For decades, direct employment relationships have been increasingly displaced by indirect employment relationships through networks of firms and layers of managerial control. The firm strategies driving these changes are organizational, geographic, and technological in nature and are facilitated by state policies. The resulting weakening of traditional forms of collective bargaining and worker power have led workers to counter by organizing broader alliances and complementing structural and associational power with symbolic power and state-oriented strategies through what the authors term “network bargaining.” These dynamics point to the limitations of dominant theories and frameworks for understanding employment relations and suggest a new approach that focuses on a range of direct and indirect work relationships, evolving forms of worker power, and networked patterns of worker–employer interactions.

Workers shut down production and transportation of strawberries during the peak of the 2015 harvest in San Quintín, Mexico, which supplies winter berries to US markets. In the years since the strike, strike-settlement wage increases have eroded, commitments to register workers in the national social security system fell far short, and no workers gained representation by a union in collective bargaining with their employer. This case analyses the limited strike outcomes and persistent gaps in labour law compliance based on interviews and observation in 2019 and 2020. Building on the power resources approach, it highlights the historical character of structural power. Falling short of achieving strike demands underscored constraints on workers’ disruptive capacity. The case suggests that reading structural power as a dynamic complex of actions by employers, national states and workers enhances the concept’s ability to predict effects of collective action on social relations of production. KEYWORDS: Mexico; agriculture; supply chains; bargaining power; structural power

While solidarity is widely understood as key to worker capacity to improve terms and conditions of employment, the creation of solidarity has received less attention. This article advances the theory that dignity is the creative process, based on a psycho-social understanding of dignity not as an outcome but an interpersonal exchange. Mutual recognition of each other's capacities to participate in social rules creates solidarity, thereby catalysing collective action and making workplace improvements more likely. The argument is developed through comparison of three cases of worker struggles in the strawberry sector that produced varied outcomes, from steady improvements through union collective bargaining to persistence of poverty wages and gender-based violence. The proposed model of dignitybased worker power suggests both functional and psychological effects of democratic practice within worker organizations, coalitions and workplaces. | INTRODUCTIONSolidarity matters. It is the difference between shared exploitation and collective action to improve terms and conditions of employment, between a 'class in itself' and a 'class for itself', in Karl Marx's (1847) classic observation. Where competitiveness reproduces and enhances an employer's position in society, solidarity makes social uplift possible for workers. In other The author's present address is 2924 W.