Subject: Re: AUT: Re: intellectuals: job mobility
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 01:05:41 -0500


> >I've been reading The Individualised Society by Bauman
> >(see a few quotes below). In it he worries that increased job
> >mobility has meant that it is impossible to build the types
> >of relationships over time that are necessary to create the
> >solidarites that will eventually lead to organisations (specifically
> >trade unions) that are capable of resisting capitals excesses and
> >regulate work relationships in the interest of the worker.
> >I just wondered if anyone can recommend any articles
> >that discuss this issue.
>
> the early IWW was largely a movement of migratory casual workers so to say
> that casualisation = no solidarity was at least untrue in the US and
> Australia in the 1910s. i think one of the early autonomists (Sergio
> Bologna?)  argued that casual work wasn't a barrier to proletarian
struggle
> but an advantage for it because it meant that struggles could circulate
with
> the moving workforce.

to push this a little further... i think we can see this phenomina as a
result of the refusal of work on some levels, with the attendent move of
many class struggles out of the workplace and into the neighborhoods,
cities, etc. in a more general since.

that is: this only becomes problematic, methinks, if you tend to fetishize
workplace class struggles over other kinda of class struggles. otherwise, it
can be seen as a positive thing, ripe with possibilities (in subverting the
dominance of work, uniting people on more communal levels, etc.).



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