Unevenness, Combination. Ethnographic Insights on Steelworkers International Unionism and Working Class (re)Organization.

JULIA SOUL

Berlin/Hamburgo

Workshop; Uneven Development and Industrial Labor; 2021

Department of Anthropology - University of Hamburgo

In the context of profound transformations and social unrest triggered by the 2008 Global Crisis (and deepened by Pandemic COVID 19), labor anthropologists retrieved two classical Marxist concepts. On one side, social class(es) is now understood as processual, uneven, and historical formations grounded on labor subsumption. As such, the making of working-classes has historically involved some kind of ?deal? with regional and national unevenness as much as with internal differentiation. I assume that historically Unions have been key actors in the political, social, and cultural processes through which working-classes deal with unevenness ? and inequalities. On the other side, the notion of uneven and combined development (UCD) allows for the grasp of multi-scaled relationships in the shaping of particular social formations. Recent insights on UCD highlight the explanatory power of labor struggles and conflicts ? rather than investment dynamics or state interventions - in the configuration of located capitalist developments. In this paper, I draw on those debates to grasp the role played by Union practices and strategies in the making of the working-class(es). Based on extensive fieldwork with steelworkers of a Latin American steel company in Argentina and the multi-scalar Union organization, I aim to discuss two analytical engagements of unevenness at different scales of Unions practices:1 ? At the local level, focused in the workplace and in the community: the unevenness of workers? national or regional identities vs. the unevenness of labor teams as international market actors that the corporate policies attempt to perform.2 ? At the global level, focused in the transnational union dynamics: the uneven constraints of national and local Union activities vs the promotion of global practices by Global Federations.The analysis may allow for an assessment of current processes of working-class (re) organization, in the light of the crisis of neoliberal productive and reproductive arrangements.