NALSU Webinar: Wednseday 26 April, 2023 @4pm, Robert Ovetz, University of California Berkeley and San José State University: “Using a Workers’ Inquiry to Organise at Critical Choke Points"

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"Using a Workers' Inquiry to Organise at critical Choke Points"
"Using a Workers' Inquiry to Organise at critical Choke Points"

NEIL AGGETT LABOUR STUDIES UNIT (NALSU)

Labour Studies Seminar Series, Rhodes University

WEBINAR: Wednesday 26 April 2022 4pm (South African standard time), online via Zoom (details below).

SPEAKER AND TOPIC: Robert Ovetz, University of California Berkeley and San José State University: “Using a Workers’ Inquiry to Organise at Critical Choke Points"

THE PAPER: 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 organized (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 will discuss how workers' inquiries can be an invaluable tool to organize, take on the boss, re-energise unions, bypass unions altogether and innovate new forms of workers' organisations that can further the class struggle.

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

JOINING: Please register in advance by going to: https://tinyurl.com/3dfum54k

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining.


Some DATA available for people outside Rhodes, in South Africa.
Apply mailto: v.wessels@ru.ac.za / 072 183 6632 in advance.

HOSTS: The 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 

NALSU, based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, is engaged in policy, research and workers' education. Built around a vibrant team from disciplines including Sociology and Economics & Economic History, it has active partnerships and relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. It draws strength from its location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and the contradictions of the post-apartheid state, are keenly felt. We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, a union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture.

MORE: https://www.ru.ac.za/nalsu