WEI Seminar with visiting academic Maurizio Atzeni
| Dates: | 29 January 2026 |
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| Times: | 11:00 - 12:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Work and Equalities Institute |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Alumni, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Maurizio Atzeni |
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We are pleased to invite you to a seminar with visiting academic Maurizio Atzeni to be held on Thursday 29th January from 11am to 12.30pm in room 3.008 AMBS. Tea and coffee will be available in the room to start.
The roots of workers’ collective action and class contestation
Abstract:
The lecture 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.
Bio:
Maurizio Atzeni is a researcher at CEIL/CONICET, Argentina and Professor at the Faculty of Business and Economics, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile. His long-term research interest is on workers collective action and organization and on labour and capitalism. He has published widely on both topics and he is the author of Workplace conflict: mobilization and solidarity in Argentina (2010); Workers and labour in a globalised capitalism (2014) and the co-editor of the Research Handbook of the global political economy of work. He is one of the editors in chief of the Global Labour Journal. He is also the coordinator of LabourTransfer, an activists/researchers school and knowledge exchange network: www.labourtransferschool.org
Speaker
Maurizio Atzeni
Role: Professor
Organisation: Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
3.008
Aliiance Manchester Business School
Booth Street West
Manchester
