Labour geography is tedious: Of contracts, grievances and the nitty-gritty of worker agency in United Farm Workers-era California
本文回应“什么算工人的能动性”这一问题，通过分析1970年代加利福尼亚联合农场工人管理新获合同的日常斗争，指出工人的能动性和阶级权力往往在最平凡甚至乏味的细节中形成和发挥作用。
Responding to the oft-asked question, ‘what counts as labour’s agency?’ this paper engages with recent developments in labour geography to argue that labour geographers would benefit from paying close attention to the nitty-gritty struggles over – and not only for – the contract. Taking the case of the United Farm Workers’ efforts to administer its newly-won contracts in the agribusiness fields of California in the 1970s, it suggests that labour’s agency is often not just expressed, but made to count, in the midst of the most mundane – and often tedious – of circumstances, like late night-grievance procedure meetings. The paper argues that not just labour’s agency, but its class power, is often formed and deployed – and sometimes countered – in the details of how the collective interests of workers, on the farm or across a region, and handled.