Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India: Popular Mobilisation in the Long Depression

Abstract

This book investigates mass strikes and social movements in India and Brazil, focusing on the forms of organisation and cross-movement coop- eration that erupted in the period between 2010 and 2014. The bases for this investigation are four cases: two in the Indian automobile sector and two in the Brazilian construction sector. These sectors displayed the strikes that attracted most of the public debate in this period, and these strikes occurred in central sectors of the economy that showed considerable growth at that time. Since hitherto established trade unions had no big stakes in those strikes, the central research question is what types of organ- isation facilitated those strikes, and which types of organisation and coor- dination did emerge in the course of those strikes. Corresponding with the results of my field research, I claim that conventional industrial relations theory and its focus on unions, employers and the state, modelled with correspondence to experiences in core countries, have to be put on their head: Only a theory of strikes that goes beyond a focus on trade unions and the workplace will be able to grasp the forms of labour conflict that affect the majority of the world population, and the global working class, which lives in non-core countries. The problem statement thus comes with the requirement to formulate a new theory of strikes that is able to understand the forms of popular organisation and coordination that occur in non-core countries. In