Critique internationale - Content
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[A Fragmented Citizenry. Integration and Segmentation of the Workers’ Group in Three Warehouses in French and Germany]
This analysis of the relationships of logistics workers to the warehouse orders is based on the results of a collective survey conducted in three logistics warehouses in Marne-la-Vallée in the second eastern Paris suburbs, in the south-eastern suburbs of Frankfurt, and in Kassel, a citizenry located roughly in central Germany in the Land of Hessen. In the first part of the demonstration we outline how the structuring of the workers' group within the warehouses helps to isolate its members and develop forms of loyalty to warehouse management thanks to the supervisory role played by local union representatives. Then, we examine the forms of contestation of workers that are emerging despite fragmentation processes. These workers' statements and defections remain most often behind the scene, outside of the warehouse and always individualized and therefore they take place in an isolated way in the logistics city within a segmented workers' group.
[From Cooperatives to Grassroots Labor Unionism: Industrial Citizenship in Italy’s Logistics Sector (1990-2015)]
In the long history of the workers’ cooperative movement in Italy, logistics became one of the most important sectors during the two last decades. Yet, during the 1990s, cooperatives embarked in a generalized process of "entrepreneurization". In reason of their cooptation in transnational value chains, cooperatives became the pivot of a regime of despotic labor that denied workers industrial citizenship and basic social and civil rights. Since the 2010s, this system has been challenged by a series of mobilizations led by “autonomous” or “grassroots” labor unions (SI Cobas and ADL Cobas) demanding the a abolition of cooperatives, the end of the sub-contracting system, and the restoration of standard employment relationships. Workers' struggles have allowed working conditions to be improved in the warehouses. Nevertheless, the Cobas also have had to face the institutional constraints specific to this sector: namely, the cooperatives' reluctancy to normalize their employment relations, client companies' resistance to reduce pressure on labor cost, and the ambivalence of traditional labor unions vis-à-vis rank-and-file mobilizations. The result of the interaction between mobilizations and institutional constraints is a precarious compromise, in which the improvement of working conditions and the recognition of grassroots unions cannot be taken for granted in face of constant employer's backlash.
[Contestation and Apprenticeship, or the Entrance into Citizenship of Immigrant Workers (Talbot-Citroën, 1982-1983)]
In early 1980s, migrant workers in several automobile factories in suburbs of Paris tacked part in long social conflicts. These conflicts are part of a special moment in the redefinition of industrial citizenship, which has been curbed for many years by systems of authoritarian social relations. The citizenship of immigrant workers is then deployed in various ways, more or less agonistic. The participation in the elections of staff representatives allows a first entry into citizenship, then it is prolonged by strike, by daily contestation and finally by trade union activism. The practices of immigrant workers as well as the modalities of their collective representation then give a new dimension to industrial citizenship.
[“If the Employees Follow Us, It’s because We’re Useful to Them”: The Ambivalence of Industrial Citizenship in a Food-Processing Plant in Argentina]
As Latin America turned left in the 2000s, labor union organizations once again assumed a central place in the balance of power. In Argentina, grassroot union groups are often seen as the vector for new forms of horizontal and democratic organization. As such, they represent a vantage point for understanding the conditions under which labor unionism today functions as a tool upon which employees may draw to assert their rights and as a resource for deepening citizenship at work. An examination of a food-processing plant that embodies this “bottom-up” renewal of Argentina labor unionism nevertheless reveals the degree to which the institutionalization of more participatory practices continues to be constrained by the relations of subordination that organize factory work. In doing so, it sheds light on the relative continuity of labor union efforts to distribute personalized favors, a characteristic of the strategies for maintaining the factory order that emerged in the neoliberal decade of the 1990s.
[Workplace Representation as a Personal Relationship: Workers and Delegates at an Italian Factory]
Thirty years of continuous restructuring of a manufacturing plant in central Italy have weakened collective bargaining and reoriented delegates’ field work towards supplying trade union services and conducting micro-negotiations to solve the individual problems of employees. These transformations of trade union work and industrial relations have affected the representative relationship between delegates and workers. While the personal character of the relations uniting them is part of the longer-term history of trade unionism in the factory, in the present configuration these personal relations become a resource for pragmatic exchanges allowing the delegates to remain in close contact with the employees, albeit sometimes at the cost of certain forms of personalised domination. However, the workers retain the ability to act on these relations, by turns shaping and challenging them.
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[Autonomy in Latin American Regional Bureaucracies: The Role and Place of the General Secretaries]
In Latin America, as in the rest of the world, regional have multiplied since the 1990s. The research questions focus on the variety of regionalisms, or their changing nature (post-liberal, post-hegemonic). To go beyond these questions, it is necessary to work on the Latin American regions through an actor-centred approach. This reflection will enable to give a more precise answer to the question of the configuration of power within Latin American regionalisms while observing Secretaries’ positions related to two key variables to understand autonomy: the institutional ambiguity and individual dispositions. In this article, we will study the Common Market of the South (Mercosur), the Union of Southern Nations (Unasur) and the Central American Integration System (Sica).
[This Charming Sheikh. Constructing and Defending Notability in Yemen (2009-2019)]
By following the differentiated trajectories of two “state-sheikhs” in Yemen, I explore the manner in which these actors mobilize the resources related to their tribal title to construct and defend their notability and thereby maintain their place within the ruling class. Drawing upon observations and interviews conducted between 2009 and 2019, I consider the evolving value and use of tribal capital in politics and empirically examine the interlocking relations between state and tribe – first in Yemen before and after the 2011 revolution and then in Egypt, from the ordeal of exile since 2014 and the outbreak of civil war. In particular, I show that tribal capital operates at a distance as a tool of political reassertion by adapting to and continuing to confer meaning to the social and political activities of leaders who “act tribal” even when they are detached from their institutions and territories of reference.
