Unlikely activists: building worker power under liberalization

Abstract

AbstractThis article explains variation in the extent to which high skill, high wage workers are able to defend their job security in services-based production regimes. It compares two cases of downsizing at German multinational technology firms in the early 2000s, and shows how workers can protect their jobs against employer threats by building power in the workplace. I find that tech workers mobilize against downsizing when they creatively redeploy management’s discourse to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of collective action in a discourse that resonates with their occupational identity as technical experts. Highlighting the significance of discursive strategies to worker power in the information technology sector advances research on the comparative political economy of liberalization, which tends to view weak labor as a structural characteristic of the knowledge economy. While the transition from manufacturing- to services-led growth has weakened labor, with union density declining and national institutions becoming less effective, successful resistance to downsizing demonstrates that these historical developments relocate and recast workers’ power resources, rather than destroy them outright. This article focuses on political struggle in the workplace to offer empirical evidence that workers can develop considerable power even when they lack access to labor’s traditional resources.