Expectations, Wage Hikes, and Worker Voice

Enabling worker voice could improve worker retention and effort by providing workers the chance to improve their situation or an outlet to express discontent. We provide a test of this hypothesis via a randomised controlled trial in Indian garment factories. Just after what proved to be a disappointing wage hike, workers were chosen at random to participate in an anonymous survey in which they were asked for feedback on job conditions, supervisor performance, and overall job satisfaction. Enabling voice in this manner reduced turnover and absenteeism after the hike, particularly for the most disappointed workers.

Peer-to-peer online voice as emergent collective action

E-voice is now a common form of worker voice. Existing scholarship has focused on e-voice’s potential for grievance-airing and resistance; however, much work-oriented online discussion is not change oriented but more in the nature of information sharing and mutual aid. Even when not deliberately intended to be, mutual aid discussion can be an exercise of worker voice because it identifies and highlights pain points in the workplace, spreads awareness of these through online communities and constitutes an attempt to improve an objectionable state of affairs. As otherwise voiceless workers discover and act on these shared ideas en masse, they create an emergent form of collective action.

Resistant Transparency and Nonprofit Labor: Challenging Precarity in the Art + Museum Wage Transparency Campaign

Drawing upon contemporary academic debates about nonprofit worker precarity combined with needed theoretical re-orientations toward transparency, this paper explicates the situated communication practices and politics of resistant transparency. Resistant transparency describes communication aimed at revealing and publicizing previously obscured or hidden wage data and employment conditions to challenge powerful actors. Resistant transparency involves dynamic shifts in control over information, modes of in/visibility, and surveillance of powerful actors. We develop the case of Art + Museum Transparency, a collective of arts and museum workers employing Google spreadsheets and Twitter to publicize salary information and challenge norms of self-sacrifice and unpaid labor. Moving beyond an understanding of transparency as an institutional demand, our analysis develops how technical affordances shaped the collective’s efforts. We argue that transparency functions as a resistant communicative practice with potential for increasing worker voice and furthering the goals of collective resistance to precarious work across sites of employment.