Book Review: Working Democracies: Managing Inequality in Worker Cooperatives, by Joan S. M. Meyers

Abstract

mobilizations. Despite the citations from interviews, we cannot learn more about the biographical and demographical information on the interviewees. The author mentions the role of the migrant workers (especially in the Brazilian cases) and the inequalities concerning female workers (especially in the Indian cases). However, he focuses mainly on their status (contract or permanent), leaving the reader to wonder about the individual profiles of some of these workers (age, gender, ethnicity, family, education, and so forth). Who strikes and who does not? Some portraits of workers could have been useful to provide more information on which workers participated in strikes and mobilizations. Nonetheless, the book achieves and goes beyond its goals through a final discussion on what to do with the analysis of strikes and what happens after strikes. The author tries to answer the question of how the study of strikes in specific sectors and countries could contribute to the general literature on capitalism, right wing movements, and authoritarian regimes. By doing this, he puts into question the research that focuses on the limits of trade unions and that claims the trade unions no longer serve workers’ interests and/or are no longer capable of playing an important role in contentious politics. He states that the trade union format has been successful when it combined with other forms of organization. Nowak provides insight on the relations between trade unions and other types of social movements. His conclusions offer new perspectives to researchers who are working on recent mobilizations in europe, such as the Gilets Jaunes (yellow vests) movement. Unlike the literature criticizing the trade unions’ strategies on the one hand and promoting the Gilets Jaunes as a new actor representing working-class interests on the other, Nowak’s results on the Indian and the Brazilian strikes between 2010 and 2014 underline the relevance of the articulation of workplace conflicts with class relations beyond the workplace and with nonclass relations as it results in greater popular power.