How Farm Workers Built Power Through Contract Details, Not Just Strikes
A new study of 1970s California farmworkers reveals that labor power is built less through dramatic confrontations and more through grinding battles over contract language and grievance procedures. For policymakers and business leaders, the finding suggests that real worker agency emerges in how employment rules are written and enforced—not just in whether unions exist.
Originaltitel: Labour geography is tedious: Of contracts, grievances and the nitty-gritty of worker agency in United Farm Workers-era California
<p>Responding to the oft-asked question, 'what counts as labour's agency?' this paper engages with recent developments in labour geography to argue that labour geographers would benefit from paying close attention to the nitty-gritty struggles over - and not only for - the contract. Taking the case of the United Farm Workers' efforts to administer its newly-won contracts in the agribusiness fields of California in the 1970s, it suggests that labour's agency is often not just expressed, but made to count, in the midst of the most mundane - and often tedious - of circumstances, like late night-grievance procedure meetings. The paper argues that not just labour's agency, but its class power, is often formed and deployed - and sometimes countered - in the details of how the collective interests of workers, on the farm or across a region, and handled.</p>