Trabalhista (PDT), formerly led by historical political leader Leonel Brizola, was Labour Minister from March 2007 until December 2011. At the meeting on 8 April 2011 he reportedly said: “I just gave my phone number to the folks from the trade union, if there is any issue I will take an airplane and come here” (own translation) (“Já dei meus telefones ao pessoal do sindicato, qualquer coisa pego um avião e venho até aqui”) (Força Sindical 2011). The PDT supported the PT-led governments. Lupi was forced to give up his post after an ethics commission of the federal presidential office found hints that he was misusing public funds. 26 230 J. NOWAK tion of holidays for workers outside the region which is conceded every ninety workdays: three days for workers who reside in a distance of 500–1000 kilometres, and five days for workers who live more than 1000 kilometres away—and the companies have to cover the travel cost via bus or via plane in case of a 2000-kilometre distance from the workplace (Força Sindical 2011). As a follow-up, workers were able to get a 30 per cent extra salary because of dangerous conditions when the first turbine was ready to operate in November 2011. The running of the turbine creates a legal basis for this incentive. In March 2012, another strike for twenty-six days was able to attain a 100 per cent wage increase for work on Saturdays, a general wage increase of 13 per cent and a full health insurance for the workers.30 The construction site employed 8000 workers then (the peak was 9000). During the strikes, the workers had created commissions of six workers, elected by the workers within every larger company in the construction site. Raimundo Nonato Gomes, president of trade union Sintepav-CE, explained that this pacified the situation and enabled the workers to lead smaller strikes in the single companies that were directed at specific issues, while “earlier when one workplace went on strike, all went on strike, it was complicated” (own translation).31 This means the formation of the workers’ commissions enabled to address more specific issues at the single workplaces of the more than fifty companies, but it also enabled the trade union to control the conflicts to a bigger extent, by working hand in hand with the leaders that had emerged from the strike in March 2011. Thus, we see here that Sintepav-CE was only able to attain some amount of control of the strikers by linking up with the informal workplace organisation. It was an unusual event that the national strike wave in the PAC construction sites started in a region in which major industrial strikes had been unknown until that time—but this event was also characteristic of the whole strike wave that brought investment and industrial unrest to a number of places: in this respect, industrialisation of the North and Northeast also went along with the introduction of new types of social conflicts. Interview with Raimundo Nonato Gomes. Interview with Raimundo Nonato Gomes, in the original: “antes se parava em um local parava tudo, era complicado.” 30 31 AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 231 5.4.4.2 The Strikes at the Steel Plant CSP After the conclusion of the thermoelectric plant in 2013, it was the South Korean company Posco that started construction of a steel plant known as CSP (Companhia Siderurgica de Pecém) in the same area, and many workers who worked and struck in the former construction site entered the new one.32 The steel factory is a joint venture of Brazilian mining giant Vale which holds 50 per cent, of Posco (20 per cent) and of South Korean steel company Dongkuk (30 per cent). Steel giant Posco formed its own construction company Posco Engenharia e Construção do Brasil (Posco E & C) and is operating with both Brazilian and Korean subcontracted companies, the major ones being Daeah, Kumyang, Samjin, S.P., Makro, Cortez and Braco, but none of the ‘big five’ Brazilian construction companies. The number of construction workers peaked with 17,000 workers, and the construction took four years, from 2012 to 2016. About 120 companies were present at the site under the direction of Posco E & C.33 The volume of this investment was about five times higher than the one for UTE with 11 billion real, at that time the biggest private investment in Ceará. With a production capacity of three million tonnes of steel per year, it is one of the ten biggest steel factories in Brazil (Manechini 2012). Direct employment of the steel factory in operation has been estimated with 5500 workers, plus 9000 indirect workers in supply, waste disposal and other outsourced parts of production (Assembleia 2011, 31). The first bigger strike in CSP occurred on 15 January 2014 and lasted thirty days, aimed at negotiation of the yearly wage increase.34 This strike was organised by the trade union Sintepav-CE. Workers had blocked roads with burning tyres. When the company cancelled the bus service to the premises on 23 January, workers made a protest march to the village of Pecém and held their strike meeting there. Since many of the regulations negotiated in the strike in early 2014 had not been implemented by most of the companies in CSP, and the workers were demanding an additional payment for the time that they needed to get to the workplace, a new strike was called on 5 June 2014 by Out of twenty-two workers interviewed that were working in the construction of CSP, eight had been already working in the construction of UTE. 33 Interview with Worker Pecém 2, 25 July 2014, Pecém. 34 Interview with Worker Pecém 2. 32 232 J. NOWAK Sintepav-CE, lasting thirty-five days until 10 July. In this period, 8000 workers worked in the construction of CSP, and due to the president of Sintepav-CE about half of them had already worked in the construction of the UTE.35 One background for this strike was the lack of transport facilities for workers and thus a long time of commuting, but also the general climate of work relations in CSP that was perceived as worse than in the previous construction site of UTE by interviewed workers. The strike ended with a wage increase of 13 per cent.36 Another factor that was different in CSP from UTE was the employment of Korean workers. About 660 Korean workers were working officially at the site, but since a much higher number of 2600 visas for Koreans were granted at the airport in Fortaleza in the period of 2013/2014, observers guessed that more Korean workers were employed at CSP illegally, since most of them entered Brazil on tourist visas.37 Nevertheless, some of these Korean workers tried to enter the premises during the strike on 26 June which led to scuffles with striking workers who burnt two cars of the company.38 At this point, the military police intervened, and one vehicle of the military police caught fire while trying to extinguish it and ten more police cars were damaged by workers. Also fire fighters that got involved were attacked with stones by workers when they tried to extinct the fire.39 In the middle of the confusion, five or six busses with workers left the area, and the military police detained all of these sixty-eight workInterview with Raimundo Nonato Gomes. Interviews with Worker Pecèm 1; Worker Pecèm 4, 25 July 2014, Pecèm. 37 Interview with Francisco Gérson Marques de Lima, Procurador at Ministério Público de Trabalho, 10 October 2014, Fortaleza. 38 By a coincidence, striking construction workers in nearby Fortaleza building a huge shopping mall were attacked by police with teargas grenades on the same day (26 June). This strike was organized by another trade union, STICCRMF, and there was no immediate connection of both events—interview with Laercio Cleiton, STICCRMF, 1 October 2014, Fortaleza and the following video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtjPqjkPxck under the title “Grevistas são atacados por Batalhão de Choque no RioMar”, video by Nigeria Midia, total length is fourteen minutes. 39 A video that documents events from 26 June 2014 shows a burning construction vehicle and workers keeping the police at distance by throwing stones (1.00), workers blocking firefighters to move further (2.00), police attacking workers with tear gas (3.00) and four burnt out cars, two burnt out construction machines and about fifteen more damaged cars. The police vehicle that caught fire appears at the end of the video (6.30). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXLpJs9ZrJI under the title “Greve na CSP”, total length is seven minutes. 35 36 AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 233 ers, who got sacked a few days later.40 The trade union paid 48,000 reals to get the workers out of arrest on bail.41 Police later confirmed ten damaged and three burnt cars on the site (Globo 2014). The trade union’s version of the events was that the rioters were coming from outside and did not belong to the workforce.42 Two days before, on 24 June, workers had blocked the access road to the construction site with a barricade of burning tyres which was subsequently removed by military police (Globo 2014). The strike went on for more than a month since the company Posco P&E refused to negotiate. It was only after the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Public Affairs intervened that the employer agreed to enter into negotiations.43 These were concluded in early October 2014, with a fulfilment of the main demand: the company obliged itself to pay one hour per day for the time of transport to work, and this hour will be paid as overtime. A second issue that could be attained in the negotiations was the full payment of the days on strike in June and July to all workers. About 600 workers were dismissed after the strike.44 In March 2015, the trade union negotiated a 13 per cent wage hike and health insurance coverage for the families of workers and a variety of other benefits after a few days of strike (Sintepav-CE 2015). The 30 per cent bonus for dangerous working conditions could only be established in October 2015 after seven days of strike. In March 2016 the union could negotiate a 15 per cent wage hike, holidays every eighty days and dental care for the workers and their families (Sintepav-CE 2016a). The construction concluded in summer 2016. The regional composition of the workforce was slightly different at CSP compared to UTE, with less workers from Bahia: about half of the workers came from Ceará, 20 per cent from Rio Grande do Norte, 15 per cent from Piauí, 10 per cent from Bahia and about 5 per cent from the state of São Paulo.45 40 Interview with Worker Pecèm 18, 29 September 2014, Caucaia; “Sessenta e sete pessoas sao presas em manifestacao no Pecém, no CE”, 26 June 2014, http://g1.globo.com/ceara/ noticia/2014/06/sessenta-e-sete-pessoas-sao-presas-em-manifestacao-no-pecem-no-ce. html 41 Interview with Worker Pecèm 1. 42 Interview with Raimundo Nonato Gomes. 43 Interview with Worker Pecèm 2. 44 Interview with Raimundo Nonato Gomes. 45 Interview with Worker Pecèm 1. 234 J. NOWAK In the following sections, I will evaluate the strike movements at UTE and CSP in light of the questions we have posed at the beginning of this chapter. Grievances The grievances on both construction sites were on the one hand related to core workplace issues such as wage arrears, but also to issues relating to the wider infrastructure such as food provision, transport and housing conditions. It is a specific feature of large construction projects that the infrastructure around the workplace becomes a workplace issue, too, since both are intimately connected. Thus, lack of such infrastructure will be blamed on the employer who is expected to take care of it, and the rage of workers is then immediately directed at low-quality infrastructure, resulting in the destruction of transport and housing facilities during the strike in Pecém in March 2011. The main grievances were about the lack of infrastructure for food (Worker 12, 20, 5)—which led to not having time to eat due to long waiting lines, wage arrears and the lack of promised bonus and overtime payments.46 For example, Worker 5 said that about 400 workers were waiting for wages being paid since two months and Worker 6 reported that companies asked workers to wait for wage payments for three months, and subsequently sacked all workers who did not accept this ‘offer’.47 While various workers reported to have had better working conditions in the UTE or in the port before they entered the construction of CSP,48 a steel worker said that he earned 1200 real without extra hours at CSP, while he had earned 790 reals at a steel factory earlier. In spite of the high amount of accidents at CSP and the lack of proper work security, he perceived that the steel factory was a more dangerous workplace: “In the Cearense49 it was heavier, there were more chemicals (…) the iron dust, the danger was bigger. There were people that were pulled inside of a machine and they were not even buried. Because nothing was left of the guy, the machine ate 46 Interviews with Worker Pecèm 5, 29 July 2014, Pecém; Worker Pecèm 12, 30 July 2014, Pecém; Worker Pecèm 20, 7 October 2014, Caucaia. 47 Interviews with Worker Pecèm 5; Worker Pecèm 6, 29 July 2014, Pecém. 48 Interviews with Worker Pecèm 4; Worker Pecèm 6. 49 He refers to the steel factory Aço Cearense Industrial, located in Caucaia, with a production capacity of 620,000 tonnes per year, part of the Grupo Aço Cearense. AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 235 everything, there was only the blood and the mash. It was brought together with a spade and put into a box.”50 As Cauê Campos (2016a, 77ff) explains in his master thesis about construction worker strikes in Jirau, Santo Antonio and Belo Monte, the aim of most migrant construction workers is to attain the highest possible wage in the period of being away from the hometown and family in order to be able to build a house afterwards, and, if possible, buy a motorbike and a car. This explains why overtime is an important issue for the workers, and why they are so eager to attain benefits and higher wages in general. One of the workers interviewed, who had worked at the port in Pecém before he entered into CSP, underlined this aspect: “If we speak about gaining money, then we speak about a site with a lot of overtime because what is increasing the salary is overtime. (…) We came here and it was something that was not there. Mainly on Saturdays, so we thought we would get it immediately and that those hours wouldn’t be missed here.”51 Thus, we can see the dominance of workplace issues in the grievances of the construction workers in Pecém. Since they work in large numbers in an area with an infrastructure that does not serve the needs of several thousand workers at once, the surroundings in the area become part of the workplace grievances, and objects of concern like transport and housing facilities become targets of destruction for the workers. Other grievances like wage arrears and lack of security at work show the amount of informality within the formal labour relations that the workers entered. Formally regulated work does not equal adherence of employers to regulations, but rather its constant violation. The ‘Korean’ Issue What I call here the ‘Korean’ issue is specific to the construction of CSP since it had a large number of Korean engineers and supervisors. The issue starts with language problems, and although translators were present at 50 Own translation, Portuguese original: “na Cearense era mais pesado, tinha mais quimica (…) o pó de ferro, o perigo é maior. Teve gente lá que a máquina puxou e näo teve nem enterro. Porque nao tinha o resto do cara, a máquina comeu tudinho, só tinha o sangue e a papa. Foi juntado com uma pá e botado em um caixão.” 51 Interview with Worker Pecèm 6. In the original: “Quando falamos de ganhar dinheiro, falamos de uma obra que tem muita hora extra, porque o que aumenta o salario é a hora extra (…) Chegamos aí e era uma coisa que não tinha. Principalmente nos sábados, o pessoal achava que ia ter direito e que não ia faltar essas horas aí.” 236 J. NOWAK the workplace, workers claimed that their translation capacities were quite limited. But the core of the claim of workers related to the different ‘work culture’ of Koreans, and the perceived disrespect for Brazilian labour law. It is well known that the latter is flouted by Brazilian employers quite routinely, but workers found the ignorance of labour law had a much bigger extent at CSP than at the UTE or other jobs they had held before as for example in the port of Pecém or at wind energy companies that operate in the region. The Korean issue is clearly grounded in experiences at the workplace but is not restricted to a class issue since it is overdetermined by racial, anti-imperial and nationalist ideologies. The conflicts at CSP were about similar issues as the ones at UTE, but the fact that the main construction company and many of the subcontracted construction companies (among the bigger ones were Chunjo do Brasil, Daehyuk Engenharia e Construçao do Brasil, Joong San Construction do Brasil, Kumyang Brasil Instalações Eletricas, Samjin Industrial do Brasil, Samjin Steel Structure do Brasil, SEIL do Brasil) and most of the engineers and supervisors were South Korean appeared regularly in interviews with workers and other commentators. Both the legal expert of the trade union Sintepav-CE and Luis Alves from the Ministry of Labour underlined the high number of official complaints of workers against physical aggression of supervisors.52 At least one of those cases was won in court and the Korean company was obliged to pay compensation to the worker in question (Sintepav-CE 2017). Gérson Marques from the Ministério Público Federal who led various investigations about irregularities at CSP talked about a ‘cultural shock’ between Brazilians and Koreans.53 Workers made recurring reference to the different ‘culture’ of Koreans, and in a trade union assembly with a few thousand workers the president of Sintepav drew on this, saying: “We can’t accept slavery, we can’t accept another ideology from outside of our country, we can’t accept that another culture is implanted in our state. We have our culture (…) and therefore we want that our culture is respected and that our rights are respected” 52 Interview with Diego Braga, Juridico of SINTEPAV-CE, 29 July 2014, Pecém; Luis Alves, Ministério de Trabalho, 7 October 2014, Fortaleza. 53 Interview with Francisco Gérson Marques de Lima. AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 237 (own translation).54 While the negative reference to slavery is a common place in conversations about working conditions in Brazil and is not specifically linked up with the Korean issue, the reference to another ‘culture’ and its link to the rights of workers was a specific topic. The speech of the union’s president does not mention ‘Korea’ or ‘Koreans’ at all, but for everyone participating in the event it is obvious what the reference of ‘culture’ here is. In another assembly on 6 October 2014 a trade unionist from the federal police was invited as a speaker and got more explicit: he said he had heard that “those Koreans” would threaten workers, and that the federal police would investigate irregular issues at the site. He added, “You can do this in Korea, not here!”, getting applause from the workers.55 This discourse was not at all specific to trade unionists, but also employed by some of the workers. Two workers mentioned the ‘Koreans’ only in terms of ‘the bosses’ in a negative fashion.56 Worker 18 was more explicit: “Because the Koreans there only want that the worker is a tool of work, they don’t want him to be a worker. (…) I will tell you, this is a race, fucking hell. They only think about production, ‘pali pali’57 which means working quick. ‘Pali pali’ my ass!”58 Worker 20 underlined that the Korean workers will be the first to break a strike, but he also reported about conflicts between Korean workers and managers due to wage arrears. He said that the clashes with the police in 54 The full video of the assembly from 21 October 2014 can be viewed here: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=biQnsgqaPyI (last accessed 17 June 2018). The whole passage from 35.17 to 35.53 goes in the Portuguese original: “Não podemos aceitar uma escravidão, não podemos aceitar outra ideologia fora de nosso pais, não podemos aceitar que seja implantado outra cultura no nosso estado. Nos temos nossa cultura, nosso pais nos temos nossa cultura e por isso nos queremos que seja respeitado a nossa cultura, ser respeitado a nossos direitos.” 55 The full video of the assembly from 6 October, 2014 can be viewed here: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=SXSIKOCx5MA (last accessed 17 June 2018). The whole passage runs from 5.35 to 6.10. 56 Interviews with Worker Pecèm 6; Worker Pecèm 13. 57 ‘Pali Pali’ means ‘quick quick’ in Korean, and the term ‘Pali Pali Culture’ has become an internationally used term for the work and service mentality in South Korea. 58 Interview with Worker Pecèm 18. In the original: “Porque os coreanos lá querem que o trabalhador seja uma ferramenta de trabalho, não querem que ele seja um trabalhador (…) Eu vou te dizer, é uma raça, puta que pariu! Só pensa em produção, é ‘pali pali’ que é pra trabalhar rápido. ‘Pali pali’ é o teu cú!” 238 J. NOWAK June 2014 started because a Korean driver aimed to break through picket lines during the strike and then hit two workers with his car. But he also puts emphasis on the fact that the workers were only attacking the police and not Koreans. In addition, he reports that Korean supervisors often insisted on workers exercising functions they are not educated for. Most Brazilian workers refused to do this, and he reports about a Korean worker falling to death because he was not properly secured with a belt.59 He makes then similar remarks about Korean work culture as Worker 18 did: “The Koreans want to work in their fashion, they want to do 1001 functions. (…) I think in order to be a professional you can only do what you know. The ones that come from abroad have to act in line with our culture here, not with theirs. If they are in a country they have to respect the norms. (…) They play with their own lives, they are very negligent with this aspect of security. Their problem is that they only want to work-workwork, they do not think about health or the risk of an accident.”60 The interesting thing here to note is that union leaders and workers equate Brazilian ‘culture’ with some amount of customary workplace rights, and contrast these with Korean work culture. We could not find a similar language among automobile workers at Maruti Suzuki (see Chap. 3), but although Japanese management principles might play a role there, there is no remarkable presence of Japanese supervisors, so the dominance of Japanese capital was not experienced on a day-to-day basis and as a personal confrontation. In the case of CSP, it is the other way around: Brazilian company Vale owns 50 per cent of the project and a high number of Brazilian companies are subcontracted at the site (Santos, Makro, Emtep, SP, Rio Verde, Braco, Cortez), but the ‘Koreans’ were identified with the project. One can say that this to some extent aggravated the rage 59 During my fieldwork period in early October, a worker had been hit by a large and very heavy tube that fell down, and was in emergency care, in artificial coma and in life danger for about a week, but then could be reanimated. Nevertheless, there was the prospect of lasting damages to his health. See the report of Union President Nonato about this during the assembly on 6 October 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXSIKOCx5MA 60 Interview with Worker Pecèm 20. In the original: “Os coreanos querem trabalhar do jeito deles, eles querem fazer mil e uma funções. (…) porque eu acho que para ser um professional você só pode fazer o que você sabe. Aqueles que vêm de fora têm que agir de acordo com a cultura daqui, não com a deles. Se eles estão em um país precisam respeitar as normas. (…) Eles facilitam com a própria vida deles, são muito negligentes nessa parte aí da segurança. O problema deles é só querer trabalhar-trabalhar-trabalhar, não pensam em saúde e risco de acidente.” AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 239 of the workers, but also removed this rage from the Brazilian shareholders like Vale to some extent since the Korean managers were seen as the culprits for the workplace relations. Nonetheless, the focus of the rage was clearly against Korean supervisors and bosses and not against the Korean workers at the site, although at least one driver hit two persons trying to break through the picket line in June 2014. And many workers did not fail to mention the absence of the Brazilian state in regulating work or demanding minimum requirements for the infrastructure around large construction sites. Migration That it came to the first massive strike with violent clashes in March 2011 was commonly attributed to the presence of workers from other states in Brazil. An expert of DIEESE attributed to workers from Bahia and the South of Brazil different expectations than workers from Ceará, and strike experiences.61 Out of twenty-two workers at UTE or CSP interviewed, four were from outside of Ceará: one from Sergipe in the Northeast of Brazil, one from Rio Grande do Sul and two from the state of São Paulo. Worker 4, who comes from Fortaleza and had worked in the construction of UTE since March 2011 and then entered into CSP in July 2013, emphasised that many workers would be leaving to other states like Pará and Minas Gerais where employers pay more benefits in construction sites. We can only assume that strikes in February 2011 swept over from Bahia to UTE in March 2011 due to the contacts that workers from Bahia had to their home state. The common narrative among union experts and workers was that workers in Ceará ‘learnt’ to strike from the workers from Bahia. In the strikes at Suape in Pernambuco that started to gain traction in January 2011, it was also the workers from Bahia to whom the most militant action was attributed (Véras 2013, 13). Thus, the internal migration of Brazilian construction workers is seen as a medium for the circulation of experiences and patterns of protest. The Forms of Informal Organisation In the case of both the UTE and the CSP there were frequent interactions between groups of workers formed at the workplace and the official trade union Sintepav-CE. Sometimes these workers’ groups were in close inter61 Interview with Bruna Frazão. 240 J. NOWAK action with the union, and sometimes they rather kept a distance to it. I could observe this interaction after an assembly close to the gates of the construction site on 6 October 2014. The workers had decided to go on strike in order to get an additional salary for compensation of the strike days in June and July.62 Afterwards, a few buses with workers inside were circling around close to the entrance to the site, and a group of about twenty workers, masked with sunglasses, balaclavas and hoods, blocked the entrance, and the local trade union official who was still at the site had no qualms to join the blockade (own observation at field site). One DIEESE official said that during the strikes at UTE workers held weekly meetings in an impartial space that did not belong to the trade union.63 As in many other cases of those strikes, they start with a small group going on strike which then extends to the whole site. Worker 2 reported that the first strike at CSP in 2013 started with fifteen workers at the company Cortez who had not been paid, subsequently extending to the 4000 workers at the site.64 One worker reported that it is usually the workers who are already for a longer time at the workplace that will start a strike, and then others would follow.65 Another worker (Worker 16) said that the ‘Cipeiros’ had an important role in the organisation of the strikes. CIPA stands for Comissão Interna de Prevenção de Acidentes (Internal Commission for the Prevention of Accidents), and every company will have its own commission, and the members of the CIPA are the only workers who enjoy some amount of protection against being dismissed. These commissions are elected by the workers. He said: “There was also an organisation from the side of the workers, and another one from the side of the trade union. In the organisation from the side of the workers the Cipeiros were involved.”66 Worker 20 also described the dialectics of smaller strikes at the workplace and larger strikes: “If you make the demand for a rise and it does not 62 The full video of the assembly from 6 October 2014 can be viewed here: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=SXSIKOCx5MA (last accessed 17 June 2018). The approval of the strike which lasted only two days is at 30 minutes. 63 Interview with Bruna Frazão. 64 Interview with Worker Pecèm 2. 65 Interview with Worker Pecèm 18. 66 Interview with Worker Pecèm 16, 30 July 2014, Pecém, in the original: “Teve uma organização também por parte dos trabalhadores e uma por parte do sindicato. Na organização por parte dos trabalhadores estiveram envolvidos os cipeiros.” AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 241 come, the only solution is a stoppage. Often we stopped work at the site and the problem was resolved, but often this did not work, we had to leave the site and go out like now last time when there were even riots.”67 The Trade Union The trade union Sintepav-CE is member of the national federation Força Sindical, the second biggest union federation in Brazil. Its branch in the state of Ceará was founded in 2001, and had 28,000 members in 2014, and it represents significantly more workers. It gained half of its membership since 2010, due to various construction projects.68 In the Fortaleza Metropolitan region a division of labour between different trade unions in the construction sector has been established: Sintepav-CE organises in heavy construction (building of highways, transposition of the river São Francisco, industrial construction), while the Sindicato dos Trabalhadores da Indústria da Construção Civil na Região Metropolitana da Fortaleza (STICCRMF), which is aligned to the left-wing Conlutas federation, is organising construction workers in urban light construction. Both trade unions maintain good contacts and thus do not intervene in each other’s subsectors—in contrast to the following case study in the state of Pará. The assemblies of the construction workers of CSP are organised regularly by Sintepav-CE—usually once a month, but more regularly during strikes—close to the construction site, and all major decisions like the demands of the trade union and the acceptance of offers of the employers are decided upon by all workers in these assemblies that are attended by at least 4000 workers.69 Moreover, in a very rare and exceptional case of transparency Sintepav-CE uploads videos from the workers’ assemblies to YouTube so that everybody can follow how decisions are taken and how they were debated; for example, in the assembly on 8 October 2014 there was a quarrel between a group of workers and the union president since these workers had not been paid by their company and thus they were not happy with the proposal of the union to end the strike (own observation at field site). Sintepav-CE was acting together with a smaller trade union 67 Interview with Worker Pecèm 20. In the original: “Se você faz uma revindicação de aumento e não chega, a única solução e parar. Muitas vezes a gente parou lá no canteiro de obra e foi resolvido o problema, mas teve muitas vezes que não teve jeito, tivemos que sair do canteiro de obra e ir embora, como da última vez agora que teve atê quebradeira.” 68 Interview with Raimundo Nonato Gomes. 69 The author of this book participated in two assemblies on 6 and 8 October 2014. 242 J. NOWAK of industrial engineers called Sintramonti-CE (Sindicato dos Trabalhadores em Montagens Industriais em Geral no Estado do Ceará). Sintramonti-CE is part of the same national federation as Sintepav-CE, and allied to the metal workers union of Força Sindical at the sectoral level. Thus, Sintepav-CE responded to the relatively strong momentum of workplace groups with an open and democratic way of taking decisions on the strikes. It did not only document demands and negotiation results on its website, but included the workers in decision-making by holding large assemblies outside of the premises. In the end, the decisions were taken by the union, and in December 2014 the union published a statement, opposing workers who held a strike that was not approved by the union. But such open disagreement of workers with the union was a rare exception, and the form of the assemblies and the fact that videos of them have been kept online safeguarded the union from larger conflicts with workers as they occurred in 2012 both at the Suape construction site in Recife and at the Belo Monte site where union leaders had to flee from assemblies since groups of workers pelted stones at them. On the other hand, the union aimed to prevent larger strikes that could slip out of its control and tried to focus on the issues of specific workgroups. While there is a certain rationale to such an approach since it can respond to more specific grievances of a smaller group of workers, this pattern of control by the union also aims to avoid larger clashes and rioting since it usually comes with repression and claims of the company making the union responsible for violence. After all, the strategy of Sintepav-CE managed to avoid larger conflicts with the workers and was able to better the conditions during the construction. The limit to this strategy is that the union will have to demand the same things every time anew when a new construction project starts, thus it cannot build on earlier gains and the workers who move from site to site will start from scratch too at every site, facing deplorable conditions in the early phase that then get better over the years if they are strong enough to force employers. The Political Economy The investment behind the thermoelectric plant and the steel factory is dominated by foreign capital. While the thermoelectric plant was at least partly a Brazilian project, the takeover of MPX by E.ON led to the dominance of German and Portuguese capital. Construction was done by two European companies, of which one was bought by capital from Angola after construction of the plant. The CSP, although mainly perceived as a AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 243 Korean project due to the construction being directed by Posco, is owned half by Brazilian company Vale. Both projects are located in an export processing zone which comes with enormous tax exemptions. A report in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo calculated 1.68 billion reals of tax exemptions only for the construction of CSP; in addition the state bank BNDES financed the project with 2 billion reals, and the government of Ceará lowered the social security tax Imposto sobre Circulação de Mercadorias e Serviços (ICMS) for several years (Sintepav-CE 2016b). Looking at the construction only, every workplace was subsidised with 49,000 reals per year, while the yearly wage of a construction worker is on average 23,000 reals. Of course, the main rationale is to attract investment that then sets the starting point for a sustainable industrialisation process. For example, Petrobras had planned to build a large refinery after the conclusion of CSP. This plan was scrapped in the meantime but a Chinese-Iranian consortium is set to take over the plan for a refinery. If everything goes as planned another 10,000 construction workers will build this refinery. Another pending project is the construction of a liquefied natural gas terminal by Korean Gas Corporation, Posco P&C, Daewoo (all from South Korea) and Brazilian Companhia de Gas do Ceará. In other words, imperialist capital plays a large role in the two industrialisation projects in Pecém, both on the side of the construction companies and concerning the companies that run the projects after completion. While the energy created in the UTE is being used inside of Brazil, the production of the steel factory is focused on export, with an estimated 80 per cent. After operations began in June 2016, a large batch of steel produced at CSP was sold to Southeast Asia’s biggest steel producer Sahaviriya Steel Industries, located in Thailand. The Spatial Patterns of the Strikes The strikes in Pecém at UTE and CSP were articulated nationally with other strikes in construction sites, but rather isolated in the region. The strike at UTE was the first strike at one of the PAC projects in 2011, and contributed to the spillover to the bigger PAC sites in Rondônia and Pernambuco which saw a much larger amount of rioting and arson than the strikes in Pecém. Allegedly it was workers from Bahia that started the strikes in Pecém after being inspired by the strikes all over Bahia in construction that already went on for a month. Since the area close to the projects is consisting of only smaller villages like Pecém, Sao Gonçalo de Amarante and Taiba, there was not much articulation with other actors in the region. Although there were ongoing strikes in urban construction in 244 J. NOWAK parallel with the strike at CSP in June 2014—who were attacked by riot police just a day before the scuffles at CSP—there was hardly any contact between the workers. Thus, the strikes in Pecém did play a hugely important role in the national strike wave, but this did not have any local or regional effects, and the strikes remained mainly focused on the workers as actors. The quite large demonstrations that took place in Fortaleza in the course of the protests in summer 2013 might have added to a general sense of mobilisation, but there has been no immediate articulation between these protests and the strikes. Workers asked about connections between strikes and street protests insisted that both movements would cover separate issues—one being about the working class, the other being concerned with society in general.70 Since this region did not have a tradition of labour conflicts or other larger mobilisations, there were not many traditions to draw on. Conclusions In the analysis of the strikes at UTE and CSP we could detect strong linkages between formal and informal ways of organisation. The organisation of the strikes itself was based on workgroups and the Cipeiros to a large extent and the official trade union Sintepav-CE successfully hooked up with those grassroots bases of workers’ organisation. This was used by the trade union to address more specific grievances, but also in order to control and moderate the course of the strike movements. The strong elements of popular democracy used by Sintepav-CE contributed to keep the amount of conflicts between the union and workers at a minimum. But the events in June 2014, when Korean workers tried to break the strike which ended up in clashes of workers with military police, show that the union—which did not endorse arson and property destruction—was not dominating the course of workers’ agitation at the site. The interdependence of class and non-class relations was mainly focused on two areas. First, the fact that both UTE and CSP were seen by workers as government projects since they were part of PAC, and the one-sided action of the state whose regulation of labour conflicts consisted primarily in sending shock troops in case of conflicts, and rarely involved mediation, while control of conditions at the work sites did occur but remained without much leverage to act against violations by the construction consortiums. Thus, the state was seen as a non-partial actor. This aspect was also 70 Interviews with Worker Pecèm 1; Worker Pecèm 2. AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 245 highlighted when the association of former political prisoners intervened into the strike at UTE and contributed to the release of an arrested worker from prison. Second, the conflicts at CSP were overdetermined by the perception of Korean supervisors and engineers as representatives of imperialist capital with a more authoritarian workplace discipline. In this way, racialised perceptions, workplace conflict and the economic power of Posco as a Korean multinational merged into a scenario of Korean supervisors versus Brazilian workers that effectively led to increased conflict, with Korean workers taking an intermediate position, being perceived by Brazilian workers as both strike breakers and victims of Korean supervisors. The extension of labour conflict beyond the workplace did not go much beyond the question of the local infrastructure like housing, medical facilities, transport and food provision. The social reproduction of the workers at the site becomes part of workplace conflicts in larger construction projects, so we can rather speak of an extended workplace than of an extension of labour conflicts beyond the workplace. The local population in Pecém supported the mobilisations of the workers in general, but did not mobilise much on their own, although they suffered from a rapidly deteriorating social environment such as more violent robberies and prostitution. In this way, the common experiences of workers and the community of a negligence of the state managing the larger social environment during construction did not see much mobilisation by the community itself. The lack of larger mobilisation beyond the strikes of the workers was due to the lack of a strong tradition of social conflict in the region, as can be seen with the earlier tradition of the indigenous nation of the Anacé that consisted in keeping a low profile. The prominence of the industrial projects themselves in the local and regional media in Ceará itself gave a large amount of visibility to the strikes, and at least facilitated the intervention of federal state actors in critical situations in April 2011 and July 2014. But these were only actions in the last resort after conflicts had already escalated. The migrant nature of workers was seen as one of the driving forces for the strikes since workers from Bahia were seen as the militant vanguard, inspired by parallel strikes in their home state. 5.4.5 Strikes at Belo Monte Dam The strikes at the Belo Monte Dam are among the three big strikes in construction that attracted the highest amount of public attention along with the strikes in Jirau and in Suape due to the sheer number of workers on strike 246 J. NOWAK and the amount of violence and arson. The Belo Monte Dam is as such one of the most controversial industrial projects in the past ten or twenty years in Brazil, given that movements of indigenous populations, fishermen and ecologists started a broad mobilisation against the project in the 1980s and had its first big rally in 1989 in Altamira, Pará, under the name Grito dos Povos Indígenas. The movement was able to attain considerable success with the withdrawal of the International Monetary Fund from the project in the 1990s, but nonetheless the president at that time, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, announced his plans to erect the dam in the year 2000. In 2001, another huge meeting of the resistance movements took place and elected a commission of five persons as its leadership. One of the five, the trade union leader Ademir Alfeu Federici was killed in his house a few months later in August 2001, obviously a politically motivated act. These incidents already throw some light at both the social and political relations in the state of Pará—Pará is the regional state of Brazil with the highest rates of the assassination of activists that struggle for land rights or against illegal deforestation—and the political history involved in the construction of the dam (see Corrêa 2014 for a detailed history of the movement against the dam).71 5.4.5.1 Belo Monte and the Workers’ Party Given this trajectory, public attention for major incidents around Belo Monte Dam was guaranteed. The Lula government started to show interest in the construction of the dam already in 2003 and brought its realisation on the way. A key role for this was played by Dilma Rousseff as federal Minister of Mining and Energy from 2003 to 2005, and she embarked on a bitter conflict with the federal Minister of Environment Marina Silva (2003–2008) around various industrial projects, and Belo Monte as the biggest among those played a key role. The conflict with Silva continued when Rousseff was Minister of the Presidency from 2005 on and it led to a decisive rupture between Silva and the Lula government. Silva left her post in May 2008 in protest against being consequently ignored in crucial government decisions and then also left PT in 2009. Silva subsequently ran as a candidate for the Partido Verde (Green Party) in 2010 and later set up a new political party, Rede de Sustentabilidade 71 Interview with Antonia Melo, Movimento Xingu Vivo Para Sempre, 10 September 2014, Altamira. AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 247 (Sustainability Network), in 2013, making the third position as a presidential candidate in 2010 and 2014. Silva had been a member of PT since 1985, while Rousseff, who had been a founding member of Brizola’s social-democratic PDT, joined PT only in 2001. In this sense, Belo Monte was very much a project at the heart of the political career of Rousseff who later became president of Brazil in 2011. In yet another major assembly in 2008 the movement against the dam changed its name to Movimento Xingu Vivo Para Sempre (MXVPS) with reference to the Xingu River which was to be affected by the construction of the dam. The construction was disputed until the last minute and subsequently had to be stopped more than a dozen times due to irregularities concerning environmental standards, but the construction started nonetheless in summer 2011.72 Other stoppages of the construction of the dam occurred after recurrent occupations of the construction site by indigenous peoples and other affected residents in the area. Belo Monte Dam will be the second biggest hydroelectric plant in Brazil in terms of provision of electric energy. The public project is financed with around 80 per cent by the BNDES; other funds are coming from the Fundo do Amparo do Trabalhador, a fund destined to provide social security payments to workers. The consortium for the construction, Consórcio Construtor Belo Monte (CCBM), is composed of various construction companies, among which the ‘big five’ in Brazilian construction hold 73 per cent: Andrade Gutierrez (18 per cent), Odebrecht (16 per cent), Camargo Corrêa (16 per cent), Queiroz Galvão (11.5 per cent) and OAS (11.5 per cent). CCBM is contracted by Norte Energia, the company that will run the hydroelectric plant. Norte Energia is composed of three stateowned energy companies that hold together 49.98 per cent of the company: Eletrobras, Chesf and Eletronorte; another 20 per cent is held by pension funds of the state-owned companies Petrobras (Petros) and Caixa Econômica Federal (Funcef); the remaining 30 per cent are held by the private energy company Neoenergia and semi-statal Cemig, the mining giant Vale S.A. and the steel company Sinobras. The workers in the subsector of heavy construction in the state of Pará is predominantly represented by the trade union Sindicato dos Trabalhadores nas Indústrias da Construção Pesada do Estado do Pará (Sintrapav-PA). Sintrapav-PA represents the workers at the consortium CCBM, but not 72 Interview with Felicio Pontes, Procurador do Ministério Público Federal Belém, 5 September 2014, Belém. 248 J. NOWAK the workers who work in other companies at the construction site. Sintrapav-PA is affiliated to the same union federation as Sintepav-CE, Força Sindical. 5.4.5.2 The Strikes Construction at the site started in June 2011, and the first strike movement at Belo Monte just a few months later set the tone for the way the consortium CCBM was about to deal with labour unrest. Due to low quality of food 200 workers suffered from food poisoning, and a strike started in early November 2011. The company asked for a commission of workers to establish negotiations, integrated Sintrapav-PA into the negotiations, promised that there will be no retaliations and announced a response to the demands of workers in two weeks’ time. One week later 150 workers were dismissed without providing a reason, the four workers in the commission included. As a response, the workers blocked the only highway leading to the construction site and went on strike again. The consortium made new promises that were not implemented and workers struck a third time, and the various stoppages amounted to eight days in November and December 2011. This pattern saw various repetitions in the coming months (data provided by the strike database of DIEESE). In March to May 2012, the strike movements got bigger since the number of workers had grown to 8000. The demands were similar to the ones a few months back: main issues were the lack of adequate transport facilities for the workers who did not stay in the remote area of the construction site (the next bigger settlement, Altamira, is in a 40-kilometre distance; see Map 5.2), the quality of food and a change in the holiday regulations: whereas most bigger public works grant a few days’ off every three months, it had been only every six months in Belo Monte. Other topics were the lack of telephone and internet connections and wage demands. Worker 3 who had started with the first batch in June 2011 said: “Our food was precarious because we ate after the others, so we found grass in the food, flies, all that stuff – our situation was dehumanised. Today this does not occur, they adapted.”73 73 Interview with Worker CCBM 3, 14 September 2014, Altamira. In the original: “A nossa comida era precária, porque a gente comia depois dos outros, então a gente encontrava capim dentro da comida, mosca, era tanta coisa – a nossa situação era desumana. Hoje em dia não, eles se adequaram.” AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 249 Map 5.2 Map of the state of Pará, showing the regional capital Belém; Altamira where the consortium and trade unions Sintapav-PA and Sinticma had their seat and a smaller part of the workers were housed; and the location of the construction site for Belo Monte A strike with a duration of nine days emerged on 28 March 2012 without prior involvement of the trade union Sintrapav-PA. On March 30, various police and security forces occupied strategic sites in the area and the workers organised pickets and blocked the access road, using transport buses.74 Again, the CCBM consortium asked for the formation of a strike 74 DIEESE Strike Database. 250 J. NOWAK committee which was established by workers together with Sintrapav-PA. Subsequently eight of the twelve workers in the committee joined the trade union. The four workers who did not join the union were dismissed by CCBM before the negotiations started.75 A controversy around the roles of members of MXVPS and a journalist in this strike shows how the different actors in Belo Monte took positions on the issues involved in this strike: in the course of this strike, one journalist, Ruy Sposati, and three members of the movement MXVPS were banned from approaching the premises with a penalty of 100,000 reals in case of any further incident, and the consortium CCBM accused Sposati of having led the strike. He had received death threats when he was taking photos of one of the first strikes taking place in December 2011 by two men in a jeep that turned out to be a car of the military police. His legal claim against the death threats was not followed up by state institutions (Vianna and Sada 2012; MXVPS 2012). That the consortium made these allegations which were taken over by the responsible judge is interesting since it aimed at keeping other people than workers, and especially media persons, away from the strike, but also implied a portrayal of the strike as the work of ‘outsiders’ and spread mistrust about the movements against the dam among the workers and the general public.76 CCBM responded that the strike was in fact started by workers, but claimed that members of social movements had helped build barricades in the course of the events (MXVPS 2012). The trade union Sintrapav-PA chimed in to the claim that the workers had been infiltrated by persons who were “creating uproar and propagate violence” (Folha Vitoria 2012). In the aftermath, about sixty workers were dismissed (Terra 2012). According to workers interviewed by media, one worker was arrested by the military police, and five were dismissed because they had put their names on a document announcing the creation of a workers’ association and another six were dismissed because they were part of the official strike commission. Others had appeared on videos that had been made by private security during the strike. One worker who was part of the strike Interviews with Worker CCBM 1; Worker CCBM 3. Furthermore it is significant that the court had no proof of the allegations, and twentyone photos presented as proof of Sposati stopping buses of non-striking workers showed him taking photos and interviewing workers. A press statement of MXVPS confirmed that Sposati was working for their website, and underlined that one of three accused members was in Belém, 500 kilometres away from the strike when it occurred (MXVPS 2012). 75 76 AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 251 commission was beaten by security forces when he refused to sign his dismissal documents. Another member of the strike commission was arrested, beaten up and released on the next day (Terra 2012). The Federal Minister of Mining and Energy, Edison Lobão,77 joined the narrative of the infiltration of workers by troublemakers and called the strikes in Belo Monte and Jirau “acts of vandalism”, and he threatened to use the national guard against strikers once more. He continued that the workers on those sites were treated ‘very well’ and that their food would be analysed in laboratories on a daily basis (Diário Comércio Indústria e Serviços [DCI] 2012). Thus, the claim of workers being infiltrated by politicised outsiders, that is, the various movement organisations against the dam, served to legitimise arbitrary violence and dismissals against strikers. 5.4.5.3 From Jirau to Belo Monte: The Diffusion of Strike Experience and the Formation of a Group During my field research, I was able to interview three of the members of the strike commission during this first big strike in Belo Monte that took place in March and April 2012. Those three—Worker 1, Worker 2 and Worker 3—formed part of the same group that started this first strike. Worker 1 had already worked in Jirau, in Tucuruí and in two other construction sites. He brought the experience of striking to the other workers. He explains how they formed as a group: “we formed (…) beginning to see the things that are not correct at the site: food, transport and so on, this repression of the bosses (…) and you start talking with other workers, you have experience from another site, you will explain that it cannot be like that, you will say that you know about your rights and that you know how it works.”78 Worker 2 then said: “(Worker 1) was really a teacher for me (…) I never had participated (in a strike), the first was in Belo Monte, 77 Edison Lobão was Minister of Energy and Mining from 2008 to 2010 during Lula’s second term and throughout the whole first term of Dilma Rousseff from 2011 to 2014. He is member of the conservative party Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB). Lobão voted in favour of the impeachment of Rousseff in 2016, and in 2017 he was target of a police operation suspecting him and his son of receiving 5 million reals for acting in favour of the implementation of a nuclear plant and the plant in Belo Monte. 78 Interview with Worker CCBM 1, in the original: “a gente forma como (…) começando a ver as coisas que tá incorreta no canteiro de obra: comidas, transporte etc., aquela repressaõ patronal (…) ai você vai falando vai conversando com o trabalhador, você tem experiênica de outra obra, você vai explicando isso não e assim, você vai falando você sabe do seu direito sabe como funciona.” 252 J. NOWAK (Worker 1) had already participated in Jirau and was my comrade that educated me.”79 Once the group was formed, it started to agitate other workers: “I got to know (Worker 2), (Worker 3), (Worker 4), I got to know these good guys, a good group and on the basis of this the group starts to form, to discuss, to converse with the workers and we formed a core (…) one day we said lets start a strike, the conditions have to get better, and we started it and decided to start the strike, the group was already united and knew what to do.”80 It was a small group that led a strike of 5000 workers, and it immediately entered into a conflict with the trade union. Belo Monte had five basecamps, and two of them, Belo Monte and Infrastructure, had joined the strike: “we were a group of 10, this group of 10 led the people and succeeded (…) we went directly to the trade union with a bus (…) we had called the press and had our list of demands noted down, all demands made by workers, but (they said) we had to change this and all, we spent one week with meetings with the trade union.”81 The commission which was set up in this period was mainly composed of workers who shared the line of the union to end the strike, and so the commission was split since three other basecamps—Pimentel, Canais and Ponto de Acesso—took a position against the strike. Since Belo Monte is composed of two units with turbines at two ends of the project, and a canal in the middle which is connecting the two areas of power generation, those five basecamps are quite distant from each other, and difficult to reach via road. After the debate did not attain results, the workers in favour of continuing the strike went back to the construction site and “we rented a sound car and went in front of the cafeteria of the consortium and we took some wood and locked down the national 79 Interview with Worker CCBM 2, 11 September 2014, Altamira, in the original: “Olha o (….) mesmo foi um professor pra mim (…) nunca tinha participado a primeira foi em Belo Monte, o (…) já tinha participado em Jirau e foi companheiro que me ensinou.” 80 Interview with Worker CCBM 1, in the original: “eu fui conhecendo (…) foi conhecendo a rapaziada boa, um grupo bom e em cima deste grupo começa a formar e discutir e conversar com o trabalhador e formamos núcleo (…) um dia nos falamos vamos estourar uma greve, vai ter que melhorar o trem e quando a gente estourou e decide estourar a greve ai já tá unido e já sabe o que fazer.” 81 Interview with Worker CCBM 2, in the original: “éramos um grupo de dez, o grupo de dez que liderava a galera e conseguia (…) pegamos os onibus, fomos para o sindicato, decemos direto pra sindicato (…) chamamos a imprensa e tinhamos a nossa pauta a revindicação anotada, e tudo revindicações feitas pelos trabalhadores, tem que mudar isso e tudo, passamos uma semana em reunião com o sindicato.” AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 253 highway, we took a bus and put it across the national highway, the Transamazônica, and we went into war and it was all or nothing and the two (basecamps) stayed on strike for some more days.”82 Worker 3 reports how parallel processes of mobilisation rolled at the site: the Cipeiros had organised a collection of signatures on 27 March for better food and transport, and the strike began on the next day since the company did not come with a response to this. Workers in the infrastructure section who had started to strike threatened to beat him up since he was still working, but he had not noticed that a strike was taking place until this moment due to the extension of the work premises. Since Worker 3 was a formal spokesperson appointed by the company in his department, he was approached by the workers to lead their assembly and then later also approached by Sintrapav-PA. After the strike went on against the will of the union, he reported that their group of seven strike leaders was invited by the union to a huge dinner. They sensed that they were being bought and in response set up a document to found an independent workers’ association. But three of their group finally sided with the union, and the remaining four were dismissed two days later.83 Worker 3 was since barred to be employed by another company that is subcontracted by CCBM. He stems from the region, and had to enter into a lower-paid service job subsequently. After the strike in April, he had to leave the city for a while due to persecution. At the end of the strike, a lot of officials from the Ministry of Labour and other government offices came and talked to workers, but Worker 1 maintained that “the Ministry of Labour (…) in reality is not even worth shit”.84 Worker 2 thinks in a similar vein: “in reality, they represent the bosses, so this will not animate our class in any way to see the Ministry of Labour in there” (at the construction site).85 Nonetheless, both Worker 1 Interview with Worker CCBM 1, in the original: “e ai nos alugamos carro de som e fomos pra frente do refeitório do consorcio e metemos pau e trancamos a BR pegamos o ônibus e atravessamos a BR da transamazônica e fomos pra Guerra e tudo ou nada e os dois ficaram em greve mais dias.” 83 Interview with Worker CCBM 3. 84 Interview with Worker CCBM 1, in the original: “e nós fomos no ministério do trabalho (…) na realidade este orgão nao vale bosta nenhuma.” 85 Interview with Worker CCBM 2, in the original: “na verdade eles representam os patrões ai não anima nada a nossa classe vê o ministério do trabalho lá dentro.” 82 254 J. NOWAK and 2 underline that transport facilities and quality of food improved a lot after this first big strike. Another strike movement with involvement of the trade union started on 23 April 2012, just two weeks later, and lasted for another nine days. The labour court declared the strike illegal after two days and threatened Sintrapav-PA with a fine of 200,000 reals per day. The trade union agreed to end the strike without paying a fine, and demands of the workers were not met. Atnagoras Lopes from the national leadership of Conlutas described how after every strike a commission of workers that had formed was dismissed, and before every strike a new commission got established, “obviously the things start at this level in a certain clandestine form, and afterwards they will legitimate themselves as a vanguard with the approval of the workforce, because when the movement arises then they have already formed themselves, they already led a commission which puts one guy at the front who goes to the consortium, a commission of ten, twelve workers, and if this one falls they already have another one”.86 The communication of the workers was more difficult in Belo Monte due to the large number of five basecamps dispersed in a quite large area. But the workers used text messages, Facebook, WhatsApp and the internet during break times in order to communicate.87 5.4.5.4 November 2012: Workers Revolt Against the Trade Union Over the rest of 2012, the unresolved conflict continued with low intensity and broke out again in November when the trade union was about to negotiate a wage hike. The company offered 11 per cent which was finally accepted by Sintrapav-PA. Fourteen thousand workers had been on strike for four days, demanding a 25 per cent wage rise. On 10 November a major riot occurred when Sintrapav-PA wanted to present the settlement and workers attacked both the management and the union representatives with stones, and wide-scale destruction of housing facilities and offices of the company followed suit. Luis Alberto Junqueira de Carvalho, who wrote about the strikes in Brazilian construction for trade 86 Interview with Atnagoras Lopes. In the original: “por óbvio as coisas nesse nível começam de certa maneira clandestina, e depois eles vão se credenciando em toda a vanguarda e em toda a categoria, então quando se levanta o movimento, eles já forjaram, já gestaram uma comissão, que põe a cara à frente e vai até o consórcio, uma comissão de dez, doze operários, e quando essa cai, eles já tem outra.” 87 Interview with Atnagoras Lopes. AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 255 union federation CUT in 2011 and 2012, estimated that the violence in Belo Monte was significantly more pronounced than in Jirau and Santo Antonio a year earlier.88 While the vice-president of Sintrapav-PA perceived this as the action of a small group of fifty masked and hooded workers, members of Conlutas spoke of 500 masked and hooded workers—probably the real number is somewhere in between.89 Nonetheless, Sintrapav-PA claims that 7665 workers were present in an assembly and that the majority approved the demands of the trade union (Sintrapav-PA n.d.). On 12 November, five workers were arrested by local police for thirty-five days with the charge of rioting.90 On 10 December, Sinticma, Conlutas, MXVPS and other organisations organised a march in Altamira to demand the liberation of the arrested workers (PSTU 2012). It was at this point that the alliance of two other trade unions became influential which enjoyed the support of workers opposed to the official trade union Sintrapav-PA. Activists of a trade union of urban construction workers in Belém, Sindicato dos Trabalhadores na Indústria da Construção e do Mobiliário de Belém (STICMB), aligned to the left-wing federation Conlutas, had been around the Belo Monte area since the first strikes began. This trade union was acting in a conspirative manner in the construction site, and collaborated with another trade union of construction workers in Altamira, Sindicato dos Trabalhadores na Indústria Madeira, da Construção Civil e de Mobiliário de Altamira e Região (Sinticma).91 We will go deeper into this aspect in one of the next sections. In the settlement that Sintrapav-PA had negotiated in November 2012, holiday leave every three months was agreed upon, but it remained 180 days for the workers who had just arrived at the site. Earlier on, helpers who were in the lowest category and often from the region did not get any permission to leave the site at all. In February 2013, the ninety Interview with Luiz Alberto Junqueira de Carvalho. Interviews with Rogivel Gobbo, vice-president of Sintrapav-PA, 24 September 2014, Belém; Ze Goutinho, director of STICMB, 28 September 2014, Ananindeua. 90 Interview with Atnagoras Lopes. 91 Sinticma is affiliated to the third largest national federation União Geral de Trabalhadores (UGT); it organises 6000 construction workers in the area of Altamira and 4000 in the wood industry. 88 89 256 J. NOWAK days were then extended to all workers.92 Supervisors and planners of the consortium said that they granted the leave every three months as a temporary measure: “We only changed it because we were losing workers, it was an exception, in order to speed up the training of the workforce (…) a strategy in order to keep the people in our training center.”93 The leave is differentiated along the occupational hierarchy: in September 2014, the lowest levels of workers from helpers to skilled workers (categories 1, 2 and 3) were granted leave every three months, technical supervisors every two months, engineers and departmental supervisors every fortyfive days, and managers every thirty days. These rules only apply for workers whose family lives in a distance of more than 250 kilometres from the site.94 Forty-nine per cent of the workers in late 2014 came from the state of Pará, followed by Maranhão in the second position with 22 per cent, and the remaining workers came from more than twenty different states, with 4 per cent coming from Piauí and Rondônia, and smaller contingents from other states (information provided by Norte Energia). The conflict in November 2012 between parts of the workers and the trade union ushered then in a first ‘dissident strike’: in April 2013, a strike of ten days that included 10,000 workers was led by the trade union Sinticma, claiming that the company did not implement the new regulations for holiday leave. This was the first strike from which Sintrapav-PA and its national federation FENATRACOP distanced itself publicly since another trade union was involved (Fenatracop 2013). Another topic raised in this mobilisation was the harassment by private security and the national guard on the construction site—after the riots of November 2012, the national guard had a permanent presence of 500 officers inside of the premises. In April 2013, a delegation of about 100 workers went to Belém in order to raise the issues of harassment by security forces with officials in the regional capital. Another strike in September 2013 of about 6000 workers who barricaded the entrance to one of the areas of construction came with property destruction, too, as a response to the dismissal of 100 workers before this strike started. Interview with Rogivel Gobbo. Interview with Marcos Antonio de Souza, Norte Energia, 12 September 2014, Belo Monte. In the original: “A gente só mudou porque estávamos perdendo mão de obra, foi exceção, pra dar alavancada na capacitação de mão de obra (…), estratégia pra manter o pessoal no nosso centro de treinamento.” 94 Interview with Marcos Antonio de Souza. 92 93 AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 257 5.4.5.5 The Official Trade Union as Manager of Discontent Although the state involvement in the construction of Belo Monte Dam is more immediate than in the case of the industrial projects in Pecém due to state-owned companies owning the majority of energy provider Norte Energia, the CCBM consortium displayed almost no disposition to enter into fair and serious negotiations that address the demands of the workers. The construction site saw competition and struggle between different trade unions. The official trade union Sintrapav-PA was formed in 1998 when the construction of the second phase of the Tucuruí Dam in the state of Pará began. In 2014, the trade union for heavy construction had 15,000 voluntary members, and represented a much larger number.95 Rogivel Gobbo, the vice-president of Sintrapav-PA, stated in an interview that the situation at the construction site at Belo Monte is characterised by the simultaneous presence of different leaderships among the workforce. He emphasised that the patterns of conflict were migrating from the construction site in Jirau to Belo Monte, but claimed that the riots in November 2012 were organised by people who infiltrated the workforce from outside. With reference to the movements against the dam, Gobbo underlined that Sintrapav-PA disagrees with the positions of these movements, and does not see itself on their side, since it is mainly interested in the creation of employment. He characterised the stance of Sintrapav-PA in general as ‘apolitical’. Gobbo specifically underlined the difficulty to establish an adequate representation of the workers at the site, due to the high amount of rotation of workers, but also due to the sheer size of the area and the workforce: “Whenever we tried to set up a commission, there was a movement against it inside of the premises (…) It is not the trade union that rules in Belo Monte, it is the worker himself (translation J.N.).”96 Worker 2 underlines that the strike in November 2012 erupted into violence and arson because there was no strike commission, and no worker felt inclined to form a commission due to the earlier repression so that the anger could be expressed only with violence. The workers perceived Belo Interview with Rogivel Gobbo. Interview with Rogivel Gobbo, in the Portuguese original: “cada vez que tentava fazer uma comissão, (…) houve um movimento contrario lá dentro (…) não é o sindicato que manda em Belo Monte, e o próprio trabalhador.” 95 96 258 J. NOWAK Monte as a government project, since not only President Rousseff used it as a showcase model of development, visiting the site during her election campaign in 2014 without making any reference to the strikes but praising the progress made in construction—but also Norte Energia, the company which ran the project, was mostly composed of state companies. This was immediately seen in line with the role of Sintrapav-PA: “there is no trade union, there is a farce inside there. A farce that gains a lot of money but does not fight for the workers. (…) unfortunately we are fighting against the government. It is a government project.”97 5.4.5.6 The State: Between Repression and Mediation In the meantime, a suboffice of the presidential office opened in Altamira in order to mediate conflicts between Norte Energia, the social movements in the region and the workers. Interviewed activists from the movement of people affected by dams, Movimento dos Atingidos de Barragens (MAB), underlined that the presence of this office helped the cause of the displaced people.98 This suboffice, called ‘Casa do Governo’ by various interviewees, was led by Avelino Ganzer, a veteran of the Brazilian trade union movement. He hails from the South of the country and came to Amazonia in 1972 with his parents and nine siblings as landless peasants looking for a piece of land to work on. He got involved with the grassroots church communities, was president of the highly influential agricultural workers’ trade union in Santarém from 1983 to 1986 and became the first vice-president of the rural wing of CUT.99 This biographical background is important to understand his position in the struggles around Belo Monte. He was appointed to this post in September 2011, with the explicit order not to block or trick the social movements “but to go there and establish specifically relations in order to try to strengthen the social movements” as he put it in his own words.100 In the interview, Ganzer spoke first of all of a ‘total war’ between the different trade unions claiming to represent the workforce in Belo Monte, with Sintrapav-PA on 97 Interview with Worker CCBM 3, in the original: “mas não tem sindicato, tem uma farsa lá dentro. Uma farsa que ganha muito dinheiro, mas não luta pelos trabalhadores. (…) mas infelizmente nós estamos lutando contra o governo. E obra do governo.” 98 Interview with two activists of MAB, 15 September 2014, Altamira. 99 Interview with Avelino Ganzer. 100 Interview with Avelino Ganzer, in the original: “mais ir lá fazer a relação em especial procurando fortalecer os movimentos sociais.” AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 259 one side, and Conlutas and Sinticma on the other side. From Ganzer’s perspective, Conlutas tried to establish its leadership of the strikes without having solid roots and an organisation in the region which he described as ‘adventurist’. Ganzer conceded that the workers were very unhappy with their situation and that Conlutas articulated this, but “without conditions in order to maintain itself and lead the process and so it drags the people into an immense fragility”.101 On the other side, he mentioned, without naming Sintrapav-PA or Força Sindical, the problem of ‘conservative trade unionism’ or ‘trade unionism under the control of the state’. Nonetheless, he underlined that it was not within the realm of his post to intervene into the strikes itself, but that his office would at times act as a mediator for labour conflicts. Ganzer himself mentioned the problem of the national guard entering into the strikes on the side of the bosses although this would be outside of its legal mandate which is restricted to protecting the site from invasions from outside—which seemed to be one of the issues beyond his influence. An official of the Ministério Público Federal who was following various complaints, with respect to both the Belo Monte Dam and related mining projects in the area (at that time still in the process of exploration), had profound scepticism about the role of the ‘Casa do Governo’, attributing to it “the objective to make viable that the project continues and to impede that there will be an occupation. (…) The presence of the Casa do Governo here is symptomatic for a project that is of priority for the government and that cannot be halted in any way. What are rights to be respected in the legal process turns into obstacles that have to be overcome. The function of this Casa do Governo is to supersede these obstacles und therefore it does not recognise these rights.”102 She spoke of a permanent state of emergency in terms of the rights of traditional 101 Interview with Avelino Ganzer, in the original: “sem condições de segurar e liderar o processo e ai coloca as pessoas em uma fragilidade imensa.” This was also conceded by Atnagoras Lopes of Conlutas in an interview; he underlined the lack of organisational structures of Conlutas in the region as a limitation of their work in Belo Monte. 102 Interview with Thais Santi Cardoso da Silva, Procuradora do Ministério Público Federal, 11 September 2014, Altamira. In the original: “com o objetivo de viabilizar que a obra continue e impeder que exista uma ocupação. (…) A presença da casa de governo aqui é sintomatica de uma obra que é prioridade para o governo e que não pode parar de forma nenhuma. Aquilo que, pelo processo legal, são direitos a serem respeitados se tornam obstáculos e, para isso, não reconhece direitos.” 260 J. NOWAK and indigenous communities and the population of Altamira which have been violated systematically during the process of construction of Belo Monte. The national guard (Força Nacional, under the direction of the Ministry of Justice) was stationed at the premises with a 500-strong group from 2012 to 2015, officially with the aim of impeding invasions and occupations by adversaries of the dam project. The presence of the national guard was legitimated with the importance of the project and it being financed to a large extent by the state bank BNDES.103 It was facilitated with an emergency decree from the presidential office—a legal means used frequently during the military dictatorship—arguing that the provision of energy is an issue of national security. There is ample evidence that the national guard intervened in strikes and systematically used violence against workers. During the strike in April 2012, the national guard intervened in order to remove a bus from the road that workers had used as a road block. In later strikes, its action became more regular. Worker 4 reported: “But when the worker was only talking about a strike, they throw rubber bullets on them. (…) There is a period in which they search the housing units. There could not be anything inside that they would not take. We have no privacy there. (…) If they want, they take you, beat you and swear at you. They want to defend the company.”104 Since its permanent instalment at the site, the national guard was also intervening in smaller conflicts at the site. Fernandes Fernandes, a lawyer representing one of the workers attacked by the national guard, reported of an incident of protest against low-quality food that was accompanied by arson to the dormitories. In the course of those events, nine workers were detained while on their way to the showers and subsequently tortured with rubber bullets, beatings, plastic bags and pepper spray.105 During fieldwork, I was granted access to a report made at the Ministério Público Federal by three workers reporting about arrests on the second 103 Interview with Allan de Miranda Bruno, Procurador do Trabalho, Ministério Público do Trabalho, Santarém, 16 December 2014, interview by email. 104 Interview with Worker CCBM 4, 15 September 2014, Altamira, in the original: “Mas é só o trabalhador falar de greve, que eles jogam borracha pra cima. (…) Tem um periodo em que eles revistam os alojamentos. Não poder ter nada lá dentro que eles apreendem. Lá não temos privacidade não. (…) Se eles quiserem, eles prendem, batem e xingam. Eles querem defender a empresa.” 105 Interview with Fernandes Fernandez, labour lawyer, 11 September 2014, Altamira. AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 261 day of the strike in November 2013, on the 14th, after workers had participated in a peaceful rally the day before (MPF, TD/PRM/ ATM/156/2013). The first of these workers reported various violent attacks against workers at the site by the national guard, and of sexual harassment of women working at the site by the same unit of public security forces. The second worker gives evidence in this report that he was impeded to return to his dormitory after giving an interview to television reporters during the same strike. The third worker claimed that he was taken out of his apartment, attacked with pepper spray and tortured for one night at the work premises in October 2013. The Ministry of Justice, which is responsible for the national guard, responded to earlier allegations against its actions: “The national guard in Belo Monte does not engage in any interference into the relation between companies and workers” (Ponto de Pauta 2013). In addition to the national guard, the military police is also present at the construction site, and there have been official complaints registered of these units making photos of strike leaders and reporting those to the company. This complaint in 2012 had no response until about two years later.106 The military police responded to the issue of filming and taking photos in April 2013: “This register does not have the intent to intimidate any person or group” (Ponto de Pauta 2013). In terms of the inclusion of Belo Monte as the biggest construction project of that time into the MNC, there were different versions why it was never implemented. Avelino Ganzer maintained that the consortium CCBM was open to the MNC, but that the quarrel between the trade unions effectively prohibited the implementation. He also cited reservations of Sintrapav-PA to install a workers’ commission of ten to fifteen workers which could represent the workforce. Ganzer said that in the end the consortium and the trade union communicated among themselves not to implement it, while the government made no movement to enforce this process.107 Gobbo, vice-president of Sintrapav-PA, raised, on the one hand, the question of the high turnover of the workforce that would make it difficult to install a commission, but he also underlined strongly that a considerable amount of workers were opposed to this tripartite 106 Interview with Andréia Barreto, Defensora Pública do Estado do Pará, 23 September, 2014, interview on Skype. 107 Interview with Avelino Ganzer. 262 J. NOWAK instrument because these workers saw it as a political instrument rather than a place of mediation.108 He also feared that once a commission was installed it would be contested by another commission due to the size of the workforce that came with a lot of dynamism among the workers. Thus, we see here different elements of state action: (a) the official trade union Sintrapav-PA, responsible for the site due to the statist model of industrial relations in Brazil (see Boito 1991), (b) the federal government as a strong supporter of the project that has been using several times an emergency decree in order to resume construction after it was stopped by courts, (c) Norte Energia as the company running the project, dominated by state-owned companies, (d) BNDES and other state funds as the main funders of the project, (e) the public security forces of the military police and the national guard, acting without much scrutiny in the construction site, (f) the Casa do Governo as a mediating organ with a limited power to intervene into the labour relations at the site, and not much power to control public security forces, (g) the different agencies of the Ministério Público which are collecting grievances but also have limited power to enforce action, and (h) the Mesa Nacional without much active support by the federal government. Thus, what emerges from this picture is the strong incentive of the federal government to complete the construction, and to effectively delegate the management of labour relations to CCBM and the diverse array of private and public security forces. The workers themselves were largely left alone and did not see much effective intervention by the official trade union which opened space for other actors like the social movements in the region and other trade unions to enter the scene. 5.4.5.7 The Involvement of Conlutas and Sinticma as Alternative Unions In the course of 2012 and 2013 two smaller competing trade unions started a systematic support of the workers at Belo Monte. Atnagoras Lopes, member of the National Executive of Conlutas, reported that the agitation of STICMB started in November 2011, together with Sinticma and the support of MXVPS. He said that workers’ commissions had to be formed in a clandestine mode and he mentioned two difficulties in maintaining a constant relationship of STICMB with the 108 Interview with Rogivel Gobbo. AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 263 workers at Belo Monte: at first, the ideological tradition of Conlutas as a Leninist revolutionary trade union was new to the workers. Second, the geographical distance of STICMB which operates in Belém (it takes twenty hours for the bus to Altamira, and plane connections are expensive) made it impossible to maintain a permanent agitation in Belo Monte.109 STICMB has 10,000 members in the subsector of urban construction and officially represents 25,000 workers in Belém. Workers interviewed emphasised that the support of STICMB activists was crucial in a number of ways: they organised leaflets and sound systems during the strikes, helped create a workers´ newspaper and gave directions concerning an effective blockade during the strike movements.110 STICMB activists, often referred to the workers as ‘Conlutas’, had been in contact with the workers in Belo Monte since the first strikes in late 2011 and were also at that time entering into contact with the social movements around Belo Monte like MXVPS and others.111 The interviewed workers valued the support of Conlutas and their work during the strikes: “The folks of Conlutas gave support, they helped us a lot, one cannot stop saying this. They gave us a lot of orientation.”112 But Worker 3 also complained that he did not get any legal help against his dismissal and after being blacklisted due to the strikes. One worker had reservations about the conflicting aims of Conlutas and the workers: “I noticed that they give support but they want to gain in numbers by workers registering in PSTU, and in every meeting (they say) affiliate to PSTU with the form and all, they benefit in this way (…) our objective (…) is a betterment without having the party in mind, we don’t have any vehicle, we are the working class and they the PSTU have to gain weight for the party and we want to get benefits for the workers”113 (Worker 1). Interview with Atnagoras Lopes. Interviews with Worker CCBM 1; Worker CCBM 2; Worker CCBM 3; Worker CCBM 4. 111 Interview with Atnagoras Lopes. 112 Interview with Worker CCBM 3, in the original: “O pessoal da Conlutas deu um apoio, ajudou muito a gente, isso aí a gente nao pode deixar de dizer. Eles orientaram bastante a gente.” 113 Interview with Worker CCBM 1, in the original: “e percebi que dá apoio só que ela quer ganhar numero de funcionário se cadastrando no partido do PSTU e toda reunião filiarse no PSTU é fichinha e tudo, se beneficiam assim (…) nosso objetivo (…) e melhora não é visando o partido, nos não temos entidade somos nos a classe trabalhadora e eles o PSTU tem que da conta de ganhar peso para o partido e nós quer ganhar beneficio pro trabalhador.” 109 110 264 J. NOWAK Since the union Sinticma was based in Altamira, too, and represents both construction workers in the dam from other companies than the main consortium, and workers who build houses in urban construction in Altamira, it could more easily remain in contact with the workers in Belo Monte. Maria da Guia Serafim, president of Sinticma, recalls that she and a representative of Conlutas were called by workers to the site during the strike in November 2012, since these workers were not satisfied with the official union Sintrapav-PA. But the company did not accept the list of demands from the workers since it was not connected to the official union, and Serafim was arrested by the national guard because she was not allowed to be at the site, and did not belong to the official trade union.114 It was at this point that activists of MXVPS organised a lawyer to remedy the situation.115 Conlutas in general tried to install itself as a force in those construction strikes, not only in Belo Monte, and was one of the few organisations which was posting news about those strikes continually on a national level, in press statements, videos on YouTube, and on its website. But, as Atnagoras Lopes, from the national coordination of Conlutas, conceded in an interview, there were only very small groups of certain political currents acting in those strikes: “It was spontaneously by the class (…) we came later in order to support the movement from outside, being in contact with some leaders, even looking for unity with those trade unions, even if we had many differences of political attitude with them.”116 Thus, in this way, Sinticma provided for the local presence, while Conlutas was able to use different channels of publicity at a national level, and both unions collaborated in these efforts against the official trade union which was perceived to be on the side of the employer. The scenario at the Belo Monte Dam shows that there was a bigger distance of the official trade union towards the workforce than in Pecém which was aggravated by the number of workers and the fact that between 50 and 60 per cent of workers lived inside of the premises which the trade union is not allowed to enter. Sintrapav-PA had significantly bigger problems to maintain the official representation of workers in Belo Monte 114 Other than in many countries, in Brazil trade union representatives are not permitted any access to work premises in general. 115 Interview with Maria da Guia Serafim, President of Sinticma, 9 September 2014, Altamira. 116 Interview with Atnagoras Lopes. AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 265 than its partner trade union in Ceará, Sintepav-CE, encountered in Pecém. That was also due to the involvement of other trade union organisations that had established roots within the workforce. 5.4.5.8 The Alliances A third actor has been the movement against the dam itself, whose different organisations like MXVPS, MAB and Conselho Indigenista Missionário (CIMI) published news about the strike movements on their websites, and supported striking and dismissed workers with accommodation, legal advice and other basic requirements.117 While Sintrapav-PA was openly opposed to these movements, the other two trade unions engaged in a close cooperation with the resistance movements against the dam. When asked, Workers 1 and 2 named as important supporters MXVPS, MAB and the Catholic Church whose local bishop Erwin Kräutler was an outspoken critic of the dam project. The alliance was also based on a common perception of the project as being directed by the white elite from the Southeast of the country. Most workers came from the Northern regions. Worker 4 who belonged to the same group as Workers 1, 2 and 3 but did not participate in the commission said: “They (the bosses) thought that we did not study. They come from São Paulo and think like this: This here is a bunch of indigenous people, native folks. No, but here are a lot of folks who know how the law works. They wanted to have it their way (…) but it doesn’t work like that.”118 In several interviews the workers related to slavery when speaking about the conditions at the site: “Today there is a lot of repression at the site, modern slave labour, they work with a gun pointed at them by the police” (Worker 1).119 “The one who works there is under surveillance and made into a slave” (Worker 4).120 The movements against the dam suffered Interviews with Antonia Melo; two activists of MAB. Interview with Worker CCBM 4. In the original: “Eles pensavam que a gente não tinha estudo. O pessoal chega de São Paulo e pensa assim: isso aqui são um bando de indigena, um pessoal nativo. Não, mas aqui tem muitas pessoas que têm um conhecimento de como funciona a lei. Eles queriam que fosse do jeito deles (…) mas não é assim que funciona.” 119 Interview with Worker CCBM 1, in the original: “Hoje tem muita repressão dentro do canteiro de obra, trabalho escravo moderno, trabalhar com arma apontada pra eles da policia.” 120 Interview with Worker CCBM 4, in the original: “A pessoa que trabalha lá é vigiada, feito um escravo.” 117 118 266 J. NOWAK from repression, too, and in March 2014 Norte Energia had won a restraining order banning all street demonstrations in Altamira that would make the company feel ‘threatened’.121 In this way, the repression led to an rapprochement between militant workers and the movements against the dam. This connection between the movement against the dam and the strikes of workers was also facilitated by the fact that a considerable number of the 20,000–30,000 persons displaced in the course of the dam construction ended up working at the construction site since they did not have access to other forms of livelihood and had lost their basis of subsistence with the displacement. Worker 5 had been displaced together with her husband and resettled into a newly built satellite city at the outskirts of Altamira. The husband had entered to work at Belo Monte and subsequently died in a work accident at the construction site. While he was hospitalised after the accident, Worker 5 had entered into the site as well as a service worker for six months, having two kids and no other income.122 She had left the post after his death due to the injuries he had suffered, and was not allowed to reenter this post when she asked again. There was no financial compensation from the side of the company. Work accidents were often not registered and, as in the case of Worker 5, the company urged her to not register the death of the worker officially. Also, the national guard kept workers from sending photographs or videos from accidents, but nonetheless some of them ended up on YouTube. In an interview with two officials of the state agency Centro de Referência de Saúde do Trabalhador (CEREST), it turned out that the work of this centre of prevention and monitoring work accidents began effectively only in November 2013, 2.5 years after construction had begun.123 Usually, the company and the attending medical staff have to report to a system called Comunicação de Acidente do Trabalho (CAT). This had not been done by CCBM in Belo Monte until September 2014 when I conducted the interview. “Accidents happen and they cover them up. At times workers die and not even the family knows it. The body does not even arrive. Only if the body would be of a supervisor, of an engineer, of an employee with a Interview with two activists of MAB. Interview with Worker CCBM 5, 19 September 2014, Altamira. 123 Interview with Gilma Ferreira da Silva, CEREST, 17 September 2014, Altamira. 121 122 AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 267 major function, then they release the body to the family.”124 The CEREST can only enter the site together with other state organs like the Ministry of Labour in the state of Pará; in other states it has autonomy to enter workplaces by itself.125 After the strike in November 2012, the union Sinticma housed many dismissed workers in a church with the help of MXVPS and the two organisations organised buses to Belém for the workers to voice their complaints in person at the Ministério Público de Trabalho which had led to a number of workplace controls later.126 One of the main divisions between Conlutas and Sinticma on the one side, and Sintrapav-PA on the other side, was the relationship towards the movements against the dam. While Conlutas and Sinticma cooperated with those movements, the vice-president of Sintrapav-PA drew a clear line against any support: “I cannot for example join the movement against the dam when they call us because they are movements against the dam and I need the dam in terms of labour for the worker, we are on opposed sides.”127 Beyond this focus on employment creation as a good in itself, Gobbo simply saw the issue as being outside of the mandate and expertise of his organisation: “You lose your focus, only one thing at a time, this is what is in your hand, the benefit of the worker, I cannot escape this for one moment, change my perspective and start to fight for other things of which I have no knowledge.”128 This attitude also manifested itself in a statement of Sintrapav-PA towards an occupation of the site by anti-dam movements in May 2012, 124 Interview with Valnez Silva da Lima, CEREST, 17 September, 2014, Altamira. In the original: “Acontece acidentes e eles encobrem. Às vezes morrem trabalhadores e a familia nem fica sabendo, o corpo não chega nem ao destino. Apenas se o corpo for de um encarregado, de um engeinheiro, de um funcionário com patente maior, eles entregam o corpo para a familia.” 125 Interview with Gilma Ferreira da Silva. 126 Interview with Maria da Guia Serafim. 127 Interview with Rogivel Gobbo. In the original: “eu não posso por exemplo me juntar ao movimento contra a barragem que eles nos chamaram, come se eles são movimentos contra a barragem e eu preciso da barragem pra emprego para o trabalhador, nos estamos em lados opostos.” 128 Interview with Rogivel Gobbo, in the original: “você perde o seu foco uma coisa só é isso aqui que ta na sua mao o beneficio é isso do trabalhador, eu não posso nenhum momento fugir disso, mudar meu aspecto e começar a brigar por outras coisas que nem tenho conhecimento.” 268 J. NOWAK saying that the trade union cannot support actions that affect employment at Belo Monte (Sintrapav-PA 2013). Thus, the social and political divisions around the construction of Belo Monte led to a sharp polarisation in which the social movements against the dam, a part of the workforce for the construction of the dam and the two alternative unions Sinticma and STICMB and the officials of the Ministério Público were on one side, while they perceived that CCBM, the federal government and Sintrapav-PA were on the other side. Sintrapav-PA would see itself rather as a mediating force, similar to the self-perception of the Casa do Governo. Brazil’s largest trade union federation CUT was not immediately involved in the Belo Monte project and is present in the region mostly through the agricultural workers union Sindicato de Trabalhadores Rurais (STTR) Altamira. Its local representative thought the national federation should show more presence regarding the construction of the dam,129 while other representatives of CUT mainly claimed not being responsible since they did not represent the construction workers at the site.130 A seminar of CUT in Altamira on the question of Belo Monte ended up with the participants signing an open letter to the federal government urging to ameliorate the situation, but the publication was stopped in the last minute by higher-ups.131 5.4.5.9 The Workers’ Group The group of workers that had formed during the first strike was dismissed but continued to be active and said that whenever new strikes erupted at the site they were asked for help and advice by other workers. They continued to hand out leaflets, edited a workers’ newspaper and kept in contact with militant workers inside of the construction site. Another worker with closer connections to STICMB arrived as a worker at the site, and the activities of the group got more systematic, reaching out to meeting points of workers like bars and hotels in Altamira (Worker 1). These activities stretched well into 2013, and Worker 2 reported that he and other supporters at times entered the premises in a clandestine way. 129 Interview with Jose Aparecido, Sindicato dos Trabalhadores Rurais Altamira, 17 September 2014, Altamira. 130 Interview with Vera Paoloni, Secretaria de Comunicação, CUT Belém, 22 September 2014, Belém; Martinho Souza Souza, President of CUT Pará, 4 September, 2014, Belém. 131 Interview with Raimunda Rodrigues, Solidarity Center AFL-CIO, 2 September, 2014, Belém. AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 269 This group was not the only one acting during the strikes, but one that attained more coherence than others. Worker 3 says that similar to the situation in Pecém, many strikes are started by workers who entered earlier since they are more frustrated: “Often it is the workers who are there since a long time suffering, tired of being cheated and tricked, who make it” (organise a strike).132 The workers from this group were also more politicised than workers interviewed in Pecém. Two of them went to Brasilia in order to participate in a national rally during the protests in 2013, and Worker 4 saw the street protests in 2013 and the strikes influencing each other. 5.4.5.10 The Aims of Energy Generation In the case of Belo Monte, the bulk of the construction and energy companies is from Brazil itself; only the turbines are coming from the German company Hydro which is partly owned by multinational Siemens. The majority of the energy companies that own the dam are state-owned enterprises. But the construction of two large transmission lines to the Southeast of Brazil shows that the major part of the energy will be used in those more wealthy region of the country (about forty per cent of the total), while another part of the energy might go into the nearby gold mining project Belo Sun, led by a Canadian consortium, and to the aluminium mining and refinery operations of Norwegian company Hydro Norsk (Fearnside 2016). A leader of the rural workers trade union STTR aligned to CUT in the region of Altamira emphasised that their main aim of struggle in the past years was the advancement of the programme Luz Para Todos (Energy For All): “the public policies were not advancing like the big projects (…) Pará provides a richness, principally energy (…) and for us here in our house not even 50 per cent of the family-based peasants were included in the program”, thus they did not have access to electric energy.133 Thus, while the financial basis of the project Belo Monte is largely based on state funds, there is a strong perception in the region that the project is favouring certain 132 Interview with Worker CCBM 3, in the original: “Muitas vezes os trabalhadores que estão lá há muito tempo sofrendo, cansados de levar porrada na cara, que faz.” 133 Interview with Jose Aparecido. In the original: “as políticas públicas não estavam avançando como os grandes projetos. (…) o Pará fornece riqueza, principalmente energia (…) e nos aqui dentro da nossa casa não tinha nem 50% dos agricultores familiares contemplado com programa.” 270 J. NOWAK industrial projects by imperialist capital, and serving the energy needs of a more wealthier Brazilian population outside of the region. It is in these aspects of being a project imposed on the region from outside, that is, by the federal government and the economic centre in the Southeast, and the fact that there is hardly any scrutiny by the state regarding conditions of work and infrastructure for workers and the local population, that the project of Belo Monte maintains many of the features of an earlier project built during the military dictatorship, the Tucuruí Dam, by the same group of construction companies. It is in those aspects, and the aspect of financial kickbacks by construction companies for politicians who helped establish the project, that considerable continuities persist regarding the practices of domination that were established during the dictatorship (Campos 2016b). 5.4.5.11 Conclusions In the case of the strikes at Belo Monte, relations beyond the workplace were very much present since social movements in the Xingu region had mobilised against the project for about thirty years, and the region was in general impregnated with a high amount of social conflict. This was symbolically reflected in the claim of police after the first big strike that movements against the dam helped build barricades in order to block roads. A certain overlap between persons displaced because of the dam and the group of construction workers added to this interdependence of workplace issues and issues related to the dam project in general. The notion of a colonisation of the Amazon region by elites from the Southeast of Brazil or from other countries was very much present in popular rhetoric. This situation also led to a split between the social movements in the region of which some remained loyal to the federal government, and this resulted in a split between the different trade unions, and the alliance of alternative trade unions with the social movements against the dam (Corrêa and Nowak 2016). The workplace issues came to be seen in a larger context, since Belo Monte was the most prominent of all PAC projects, gaining considerable media attention due to its controversial nature. It was in this way that mobilised workers, the alternative trade unions, and the social movements against the dam construction developed a common vision and perspective on the type of development that came to dominate the Xingu region—but this was an alliance that ended with the conclusion of the construction, and it was based on the large-scale strikes during which between 8000 and 35,000 workers were at the site. This alliance was— apart from the common perspective on development imposed from the AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 271 outside—also serving pragmatic interests of both the workers and the movements against the dam: the workers had the power to block the construction of the dam for several days in a row, and these periods were often interspersed with occupations of parts of the premises by the movements against the dam; for example, the strikes from 28 March to 5 April 2012 and 23 April to 4 May had been followed by occupations of the site on 14–16 June 2012, and for about three weeks from 21 June to 11 July the biggest construction site in Pimentel had been occupied by anti-dam activists, too (Lourenço 2012).134 Furthermore, in late July 2012 two engineers of Belo Monte had been kidnapped by indigenous activists for four days (Peduzzi 2012). The course of events in only those few months demonstrates the high amount of conflict around the project. In the end, by different means, the workers and the anti-dam activists attained the same thing: a temporary halt of the operations. In this way, the strikes of the workers contributed to the strategy of the anti-dam movement to slow down progress of the works, but also to create media attention and controversy around the nature of the project Belo Monte as such. On the other hand, the support of the workers provided by the anti-dam movements, for example, creating publicity by using their websites and providing help in terms of accommodation and legal help for dismissed workers, was a welcome support since the infrastructure and resources of the alternative unions and the workers were not very elaborated beyond their capacity to stop the construction temporarily. After the strike in April 2013, the site saw another occupation by anti-dam activists that started on 2 May 2013.135 The linkages between formal and informal types of organisation are much more complex in the case of Belo Monte than in the case of the strikes in Pecém. Most of all, there was an enormous lack of trust of 134 After offices of the company had been ransacked during the occupation from 14 to 16 July, eleven activists had been accused by police, and two of those accused in July—journalist Ruy Sposati and speaker of MXVPS Antonia Melo—had been accused of supporting the strikes of workers two months earlier. 135 The occupants released a statement saying: “We are Brazilians. The river is our supermarket. Our ancestors are much older than Jesus Christ. You are pointing guns at our head. You are occupying our territories with soldiers and war trucks.” In the Portuguese original: “Nós somos brasileiros. O rio é nosso supermercado. Nossos antepassados são mais antigos que Jesus Cristo. Vocês estão apontando armas na nossa cabeça. Vocês sitiam nossos territórios com soldados e caminhões de guerra” (Ocupação Belo Monte 2013). 272 J. NOWAK militant workers towards the official trade union Sintrapav-PA, and not even a pragmatic form of cooperation. This led to alternative formal organisations entering the scene, like the trade unions Sinticma and Sticmb, and the anti-dam movements, mostly MXVPS, CIMI and MAB. Thus, Sinticma and Sticmb entered into competition with Sintrapav-PA, claiming to represent the workers at the site, or at least parts of them and their demands. While they could not achieve this on the official plane, due to the structure of union representation in Brazil, they undermined the credibility of Sintrapav-PA in the public and among the workers. Thus, the informal types of organisation of workers in workers’ commissions interacted with both the formal organisation of the official trade union, although often in conflictive ways, and the formal structures of the alternative unions and organisations of the anti-dam movements. Workers who led the first big strike in April 2012 created a sustainable group of workers which discussed political issues and met on a regular basis, but this did not take the form of a formal organisation, probably also in order to avoid a repression, and remained a small group. Finally, it was the long trajectory of conflicts and popular mobilisations against the dam in the Xingu region that had an impact on how the mobilisations of workers got articulated in this region: they were interpreted in the light of the other effects that dam construction had on the local population which then facilitated the alliance between anti-dam movements and striking workers. Both constituents of this alliance experienced that the prominence of the project Belo Monte in the general public led to a large media presence of the strikes and the actions against the dam, but this did not have much impact on the political line of the government regarding the project since it was seen as a landmark for the success of the neodevelopmentalist regime. On top of this, the specific spatial pattern of the strikes of construction workers, that is, the migration of workers as migration of strike experiences, added another layer of political traditions: the narrative “from Jirau to Belo Monte” was employed both by militant workers and by the official trade union. Thus, a specific regional pattern of resistance, the national project of neodevelopmentalism and the specific patterns of migrant work were three different spatial layers that intersected in the scenario of the strikes in Belo Monte. The project of the Canadian consortium Belo Sun to start gold mining close to the dam, and close to indigenous territories, that took shape already in 2014 and gained traction since then, projected a scenario in which a good part of the energy created by the Belo Monte Dam will be used for mineral extraction by AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 273 imperialist capital—and the high energy use by Norwegian aluminium company Hydro Norsk in various existing sites in the region is another indication for the projected distribution of energy generated in Belo Monte (Fearnside 2016). 5.5 comparing pecém and Belo monTe While comparing the strikes in Pecém and Belo Monte, we will follow the seven analytical levels introduced at the beginning of this chapter. We will fuse here the first point about non-class relations and relations beyond the workplace with the sixth issue of imperialist capital since they cannot be dealt with in a separate manner. The same goes for the second issue of common experiences of strikers and non-striking social movement actors— this issue will be evaluated jointly with the question of political tradition. For this reason, the seven issues here are boiled down to five: 1. Non-class relations, relations beyond the workplace and imperialist capital Issues beyond the workplace played a role in Pecem and in Belo Monte: first, in both projects state intervention was seen as one-sided by the workers since police repression was quick and effective and mediation efforts by the Ministry of Labour, and state monitoring of work conditions at premises were timid and ineffective, partly due to court procedures that prolong any timely implementation of legally established work standards. The investigation of the federal police against illegal employment of Korean workers at CSP did not show any considerable results during the construction period. This partiality of state agencies was seen in the light of the fact that the projects in question were part of the publicly funded PAC programme and thus perceived as projects of the government, and presented as such by local, regional and national politicians. Beyond state agencies, in Pecém the issue that the construction of CSP was led by Korean company Posco and that many supervisors and engineers were Korean contributed to the project being seen as ‘Korean’ by workers and the trade union, giving rise to complaints about the harsh treatment by Korean supervisors, including physical violence. It also found a practical expression in the use of Korean workers as strike breakers by the construction consortium, and the fact that a Korean driver hit 274 J. NOWAK two workers trying to break a picket line which led to a violent clash between workers and police, and the arrest of sixty-eight workers. On the ideological plane, workers and trade union officials saw the conflict with Posco as the defence of established national Brazilian work culture and its moral economy against the harsher moral economy of imperialist capital represented by Posco. The issue of ‘foreign intrusion’ was also present in Belo Monte, but rather as the intrusion of Brazilian elites from the wealthier Southeast of the country into a Northern poor region with a different racial composition. Suffice it to say that black workers are overrepresented in construction. This perspective, underlined by anti-dam movements that were active in the region for thirty years, and thus well established, is strengthened by the use of a considerable amount of the energy produced in Belo Monte by extractive industries active or planning to be active in the region which are dominated by imperialist capital for example from Norway, Canada and Israel. Thus, both the question of state involvement in the projects, repressive against workers, and lenient against construction companies, and the question of the interests of imperialist capital which were seen in contradiction with regional interests came to be mixed up with proper workplace issues. A third element was the question of the infrastructure for workers, one of the main grievances, and also an issue at the borderline of state responsibility for local planning around state-funded projects and the responsibility of construction companies. In both instances, questions of race became articulated, in Belo Monte in the idea voiced by one worker that managers from ‘São Paulo’ (i.e. standing for the white elite in the Southeast of Brazil) see construction workers in the North as ‘uneducated Indios’, and in Pecém in the idea of Korean managers being disrespectful to the Brazilian moral economy, the established rules and customs, at the workplace. On the theoretical level, we can conclude from these case studies that non-class issues and non-workplace issues such as different work cultures of imperialist capital, or the internal colonialism of the Brazilian social formation mix up with workplace grievances. The compound nature of large construction sites adds many issues of social reproduction to traditional workplace grievances which also demonstrates that what is conceived of as workplace issues might vary according to the sector. On the one hand, this means we have to take a distance from too narrow conceptions of the workplace and recognise that it might include many aspects that are traditionally conceived as areas of social reproduction (older forms like company housing come to mind). On the other hand, national and regional identities can play a huge mobilising role for workplace issues since they might provide an additional context and a matrix of identification for the AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 275 workers on the top of workplace problems. Thus, both strike movements were overdetermined by anti-imperialist or anti-colonial identifications against internal colonialism and imperialist capital. It is important to note here that in the case of Belo Monte the identification against internal colonialism was on the one hand based on an identification with a certain region (the North/Northeast of Brazil), and this identification was subsequently enforced by the pre-existing movement against the dam project. 2. Formal and informal forms of organisation In both industrial locations, strike movements were based on workplace groups that organised in commissions and the structure of the work safety commissions called CIPA. Strike movements took various forms like shorter work stoppages at the site, larger walkouts, enforced by street blockades that prevented the entrance to the premises and were accompanied by property destruction and occasional violence against security forces and, in the case of Belo Monte, also violence against trade union representatives. In both sites an official trade union affiliated to Força Sindical led negotiations and both unions gained considerable influence due to the surge of construction projects in the course of PAC 1 and PAC 2. But while Sintepav-CE was extraordinarily engaged in including the workers in decision-making processes which were documented on YouTube, Sintrapav-PA used a more top-down form of trade union activity and did not document any assemblies. Sintrapav-PA was constantly faced with mobilisations of workers that challenged its authority to represent the workers, which was aggravated by the engagement of two other trade unions with workers that dissented with the official union. While there were actions such as arson and attacks at police forces and firefighters by workers in Pecém that were not approved by official union Sintepav-CE, there was no profound challenge to Sintepav-CE as the representation of workers at UTE and CSP, but rather short-lived disagreements between workers and the trade union. This difference is significant since both unions belong to the same federation, and shows the relevance of local and regional differences within one federation. The higher amount of dissidence in Belo Monte was largely due to workplace dynamics such as the harsher conditions in Belo Monte and the higher amount of collusion of Sintrapav-PA with the consortium, and only aggravated by the opposition of Sintrapav-PA towards the anti-dam movements who became in turn allies to the militant workers and the dissident trade unions in Belo Monte. 276 J. NOWAK This situation consequently resulted in a rather smooth convergence of informal and formal types of organisation in Pecém, and a constant conflict between organisations claiming to represent workers in Belo Monte. Sintrapav-PA aimed to coopt the informal organisation of workers early on, but succeeded with it only to some extent. The alliance of militant workers with organisations hostile to Sintrapav-PA and the dam as such, and the violent intervention of state security organs against workers, then increased the polarisation between different camps in Belo Monte. But, due to the short-lived nature of the workplaces in construction, and the fact that workers are not employed on a long-term basis by companies, a more sustainable form of organisation did not emerge from those strikes. It is here that we can see the effect of the nature of construction work in heavy construction on the forms of organisation—urban construction workers for example will rather stay in the same area and also have more long-term links to employers in some cases at least. The theoretical lesson from these cases is again the primacy of informal workplace organisation for the strikes. But we can also observe that formal and informal forms of organisation do not necessarily converge; they can also enter into serious conflicts. In the case of Belo Monte, the informal workplace organisation resulted in a competition between different formal organisations about who might more adequately represent this informal level of organisation. Thus, the central question of representation and its problematic nature comes up here and the fragility of every claim of representation becomes visible. On the other hand, since the aspirations of workers in Belo Monte to constitute their own association were undermined by repression of the employers, the necessity arose of them being represented by alternative formal organisations. The fragility of representation is at the same time the necessity of representation, at least in the given context. The question of regional identification was adequately addressed by the social movements against the dam and so they could attain the support of a section of the workers in Belo Monte. The larger amount of independence that the official union in Pecém had with respect to employers allowed it to adapt the language of national identification against ‘Korean’ employers and assume a less contested role of representation. 3. Common experiences of strikers and other actors and political traditions The relative spatial isolation in the local area where strikes happened, quite typical for large industrial projects which are rarely built in established AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 277 urban centres, did not seem to be a determining factor and has to be weighed against the inscription of political traditions into local and regional places. While the spatial isolation of workers in Belo Monte was significantly different from the one of workers in Pecém, with 50–60 per cent of workers staying at the premises which are in a 40-kilometre distance of a larger settlement, this situation added up to the frustration of workers, but it was also balanced by the presence of the movements against the dam in the area with their long-standing tradition. Thus, we cannot deduct that spatial isolation as a single factor is demobilising. On the other hand, workers in Pecém usually stayed in São Gonçalo de Amarante or Pecém (7500 inhabitants) which both have some basic infrastructure, or in Caucaia, a suburban centre bordering Fortaleza with about 360,000 inhabitants in a thirty-minute distance from the premises. Although the construction projects in Pecém were thus less isolated spatially, the strike movements did not create cooperation with other actors, not even with urban construction workers in nearby Fortaleza who struck and clashed with police during the same week in June 2014 as workers in Pecém did. The decisive difference between both sites of strikes were thus the fact that in the region around Belo Monte a large amount of organised social movement actors hostile to dam construction was established since three decades. Thus, we can deduct that the existence of a strong tradition of political resistance exerted more influence on the way the strike movements unfolded than the spatial isolation of the strikers in Belo Monte. Plus, the fact of spatial isolation with lack of proper transport services, and often dysfunctional networks of electronic communication, became one of the main grievances of the strikers, thus spatial isolation aggravated the anger of workers and became a mobilising factor in itself. The long history of resistance against the dam in the region was the decisive factor that allowed for a common perspective of striking workers and the movements against the dam. 4. Sectoral patterns and diffusion to other sectors The spatial diffusion of strike experiences played a huge role for the movements in Brazilian heavy construction. In both sites, a widely circulated narrative explained the strikes with experiences of workers that came to the respective region by way of labour migration, in Pecém migrating from Bahia (at least in the case of UTE), and in Belo Monte as having worked earlier in Jirau in the Southern Amazonian state of Rondônia. 278 J. NOWAK The accuracy of this narrative is hard to prove, but at least the anecdotal evidence of the strike leader Worker 1—who had participated in the strikes in Jirau and then came to Belo Monte—supports it. The significance lies in the narrative being accepted by different and opposed actors. It also reflects that the strikes in Brazilian construction formed a coherent wave over a longer period of time and were perceived as such by the general public. Thus, the migrant nature of construction work contributed both to the diffusion of experiences from one Brazilian region to another and to the diffusion of contacts among workers who informed each other about stoppages, encouraging the quick diffusion across the national territory. The novelty of the recent wave of strikes in Brazilian construction was the fact that they emerged into a sectoral strike wave. And, they occurred in a context in which numbers of striking workers spiked in 2012 and 2013 in various sectors. The public sector strike in the summer of 2012 saw an unprecedented participation and strikes of different groups of the urban workforce like teachers, bus drivers, street cleaners and metro drivers were frequent in 2013 and 2014 (De Amorim 2014). The total number of strikers in 2011 and 2012 was dominated by public sector workers, but most of those in 2011 were smaller strikes. Said differently, the strikes of construction workers in 2011 and 2012 were the first mass strikes in this larger strike wave, and both initiated a series of mass strikes in other sectors, and strikes in construction maintained their momentum until 2014. Thus, we can conclude that across the various sites of strikes in Brazilian construction there was something like a sectoral identification, and the travelling of political traditions across space due to the migrant nature of work enhanced this level of identification of workers. At the same time, within the context of a larger strike wave in Brazil from 2011 to 2016 (and possibly continuing) with record numbers of workers involved and hours lost due to strikes, the construction workers formed a vanguard in the sense of being one of the first groups in this period launching a continuous wave of strikes from 2011 to 2014, and the most militant ones in terms of the violent measures adopted, the extent of informal grassroots organisation, and also in terms of results of negotiations. They lost this vanguard role after 2014 due to the downturn in construction activity, but the momentum of strikes in other sectors remained as can be seen from the high number of strikes in 2016. On a more general level, we can state strong sectoral dynamics of strikes in the construction sector, in the Brazilian case initiated by massive public financing of AN ASCENDING WAVE: MASS STRIKES IN THE BRAZILIAN CONSTRUCTION… 279 infrastructure and industrial projects, but also a strong cross-sectoral pattern that unfolded over time. 5. Significance of the strikes for the larger political scenario As a last aspect, we will deal with the question to what extent the strikes in construction had an impact on the national political scene. The political significance of the strikes in construction was the fact that they occurred at the heart of industrial projects that were symbols for the neodevelopmentalist agenda of the Lula and Rousseff presidencies. Especially the project of Belo Monte had been opposed consistently by Lula and PT before they came to power at the federal level in 2003. The fact that strikes were mainly dealt with by sending in the national guard and other repressive agencies came to symbolise the nature of the neodevelopmentalist compromise. While the MNC as a tripartite compromise was destined to revive the trade unionist tradition of the PT and some of its allies, the patchy nature of its implementation and the lack of urge and priority that it had for the federal government once installed on the symbolic level are another indication how working conditions and workers’ aspirations were subordinated to the neodevelopmentalist agenda. Thus, the way the government dealt with the strikes of these lower layers of the workforce became a symbol for the compromise that the Lula and Dilma governments seemed to represent. After the successful struggle against extreme poverty, workers expected more, at least better working conditions and an enlarged participation in material wealth. This upward process came to a halt in the 2010s, and came to express itself first in the surge of strikes, and then in the street protests of 2013 whose dynamic then was successfully transformed by the right-wing into anti-PT movements from late 2014 on. The new profile of workers that came to the fore in those strikes was one impregnated by earlier social progress in the 2000s: These folks today are not any more the semi-illiterates coming from rural areas, these folks have blogs, they wear an earring, participate in social media networks, listen to rock music, and the bosses and the government don’t know how to read this new type of toiler, and the most grave of all is that these people don’t have conditions to stay anywhere, subhuman conditions and no decent work, and in the moment when the trade union should act as a trade union it is like a boss, the trade union looks for a solution, and enters 280 J. NOWAK into the judicial area where they alienate themselves from the working class, and the interaction is made via the police which has the least conditions to resolve anything with those folks who don’t fear the police, even more in the case of the toiler in construction. The police instills fear in others but not in the toilers.136 This embedding of the strikes in the larger scenario allows to use the strikes as an epistemological tool in order to make the conjuncture and the political project of neodevelopmentalism legible: it unfolds the contradictions of neodevelopmentalism, the situation in which the growing consciousness of workers could not find an expression in the given political constellation since the established left appeared as the adversaries of the workers so that any other major political articulation could only be found on the right-wing spectrum of politics. 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La rebelión obrera de Jirau. La Jornada. http:// www.jornada.unam.mx/2011/04/08/index.php?section=opinion&article=0 23a2pol. Accessed 14 June 2018. CHAPTER 6 Conclusion This book set as an aim to understand the new forms of organisations of workers that emerged from mass strikes in emerging economies in the wake of the global economic crisis in the late 2000s. This research question was provoked by the forms that strikes in several countries like China, South Africa, India and Brazil took, often acting against or in tension with established unions, entering into violent confrontations with security forces, and without finding much support in established political parties. The exclusionary nature and the violence of the neoliberal state was all the more visible when party formations on the political left like the ANC in South Africa and the PT in Brazil participated in governments without lending much support for or often even employing outright repression against these strikes, raising considerable doubt about the progressive nature of those party formations. Which lessons can we draw from those strikes and what are the organisational forms we encountered in the four case studies? The theoretical endeavour in this book sets out to analyse strikes beyond a focus on the workplace and the trade union, thus including other forms of organisation and other places of mobilisation. We will recapture which findings this perspective provides and to what extent it contributes to understand the mass strikes in question. We have defined mass strikes as strikes that mobilise previously unorganised workers and that become political events with a significance beyond the workplace. In order to differentiate the phenomenon we have distinguished between three forms of mobilisation—demonstrative © The Author(s) 2019 J. Nowak, Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India, Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05375-8_6 289 290 J. NOWAK mass strikes, centrally coordinated fighting mass strikes and worker-led fighting mass strikes—as well as three spatial patterns of mass strikes: sectoral copycat strikes, national cross-sectoral mass strikes and regional mass strikes. These are analytical categories that might see overlaps and grey areas if applied to empirical reality. The first section of this chapter will look at the strike movements we analysed thoroughly in Chaps. 4 and 5 in the larger context of the social and political situation in India and Brazil with a recourse to the global environment and the insertion of those countries in the global political economy. Strikes do not take place in a vacuum, and strike waves usually have many direct and indirect effects on the larger political environment, that is, dissatisfaction of employers’ organisations which might become impatient with the inability of governments to rein in labour unrest. Thus, the question which social constellations and problems found their expression in organisational forms emerging from mass strikes will be asked with recourse to the larger picture: which were the larger grievances driving those strikes, and which effects did the strikes have on the broader political environment? The second section on spatial patterns tackles the question of the spatial dimension and spatial relevance of those mass strikes. Beyond the local and regional levels, we will here locate the strikes analysed in the case studies in the national and global context. How were particular strikes affected by national strike waves or affected and constituted them? Can we identify particular spatial patterns of those strike waves and how did those patterns facilitate or restrict the trajectory of the protest movements? This section also represents an application of labour geography to mass strikes which has not been done before, and builds on the more detailed analyses in the previous chapters. In this section, we come back to core questions developed in Chap. 1, responding to the question on organisational forms, and reflecting on the dialectics of workplace organisation and other places of mobilisation. To what extent do the labour process and the workplace develop specific dynamics, i.e. a relative autonomy (Edwards 1986), and to what extent are these specific dynamics in turn determined and affected by dynamics outside of the workplace? The spatial dynamics will be one aspect of this investigation into the intersection of different dynamics and logics of labour unrest. Thus, in those two sections, we come to discover that we are only able to provide satisfying responses to the question about organisational forms if we first enquire into the larger social relations that inform CONCLUSION 291 the organisational forms of workers and other social actors around mass strikes and then go back to the initial question on forms of organisation. The following two sections go beyond the initial guiding question: the third section situates the mass strikes we analysed in the larger global conjuncture of protest movements in the wake of the global economic crisis, which face both the non-death of neoliberalism (Crouch 2010) and the strong surge of an anti-globalist conservative movement in both core and non-core countries. We will locate the mass strikes in this considerably recalibrated global political universe and consider the challenges that come with this constellation—which will also provide some explanations on the gains and failures implied in those strike movements. This complex leads us immediately to the last section that will determine the political significance of the mass strikes in the period 2010 and 2014. Why did they succeed with certain issues and not with others? What is the specific limit of this form of working class action? Can we distinguish conjunctural features of those specific mass strikes from general features of mass strikes? Which would be the necessary ‘next step’ to move on and why is the mass strike not the ‘one-size-fits-all-solution’ for revolutionary transformation? In all of these sections, we will compare the mass strikes in Brazil and India dealt with in this book following the method of incorporated comparison (McMichael 1990): the strikes are seen as part of a global conjuncture which means that they coconstitute this conjuncture, and are not just aspects or phenomena of this conjuncture. It is within and through those conflicts that a conjuncture emerges—a certain global constellation is always conjunctural and will not be defined entirely by path dependency or the characteristics of a global system (Wallerstein 1974). Thus, incorporated comparison takes the global nature of capitalism and its determinations into account, but underlines the singular nature of the conjuncture as decisive for the political character of a concrete situation (Althusser 2006a; Gallas 2017). The comparison will thus proceed through the coming four sections and explore different aspects of this conjuncture. 6.1 The STrikeS in ConTexT In this section, I will establish primarily the national context of the strikes in question. It is one of the characteristics of mass strikes to have a broader impact on society. It is striking that in both countries a period of labour unrest and middle-class-led street protests against corruption was followed 292 J. NOWAK by a turn to right-wing governments—through electoral victory in India in 2014, and through a parliamentary coup in Brazil in 2016. This common trajectory raises questions about the effects of those mass strikes in the larger context, beyond immediate demands for wage increases and better working conditions. In both countries, the mass strikes occurred in isolation from street protests, and could not obtain political hegemony over those—moreover, the industrial strikes were largely ignored by street protesters and did not represent a point of reference (Nowak 2016), despite the significant presence of those strikes in the national media. This says a lot about the lack of common political frameworks and the inability of the working classes to exert political leadership during the period in question. Also in both countries, the strike movements were confronted with a political vacuum: no major political party or social force declared support to the strikes. In India, there was some amount of support from CITU, the trade union aligned to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and also from unions close to the Communist Party of India for the strike movement at Maruti, but both parties did not come out in a more systematic fashion in favour of striking workers in the automobile or other sectors beyond national demonstrations. The newly founded Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) showed the most consistent support for both the strikes at Maruti and at Bajaj Auto, but the connections to the working class movement got looser after AAP entered the government of the Delhi state in January 2014, which immediately led to conflicts with striking bus and metro drivers who vindicated the fulfilment of the demands AAP had launched during the election campaign (Nowak 2016). In Brazil, the main party expected to support strikes would have been the PT. But, as has been developed in detail above, the government in which PT participated saw the strikes as uncomfortable events intervening in its national developmental programme, and trade union CUT with political proximity to the PT was not representing workers in those construction sites and hesitant to back those workers’ actions. The establishment of minimum standards in large construction sites, the Mesa Nacional, turned out to be an at best halfhearted attempt due to unclear rules of implementation and a complete lack of monitoring. The slow demise of the government of Dilma Rousseff from 2013 on added other priorities to the government agenda, including a sharp turn towards austerity measures immediately after the election in late 2014 (Singer 2018, 197). Thus, the only consistent support for the construction CONCLUSION 293 workers’ strikes came from the small party PSTU which scored only 0.19 per cent in the national legislative elections in 2014. If we compare this scenario with strikes that spiked in Brazil, South Africa, South Korea and the Philippines in the mid-1980s, we register the absence of a national political party that relates to these strikes. At least in Brazil, South Africa and the Philippines the union movements of the 1980s had a central political organisation which they could relate to, the PT in Brazil, the ANC in South Africa and the Philippine Communist Party in the Philippines. If we take a closer look, the situation in the 1980s was less clear-cut as it seems in retrospect: in South Korea, the Left was not able to form a working class mass party, or a social-democratic project in the 1980s; in Brazil, PT was only formed in 1980, two years after the strikes had taken a mass character; and in South Africa, a definitive alignment of the militant unions with the ANC only occurred in 1985 when the state of emergency united the multifaceted opposition against the apartheid regime. But, however wound the trajectory of social movement unionism in the 1980s was, its result was a coherent political project which cannot be identified in the wave of mass strikes between 2010 and 2014. This was also determined by the situation of united opposition against long-standing dictatorships in all those four countries of South Korea, the Philippines, South Africa and Brazil.1 The situation for the last big wave of strikes in India was different from the earlier mentioned countries. It emerged between 1978 and 1982, after the emergency period under Indira Gandhi that she had initiated against the national railway strike in 1974, anti-corruption movements and a judicial process against Gandhi herself. Other than in Brazil, the opposition against the emergency did not come with a new left political project. It rather established the slow ascent of the Hindu right and the consolidation of the Indian middle class, and in addition it sealed the fate of the national developmentalist project of post-war India (Rajagopal 2011). Thus, the postemergency strikes in India petered out due to the lack of a stable political vehicle that might have emerged or linked up with them, and the crushing 1 Beverly Silver (2003) argues that the fusion of workers’ movements with broader political mobilisations in the cases of South Korea, Brazil and South Africa effectively raised the chances of success of labour unrest. It would be worthwhile to discuss to what extent the focus of these movements on authoritarian regimes, that is, the political level, weakened the class content of those mobilisations in the mid- and long-term perspective. 294 J. NOWAK defeat of the Mumbai textile strike in 1982 came as a confirmation of this tendency (Van Wersch 1992). But at least the CPI (M), founded in 1964, was an ascending force in this period, and related to the strikes positively, bolstering its government position in the states of Kerala (from 1980 to the present) and West Bengal (from 1977 to 2011). Thus, the current political vacuum in Brazil and India in terms of left and working class politics is not without precedents as the case of India shows. We can also perceive similarities in the fact that strike waves mobilise conservative, elite and middle-class social forces as a counterresponse: this was clearly the case in 1989 with the first free presidential elections in Brazil after the military dictatorship which the left candidate Lula lost by a small margin and that initiated a neoliberal period of privatisation and flexibilisation that took hold for the next thirteen years. The trajectory in India in the late 1970s and early 1980s was more wound up, but one can trace that the strike wave from 1978 to 1982 was followed by the slow ascent of the Hindu right that emerged from the ideologically vague Janata Party as Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1980 and was able to fill the post of prime minister for the first time in 1996. If we look at the recent past in Brazil and the ousting of Dilma Rousseff from the post of president in 2016, the preceding strikes since 2010 have been characterised as one of the issues that led to the rupture of the Brazilian bourgeoisie with the PT. André Singer, undoubtedly the most influential interpreter of Lulismo, or the PT during the period of the presidencies of Lula and Rousseff, sees the rise of strikes during the first Rousseff presidency (2011–2014) as one of the three reasons why the industrial bourgeoisie embarked on a clash with the government since 2013. He names as the other two reasons the fall of profits, and an international reorientation of the Brazilian bourgeoisie since 2008, refocusing on an alliance with the USA, and demanding greater distance to China (Singer 2018, 73). Singer regards it as one of the central errors of Rousseff that she did not establish any positive relationship with the upsurge of strikes in order to increase her backing among the population (ibid., 95). Instead, she addressed the workers who had left misery or the status of low-waged workers as the ‘new middle class’, a widespread slogan across the political spectrum in the early 2010s. Finally, the protests in 2013 that started as left-wing mobilisations for better and cheaper public transport ended up as anti-PT movements against corruption (Estanque 2014; Scherer-Warren 2014). The social composition of the protests in 2013 was CONCLUSION 295 divided between young poor workers and poor students who represented half of the protesters, while the second half of protesters were clearly middle and upper class, with around 25 per cent of all protesters having a family income of five to ten minimum wages, and another 25 per cent of protesters with a family income of more than ten minimum wages (Singer 2018, 114). While strike numbers continued to spike during 2013 and 2014, and strikes of teachers, petroleum workers, metro drivers and street cleaners in late 2013 and 2014 received considerable news coverage (Nowak 2016; Braga and Purdy 2018), after 2013 the strike movements did at no point dominate the political debate. The political imaginary was captured by protests against corruption, focused on the left-wing presidential figures of Lula and Rousseff. This hints at the fact that the lack of a political project and a coherent narrative limited the effectivity of the strikes beyond the economic realm. This does not mean that they did not have political effects. Absent any political force that represented a central reference for the strikes that were dispersed throughout sectors, trade union federations and federal states, the street protests against corruption provided the more spectacular event, and were pushed by the quasi-monopoly of right-wing media (Ortellado and Solano 2016). Singer notes explicitly that neither Rousseff as president nor the PT or the trade unions tried to politicise the strikes and other popular protests in the period of anti-PT movements. “In the absence of a response from the left (…) the center and the right-wing occupied the space, proposing to take the opposite direction” (Singer 2018, 119; own translation). Curiously, we can trace similar dynamics in India in the same period. While strike numbers did not see the unequivocal rise between 2010 and 2014 in India as they did in Brazil, but rather an up and down, the strikes at Maruti, many other labour conflicts in the automobile sector and the massive general strike movements since the early 2010s are part of the general picture in the period that preceded the return to power of the BJP in 2014. The central message of BJP candidate Narendra Modi in the election campaign in 2014 was economic growth with reference to Gujarat as a regional state that saw much private sector investment due to a liberal investment policy and lax regulations. Part of this package and the party programme was a further flexibilisation of labour law. Neoliberal trickle-down-effect rhetoric was not affected by what had happened in the global economic crisis of the late 296 J. NOWAK 2000s. At the same time, India witnessed anti-corruption protests, too, that had their highest point in 2011, and several protest leaders subsequently supported the BJP, while others remained independent or founded their own party, the AAP. It was also in this case that a good part of the protesters came from the middle class, and since the protests focused on corruption in state institutions (but the corruption cases were often about benefits granted to private companies or rich individuals), some commentators saw the anti-corruption movement as driven by the new privatesector-based middle class against the old public-sector-based one (Visvanathan 2012). In any case, the amount of public support that CEOs of large companies lent to the movement was remarkable (Sitapati 2011). Similar to what happened in Brazil, the anti-corruption movement generated an anti-establishment mood, primarily directed against the incumbent government that represented a ‘weak reformism’, or social democracy blended with neoliberalism. The strikes of workers did not provide a strong reference point for the anti-corruption movements in India, too, although at least leaders of anti-corruption party AAP felt the need to support the strikes of Maruti and Bajaj workers in public. Thus, there was a bit more of a connection between street protests and strikes in India, but in no way the strikes would have inspired protesters in street rallies against corruption. Thus, if we look at both national scenarios, we can identify strong and consistent strike movements, but ones that did not provide much inspiration to other large-scale national protest movements. Street protests with a considerable larger middle-class participation tended to ignore the labour conflicts, and rather strove for formal equality in the framework of a democratic state, expressing dissatisfaction with the impartiality of state institutions and the misuse of public funds for private interests. These anti-corruption protests served to change the political mood and prepared the ground for the takeover of right-wing governments. The anti-PT mobilisations in Brazil in 2015 and 2016 were the largest in the history of the country, and in distinction to the mixed composition of the street protests in 2013 the former were clearly dominated by the middle class. We can conclude that the strike movements both in India and in Brazil were unable to create a larger narrative and ideological framework, in spite of or because of their mass character. Instead of establishing links to middle-class street protests they rather seemed to compete with them. Given the bias of news media and protest researchers, street protests got far more media coverage and attention from academia than strikes did. One conclusion that we can draw from CONCLUSION 297 this is that the strikes broke out into an ideological vacuum on the left— no social force was able to sufficiently amplify their message, inspite of the manifold alliances that strikers forged on the ground. Notwithstanding these tendencies, powerful strike movements in India and Brazil persisted. India saw even larger strike movements in 2016 and 2017, with more than 100,000 textile workers on strike in Bangalore against repealing a law in April 2016, repeated mass strikes of more than 200,000 workers in tea plantations since 2016 and peasant strikes that peaked in late 2017. In Brazil, strike numbers in 2016 were even higher than in 2013 and 2014, outnumbering any year in Brazilian history that entered into strike statistics (DIEESE 2017), and the truckers’ strike in May 2018 paralysed the whole economy for eleven days, leading to a change of the CEO of Petrobras and of its price policy, one of the ten largest companies worldwide. This tells us that the right-wing governments were not able to break the strike movements, rather to the contrary, and that the cause is not lost. In the face of these more recent mass strikes in both countries, the strikes between 2010 and 2014 were only the first act. Other than in social movement unionism in the 1980s, the political target of those strikes was not national dictatorships, but companies protected by weak reformist governments aligned with neoliberalism. Thus, the adversary in these cases was rather the global model of capitalism than any of its national variants. While the strike movements in the 1980s saw capitalism as their adversary, too, it was the popular protest against dictatorships that gave the mass strikes their dynamic and context. In the 2010s, the main dynamic was the inclusion of India and Brazil in the global economy, and workers primarily strived to participate in the wealth they created. The labour unrest resulted from the fact that this participation was not part of the prevailing model of capitalism, and less so in the right-wing governments that succeeded the ‘weak reformists’. Thus, the strikes expressed that workers took the words and proclamations of governments at face value. It is important to note that the neoliberal state offered no place for these workers’ demands. Regulation in favour of workers was weak, often absent, or insufficient, especially in terms of health and safety procedures in all its facets. In contrast to this, governments were quick to send the police, often special troops, if conflicts escalated. Literature on labour repression is conspicuously absent in the past twenty years with very few exceptions (Pratap 2011; Kolin 2016; see for older accounts: Greenberg 1980; Woodiwiss 1991; James 1992; Freeman 1994; Kwon and O’Donnell 298 J. NOWAK 1999). It was only the massacre of mining workers in South Africa that led to a series of publications (Satgar 2012; Stewart 2013; Bond and Mottiar 2013), but a general approach to labour repression is still a desiderate. This also raises the question of the relationship of the neoliberal state to labour movements, a question which also affects trade unions that pretend to work within the framework of such states. Research on the effects of neoliberal changes in labour law shows that these come with a severely restricted space of movement for unions (Knox 2016). Both for Brazil and India, we can derive from the case studies largely a mixture of enforced application of the repressive aspects of labour law combined with an outright neglect of those aspects of labour law that protect workers. Thus, we see both an increase of repression (again reinforced by changes in labour law in both countries after the period dealt with in this book) and a highly selective implementation of labour law during centre and centre-left governments. It is by way of this uneven nature of the application of law that the ideology of law unfolds its effectivity: the law as such presents itself and is presented by interested parties as a compromise between conflicting forces and a balanced construction, while the functioning of the repressive apparatus and the composition of its personnel is highly selective and onesided—the state is a machine designed for the oppression of the working class (Althusser 2006b). To sum up, we can deduce from this comparison that the industrialisation drive in emerging economies is coming with sustained strike movements in India and Brazil since 2010, but those moments seem to not have any major institutional repercussions at first sight. At second sight, there are massive repercussions, but rather adverse ones in terms of a middle-class and elite countermobilisation, and a turn of labour law towards more repression and employer-friendly flexibilisation, followed by right-wing governments taking over, which are, slightly paradoxically, incapable to end the strikes, at least not until the time of writing (August 2018). Workers do engage in coalitions with other actors in the course of the strikes, but absent larger left organisations or more sustained and broader action, these coalitions remain ephemeral, at a too small scale or too weak in order to present a serious challenge to the various levels of countermobilisation. Thus, we will have to evaluate the second act of the currently ongoing strike movements in later investigations to see if the ideological and political impasse has been resolved to some extent. CONCLUSION 6.2 299 SpaTial paTTernS: The WorkplaCe and iTS oTherS After reaching to the broader context in which the strikes unfolded, we will now zoom in again on our case studies, but also situate them within national strike waves. If we endeavour to identify spatial patterns of mass strikes we can apply several levels of analysis: (a) the places of mobilisation, (b) the spatial conditions in a certain industrial cluster and a region, what van der Linden calls “communicational distance” (2008, 191), (c) the political traditions inscribed in a certain spatial area and (d) national or regional strike waves as a certain socio-spatial event or series of events. We can identify a specific logic in any of these four different levels: the specific dynamics of certain places like the workplace, the neighbourhood and so on; spatial conditions in terms of proximity to (other) urban areas, traffic connections and spatial characteristics that would allow police to close off an area easily; political traditions that go back to earlier defeats, victories or compromises, materialised in a certain self-perception of individuals and collectives, contacts and networks, and resources; a general climate of mobilisation that facilitates mass action and eases fear and hesitation. These different levels usually overlap with one another and influence each other. In the case of the strikes at Maruti Suzuki, the original place of mobilisation was the Manesar factory, but during the course of the struggle a number of other places became relevant, especially after a huge number of workers, more than 2300, were dismissed. Court rooms, prisons, neighbourhoods, university campuses, public places in central New Delhi and villages in Haryana state became some of those places, and beyond the specific workplace at the Manesar factory a number of other factories and the whole terrain of the industrial cluster in Gurgaon and Manesar became places of mobilisation, and finally other cities all over India were included. But it was also during the factory struggle proper when the workers did sit-ins inside the premises, that the neighbourhoods, family bonds, workers in the wider Manesar area and villages in Haryana turned into crucial resources to maintain the action inside of the factory, and mobilised from the outside. The workers of the third shift who remained outside during the first occupation acted as intermediaries in this case and spread out networks into the wider social territory. 300 J. NOWAK This multiplication of the social places of mobilisation was also accompanied by a variety of organisations that supported the workers. At the beginning was the interaction between workplace organisation and the union MSEU, then later renamed as Maruti Suzuki Workers Union (MSWU), accompanied by established trade unions in Gurgaon. The interaction between workplace organisation and the factory union had its own dynamic and evolved over time in face of the necessities of the conflict. It was just a few months after the struggle had started that new actors entered the field: workers at other Maruti factories went on strike in parallel, and workers at more than ten supplier factories struck out of solidarity, and besides a lot of journalists, a large variety of actors from both Haryana state and New Delhi got involved, later accompanied by workers and activists in various cities all over India. Thus, while the trade union MSWU as representative of the permanent workers at the Manesar factory (and since 2014 at the Gurgaon factory) played a central role throughout, the trajectory of the Maruti struggle would have been inconceivable without the multitude of other trade unions but also other types of political organisations involved. Plus, individual intellectuals like Arundhati Roy and Yogendra Yadav intervened in the struggle. Later developments then came with the foundation of companywide, regional and national alliances and organisations that emerged from the conflict at Maruti Suzuki. Thus, we do not see the abandonment of the form of the trade union, but rather it being embedded into a variety of other forms of coordination and popular mobilisation without losing its specific role. Nonetheless, it becomes obvious that an exclusive focus on the trade union as the form of organisation of workers would have made it impossible to evaluate the processes involved in the Maruti strikes. We see a less broad number of actors and places involved in the strike at Bajaj Auto, but also in this case there is at the beginning an interaction between workplace organisation and the trade union VKKS. This union is embedded in the dynamic of a regional federation and an NGO that is consulting this federation. Financial support from other workers, partly organised via the federation, was essential during the strike, and meetings were held in the office of another union federation in a central location. The strike assemblies were moved to a more central area and thus removed from the factory itself in order to be better protected against physical attacks from third forces. In the course of the strike, intellectuals and social movement activists got involved in the activities and assemblies of workers. CONCLUSION 301 Although there was a more central role of union organisations in this strike, the dynamic around it evolved through the participation and engagement of other actors and the permanent presence of the strike in the media. The choice of a more established working class neighbourhood was an important decision and shows the spatial awareness of the union, and this decision also contributed to the enlarged visibility of the strike since marches of workers were conducted in this densely populated area and not close to the factory which was in a 15-kilometre distance. If we look at how spatial conditions strictly speaking and the political conditions inscribed into spaces were related to each other, we can identify certain physical and infrastructural limits that were given with the fact that both the Maruti and the Bajaj Auto factories are located in relatively new industrial zones with a lack of public transport connections and vivid street life, both aspects that might provide shelter against an isolation of the strike. These limits were overcome in the case of the Maruti strike through the interaction with neighbours and workers from other factories, and later through the relocation of protest action to other areas. In the case of the Bajaj strike, it was the relocation of strike assemblies to the more populated Akurdi area that evaded the spatial isolation of the new industrial area in the Chakan special economic zone. In both cases, it was political traditions inscribed into a spatial area that allowed to overcome physical and infrastructural limits: the relative isolation in Manesar could be overcome through the networks between workers that got established during the strikes in the later 2000s, while the older tradition of labour conflicts in the Akurdi area came with, for example, established meeting points of union organisations, and a vivid street life that workers and the union saw as a protection against attacks by police and privately hired goons. It was obvious that the more recent tradition of labour conflicts in the Gurgaon region provided for a stronger support network than the Bajaj workers could enjoy, and the relative proximity of New Delhi with a stronger tradition of a metropolitan Left as well as the relative proximity of villages in Haryana where Maruti workers stemmed from provided for additional support networks. Thus, in the case of the last two factors, physical proximity coincided with the presence of certain solidarity networks. Workers at Bajaj Auto came mostly from Maharashtra state, but often from regions further away from Pune, and the left political tradition in Pune itself is less pronounced than in New Delhi as the capital city of India. 302 J. NOWAK Finally, both strikes are part of a larger strike wave in the car passenger and motorcycle sector that flared up and down since 2005. It has been more pronounced in the NCR and the Chennai cluster than in the Pune cluster or other smaller clusters. While most of these strikes were unionled, there has been no coordination between these strikes, so they erupt due to dynamics internal to the workplace and inspired by the larger dynamic. There are certain regional differences in this larger national pattern; that is, within the general form of worker-led mass strikes in the automobile sector, we can identify a strong spatial pattern of sectoral copycat strikes combined with a pattern of regional mass strikes due to the more insistent occurrence of strikes in the NCR region. At least for the period of our investigation, between 2010 and 2014, we could not identify a strong diffusion to other sectors, although there had been a number of strikes in the pharmaceutical, textile and electronics sectors in the NCR in this period, and much of the electronics sector is supplying to automobile factories. It was only after 2014 that major strikes spilled out to other sectors as mentioned in the preceding section. Looking at the strikes of construction workers in Brazil, we can also identify the workplace as a specific area of mobilisation, but due to the specific situation of the workers in big industrial construction sites, the places of social reproduction are often within the premises or close to them. In any case, beneath original workplace-related grievances, issues related to social reproduction like holidays, housing facilities, food provision and medical services were core issues for the mobilisations. Due to the specific situation of big construction sites, it was not so much the places of mobilisation that multiplied, but the issues concerned. There has also been some amount of mobilisation of construction workers within urban spaces, but these played only a minor role for the strikes in Belo Monte and Pecém. Given the fact that the state funded (or organised in one case) these major construction projects, the non-compliance with labour law was seen as a more grave issue by workers. In the case of the steel factory CSP built by Korean multinational Posco, the antagonism with Korean managers took a specific nationalist form, going beyond strict workplace issues, and articulating dissatisfaction with the role of imperialist capital. The dam construction in Belo Monte, itself a highly controversial issue, was seen as an invasion from outside of the region, following a long trajectory of industrial projects in the Amazon region, and construction workers identified in antagonism to the manag- CONCLUSION 303 ers and engineers from the richer South of Brazil, which created a common line of resistance with anti-dam movements. The role of trade unions in both conflicts was much more limited as in the two Indian cases, since they largely led negotiations in response to strikes that were planned and organised by workers themselves. While the official union in Pecém maintained relatively closer, but sometimes tense, relations to the organisation of workers at the workplace, the official union in Belo Monte was in open conflict with most of the striking workers, and competition with smaller unions that sided with the organisations of the anti-dam movements took on a hostile character. Thus while the actors in Pecém were largely reduced to workers and the union, but with a multiplication of issues, the situation in Belo Monte saw a larger number of actors, especially the intervention of the anti-dam movements in the strikes that then formed a front with dissident unions and militant workers against the official trade union. In this case we can trace the consequences of corporatist trade unionism with an exclusive focus on the workplace: the official union in the Belo Monte Dam construction was mostly concerned about jobs and working conditions but openly declared to ignore all other social problems around the construction of the dam itself. Much of the actual strike organisation was organised through workplace organisation and without the official union in both of the strikes, but again we can recognise that the form of the trade union itself did not disappear from the scene, although the official unions took very different forms and roles in the two sites, and the cases of dissident unions displayed other roles. In any case, the classical role of the corporatist union is barely present in the strikes in Brazilian construction, despite (or because of) the state-centred union law in Brazil. The strike wave in Brazilian construction was a consistent phenomenon between 2011 and 2014 and intensified in the given period. These were classical worker-led mass strikes with a spatial pattern of sectoral copycat strikes, obviously as a consequence of the spike of investment in construction in 2010. This sectoral strike wave unfolded within the context of overall rising numbers of strikes, mainly in the public sector in 2011, and then mainly in the private sector in 2012 and 2013 (DIEESE 2015). There was some amount of similar strike forms since 2013, probably inspired by the street protests in June 2013, by bus drivers and street cleaners who organised independently and against the official trade unions, but these did not develop into a sustained action like in construction (Linhares 2015, 12). Bus drivers also used arson to some extent during their strikes, damaging 304 J. NOWAK and burning buses driven by strike breakers. There were no strong regional patterns in the strikes in construction, so we can speak of the main form of sectoral copycat strikes being accompanied by some amount of spillover to other sectors, but only with minor significance. If we compare these tendencies across countries, we can underline the persistence of the trade union form, but with a high amount of variation across context, leading to the conclusion that the classical pattern of the corporatist trade union was not dominant in the mass strikes in question, with only the strike at Bajaj Auto resembling this classical pattern. There were many other forms like workplace organisation, alliances with social movements, a regional organisation which does not incorporate the union form and accompanies trade union organisation and often it was the specific combinations of different forms of organisation that made the difference. This multifaceted nature of how workers organise is not exclusively of a positive nature since it also leaves the observer without a clear orientation which would be the model to follow. While complaints about the unitary application of Western models to other contexts have been a source of legitimate criticism for a long time, the lack of a larger model of political mobilisation can easily lead to fragmentation and action restricted to the local and regional levels. It is one of the crucial questions in this regard if this is due to the early phase of these workers’ movements or if this is a general characteristic of the global conjuncture that broad alliances on a local or regional level are confronting a global model of production. Albeit the social movement unionism of the 1980s displayed a number of limits and huge variation across national contexts, one can at least say that it confronted national dictatorships with national union federations (and national political parties), while the current conjuncture displays a much more asymmetrical and fragmented scenario. Second, the workplace remains a central area of mobilisation, but it were those mobilisations of workers that included other issues and/or other actors that had the strongest effects, either in the case of the Maruti workers with a large number of actors and territories involved in the conflict, or in the case of construction workers in Belo Monte, including a larger number of issues and again a larger number of actors. Thus, we can conclude that at least for the mass strikes investigated in this book, the intervention of other actors beyond workers was crucial in some cases, and it contributed to a higher visibility for those strikes. CONCLUSION 6.3 305 The Global ConjunCTure If we conceive of the mass strikes in Brazil and India as important moments that constituted the scenario of social struggles in the wake of the global economic crisis in the late 2000s, we have to relate it to two phenomena: first, there was a surge of mass strikes in various countries since 2010. In some countries mass strikes preceded street protests, like in Egypt 2010 a year before Tahrir Square movement, and in Brazil since 2011 before the street protests in 2013. In other countries, worker-led mass strikes became the dominant form of protest in this period, like in China in 2010, and in South Africa in 2012 and 2014. Other countries like Turkey saw a large strike movement in the automobile sector in 2015, after street protests in 2013 had been squashed violently. The European general strikes spread out to Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Greece since 2010. Thus, we witness a resurgence of strikes in a number of countries and while these came with new left-party formations in a number of West European countries, we have not seen these types of changes in non-core countries (with the only exception being Mexico). We can rather detect the situation of a stand-off between workers and the state. What is striking is the similar phenomenon of a surge of worker-based mass strikes and a surge in state repression across non-core countries in the period between 2010 and 2014, independently from the fact if governing parties were formally aligned to the ‘left’ or to the ‘right’. While India and Brazil have seen a turn to right-wing governments since 2014, Egypt entered into a military dictatorship from 2013 on, and the regimes in Turkey and China formally remained under the same leadership but took a more authoritarian character from 2013 on, while the regime in South Africa is largely unchanged. It is part of this specific conjuncture that confrontations of workers with the state in many non-core countries led to more violence and repression than at any point of time since the 1990s, while the political responses of official political parties have never been so mute in the same time period. There is something unspeakable about these strikes, despite or because of their omnipresence in news media in this period. While the mass strikes in non-core countries in the wake of the global economic crisis can be regarded as a global and non-coordinated response to this crisis, we should also pay attention that some of the affected sectors still saw considerable growth at the time of the surge of those strikes, and this is absolutely the case for the construction industry in Brazil and the automobile industry in India. 306 J. NOWAK Second, the remarkable limit of these strikes is that they engage with global companies. The Indian automobile industry produces primarily for the domestic market, but with a rising proportion of exports in total production. But it is not a domestic industry, since Japanese and South Korean multinationals (Suzuki and Hyundai) dominate the car passenger market, while the motorcycle market is divided between Japanese multinationals (Suzuki and Honda) and Indian companies (Hero and Bajaj Auto). Bajaj Auto has a quite large export proportion of exports for some of its products. Thus, the Indian automobile industry is based on and dependent on imperialist multinational capital to a considerable extent, and to a lesser extent on exports. The Brazilian construction industry was dominated by the ‘big five’ which all participated in the construction of Belo Monte, and all of these companies became multinationals and multisector conglomerates in the last decades of the twentieth century. The construction of the Vale-Posco joint-venture steel factory was directed by Korean multinational Posco itself which demonstrates the presence of Asian imperialist multinational capital in construction, a rather rare case for the period between 2010 and 2014 which set precedents for the coming period. Thus, the Brazilian construction industry itself has been a largely domestic sector between 2010 and 2014, and it saw the influx of imperialist capital to some extent. The activities of Brazilian construction companies in Latin American, African and Arabic countries establish the presence of multinational subimperialist capital across various continents. Other than the Indian automobile industry it has not been dominated by multinational capital, and branches abroad play an enormous role for its economic activities. Although the companies involved in the strikes investigated here, with the exception of Bajaj Auto, are present in a number of different countries, workers did not establish much means of direct communication with other workers across national borders. One of the rare instances to the contrary were the solidarity demonstrations that Maruti workers held for South African miners, of whom thirty-four were killed in the Marikana massacre in August 2012, just three weeks after the uprising at the Manesar factory. While Brazilian construction workers had no idea about what was going on in India, they had all heard about the Marikana massacre in the media. In this way, these tragic events became a symbol for the place of labour in the post-crisis scenario, but to complete the picture we have to add that the strikes in South African mines only began after Marikana and lasted five more weeks, sweeping through almost all major gold and platinum CONCLUSION 307 mines of the country and extending to other sectors. But the main tendency of the strikes in this conjuncture was the national focus, and often a sectoral focus. These are two crucial limits since they came with the reproduction of existing divisions between workers. Workers in Indian automobile factories had a specific position in being able to block manufacturing, while workers in construction in Brazil were highly sought after in the given period which encouraged them to go on strike. So we should not discard the influence of specific sectoral aspects. The national focus of strikes is a central weakness which might not be possible to overcome in the near future, but it is nonetheless important to note it. Part of the global conjuncture is how India and Brazil are integrated into the global economy. As has been outlined in Chap. 2, Brazil’s exports saw a strong shift towards agriculture and minerals since the early 2000s and industrial exports dropped spectacularly in the same period. The PAC infrastructure investment programme strengthened both the primary commodities sector (much of the energy from hydroelectric plants goes to mineral extraction; see Fearnside 2016), but also the industrial sector, as with the construction of the steel plant in Pecém close to Fortaleza and petrochemical investment in Abreu e Lima close to Recife. Construction workers were at the lower end of this investment boom in the early 2010s. While the construction projects were bringing employment and income to the affected regions, this came at a high cost in terms of working conditions and adverse health effects for workers—and environmental changes and dislocation altering the economic bases of tens of thousands in the case of the dam. Plus, once built the thermoelectric plants, hydroelectric plants and steel factories will be run by rather small groups of employees, although they might bring some indirect employment effects. In any case, the population in the affected regions does not enjoy a large share in the profits, and changes in the local areas of construction are unequivocally negative with a rise in crime, drug business and prostitution. India has seen a different type of integration into the world market, with a recent rise in industrial exports, but a high dependency on oil prices which regularly leads to current account imbalances. It is expected that industrial exports will continue to rise in the coming years, but the amount of employment in the Indian industry relative to the national economy is stagnant since the 1980s. Thus, the employment effects of industrialisation are severely limited to non-existent. Automobile workers are rather at the higher end of the working class in India, different from construction workers in Brazil. Nonetheless, the rapid diffusion of contract labour 308 J. NOWAK established conditions in manufacturing plants that resemble much of the general conditions of the Indian working class. Adverse effects on the health of workers are a much bigger issue than in Brazilian construction. Japanese capital plays a key role for the Indian auto industry, thus the dependence on foreign technology and know-how remains immense. In both countries, we witness a partial industrialisation with a high dependence on foreign inputs. This means that the industrial working class remains an intermediate group situated above a large group of paupers, even if this group of paupers has shrunk considerably in Brazil from 53 per cent in 2002 to about 30 per cent in 2014 (Singer 2018, 82)— and the relative size of this group is certainly increasing again in Brazil since 2014 as all indicators signal. This group of paupers remains a much bigger share of the population in India with a gigantic reserve army in the countryside and an enormous mass of 100 million migrants who move constantly back and forth between town and country. This peripheral type of global integration of both Brazil and India comes with an enormous wage suppression, and an extreme strain on the health of industrial workers. Since capital will only invest if wages are sufficiently low and demands of the state to respect labour law remain modest and incomplete, there is a vicious circle at work that will not be broken through industrial upgrading. It is now the former late developers like South Korea and Japan whose capital participates in the unequal exchange between core and non-core countries, and the structure of the world market does not allow for countries like India and Brazil to move up in the way Japan and South Korea did, and ecological conditions will prevent this anyway. The incorporated comparison does show to which extent the mass strikes in Brazil and India are important instances of class formation, revealing the particular strengths of those workers, but also the weaknesses that come with the specific constellation of this global conjuncture: the ideological and political vacuum into which those strikes enter, enforcing as the main response a middle-class and elite countermobilisation with a strong religious-conservative ideology, while traditional reformist forces in government power (the PMDB-PT-dominated coalition Para o Brasil Seguir Mudando, headed by President Dilma Rousseff; the coalition United Progressive Alliance, led by the Congress Party) responded devoid of any ideology primarily with state repression. It was this situation of a vacuum that prevented strong links of strike movements with street protests, since both the strike movements and the street protests in India and Brazil were not able to formulate a coherent proposal for the renewal of CONCLUSION 309 society which could have attracted other groups. This situation allowed right-wing parties to dwell on the dynamic of the street protests, while the strikes could not be coopted (due to their obvious class character), but have been to some extent isolated. Thus, the strike waves as major social conflicts provide a key to read the global conjuncture if they are evaluated in the larger context. 6.4 TheoreTiCal ConCluSionS What are the theoretical conclusions that we can derive from those case studies and their analysis and interpretation? First of all, the usefulness to include non-class relations and social relations beyond the workplace into a theory of strikes has been proven: the broad support network that the Maruti workers established in the course of their mobilisations and the alliance of the construction workers at Belo Monte with anti-dam movements demonstrate that a narrow focus of strike analysis on the state, employers and unions would not be able to capture the multiplicity of actors and social relations around those strike movements. But also during the strikes in Pecém and at Bajaj Auto that saw a less wider network of support, the national overdetermination in the conflict with Korean managers and supervisors and the support that Bajaj workers got during their strike show that non-class issues had a certain salience for those labour conflicts. We can observe that the course of a strike depends much on the wider social network around it, the specific political traditions in a region or industrial cluster, and whether a strike is part of a larger series nationally or regionally. While there are specific dynamics emanating from the workplace, once a strike has started factors beyond the workplace become more important which does include not only the wider social environment but also the insertion of the specific workplace into production networks, and thus the ability of workers to impinge on profit-making. In the case of the compound nature of work in large industrial construction, it is important to question a narrow concept of the workplace since it includes many aspects of social reproduction in those cases. For common experiences of striking workers and other actors to develop in the course of labour conflicts depends much on the density of the social network around strikes and the level of independent mobilisation that non-strikers have developed. This can be seen in the Maruti strike where already highly politicised social movement organisations of students and agricultural workers joined in, or the case of the workers at Belo Monte who encountered a variety of social movement 310 J. NOWAK actors that have been engaged for three decades in protests against dam construction. The specific weight of strikers in these alliances or networks has been the ability to immediately affect profit-making and block production (or construction) which distinguishes them from other actors to a certain extent—the various occupations of the construction site of Belo Monte by anti-dam protesters had the same effect in terms of blocking construction but did not lead to wage rises for workers. Second, the question on the relationship of formal and informal organisation has been analysed in its various aspects: all formal union organisation is based on informal workplace organisation, so we can confirm that there is no strict distinction in this respect. But on the other hand, office bearers and organisational structures of unions are to some extent differentiated from the various forms of informal organisation, and tensions between informally organised actors and official unions have been present to a larger or smaller extent in all case studies. We can thus conclude that formal union organisation requires informal organisation at the workplace in order to be effective, but that formal organisation might nonetheless take on a life on its own despite this dependence. While we cannot strictly distinguish between both types of organisation since they coexist in all case studies concerned here, they exhibit different dynamics and logics and it makes sense to retain the specific concepts of formal and informal organisation, but without turning them into a dichotomy of completely separate or even antagonistic social types of organisation. Third, regarding spatial patterns of mass strikes, we can conclude that political traditions have primacy over strictly physical limits of mobilisation. The industrial clusters around New Delhi and Pune display a similar density of industrial activity and the factories of Maruti and Bajaj Auto where strikes occurred are located in new and rather isolated industrial areas. The decisive difference in the form of mobilisation stemmed from the fact that the New Delhi cluster saw a large number of strikes since 2005, contacts to villages where workers originated from were more intensive and New Delhi provided a larger political support network than Pune did. In the case of Brazilian construction sites, the considerably more isolated construction site at Belo Monte—in comparison with construction sites in Pecém—saw a larger articulation with other actors due to the politicisation of the region. It would be incorrect to downplay the difficulties stemming from the fact that the five basecamps at Belo Monte were far from each other and not well connected, but all these physical limits could be overcome by mobilisation. At the same time, the peri-urban environment CONCLUSION 311 in Pecém facilitated contacts to other actors like urban construction workers that were on strike at the same time but due to a lack of interlocutors the strikers in Pecém remained without many contacts to other local actors—except in one instance of police repression when a solidarity delegation urged the release of an imprisoned worker. At the same time, the strikes in Pecém had significance on the national level: in 2011 and in 2014, the Federal Minister of Labour urged the construction companies to negotiate settlements, and the strike in Pecém in March 2011 was the first in a long series of similar actions at PAC construction sites. We can thus differentiate regional from national spatial patterns: the Pecém strikes show that a weak regional embeddedness does not exclude significance on the national level. And we can underline that political traditions inscribed into a region prevail over any physical aspects of spatial isolation. Inversely, spatial proximity to other mobilised actors does not guarantee greater success if these possibilities are not realised. The sectoral and national patterns represent decisive limits of mass strikes: we can detect strong sectoral dynamics which facilitate mobilisations via the identification with other workers from the same sector. Over time, these can turn into limits if strikes do not expand to other sectors. Nonetheless, we can say that construction workers in Brazil and automobile workers in India acted as a kind of vanguard in the respective national contexts, in being the most visible section of the working class in terms of strike action in the wake of the global financial crisis. Both sectoral groups left this role after the period under investigation here—2010 to 2014— and other groups of workers took over. Thus, one can say that in both cases the sectoral mobilisations were successful in initiating a cycle of struggles that was then inherited by workers in other sectors. We should thus not discard sectoral mobilisations as a purely ‘partial’ endeavour of comparatively privileged groups of workers. Sectoral identifications are an important driving force and can unleash struggles in other segments of the workforce. The most important limit is the national one since traditions of the media and the general public and language differences facilitate a national focus of strikes. Strikes in other countries are seldom perceived as a reference by workers, and international solidarity actions are often limited in scope. We can at this point only register this crucial limit which cannot be overcome by voluntaristic proclamations about the necessity of international action. Fourth, we have already said much about the position of those strikes in the national scenarios and the global conjuncture. Given the political 312 J. NOWAK constellations, those strikes had the effect of a rightward shift of governments, employing more and more repressive courses of action. Construction workers in Brazil had considerable success in getting their demands fulfilled, while in India this was restricted to permanent workers as a minority group in the workforce. While in both cases police repression was strong, it was much more harsh in India. The fact that most workers on Brazilian construction sites were covered by the same collective agreement while Indian workers are separated into various groups with different legal status made a crucial difference. One interpretation of this situation is that the maintenance of the hierarchies between workers in India requires more police violence than the situation at Brazilian construction sites does. 6.5 MaSS STrikeS: and Then? We have applied a labour geography perspective on the mass strikes in India and Brazil in order to understand their insertion into local and regional, national and international dynamics. The different spatial levels provide for manifold interactions but also come with restrictions and barriers: the most important being the national level as a unit that labour conflicts rarely transcend. The endeavour to understand strikes in their relation to the wider territory and a larger number of places and actors as normally are included in industrial relations research reveals that the trade union form is in transformation, resulting in different forms. The discrepancies between these forms are too large to allow the identification of a coherent trend: the corporatist trade union comes in top-down (Belo Monte), traditional (Bajaj Auto) and more grassroots-oriented variants (Pecém), while smaller factory unions (Maruti) or dissident sectoral unions (Belo Monte) made significant inroads into territories earlier typically held by larger and/or yellow unions. While the established trade union form in India is coming with a high amount of exclusion and segmentation since in many companies de facto only permanent workers, that is, often the minority at a workplace, can join them, the Brazilian trade union system includes all workers of a sector in the system of trade union representation while only a minority of those are union members which have a say in the trade union activities. Thus, while segmentation is avoided to some extent with the Brazilian system, it comes with a high amount of trade union bureaucracy, business unionism and corruption in union elections, as was uncovered by the scandal in 2018 around union registration involving the Minister of Labour and the president of second largest union federation CONCLUSION 313 Força Nacional (see Chap. 4). Thus, while single unions as social movement organisations remain relevant, the systems of trade union representation established in India and in Brazil have strong oligarchic features and expose the considerable democratic limits of labour law. A commonality between the mobilisations in Maruti and Belo Monte were the manifold cooperations and alliances that emerged around the mass strikes. These might have been the result of the prominence of the specific workplaces that attracted more attention as scenes of conflict than a no-name large factory would do. But the important issue here is that the trade union form has been successful when it combined with other forms of organisation, primarily informal workplace organisation that had a large amount of autonomy in the Brazilian construction sites, but was also essential for the strikes in India. “Contrary to a stubborn prejudice, large and successful strikes are perfectly possible without unions. Workers’ unions cannot exist without (the ultimate threat of) the strike weapon, but the converse is not true” (van der Linden 2008, 179). But apart from that, the links to other places and other actors, the beyond of the workplace, seemed to guarantee larger visibility and effectivity for the strikes, so we can make a tentative strategic recommendation here. These connections across the boundary of the workplace seemed to add significance to the strikes, or seemed to let their significance become visible and readable (van der Linden 2008, 191). The articulation of workplace conflicts with class relations beyond the workplace and with non-class relations was not a strong factor in all of the strikes, but cases of a stronger articulation between those resulted in greater popular power. In addition, the integration into national strike waves conferred upon the events a certain sense of salience, they seemed to be more significant since they were not seen as isolated events, but as nodes in a larger chain of events. But, as we had mentioned earlier, the mass strike as a sectoral strike wave, even when embedded into a larger scenario of record numbers of strikes, as was the case in Brazil from 2011 to 2014, will run up against limits if the national political scenario is not favourable. To create wider and long-lasting connections across the national territory or even across borders will be a decade-long project and it cannot be focused on the industrial working class exclusively. The workers and their activities described in this book acted as a vanguard, but not in the sense of a political elite—rather in the original military sense of the fore-guard at the frontline (avant-garde in French), testing out new models and the limits these come up with. The later meaning of the term ‘vanguard’, used for 314 J. NOWAK art movements, implied a pioneer role that leads to changes with a groundbreaking and long-term effect, being a creative and innovative movement. It will be in this sense that we can read off those mass strikes innovative models but also the challenges for any broader class movement in the early twenty-first century. referenCeS Althusser, L. (2006a). Contradiction and Overdetermination. In For Marx (pp. 49–93). London: Verso. Althusser, L. (2006b). Marx in His Limits. In The Philosophy of the Encounter (pp. 7–162). London: Verso. Bond, P., & Mottiar, S. (2013). Movements, Protest and Massacre in South Africa. 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New York: Routledge. INDEX1 A Accumulation, 29, 73, 103, 107 Agriculture, 31, 57, 111, 130, 185, 307 Austerity, 292 Automobile industry, 18, 70, 98, 100, 102, 104, 105, 126–129, 131, 132, 178, 180, 181, 183–185, 201, 305, 306 B Blockades, 240, 263, 275 C Class, 2n1, 3, 8, 9n6, 11, 14, 16, 17, 25–30, 28n2, 32–34, 36, 37, 39, 41, 43–45, 49, 49n7, 50, 52–58, 65–67, 69, 70, 74–76, 80, 81, 100, 101, 107, 108, 113, 125, 1 133, 145, 152, 157, 183, 201–204, 236, 244, 253, 263, 264, 280, 291–296, 293n1, 298, 301, 307–309, 311, 313, 314 Class formation, 27, 28, 28n2, 30, 31, 81, 194, 308 Construction sector, 3, 5, 193–280 Contract work, 154 D Demonstrative strikes, 58, 59 Development, 26, 30, 36, 37, 43, 45, 50n9, 51, 53, 55, 56, 73, 97, 102, 110, 112, 118, 129, 132, 133n2, 174, 182, 196–201, 208, 210, 223–227, 258, 270 Diffusion, 16, 58, 60, 64, 65, 69, 79, 84, 185, 209, 251–254, 277–279, 302, 307 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. © The Author(s) 2019 J. Nowak, Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India, Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05375-8 317 318 INDEX F Family, 14, 26, 28, 30–32, 48, 68, 77, 80, 101, 137, 138, 147–149, 156, 157, 159, 176, 181, 194, 211, 226, 233, 235, 256, 266, 267, 295, 299 Fighting strikes, 59, 61 Food, 17, 25, 29, 78, 101, 118, 138, 147, 156, 165, 180, 199, 200, 213, 229, 234, 245, 248, 251, 253, 254, 260, 302 G Gender, 30, 38, 45, 76, 80, 81, 170 General strike, 48, 50, 56n14, 57–60, 66, 79, 116, 140, 182, 196, 295, 305 H Hegemony, 40, 44, 66, 292 Housing, 29, 66, 76, 80, 101, 199, 200, 212, 213, 227–229, 234, 235, 245, 254, 260, 274, 302 I Industrialisation, 19n9, 30, 45, 57, 71, 98, 99, 101, 102n2, 125, 129, 157, 209, 210, 230, 243, 298, 307, 308 Informal work/informalisation, 29, 98, 105, 106, 108, 130 L Labour geography, 7, 14, 16, 33, 34, 72–78, 290, 312 Labour market, 38, 73, 74, 76–78, 83, 106, 201 Labour repression, 297, 298 Labour unrest, 33, 66, 126, 128, 136, 153–155, 180, 204, 210, 221, 248, 290, 291, 293n1, 297 Lenin/Leninism, 13, 49n7, 51, 54n12, 55n13, 60, 68 Lockout, 135–140, 157, 182 Luxemburg, Rosa, 5, 15, 16, 33, 46, 47n6, 48–61, 69–72, 80 M Marx/Marxism, 2n1, 10, 30, 37, 42, 68, 100, 107 Mass strikes, 3, 5, 9, 15, 16, 27, 33, 46–72, 74, 78, 97–118, 176, 182, 184, 185, 193–280, 289–293, 297, 299, 302–305, 308, 310–314 Migration/migrant work, 17, 73, 75, 102, 107, 147, 213, 239, 272, 277 Mining, 42, 43, 197, 198, 200, 201, 231, 247, 259, 269, 272, 298 N Neoliberalism, 9, 200–204, 291, 296, 297 NGOs, 162n44, 300 O Occupation, 5, 8, 118, 136, 139, 156, 157, 194, 247, 259, 267, 271, 271n134, 299, 310 Organisation, 3, 5–10, 9n6, 14, 15, 17, 18, 25–29, 31–34, 36, 37, 39–47, 49, 50, 52–54, 52n11, 57–62, 64, 66, 68, 71–75, 78, 80–83, 97, 99, 104, 116, 118, 125–128, 142, 145–159, 170–172, 178, 179, 181–185, 194, 202, 212, 214, 222, 227n21, 228, 230, 239–241, 244, 251, 255, 259, 264, 265, 267, 271, 272, 275–276, 278, INDEX 289–291, 293, 298, 300, 301, 303, 304, 309, 310, 313 P Place, 2, 4, 6–8, 10, 14, 15, 17, 18, 26, 28, 31–35, 38, 42, 43, 46, 47, 61, 63, 65, 67, 72–79, 83, 100, 112, 114, 127–130, 137, 151, 153, 158, 164, 165, 168, 170–172, 184, 195, 198, 199, 206, 211, 213, 214, 223, 224, 226, 227, 230, 237, 244, 246, 250, 251, 253, 262, 277, 289, 290, 297, 299, 300, 302, 306, 312, 313 Police, 18, 126, 136, 137, 140–143, 149, 152, 157, 160, 168, 177, 179, 200, 214n11, 232, 232n38, 232n39, 233, 237, 238, 244, 249, 250, 251n77, 255, 261, 262, 265, 270, 271n134, 273–275, 280, 297, 299, 301, 311, 312 Precarity, 106–108 Privatization, 69, 171, 197, 198, 201, 294 R Regulation, 75, 105, 106, 108, 131, 203, 228–231, 235, 244, 248, 256, 295, 297 Repression, 4, 18, 69, 142, 143, 149, 152, 183, 194, 199, 201, 242, 251, 257–262, 265, 266, 272, 273, 276, 289, 298, 305, 308, 311, 312 S Sectoral strike, 278, 303, 313 Social movements, 3, 6n2, 10, 11, 13–16, 31, 32, 39, 54, 59, 319 62–65, 63n15, 67–69, 71, 72, 128, 156, 179, 181, 193, 228, 250, 258, 262, 263, 268, 270, 273, 276, 277, 300, 304, 309, 313 Social movement theory, 16, 62, 64, 65, 68 Social movement unionism, 15, 16, 33, 46–72, 293, 297, 304 Social reproduction, 16, 30, 81, 101, 245, 274, 302, 309 Space, 7, 8, 17, 32, 33, 59, 69, 71–78, 83, 128, 133n2, 142, 145, 151, 158, 184, 194, 240, 262, 278, 295, 298, 301, 302 Strike wave, 5, 17, 42, 46, 47, 47n6, 50, 78, 79, 84, 97, 98, 104, 112–118, 115n5, 129, 160, 181, 182, 184, 185, 193, 195, 196, 199, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 221, 224, 230, 244, 278, 290, 294, 299, 302, 303, 309, 313 V Violence, 6, 7, 43, 51, 68, 69, 115, 157, 228, 242, 246, 250, 251, 255, 257, 260, 273, 275, 289, 305, 312 W Work group, 62, 82 Workplace, 3, 5–7, 14–18, 26–28, 30–35, 37, 39–41, 40n4, 43, 45, 46, 48, 54n12, 58, 61, 63, 66–68, 70, 72, 75, 76, 78, 80–84, 128, 145, 147, 149, 155–158, 162n44, 176, 179, 182–184, 194, 203, 209, 214, 222, 230, 231, 234–236, 238–240, 242, 243, 245, 267, 270, 273, 275, 276, 289, 290, 299–304, 309, 310, 312, 313