Introduction—trade unions in times of austerity and development

This special issue seeks to understand how unions resist and are reshaped as they confront global capital and neoliberal austerity. It was born out of panels at the annual conferences of European Association of Social Anthropologists and the American Anthropology Association and through ongoing conversations about the similarities and differences between the challenges unions face from austerity in the Global North and from Global South aspirations for national ‘development’. The papers explore unions’ interactions with ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’, where the state and other actors express extreme faith in markets as policy devices, and in the superior efficiency of the private sector (Rizzo 2017). We describe unions responding to the growing criticism (from the right) that they imped the economic growth that would assist all of society and (from the left) that they represent a privileged and increasingly irrelevant minority of workers. While we explore unions’ attempts to dispute these narratives, our special issue is equally invested in detailing how unionism is re-constructed inside a community and, through this, how unions respond to, and co-create, legal, economic and cultural structures. In analysing how unionism shapes and responds to economic practices and workplace subjectivities, we foreground that the obligations and entitlements of being a ‘unionist’ and a ‘worker’ are negotiated through intra-community expectations and political histories. We therefore link unions to recent breakthroughs in the anthropological study of capitalism, where political economies are enacted through sociality and subjectivity (cf. Bear et al. 2015 and Hann and Parry 2018). Unionism is only beginning to be analysed using this framework, yet we show that unions are crucial to the concepts of self and relationships that shape and enable intra-national capitalisms (c.f. Kasmir 2014 and Lazar 2017). We explore how unions guide and respond to what it means to be a miner, steelworker or longshoreman, while simultaneously influencing what it means to be Zambian, Congolese, Greek or Argentinian. This enables us to provide new insights into the local configurations of labour, unionism and capitalism that are responding to unions’ global disempowerment. Our collection aspires to explore how unions are responding to the (perceived) growth of precarious work and to discourses presenting them as illegitimate or irrelevant; to detail how union practices and discourses connect the workplace to society; and to link ethnographies of unionism, grounded in a cultural anthropology tradition emphasizing ethos and discourse to their encompassing political economies, enabling an understanding of how unionism shapes specific capitalist projects. To guide our exploration, we utilize case studies from the North and South, where unions are differently challenged by, and differently respond to, global and local capitalisms.