NALSU NEWS: Labour Studies podcast/ video: Robert Ovetz, University of California Berkeley & San José State University: "Using a Workers’ Inquiry to Organise at Critical Choke Points."
TOPIC: Engaging in what Karl Marx called a workers' inquiry, workers and militant co-researchers are studying how workers are organised (the working class composition), how capital is organised (the technical composition of capital), and how workers can recompose their own power by devising new tactics, strategies, organisational forms, and objectives. A workers' inquiry can help workers identify and organise at vulnerable choke points in the local, national and global supply chain. Drawing on case studies in his book "Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives" (Pluto Press, 2020), Robert Ovetz discusses how workers' inquiries can be an invaluable tool to organise, take on the boss, re-energise unions, bypass unions altogether and innovate new forms of workers' organisations that can further the class struggle.
DETAILS: This is a recording of an online event in the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) Labour Studies Seminar Series, held on Wednesday, 26 April 2023 4pm, on Zoom at Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T1no_N6C5I&t=1440s
Podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nalsu
SPEAKER: Dr Robert Ovetz lectures in Sociology at the University of California Berkeley, and in Political Science and Labour Relations in the Master of Public Administration at San José State University. He focuses on global labour organising strategy and does trainings on preparing credible strike threats at critical choke points. His books include "We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few" 2022),"Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives" (2020), and "When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921" (2018 / 2019). He was Associate Editor to The Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy, edited by Immanuel Ness (2022). Ovetz writes about worker organising for "Dollars & Sense" magazine and "The Chief," and is the Book Review Editor of the Journal of Labor and Society. More at https://sjsu.academia.edu/RobertOvetzPhD
HOSTS: The Labour Studies Seminar Series is run by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) in partnership with the Departments of Sociology & Industrial Sociology, and Economics & Economic History, Rhodes University. ABOUT NALSU: Based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, NALSU is engaged in policy, research and workers' education. Built around a vibrant team, including from the disciplines of Sociology and Economics, NALSU has a democratic, non‐sectarian, non-aligned and pluralist practice, and active relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. We draw strength from our location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and post-apartheid contradictions, are keenly felt. NALSU is named in honour of Neil Hudson Aggett, union organiser and medical doctor who died in an apartheid jail in 1982 following brutality and torture.