The Anthropology of Labor Unions

10: Concluding Thoughts

211 The chapters in this book offer a valuable repertoire of ground-level portraits of the changing nature of the working class and its discontent, as well as some of the many disconnects between unions and workers in today’s era of neo-liberal and global capitalism. But that is not all they do. Some chapters also speak to promising and innovative forms of worker organizing and organization that are coming from some of the lowest-paid, marginalized sectors of the working class. These and less optimistic analyses also suggest arenas of working-class activism that have shown potential for creating working-class social movements. In this conclusion I read both the bad news and the good news in the assembled case studies and link their insights to wider themes in labor and working-class studies. This may serve as a way of thinking about what a specifically anthropological and ethnographic study of labor and working-class activism might contribute to work by other activists and scholars wrestling with the state of the working class in the age of globalization. t e n Karen Brodkin ConcludingThoughts Lydia Savage’s chapter was not part of the session and thus is not considered in these comments. EPD K a r e n B ro d k i n 212 Bad News Tolstoy tells us that “[h]appy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Tolstoy, Anna Karenina). The varieties of discontent and disconnect chronicled in these case studies and in the editors’ Introduction resonate with Tolstoy’s sentiment. The chapters by Marty Otañez and Christian Zlolniski illustrate the uneven impacts of capitalism’s neo-liberal globalization and some of the consequences of those impacts. Otañez takes on big tobacco’s outsourcing of tobacco growing to Malawi, where an alliance of government, big landowners, and global tobacco has benefited handsomely but the tenant farmer families who grow the tobacco can barely make ends meet. He describes a global public relations campaign against child labor that big tobacco companies orchestrated—largely to block anti-smoking efforts by the World Health Organization—which brought together the Malawi government, landlords, international unions, and nongovernmental organizations. Long-standing efforts by the Malawi tobacco workers’ union to improve working conditions and to end the conditions that force their children to work were systematically stymied thanks to many of these same forces. Although the union felt forced to join big tobacco’s anti-child labor campaign, it did nothing to improve tenant farmers’ livelihoods or end the conditions that make child labor a necessary part of tobacco growing. Zlolniski describes how the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has helped intensify the internationalization of big agribusiness control over the growing of fresh fruits and vegetables. In northern Mexico, this situation has supported the permanent settlement of agricultural workers and waged agricultural work for women, on the one hand. On the other, women’s wages are lower than men’s had been for agricultural work, an amount insufficient to support their families. This economic reality has forced men to migrate to the United States for work, where they in turn are simultaneously politically stigmatized and economically exploited, as Sandy Smith-Nonini shows in her chapter. Like Otañez, Zlolniski also describes how government policies and practices cripple workers’ unionization. In Mexico the particular capital-state nexus operates in the ruling party’s control of official unions, so they serve business instead of workers; further, the state regularly takes aggressive action against workers’ efforts to build independent unions. State hostility toward unions combined with International Monetary Fund–backed free-market policies have made it difficult for workers in newly C o n c l u d i n g T h o u g h t s 213 industrializing countries to organize and have weakened even the strongest unions in the West. In the United States, where unions today represent approximately 12 percent of the labor force (perhaps 9 percent of the private sector), down from a high of 35 percent in the early 1950s, simply “servicing ” a shrinking and aging membership constitutes institutional suicide. Paul Durrenberger and Suzan Erem found that a union leadership that focuses exclusively on “servicing” may be short-lived as well. The five chapters that focus on workers and unions in the United States do so against this background, in which capital’s global reach...