Social Strike
Description
Vanessa Bilancetti, Julia Lindblom et al.:
"The ‘social strike’ can be understood as the adoption of tactics traditionally associated with labour disputes (the ‘walk-out’ and the ‘withdrawal of labour’) into the activity of political projects outside of the traditional workplace and its securities; as recently demonstrated by the call for ‘everyone to stop work’ (both in the workplace and in the home) during the mobilisation in defence of ‘reproductive rights’ in Poland and during the social strike in Italy of 2014, where a coalition of organisations struck in demand of wages, the right to remain and welfare.
In this way, a social strike could be argued to be an exercise by labour in constituting ‘political’ power in order to effect pressure on state legislature in much the same way as a workplace strike puts pressure on a boss or a rent strike puts pressure on a landlord.
The social strike is different to other forms of ‘mass protest’; primarily social strike is predicated on the recognition of the role of labour within the process of capitalist valorization (whether waged or unwaged) and seeks to exert leverage through its withdrawal. A social strike is effective when we converge as different workers, precarious, women, migrants to struggle together turning their difference into a source of power.
Within the schematics of traditional labour struggle, the success or failure of a strike is contingent on the ability of those within a dispute to build for mass participation and then ‘socially reproduce’ themselves over a protracted period. A strike will last as long as either a ‘work force can survive without wages’ or ‘management can survive without profits’. In this model a strike is understood to be a race, pivoting on the capacity of either party to ‘hold out’ over the necessary distance for victory. How then have social struggles external of either traditional sites of production or outside of official union structures constitute themselves in order to win?" (https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/assembling-the-strike-recordings-from-the-tss-assembly/)
Podcast at https://www.mixcloud.com/PlanCLondon/social-strike-striking-across-the-wage/
Example
The Logistics Strike
By Plan C:
"After the spontaneous struggles that exploded in Deliveroo and UberEats in London over the summer, lots of attention has been paid to conflict in the ‘gig economy’.
The ‘gig economy’ in the UK is relatively small employing about 3% of the workforce, but it could potentially have importance beyond its size. Moreover, the ‘gig economy’ is becoming a site of tensions and struggles across borders. ‘Algorithmic management’, the use of big data to predict demand and allocate resources using automated systems and processes, reveals new forms of organisation of labour that manage exploitation and are likely to spread. Over the next few years it will increasingly reorganize the labor process that creates and imposes on to low wage, migrant and precarious sectors of the workforce.
As a result, there is a chance for lessons to be learnt in struggles against companies like Deliveroo, Foodora and Amazon that can be circulated on a transnational level.
One the one hand, if we continue to learn how to take ‘unorganisable’ working conditions and turn them into a source of power, we could generate the basis for much larger struggles. On the other hand, we need to increase our common understanding of the role that the ‘gig economy’ plays in the wider logistical reorganization of production. As TSS we recognise logistics as a critical site of struggle for a strike that wants to be social and transnational. We also recognised and discussed in previous meetings the diversity of conditions inside logistics."
Presentations and participation from: Precarious (dis)Connections (Bologna, Italy), Plan C (UK), IWGB – Couriers Branch/Deliveroo Workers (Brighton, UK), IWW Union (Bristol, UK), SI COBAS Union (Italy)
Podcast via https://www.mixcloud.com/PlanCLondon/logistics-strike/