Troublemaking Goes International…
Cover of “Troublemaking: Why You Should Organize Your Workplace by Lydia Hughes and Jamie Woodcock.
By Kevin Van Meter
A slim volume by London-based organizers Lydia Hughes and Jamie Woodcock, Troublemaking: Why You Should Organize Your Workplace, released in 2023 from Verso Books, draws upon workers movements in Britain, India, Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, across Europe, and the United States. “Being a troublemaker,” the authors argue, “is about trying to build power at work. Building power is always a process. It requires bringing workers together, developing confidence and discerning ways to win.”
Clearly influenced by the American monthly magazine and left labor project Labor Notes, the authors provide a set of international examples and principles for organizing in our workplaces focusing on creating rank-and-file led, democratic unions. Moreover, the authors draw upon the tradition of workers’ inquiry, common to British and international labor movements but curiously absent from the US today.
Hughes and Woodcock “start from the simple proposition that ordinary people have the power to change the world, and [the] book asserts that workplace struggles are a key part of how we can do so.” Based on this argument, the authors focus in on work itself — as a central force in our lives and as the site where all wealth in our society is produced by workers themselves, and this notion appears on nearly every page.
Troublemaking itself is broken up into three sections — a set of case studies, an examination of work in our contemporary society, and “the art of troublemaking” —each with short chapters, prefect for a quick read, study group, or to open a steward council or union meeting. In this sense, it is immensely readable and prefect for busy organizers and workers looking to gain insight into their working lives.
Moreover, by going international with their case studies on troublemaking, the authors offer the opportunity to learn about worker movements that don’t often appear on the pages of American labor publications. The experiences of immigrant couriers and cleaners as part of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain are reflected in those of waste collectors in India, as both unions organize industrially and are made up of workers previously considered “unorganizable.” Precarity is a social condition common to all contemporary “societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails,” and the case studies in Troublemaking takes us through worker organizing in a few of them.
To examine the role of work and the power relations imbedded in our workplaces, the authors draw on the tradition of workers’ inquiry, which “is a process of discovery, not only of the conditions of work now but also how to fight them.” Each workplace is organized in such a fashion — structurally, technologically, managerially — as to extract the workers capacities during the working day, or in some cases through piecemeal work. By uncovering how the bosses organize the imposition of work, strategies emerge to counter it and create some semblance of worker control and democracy. Furthermore, inquiries that produce narratives about our working lives resonate with other workers and their working conditions, revealing our common circumstances and experiences.
Since work extends beyond our workplaces into nearly every aspect of our lives, be it work-creep itself, or the unwaged work of reproducing ourselves for the next workday, Troublemaking hinges on change beyond the workplace. Immigrant workers are fighting for their legal papers in France, water in Bolivia, and land in Brazil — these are working class struggles too. Herein, they illuminate the limits of trade unionism and a labor movement that doesn’t address the entirety of our lives as workers.
In the final section of the book, after addressing workers’ inquiry, the authors shift into the importance of amplifying the individual into collective action, empowering the rank-and-file membership, union democracy, and envisioning a new horizon for the labor movement. Initially, it may appear that the authors are parroting Labor Notes and left labor here in the US, but in fact, they are offering a corrective to the obsession and singular focus on reform caucuses here, which after decades have only shown mixed results.
Independent unions and autonomous worker actions offer a different path forward. Troublemaking doesn’t just want workers to build rank-and-file unions, it views building worker confidence as a stage toward building workers capacity to govern. Hughes and Woodcock offer:
“Through the practice of workplace struggle we are forming the seeds of what an alternative society could look like. Organizing is an experiment with this. When we debate with other workers, build our own structures and take action together, we are building our capacity for struggle. [...] These moments of collective solidarity give us a glimpse of what that alternative could look like.”
Troublemaking begins with “why you should organize your workplace, and chapter-by-chapter, you encounter new and better questions. The answers will be found in your own organizing.
Kevin Van Meter is a labor educator, former union organizer, and author of “Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible” and is currently writing his next book: “Reading Struggles: Autonomist Marxism from Detroit to Turin and Back Again.” Follow him @AmericanWork47