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NALSU NEWS: Labour Studies podcast/ video: Prof. Emeritus Eddie Webster, Annual Neil Aggett Labour Studies Lecture,"Re-Casting the Power of Labour: Working in the Shadow of the Digital Age"
TOPIC: There is a widespread view that labour, as a counter-hegemonic force, has come to an end. There is a lot going for these arguments; there is no question that there has been a decline of union membership and density in the Global North. But the problem with the pessimistic "end of labour thesis" is that it reifies globalisation and the digital age, giving them a logic and coherence that they do not have. Most importantly, the pessimists present workers as victims. The result is that labour is seen as an actor without agency that cannot think of alternatives or imagine a future towards which labour can work. In this lecture, Professor Webster draws on the power resources approach to examine the new forms of worker organisation emerging among large swathes of precarious and informal labour in Africa and South Africa. He identifies examples where workers on the margins are beginning to cross the divide between the protected and the unprotected, the established workers and those marginalised by liberalisation.
PODCAST: https://tinyurl.com/9jp4swvs
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/HgTagNTEv_U
DETAILS: The Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) hosts the Annual Neil Aggett Labour Studies Lecture as part of its labour studies seminars series, and its Vuyisile Mini Workers School. This is done in partnership with the Departments of Sociology & Industrial Sociology, and of Economics & Economic History, at Rhodes University, South Africa, and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES).
SPEAKER: Professor Emeritus Eddie Webster, public intellectual and prolific scholar, is Distinguished Research Professor at the Southern Centre of Inequality Studies (SCIS) and founder of the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP), at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Webster headed the Chris Hani Institute, helped establish the GLU (Global Labour University), and his decades of engagement with the labour movement include research, policy and workers' education. Author of nine books including the ground-breaking "Cast in a Racial Mould" and 130 academic articles, he has reshaped economic and industrial sociology, and mentored generations of unionists, students and academics. A winner of the American Sociological Association's best labour monograph award, and recipient of the Ela Bhatt Professorship, he was rated South Africa's top sociologist by the NRF. Webster hails from the Eastern Cape, starting his academic studies at Rhodes University, Makhanda, where he was also SRC President. He is Visiting Professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Rhodes: the university awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in 2016 in recognition of his many accomplishments.
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.