Towards what end? Collective bargaining and the making and unmaking of the working class

Zaad Mahmood and Supurna Banerjee
Additional contact information
Zaad Mahmood: Presidency University Kolkata, India
Supurna Banerjee: Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, India

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2023, vol. 44, issue 4, 964-985

Abstract: In contemporary literature, bargaining is often construed as an instrument in the hands of the employer, a practice that is sustained by undermining worker solidarity and promoting interests of privileged unionized workers at the expense of other workers. This article challenges such narratives by foregrounding the idea of solidarity and highlighting the complex interplay of solidarity emanating from the multiple ways consciousness about worker identity plays out. Drawing on the literature on new social movements (NSM) and industrial relations (IR), the article shows that the relevance of bargaining is not merely confined to instrumental economic goals but extends to politically constitutive action. In the process of bargaining the political agency of workers and distinctive articulations of solidarity are identified. This article presents and classifies three kinds of solidarity that correspond to the three dimensions of political consciousness, namely critical solidarity, limited solidarity and absent solidarity across cases that are shaped by contextual realities of labour politics.

Keywords: Collective bargaining; deregulation of industrial relations; social inclusion/exclusion; trade unions; workplace democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X221096863 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:44:y:2023:i:4:p:964-985

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X221096863

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().