Chapter 6 Bridging Social Movement and Industrial Relations Theory: An Analysis of Worker Organizing Campaigns in the United States and China

The Future of Work

“…And Evans and Tilly (2016) coin the term Owenite to describe solidarity economy-type initiatives to create a parallel economic sphere guided by humanist rather than profit considerations. Technology availability can alter the forms and potentials of worker resistance, as with Indonesian delivery drivers or Chinese Walmart workers using social media platforms to build collective power (Ford and Honan 2017;Tapia et al 2018).…”

Social movement unionism in Spain's feminized precarious service sector: Criticism, cooperation and competition

“…First, a predominance of case studies that focus on top‐down union practice and typically build on interviews with union officials and, to a lesser extent, with workers (Ibsen and Tapia, 2017). And second, current debates on the relationship between unions and movements are hampered by a lack of dialogue between scholars of industrial relations and of social movements (Diani, 2018; Tapia et al., 2018): while studies on SMU have brought both fields together in the last decades, research still suffers from ‘not fully satisfactory conceptualisations of what a social movement is in analytic terms, namely of the specific manner in which collective action gets promoted within movements’ (Diani, 2018, pp. 43–44).…”

“…To address the second shortcoming, some authors advocate for bridging industrial relations and social‐movement research (Diani, 2018; Tapia et al., 2018). Doing so requires looking at both unions and movements under a common framework, in the context of broader collective action field, to better reflect the different relational patterns between actors engaged in collective action (Diani, 2018).…”

“…As a matter of fact, a growing body of bottom‐up research has turned to precarious service workers to explore innovative forms of worker representation outside unions. Insightful studies have been conducted in different service industries so far, including courier and delivery (Atzeni, 2016; Marrone and Finotto, 2019; Però, 2020; Rizzo and Atzeni, 2020; Vandaele, 2018); non‐academic university staff (Alberti, 2016a; Alberti and Però, 2018); cleaning (Però, 2020; Tapia et al., 2018); entertainment (Atzeni, 2016); hospitality (Tapia et al., 2017); creative professionals (Bellini and Lucciarini, 2019); and public transport (Rizzo and Atzeni, 2020). While our focus is on the feminized precarious service sector, we may learn some lessons from this body of literature.…”

“…While our focus is on the feminized precarious service sector, we may learn some lessons from this body of literature. Exclusion from established unions and lack of access to traditional channels of representation lead some precarious workers to develop alternative grassroots organizations, also referred to ‘quasi‐unions’ (Heckscher and Carré, 2006), ‘informal unions’ (Marrone and Finotto, 2019) and ‘indie unions’ (Però, 2020), which confront the conservatism and service‐driven culture of established unions by engaging in mutual support, community mobilization, (social) media campaigning, informal bargaining, direct action and intersectional politics (Alberti, 2016a; Alberti and Però, 2018; Atzeni, 2016; Bellini and Lucciarini, 2019; Marrone and Finotto, 2019; Però, 2020; Rizzo and Atzeni, 2020; Tapia et al., 2017, 2018). While these initiatives often lack support from established unions (Bellini and Lucciarini, 2019; Però, 2020), the literature offers some instances of cooperation between unions and self‐organized precarious workers, albeit with tensions between institutionalization and mobilization (see Atzeni, 2016; Marrone and Finotto, 2019; Rizzo and Atzeni, 2020).…”