Worker Organisation in Precarious Times: Abandoning Trade Union Fetishism, Rediscovering Class

ATZENI, MAURIZIO

Global Labour Journal

International Sociological Association, RC44 Labour Movements

Año: 2020 vol. 11 p. 311 - 314

1918-6711

One of the core areas of labour studies in which a call for visibility is probably most neededconcerns the forms of workers? organisation and representation. Against increasingprecarity and informality, working-class representation continues to be largelyframed in the trade union form. I argue, paraphrasing Marx and as a way of provoking discussions, that the dependency of research on the trade union as the par excellence form of organisation is creating a fetish of the union form, an interest in the form itself that hides from view broader processes of struggle and collective formation and of working-class mobilisations outside/in parallel/alternative to the union form currently occurring in the underworld of precariousness, the contemporary hidden abode of production.