The Union Surge in the Media and Cultural Industries: Mapping the Circulation of Struggles
This article maps and explains the recent surge of unionization in media and cultural industries in the United States and Canada. We structure our analysis around a three-part argument. First, union organizing is intensifying in media and cultural industries, evident in the number of workplaces that have unionized and the surge’s expanding reach across fields. Second, workers’ motivations to organize extend beyond compensation and job security to include racial diversity, equity, and care for their work. And third, the union wave can be understood through the lens of the circulation of struggles, an autonomist concept that enables us to theorize the dynamics propelling the union surge and its implications. Circulation of struggles points to cultural workers’ strategic position in the labour economy as they generate a wider movement to organize media and culture and spread critical perspectives on work by counter-mobilizing the very communicative capacities that employers in these industries seek to control.
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