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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Precarious Collaborations. Working-Class Subjectivities, Community Activism, And The Problem With “Social Movement Unionism” In Late-Apartheid East Rand (South Africa), Franco Barchiesi, Bridget Kenny
Precarious Collaborations. Working-Class Subjectivities, Community Activism, And The Problem With “Social Movement Unionism” In Late-Apartheid East Rand (South Africa), Franco Barchiesi, Bridget Kenny
Franco Barchiesi
An influential current in South African labor studies has used the concept of ‘social movement unionism’ to characterize organized labor’s contribution to South Africa’s post-Apartheid democratization. Part of the concept of social movement unionism is the idea that during the 1980s independent black workers’ unions combined workplace struggles with community-based concerns related to social services, repression, and political disenfranchisement. In this way, trade unions came to play a politically transformative role, which implied both innovative labor-community alliances and the appropriation by organized labor of social movements’ mobilizing modalities. After a decline in the immediate post-Apartheid period, when scholars and union …
Ethnic Democracy And Its Ambiguities: The Case Of The Needle Trade Unions, Gerd Korman
Ethnic Democracy And Its Ambiguities: The Case Of The Needle Trade Unions, Gerd Korman
Gerd Korman
[Excerpt] During the years between World War I and World War II the conduct among well-known Jewish labor leaders seems to have foreshadowed events in the history of America’s nationality following the tumult of the 1960’s. In the 1920’s and 1930’s America’s elected or appointed officials still used a pecking order based on assumed inequalities of race, ethnicity, and gender in making policy decisions. They presumed that their private interests, those of the “insiders,” the “leading groups,” or “controlling minorities,” were the only appropriate ones for determining public policy. It was then, especially in the Depression years, when the New …