Ben Laurence (University of Chicago) will give a presentation entitled “Labor Struggle as Transformative Experience” as part of the activities of the Philosophy of Work Network.

The activities of the Philosophy of Work Network are open to researchers and graduate students with research interests in this area. Please write to the organizers, Denise Celentano (denise.celentano@umontreal.ca) and Pablo Gilabert (pablo.gilabert@concordia.ca), to receive the zoom link.

Summary

It is a commonplace that workers who participate in dramatic forms of contested collective action—in hard-fought union elections, contract negotiations, or strikes—are often changed by the experience. This talk begins to make the case that such transformative experiences of collective action should be treated seriously in a political philosophy of labor unions. As we will see, the failure to grasp this point raises theoretical problems for some dominant approaches to the theory of unions on which unions cater to interests of workers that are fixed by their structural position in the economy prior to labor struggle. My first thesis is that by pursuing interests through collective struggle, workers acquire new interests rooted in this evolving practical confrontation with employers, including inter alia interests in fostering felicitous conditions for the development and exercise of solidarity. My second thesis speaks to a deeper way in which labor struggle can be transformative. Building on a critical reappropriation of recent philosophical literatures about transformative experience, I argue that such communities of solidarity at the point of production prefigure emancipatory relations between workers by making available a community in which an experience of a different relationship to labor and co-workers, not normally on offer under capitalist arrangements, can be had.