Workers in Third-World Industrialization

In third world countries an increasing number of people have been drawn into the process of industrialization as wage workers. Only when confronted with their practices, strategies and struggles can the competing and contradictory policies they face at the level of capital and state be explained. Consequently, the empirical analyses here presented cover the limits set by workers to exploitation in workshop production, ethnicity as a workers' strategy, the role of workers' absenteeism and turnover, and labour strategies in a situation of recession and de-industrialisation. Using a historical approach labour migration, union strategy for democratisation, and the world-scale pattern of labour unrest are studied as outcomes of social conflict. Some of the chapters in this book focus on single events in a factory, others on a branch or a region in a long-time perspective. They all contribute to an empirical and theoretical investigation of the impact of industrial workers' actions on societies in transition. They also share the same urge to look beneath the surface in order to find the unnamed, and to understand how they make history.