Review of Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India: Popular Mobilisation in the Long Depression by Jörg Nowak

The central argument of this book is that ‘Only a theory of strikes that goes beyond a focus on trade unions and the workplace will be able to grasp the forms of labour conflict that affect the majority of the world population, and the global working class, which lives in non-core countries’ (p.3). Jörg Nowak states that this claim emerges from his investigation of two strikes in the Indian automobile sector and three in the Brazilian construction sector, in the course of which workers created new forms of organisation and allied with other actors who were not all waged workers.