LAZAR, SIAN, 2023, How We Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour. London: Pluto Press, 392 pp., ISBN 978 0 7453 4754 7 EPUB

Keywords: Resistance, labor, ethnography, collective action, workplace, unions

Sian Lazar’s How We Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labor comprises a soaring review of recent labor ethnologies across the globe that converge to insist upon a more nuanced and transformational understanding of worker resistance. While at times overwhelming in scope – her analysis includes a review of worker resistance in factories, sweatshops, farms, office buildings, call centers, delivery workers, and social activism writ large from India to Argentina to Eastern Europe and everywhere in between – How We Struggle is a vitally important contribution to a growing and evolving theoretical understanding of labor agency.

Lazar rightly points to the limitations and hegemony of the white, male, industrial, union organizer archetype in the common imaginary of what it means to resist oppression at work. Not only does work today rarely resemble the “standard employment relationship” that dominated conceptions of work in the mid-20th century (and, as she points out, was only ever accessible to a privileged minority), worker resistance has evolved as well. Indeed, as she asserts, “It is not only capital that is creative, but workers too.”[i] Through assembling these ethnographies and putting them in dialogue with one another, Lazar dissolves the binary between submissive victim and active industrial proletariat resistance. In this way she recognizes and thereby honors the myriad other forms of resistance that exist, while at the same time expanding our collective capacity to imagine other ways of making a (life worth) living. In contrast with protest, which she states “is spectacular and therefore amenable to research and comment; indeed, that is usually the point. […] Workers do not always resist, and often their agency can be found in ways that they respond to their conditions of work that are not exactly oppositional, either overtly or covertly.”[ii] Embracing a “capacious notion of agency”^[1] that welcomes the covert and incremental alongside the spectacular, therefore, allows for an evolving understanding of resistance alongside an evolving understanding of late capitalist oppression in the post-Fordist, informal economy that dominates worker relations worldwide.

Of Lazar’s most important contributions in this book is her insistence on a feminist and pluralized approach to labor agency. In her review of working conditions in the garment industry, she notes that agency more often takes the form of individual physical and medical ailments than collective resistance, as the grueling demands of the workplace engender health complications that lead to workers disrupting the flow of production through calling out sick or moving at a slower pace. Rather than dismissing these more individual, non-coordinated efforts as “not resistance,” she pointedly asks: “But is this a problem for the workers or for our analytical categories? Do our gendered assumptions about labour agency mean that we expect a kind of class consciousness and organised resistance that could not come out of the modes of production specific to these industries?”^[2]