WEO Research Seminar: The roots of workers’ collective action and class contestation
Event Date: 4 March 2026
Speaker: Professor Maurizio Atzeni, Faculty of Economics and Business of the Alberto Hurtado University, Argentina.
Time: 14:00 - 15:30 GMT
Location: Strathclyde Business School, Duncan Wing, DW601
Biography:
Maurizio has a curriculum of interdisciplinary training (law, development studies, labour studies), work experience and academic networks across Chile, Argentina, United Kingdom and Italy. He is part if the steering group of the International Labour Process Conference and organises the international summer school, Labour Transfer. Maurizio is editor in chief of the Global Labour Journal and part of the editorial board of the journals Journal of Labor and Society and Work in the Global Economy.
Abstract:
The talk will theoretically systematise and draw on two decades of experience and empirical research on the nature and dynamics of labour conflict and on the forms of workers collective organisation. These aspects have been studied in Argentina in different work contexts and time periods, covering a wide range of cases (the automotive industry, the delivery industry in pre- and post-digitalisation contexts, the e-commerce warehouses, self-managed factories and cooperatives, and the informal labour market), thus allowing for a mapping of conflict and forms of work organisation. Workers’ collective resistance is generated by processes of value extraction within the labour process, but shaped by external political and economic factors. Against a tendency within industrial relations to frame workers’ collective action and organization in trade unions terms, in the lecture we will explore how a return to class can help identify strategies, alliances and practices, that can help to go beyond the currently fragmented reality of the world of work, renewing
working class political identities and, possibly, inspiring a narrative of victory. Given the context of war, genocide and discrimination of any sort of non compliant groups, pushed forward by right wing authoritarian governments, a class strategy is becoming a pressing need.
Published: 25 February 2026
