How We Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour - Paperback

by Sian Lazar (Author)

A comparative, ethnographic approach to the question of labor struggles and workers' political agency

When it comes to labor movements, unionized industrial workers on the factory floor have only ever been part of the picture. Across so many different workplaces, sectors of the economy, and geographical contexts, the question of how working people struggle in the day-to-day has no single answer.

Here Sian Lazar offers a unique anthropological perspective on labor agency that takes in examples from across the globe, from heavy industry and agriculture to the service and informal sectors. She asks: how do people strive to improve their lives and working conditions? How are they constrained and enabled in that struggle by the nature of the work they do, and by their own positionality in local histories, cultures, and networks?

How We Struggle explores worker action across the spectrum from organized trade unionism to individualized strategies of accommodation, resistance, and escape. The book marries a discussion of global political economy and Marxist feminist theories of labor with ethnographic approaches that begin from a perspective of human experience, kinship, and radical heterogeneity.

Author Biography

Sian Lazar is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Social Life of Politics: Ethics, Kinship and Union Activism in Argentina and editor of Where are the Unions? Workers and Social Movements in Latin America, the Middle East and Europe amongst other books.