The banality of engagement and the neoliberal union: Workplace engagement series Part Two

The language of engagement in the workplace treats engagement as the basis for justifying and propping up neoliberal re-organizing.

Workplaces are re-organized on the logics of engagement. Workplace restructuring and job redundancies are legitimized through the logic of engagement.

The neoliberal organization justifies these techniques of re-organizing through the language of consultation.

Workplace policies are codified on the technologies of engagement.

To the extent that organizations follow the "right" steps, they can fire workers, reduce wages, increase hours, reduce permanent positions, and increase the number of precarious positions.

In other words, if management follows the precsribed steps of engagement, there is no valid basis for worker struggle. Workers are disciplined into internalizing the lesson, "All I need is engagement." The message is, "Engage us. Consult with us. Follow the policy guidelines. And now, you can fire us. Re-hire us. Take away our permanent positions."

The mantra, "Do whatever you want as long as you have engaged us."

The neoliberal union is accommodated into a dialogic relationship with the neoliberal organization, where the performance of engagement itself is the source of sustenance for the union. Reduced to negotiating in terms of engagement, the neoliberal union exists because of the frameworks of consultation. The job of the union is turned into a professional-managerial role of ensuring that the rules of engagement have been followed.

Now consider what would dismantling this vision of union organizing look like. What would union organizing look like when we take back our control over unions as sites of resistance. No longer are we then held to the management's dictation of engagement, defined in terms established by management. Instead, the very definition of engagement and workplace democracy is determined by workers.

Voice democracy in union organizing must begin with challenging and dismantling the neoliberal unions that have turned workplaces into precarious spaces ruled by the hegemony of dialogue.

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...

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Figure 1: Trump, Vance and their partners responding to the remarks by Mariann Edgar Budde Emergent from the struggles of the civil rights movement , led by African Americans , organized against the oppressive history of settler colonialism and slavery that forms the backbone of US society, structures around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) formed an integral role in forging spaces for diverse recognition and representation. These struggles around affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion were at the heart of the changes to white only immigration policies, building pathways for migration of diverse peoples from the Global South. The changes to the immigration policies created opportunities for Indians to migrate to the US, with a rise of Indian immigration into the US since the 1970s into educational institutions, research and development infrastructures, and technology-finance infrastructures. These migratory structures into the US were leveraged by l...

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In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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