Counterhegemonic Tactics

Abstract

Chapter 6 traces how workers at Siemens saved thousands of jobs by mobilizing against layoffs. Similar to the other cases, management established market fundamentalism as hegemonic in the workplace, framing employment conditions as determined by markets. In contrast to the other cases, however, organizers at Siemens developed counterhegemonic tactics to recode management’s discourse, which allowed them to attribute employment conditions to factors within workers’ control and to do so in a discourse that workers found credible. Workers at Siemens mobilized because they believed that collective action could be effective in protecting their jobs. In the end, they were right. In addition to making mobilization possible, workers at Siemens made it effective by enforcing national institutions in order to make job cuts prohibitively expensive, thereby forcing management to rescind layoffs.