The white-painters of Cabbagetown: Neighborhood policing and sex worker resistance in Toronto, 1986–1987

Toronto in the 1980s was embroiled in intense debates about the place of sex work in society. The passing of new legislation in 1985 criminalizing communication for the purposes of prostitution led to increased police harassment of outdoor sex workers. Within a gentrifying urban neighborhood, homeowners created a neighborhood organization, the South of Carlton Association, with the express purpose of collaborating with Metro Police and City Council to remove sex workers from the downtown stroll. In turn, sex worker activists in the Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes practiced a range of strategies to challenge this oppression—including archiving their resistance.

Freedom of Association in Vietnam: A Heretical View

Vietnam is a one-party state with a single state-led union federation and significant numbers of wildcat strikes. In January 2021, independent worker representative organisations became legal. The reforms are creating significant excitement among labour watchers and practitioners. This article, however, provides a more sceptical tone. Drawing on Atzeni’s critique of trade union fetishism, I argue that, rather than being a progressive step forward, freedom of association reforms are an attempt to reduce labour militancy. First, Vietnam is implementing reforms while further embedding itself into neo-liberal capital flows and global production networks – the very form of capitalism that undermined trade unionism elsewhere. Second, workers have been using effective forms of self-organised, wildcat militancy for two decades, which has led to significant improvements in terms of wages, conditions and national policy. The current organisational form of wildcat strikes does not easily fit into a worker representative organisation (WRO) structure. Third, because existing forms of resistance have worked, workers have not been demanding independent organisations. Rather, such demands have come from capital. Previous attempts to build harmonious labour relations by reducing militancy through incorporating class antagonisms into non-threatening forms have failed. Consequently, capital has now embraced ideas around freedom of association as an attempt to tame worker resistance. KEYWORDS: Strikes; unions; freedom of association; Vietnam; WROs

Rethinking Representations’ of Trade Unionism in South Africa

This essay reviews the literature on trade unions in South Africa in the last century. It points to some of its limitations seeking to challenge narrow conceptions and worn binaries of worker resistance and trade unionism, spontaneity and organization, that still plague some histories of labor and labor unions. It therefore attempts to review the literature in a way that opens up new readings and theoretical perspectives on labor and trade unions. It seeks to show how migrant and women’s organizing continue to be two areas that the literature has not adequately grasped. That women have often organized themselves outside of unions and dominant political structures implies that there is broad scope for theoretical perspectives that challenge masculine notions of organizing and institutional culture. In addition, there needs to be more attention paid to the issue that migrant members of unions themselves are finding more expression for their grievances outside of trade union bureaucratic structures. Moreover, in a country such as South Africa, with extremely high unemployment in a global economy of fewer and fewer jobs, it is necessary to ask whether the notion of industrial unionism, which has for so long excluded those on the margins of the so-called formal economy, is still viable, or whether new forms of organizing that are more cognizant of the local and global interconnectedness of all spheres of the economy, beyond the public/private divide, must be sought. In order for these perspectives to emerge, however, it is necessary to rethink the categories that people impose on history and how it limits future possibilities.

Accounting for the “uncounted” workers: a dialectical view of accounting through Rancière

PurposeThis paper examines how accounting either contributes to or undermines worker resistance to unfair pay, thereby enhancing our current understanding of the emancipatory potential of accounting.Design/methodology/approachWe apply Jacques Rancière's concept of politics and build on recent calls to introduce Rancière's work to accounting by analysing a case based on workers in an Australian supermarket chain who challenged their employer Coles over wage underpayments.FindingsWe find that in this case, accounting is, in part, a means to politics and a part of the police in Rancière's sense. More specifically, accounting operated within the established order to constrain the workers, but also provided workers with a resource for their political acts that enabled change.Originality/valueThis empirical research adds to Li and McKernan (2016) and Brown and Tregidga (2017) conceptual work on Rancière. It also contributes more broadly to emancipatory accounting research by identifying radical possibilities for workers' accounting to bring about change.

Rediscovering the cash nexus, again: Subsumption and the labour–capital relation in platform work

This article proposes a re-theorisation of the main social relations of platform work, based on two concepts drawn from Marx: subsumption of labour and the cash nexus. Platform work research to date is heavily empirical in character, with little theoretical development. As a result, the social relations of platform work are treated descriptively, using ad hoc or common-sense categories, or platforms’ own terminology. This under-theorisation leads to over-estimation of platform work’s novelty, decentring of capital in accounts of its development, incipient technological determinism and problematic generalisation from emergent trends. In place of the commonly assumed ‘triangle’ of platform work relations, this article argues that platform work is best understood in terms of an emerging labour–capital relation, which establishes a cash nexus between platform and worker as a result of a process of subsumption. This re-theorisation, in turn, helps to understand the rapid emergence of platform worker organisation and resistance, and the similarity of its demands with worker resistance in other, more established areas of paid work under capitalist relations of production.

Leading Indicators—A Conceptual IoT-Based Framework to Produce Active Leading Indicators for Construction Safety

Active leading indicators (ALIs) have the potential to identify safety hazards and prompt immediate actions to prevent incidents. Currently, there is a major gap in research that incorporates a fully automated ALI system because implementation has been hindered by a lack of established industry thresholds of measurable performance that would trigger an actionable response. Therefore, this paper addresses this gap by presenting a new method that utilizes the Internet of Things (IoT) to collect quantifiable data which can trigger an actionable response in real time based on established thresholds. This novel method integrates the Construction Industry Institute (CII) active leading indicator framework with a prototype IoT-based system. Significantly, the ALI provides the physical–virtual feedback loop, which is an essential aspect of the IoT system because it provides real-time feedback to both the users and systems. This paper also identifies potential inputs to the ALI framework from emerging IoT-enabled systems. A case study was presented to initially validate the IoT-based ALI framework. Bluetooth-enabled heart rate monitors were issued to workers in a hazardous and critical mining construction site. The ALIs that were recorded included heart rate and body temperature. Thresholds were established that alerted the monitoring safety staff when a worker exhibited potentially unsafe conditions. The results of the study demonstrated the feasibility of the system. Additionally, other results included worker resistance; non-disclosing of medical conditions, and limitations for IoT connectivity.

“In Defense of Our Livelihoods”: Rethinking Authoritarian Legality and Worker Resistance during Argentina’s Proceso de Reorganización Nacional

This article examines a series of worker strikes that culminated in the takeover of the Deutz Argentina tractor factory in October 1980. These mobilizations occurred under the most violent military regime in modern Argentine history—the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganization, 1976–83)—yet they did not provoke legal or extralegal repression. Instead, over a week of highly visible conflicts, the Deutz workforce challenged the company’s decision to close the plant and publicly attacked the dictatorship’s economic policies and failure to defend Argentina’s national interest. This episode has been largely ignored within the history of labor relations during the Proceso. In this article, I advance two related arguments. First, I suggest that while several factors contributed to the lack of violence, the workers’ discourse demands serious analysis and shows important continuities with historical Peronist ideologies. Rather than passive victims or heroic revolutionaries, I demonstrate that Deutz workers pursued a pragmatic and occasionally aggressive strategy centered around ideas of patriotism, family, and religion—all ideas that the Armed Forces rhetorically celebrated. Second, I argue that this case challenges accepted notions related to the “state of exception” that nominally suspended the normal functioning of the law. Instead, I show, the law and legal precedent remained critically important to workers, trade unionists, management, and state actors as they navigated this situation. Labor legislation played a key role in the development, understanding, and resolution of the confrontation. This reading takes seriously the Proceso as a government and offers new insight into authoritarian legality.