386 - Thematic Session. Precarity and Polanyi: Transforming Labor, Citizenship and the Neoliberal State

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

A large body of recent research documents the ways in which the world’s informal and precarious workers are developing novel approaches to organizing that aim to de-commodify their labor, restore their dignity, and address the challenges of working in poorly paid, insecure, and unregulated forms of employment. These innovative approaches have created new institutional forms, strategies, and tactics. In the process, informal/precarious workers’ movements are redefining the meaning of “work” to include irregular forms (such as contract work and self-employment). They are highlighting spaces of productive work that have long been ignored—such as the home, unregistered worksheds, and the street. They are mobilizing workers that have historically been underrepresented in traditional labor movements, such as women, immigrants and members of racial and ethnic minorities. Informal/precarious workers are forging new alliances with community groups and social movements. They are redefining targets and labor movement goals, and reshaping how data on work is collected. Ultimately, they are altering the conversation about work in the 21st century.

This thematic session will conceptualize these shifts as a turn toward politics and specifically toward the state. Drawing from case studies of worker centers, informal worker movements, immigrant labor activism, and alternative union formations in the Global South and North, this panel seeks to examine the implications of these mobilizations for politics, citizenship and the state. Is there a paradox to labor’s renewed focus on the state in the context of neoliberalism? Do informal/precarious workers hold the potential for reinvigorating citizenship? Do they hold the key to swinging the Polanyian pendulum away from market fundamentalism, or has the neoliberal context fundamentally changed the terrain, undermining these mobilizations’ potential for social change? In the contemporary era, what is the relationship between workplace-based versus state-centered movements for social change? How have these efforts to alter the language, rhetoric, and conversation of work and power affected workers’ livelihoods? And how do political mobilizations of informal/precarious workers play out differently at local, regional, national, and global scales?

Sub Unit

• Thematic Sessions

Session Organizers

• Rina Agarwala, Johns Hopkins University

• Rachel Meyer, Harvard University

Presider

• Rachel Meyer, Harvard University

Panelists

• Michael Burawoy, Univ. of California, Berkeley

• Rina Agarwala, Johns Hopkins University

• Ching Kwan Lee, UCLA

• Nik Theodore, University of Illinois at Chicago