Since the onset of the world financial crisis a new cycle of labour unrest emerged around the world. In this project, I compare mass strikes in India and Brazil since 2008 and the new forms of workers´ organisations that emerged in these strikes. Characteristics of these strikes were that they took place in central and growing sectors of the economy; that they focused on wage demands in an early phase, but transformed into strikes with a political dimension in the course of events; a resurgence of wildcat strikes; and the use of wide-scale state repression against strikers.
The mass strikes affected various sectors in the two countries, but were showed the highest occurrence in one sector in each country: the automobile industry in India and the construction sector in Brazil. The mass strikes in question were traditional strikes in the sense that they were focused on specific economic sectors on the one hand, on the other hand the forms of workers’ organisation were innovative, including new alliances with social movements.
The research question of the project concerns the characteristics of the new forms of organisations of workers: What types of organisation emerge and how does the form of organisation impact on trajectory and results of the strikes? This question is important since the way conflicts are led by a new generation of workers in the emerging economies will have a profound impact on global economic and political constellations. On a theoretical level, I contend that theories of strikes that focus on quantitative analyses and trade unions as organisational centres are not capable to grasp the specific spatial patterns and the forms of organisation and cooperation that characterises the recent wave of mass strikes. A wider scope, like the one employed by labour geography and its focus on community unionism is needed in order to grasp those logics of organisation. In order to demonstrate this, I explore four case studies, two in each of the countries.
Conclusions
One can observe that the forms of workers´ organisation that emerged during the mass strikes in emerging economies after 2008 are characterised by a diminishing significance of established national trade union federations. Independent factory-based or regional union federations and grass roots mobilisations of workers gained in relevance, and in two of the four case studies workers entered into alliances with other actors beyond the workplace. Nonetheless, trade unions continued to play an important role in all case studies investigated, but they do not adhere to one or two standard models of trade unionism, but exhibit very different characteristics in each of the cases. Thus, there is considerable plurality, or better fragmentation, among trade union strategies and politics. In those two cases where strikers established alliances with other social movement actors they were significantly more successful regarding workplace demands or political organisation than in the other two cases investigated.
Another conclusion on another level of analysis is that the wave of mass strikes in Brazil and India between 2010 and 2014 led to new right-wing authoritarian governments – in India with the electoral of the BJP in 2014, and in Brazil with the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff in 2016, preceded by a neoliberal turn of the second presidential term of Dilma Rousseff from 2015 on. The right-wing governments in India and Brazil can be seen as political projects designed to cope with the recent upsurge of labour unrest in both countries – but consistently high numbers of strikes in Brazil after 2016 and a number of very large workers’ mobilisations in India after 2014 show that right-wing authoritarianism came only with limited effectivity against those strikes. At the same time, the mass strikes in question between 2010 and 2014, and also in the following period, were not able to forge a movement that would attract participants from social movements that occurred in parallel, like the anti-corruption movement in India, or the street demonstrations in Brazil in 2013. The inability of the strike movements to connect to national political forces and to exert hegemony over other social movement actors on a national scale revealed a political vacuum, and the strike movements themselves lacked the means to fill this vacuum.
