Workers’ Power in Resisting Precarity: Comparing Transport Workers in Buenos Aires and Dar es Salaam

Rizzo, Matteo; Atzeni, Maurizio

Abstract

The growing precariousness of employment across the world has radically altered the conditions upon which the representation of workers’ interests has traditionally been built, as it has posed challenges for established trade unions: individualized employment and fragmented identities have displaced the centrality of the workplace and the employee–employer relationship in framing collective issues of representation. In this article, we compare the processes of collective organization of two groups of precarious workers in the transport and delivery sector of Buenos Aires and Dar es Salaam. Through this comparison we investigate how existing trade union structures, industrial relations frameworks, socio-political contexts and labour processes interact with the processes of workers’ organization that take place even in the harsher conditions of informal work, critically engaging with the argument that the growing precariousness of work represents the end of trade unionism as we know it.

Citation

Rizzo, M., & Atzeni, M. (2020). Workers’ Power in Resisting Precarity: Comparing Transport Workers in Buenos Aires and Dar es Salaam. Work, Employment and Society, 34(6), 1114-1130. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017020928248

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 23, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Jul 8, 2020
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2020
• Deposit Date: Sep 11, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 11, 2020
• Journal: Work, Employment and Society
• Print ISSN: 0950-0170
• Electronic ISSN: 1469-8722
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 34
• Issue: 6
• Pages: 1114-1130
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017020928248