Against Solidarity and Unions

The role of labour and trade unions in mobilising workers to fight for fair wages, decent work, dignity, and occupational safety has received much-needed attention in examining the implications of workers' solidarity in contemporary capitalism. This session, however, seeks ethnographic research that centres labour demobilisation, fragmented solidarity, and anti-unionisation among workers. By centring why and how unions have failed to mobilise, the session invites researchers to rethink not the possibilities of solidarity but the opposite - how does labour (dis)organise? The session calls for papers that take union failures as a critical moment for understanding emerging challenges in fostering solidarity among workers, how increasing density of workers may not always imply solidarity, and the socio-cultural nuances that render labour mobilisation far from straightforward. Seen this way, the session invites papers that reflect on emerging forms of barriers to workers' solidarity and unionising, both structurally and from below.