Microsoft Word - Alternate Routes Vol 30, Issue 2 Final


Edited by Carlo Fanelli 
and Stephanie Luce

ALTERNATE ROUTES 
Vol. 30 (2), 2019

AUSTERITY AND THE 
PRECARIZATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE



© Alternate Routes, 2019 Toronto 
www.alternateroutes.ca 
Twitter: @ARjcsr 
 
“Alternate Routes” 
ISSN 1923-7081 (online) 
ISSN 0702-8865 (print) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

 
 



Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research 
Vol. 30, Issue 2, 2019 

 
 

 
 
 

Editors: Carlo Fanelli and Stephanie Luce 
 

Interventions Editor: Matthew Flisfeder 
 
Reviews Editor: Thomas McDowell 

 
Editorial Advisory Board: Nahla Abdo, Dimitry Anastakis, Pat Armstrong, 
Tim Bartkiw, David Camfield, Nicolas Carrier, Federico Chicchi, Sally Chivers, 
Wallace Clement, Simten Cosar, Simon Dalby, Aaron Doyle, Ann Duffy, Bryan 
Evans, Randall Germain, Henry Giroux, Peter Gose, Paul Kellogg, Jacqueline 
Kennelly, Priscillia Lefebvre, Marco Marrone, Mark Neocleous, Bryan Palmer, 
Jamie Peck, Sorpong Peou, Garry Potter, Georgios Papanicolaou, Mi Park, 
Justin Paulson, Stephanie Ross, George S. Rigakos, Heidi Rimke, Arne 
Christoph Ruckert, Toby Sanger, Ingo Schmidt, Alan Sears, Mitu Sengupta, 
Meenal Shrivastava, Janet Lee Siltanen, Susan Jane Spronk, Jim Struthers, Mark 
P. Thomas, Rosemary Warskett 

 
Journal Mandate: Alternate Routes is committed to creating an outlet for 
critical social research and interdisciplinary inquiry. A broad range of 
theoretical and methodological approaches are encouraged, including works 
from academics, labour, and community researchers. Alternate Routes is a 
publicly accessible academic journal and encourages provocative works that 
advance or challenge our understandings of historical and contemporary 
socio-political, economic and cultural issues. In addition to full-length articles, 



we publish review essays sparked by previously published material, interviews, 
commentaries, and book reviews. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



Table of Contents 
 

Editorial Introduction 
 
Austerity Without End 
Carlo Fanelli and Stephanie Luce 
 
Articles 
 
Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus: 
Embedding Neoliberalism 
Bryan Evans and Marcel Goguen 
 
Social Innovation Labs: A Neoliberal Austerity Driven Process or 
Democratic Intervention? 
Meghan Joy, John Shields and Siu Mee Cheng 
 
The Dimensions of Passive Revolution 
Gianmarco Fifi 
 
Precarity as the New Reality? Millennials’ Representation in the 
Changing Workplaces Review Policy Process 
Jordyn Perreault-Laird and Susan Silver 
 
Building Justice in the American Labour Movement 
Biko Koenig and Deva Woodly 

 
 

6 
 
 
 
 

13 
 
 
 

35 
 
 
 

55 
 
 

78 
 
 
 

107 

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 



Editorial Introduction 
 
Austerity Without End 
 
Carlo Fanelli and Stephanie Luce 
 

In 2019, the now 187-member International Labour Organization 
celebrated its 100th anniversary. As one of the oldest agencies of the United 
Nations, the ILO used the occasion to renew calls for improved opportunities and 
working conditions, social protections and collective bargaining rights. The ILO’s 
Global Commission on the Future of Work (2019, 2) proposed a “human-centred 
agenda for the future of work that strengthens the social contract by placing 
people and the work they do at the centre of economic and social policy and 
business practice.”  

Because the world of work begins at home, this included calls for new 
investments that more evenly distribute unpaid care work, from parental leave to 
public care services, thereby genuinely increasing opportunities in the workplace; 
universal entitlements to lifelong learning via active labour market policies that 
provide opportunities for re/upskilling; proactive universal social protections that 
support people’s needs over the life cycle; new investments in the institutions of 
work, from regulations and employment contracts to collective bargaining and 
labour inspection systems; expanded “time sovereignty,” that is, the right to 
disconnect from work and greater autonomy over working time; and harnessing 
technology – artificial intelligence, automation and robotics – in a manner that 
prioritizes human well-being, regulates data use and algorithmic accountability in 
the world of work. The Commission (2019, 3) also called for establishing a 
Universal Labour Guarantee: “All workers, regardless of their contractual 
arrangement or employment status, should enjoy fundamental workers’ rights, an 
“adequate living wage” (ILO Constitution, 1919), maximum limits on working 
hours and protection of safety and health at work.” They stress urgent action is 
needed to develop national strategies on the future of work and transformative 
investments that meet the challenges of climate change.  
 There is a vast gap between this call for living wages and fundamental 
rights, and the reality most workers face in the workplace. For decades, employers 
have been attempting to increase profit margins by re-organizing work. This 
includes subcontracting, offshoring, converting full-time jobs to part-time and 
temporary, and reclassifying direct employees as independent contractors. This is 

6 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



what economist David Weil (2014) calls the “fissured workplace.” They have 
introduced new technologies to cut jobs and adopted “just-in-time” scheduling 
practices to more precisely adjust work hours. In some fields, like healthcare, 
workers are forced to work long hours and double-shifts. In others, such as retail, 
employees often do not have enough hours of work and may even have to compete 
with other employees to get assigned shifts (Clawson and Gerstel 2014, Lambert, 
Haley-Lock, and Henly 2012). 
 Employers have been able to pursue some of these strategies due to 
neoliberal reforms which deregulate industries and labor laws. Indeed, “labor 
flexibility” is a key plank of a neoliberal platform. Employers and policymakers 
have worked hand-in-hand to rewrite laws and regulations; the result is greater 
rights for employers and investors, and fewer rights for workers (Luce 2014). 
Finally, employers and their associations have in many countries actively worked 
to weaken labor unions. The “union-avoidance” industry began to flourish in the 
United States in the 1970s and eventually grew into a multi-billion dollar 
international industry (Logan 2006). The result has been declining union density 
in most industrialized countries. 

A recent ILO Brief (Xhafa 2018) finds that Canada failed to crack the top 
twenty countries when it comes to the rate of collective bargaining coverage as a 
proportion of total employment. At 27 percent, Canada finds itself in a category 
of medium-to-low levels of collective bargaining coverage with Japan, South 
Africa and the United Kingdom. Collective agreements extend the rule of law to 
the workplace (Doorey 2017). They afford workers certain rights and place limits 
on the arbitrary power of employers, like grievance-arbitration mechanisms that 
give workers rights like due process and fair treatment, not available to other 
workers except via the courts. And because unions raise wage and benefit floors 
these gains are undoubtedly one of the main reasons why unions have historically 
been opposed, and continue to be opposed, by employers and governments. 
Unions also create a presence in local labour markets or sectors – “spillover 
effects” – that can create pressure to raise wages in surrounding non-unionized 
workplaces. This often compels employers to adjust wages to remain competitive 
in labour markets, often to stave-off unionization efforts. 

Aside from the socio-economic advantages to being unionized – higher 
wages, pensions and benefits, job security, training, transparency and due process 
– organized labour has a long history of shaping social policy in the interests of 
working class communities and strengthening the social wage – public services or 
benefits that people receive in supplement of their wages earned from work and 

Austerity Without End | 7



paid for by redistributing wealth through the tax system (Himelfarb and 
Himelfarb 2013). Compensation in unionized workplaces tends to be more 
equitable overall, with relatively higher wages for lower paid workers and less of a 
wage gap for women, younger workers and racialized groups. Unionized workers 
are also more likely to be full-time, permanent and to work longer for their 
employers. Finally, unionized environments tend to be safer, with lower rates of 
critical injuries, mobility impairments, lost-time due to injury claims and broader 
support services.  

Unions are also able to exert political pressure outside the workplace, 
such as raising a series of demands for pay equity and equal pay for work of equal 
value, the undervaluation and occupational segregation of women and other 
groups, struggles for changes to human rights legislation, and same-sex spousal 
benefits. As Susan Hayter and Jelle Visser (2018: 4) have argued: “It was 
considered desirable that the norms and rules negotiated between organized 
employers and the union(s) be made generally applicable.” In neoliberalism’s 
wake, that is no longer the case, if it ever was. 

In Canada, there has been major structural shifts to the composition of 
union membership by sex, age and industry over the last three decades. Since the 
1980s, the proportion of unionized members in the public sector has eclipsed 
private sector trade union density. Whereas public sector union density has stayed 
relatively consistent from the mid-1980s to early-2000s, hovering around 72 
percent, total Canadian private sector density fell from 26 percent to just over 18 
percent. Since 2011 private sector union density has fallen to around 16 percent, 
while public sector density remained generally stable (Statistics Canada 2019). In 
other words, while public sector unionization rates have remained fairly 
consistent over the past thirty years – buoying total union density (around 30 
percent) – private sector unionization has been nearly halved. 

In the United States, the patterns are similar. Today, 14.7 million workers 
belong to unions. Union density peaked in 1955 at 35 percent and has been on the 
decline since, though that hides certain interesting patterns. Public sector density 
was at 33.9 percent in 2018, compared to just 6.9 percent in the private sector. And 
like Canada, public sector members outnumber that of the private sector.  
National density figures mask tremendous variation between states. In fact, over 
half of all union members live in just seven states: California, Illinois, Michigan, 
New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington (US Department of Labor 2019). 
 

8 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Union density figures may reveal the extent of potential union 
organization, but it is also illustrative of the ways in which organized workers have 
been able to effectively reduce inequality, improve working conditions and widen 
income distribution through wider bargaining coverage and coordination. 
Advancements for workers via collective bargaining are illustrative of capitalist 
class concessions fought for and won over the course of intergenerational class 
struggles, not privileges bestowed by employers or the benevolence of the state. 
The growing spread of low-waged work has occurred in tandem with stagnant 
union growth, aggressive anti-labour legislation and drastic expenditure 
reductions in general government spending and public services – that is to say, 
austerity without end (Evans and Fanelli 2018; Albo and Fanelli, 2014;).  

As Kris Warner (2013: 111) has argued:  
 

“While the loss of heavily unionized manufacturing jobs has 
been a contributing factor in the declining private-sector 
unionization rate in [the US and Canada], it would be a mistake 
to place too much emphasis on this in and of itself because it 
cannot explain the inability of workers to realize their desires 
for unionizing the new jobs they have moved into. Instead, in 
both countries, the increased ability of employers to effectively 
oppose unionization offers a more compelling explanation. In 
the United States this has been a long-standing issue, while in 
Canada it is a relatively newer phenomenon, related in large 
part to a change in the way unions can be formed.” 

 
Though variegated in form and function, the state has often been the chief 
architect of neoliberalism’s anti-labour reforms: at times imposing austerity from 
above or leading the charge from below, and at other times created the conditions 
for capital to lead in an assault against working class institutions. The results have 
been a continued decline in real wages and the erosion of the total labour share of 
wages. In contrast to the postwar class compromise, the ability of organized labour 
to help secure increases in social spending, impart political pressure for more 
progressive taxation and improved equality for all workers is at an impasse. 
Should the trendline continue, this could have significant implications for labour 
in an era of authoritarian neoliberalism and amid the resurgence of radical right-
wing populists (Thomas and Tufts, 2016; Greenhouse 2019; Albo et al., 2019).
 The mutual relationship between higher rates of unionization and 

Austerity Without End | 9



increased democratic participation has received consistent empirical support 
(Sojourner 2013). As Alex Bryson and colleagues (2014) have recently argued, 
union members have historically been more likely to participate in general 
elections than non-members, cultivating a broader civic culture and participation 
in democratic politics. Union members are also more likely to vote and engage in 
a range of pro-social civic behaviours, including the signing of petitions, attending 
public meetings and/or volunteering for political parties. Consistent with 
previous research, Bryson et al., have noted that the wider decline in civic 
engagement is also coincident with the decline of trade union density and larger 
collective disengagement from formal political participation. In other words, 
democratic governance at work in the form of higher rates of unionization tends 
to contribute to a life-long attachment to democratic politics outside of it. With 
union density stagnant or shrinking across much of North America and Europe, 
the democratic implications of rising low-waged work and political polarization 
has emerged as a significant political concern. 

While challenging the ‘common sense’ of neoliberalism is important and 
necessary, so too is confronting the wider capitalist context that leaves workers 
dependent on the imperatives of capital. In this regard, unions are paradoxical 
institutions, simultaneously advancing workers’ interests but rarely challenging 
the prevailing power relations at work (Fanelli and Noonan, 2017). As James 
Rinehart (2006, 203-4) has noted, while unions might nibble away at the margins 
of power, they do not alter the subordination of labour that lies at the root of 
capitalist class power. Of course, unions remain one of the few mechanisms 
through which workers can affect change inside and outside of their workplaces. 
But if trade unions are to deepen and extend their political influence and 
organizational capacities, it is incumbent on a wider revitalization of working-
class politics, like movements for living wages embody (Evans et al., n.d.; Luce 
2017).  

The welfare states of the postwar era were only possible because millions 
of people demanded change. If labour is going to break from its political paralysis 
it is dependent upon a wider renewal of a politics left of social democracy – a spent 
force increasingly an impediment to, rather than an instrument of, progressive 
politics – and rooted in an intersectional class politics that prioritizes building new 
institutions, engaging in direct action, running for office, organizing in our 
workplaces and communities. In other words, a politics that confronts both the 
authoritarian/anti-democratic politics of the right and transcends the debilitating 
“post-politics” of radical centrism (Mouffe 1998). Liberal democratic capitalism 

10 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



is losing legitimacy. But what comes next may be a form of right-wing populism, 
supported by nationalist politicians and movements looking to close borders and 
blame immigrants and trade for economic insecurity. Will unions look to 
protectionism or internationalism? Will working class movements be able to unite 
across borders to radically shift the balance of class power relations? 

 
References 

  
Albo, G. and C. Fanelli (2014). Austerity Against Democracy: An Authoritarian 

Phase of Neoliberalism? Teoria Politica: An International Journal of 
Theory and Politics, 2014, 65-88. 

Bryson, A.,  R. Gomez, T. Kretschmer and P. Willman. (2014). What Accounts for 
the Union Member Advantage in Voter Turnout? Evidence from the 
European Union, 2002-2008. Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, 
69(4), 732-765 

Clawson, D. and N. Gerstel. (2014). Unequal Time: Gender, Class, and Family in 
Employment Schedules. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.  

Doorey, D. (2017). The Law of Work. Toronto: Elgar Publishing.  
Evans, B. and C. Fanelli, eds. The Public Sector in an Age of Austerity: Perspectives 

from Canada’s Provinces and Territories. Montreal and Kingston: 
McGill-Queens University Press 

Evans, B., C. Fanelli and T. McDowell, eds., (forthcoming). Living Wage 
Movements in Canada: Comparative Perspectives on Resistance and 
Alternatives to Low-Waged Work. Vancouver: University of British 
Columbia Press.  

Fanelli, C. and J. Noonan. (2017). Capital and Labour. In Schmidt, I. and C. 
Fanelli, eds. Reading Capital Today: Marx After 150 Years. London: Pluto 
Press. 

Greenhouse, S. (2019). Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future 
of American Labor. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.  

 
Hayter, S. and J. Visser, eds. (2018). Collective Agreements: Extending Labour 

Protection. Geneva: ILO 
Himelfarb, A. and J. Himelfarb, eds. (2013). Tax is Not a Four Letter Word: A 

Different Take on Taxes in Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press.  

Austerity Without End | 11



International Labour Organization. (2019). Global Commission on the Future of 
Work. https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/future-of-
work/WCMS_569528/lang--en/index.htm 

Lambert, S, A. Haley-Lock, and J. R. Henly. (2012). Labour Flexibility and 
Precarious Employment in Hourly Retail Jobs in the U.S: How Frontline 
Managers Matter. In C. Warhurst et al., eds., Are Bad Jobs Inevitable? 
Trends, Determinants and Responses to Job Quality in the Twenty-First 
Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Luce, S. (2014). Labor Movements: Global Perspectives. Wiley. 
Luce, S. (2017). Raising Wages. Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social 

Research, 27, 12-20.  
Mouffe, C. (1998). The Radical Centre: A Politics Without Adversary. Soundings, 

9, 11-23. 
Rinehart, J. (2006). The Tyranny of Work: Alienation and the Labour Process. 

Toronto: Nelson.  
Sojourner, A. (2013). Do Unions Promote Electoral Office-Holding? Evidence 

from Correlates of State Legislatures' Occupational Shares. Industrial 
and Labor Relations Review, 66(2), 467-486. 

Statistics Canada. (2019). Table 14-10-0132-01: Union status by industry. 
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1410013201 

Thomas, M.P. and S. Tufts. (2016). Austerity, Right Populism, and the Crisis of 
Labour in Canada. Antipode, 48(1), 212-230 

U.S. Department of Labor. (2019). Union Members Summary. 
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm 

Warner, K. (2013). The Decline of Unionization in the United States: Some 
Lessons from Canada. Labor Studies Journal, 38(2) 110–138 

Weil, D. (2017). The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many 
and What Can Be Done to Improve It. Boston: Harvard University Press.  

Xhafa, E. (2018). ILO Brief No. 3 – Collective bargaining and non-standard forms 
of employment: Practices that reduce vulnerability and ensure work is 
decent. Geneva: ILO 

 
 
 
 
 

12 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus: Embedding 
Neoliberalism 
 
Bryan Evans1 and Marcel Goguen2 
 

ABSTRACT: This contribution explores the resilience of 
neoliberal policy ideas within the state by situating the process 
of manufacturing policy advice within the context of the 
prevailing policy paradigm. The central question informing this 
work is despite evident failure, neoliberal ideas continue to 
prevail within the state policy process. Why and how this is the 
case, despite the lived experience and evidence, is the subject 
interrogated here. While the study of conventional public policy 
tends to be presented as a technical, evidence-based discipline, 
this ignores, or at best minimizes the highly hierarchical and 
politicized nature of evidence, expertise and knowledge 
employed in the work of constructing policy.  
 
KEYWORDS: neoliberalism, policy paradigm, evidence, New 
Public Management, centralization 

 
Introduction  

This paper examines the relationship between ‘policy paradigms’ (Hall, 
1993) and the institutional structure of the state apparatus. While work on policy 

 
1 Bryan Evans is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration, 
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. Together with Stephen McBride, he is the co-editor 
of Austerity: The Lived Experience and The Austerity State. 
2 Marcel Goguen is a Ph.D. candidate in International Relations at McMaster University, 
Hamilton, Canada. His dissertation examines the methodological implications of critical 
theories of the state for the study of global finance. 
We wish to acknowledge the support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research 
Council of Canada and Dr. Stephen McBride (McMaster University), Principal 
Investigator leading a Partnership Development Grant whose generous support enabled 
part of this research. Marcel Goguen would like to acknowledge support from the Centre 
for Research in Empirical Social Sciences (CRESS) at McMaster University.  
 
 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 13



paradigms has produced many useful insights relating to the processes through 
which certain ideas influence the policy making process, it has thus far not 
sufficiently examined how these dynamics interact with the structure of the state 
apparatus. We thus argue that an important but still mostly unexplored 
dimension in understanding the dynamics involved in the struggle over the 
maintenance and replacement of policy paradigms is the institutional structure of 
the state apparatus and role of ‘ideational’ agents working within that. Lukes 
(2005) forwards the claim that for a process to be understood as an exercise of 
power it assumes “that it is in the exerciser’s or exerciser’s power to act differently” 
(2005, 57). This framing implies that operatives within the institution possess the 
agency to make different decisions. The broader political context in which these 
agents (exercisers) function (the paradigm) works to constrain this exercise of 
agency. 

To illustrate this broader theoretical argument, we draw on previous and 
recent interviews with government and non-government policy workers in three 
Canadian provinces to examine the ways in which changes in the structure of the 
state apparatus has shaped the mechanisms involved in maintaining the stability 
of the neoliberal policy paradigm and helped insulate it from alternative ideas. 
This article proceeds in three parts. A first section sets out the significance and 
meaning of the concept of policy paradigms for studying the power dynamics 
involved in the policy process. A second section examines the changes in the 
structure of the state apparatus associated with the emergence of NPM and the 
‘neoliberal state’. A third section examines the impact of these changes in the 
structure of the state apparatus on the dynamics involved in maintaining or 
contesting the existing neoliberal policy paradigm. 
 
Public Administration and Policy Paradigms 

Despite the ideology of technocratic neutrality having long prevailed in 
the field of public administration and the public service in most western 
democracies (Raadschelders and Rutgers, 1996; Waldo, 1948), policy making does 
not take place in a power vacuum. Contrary to the implicit view that dominates 
the field of public administration, then the ideas that come to be accepted as 
common wisdom and received knowledge in the manufacture of policy are not 
there simply as a result of having been 'proven' to be superior through a neutral 
and apolitical process wherein experts carefully weigh evidence and refine their 
understanding of (social) reality. Ideas concerning public policy and 
management, as the basic building blocks of knowledge and expertise, no matter 

14 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



how anodyne and antiseptic the packaging, are anything but technical and 
apolitical. Politically imposed deadlines usually push policy practitioners to make 
a decision without there being sufficient time to completely weigh the evidence 
(Forshey, 2005; Lidman and Sommers, 2005).  

Further, more information does not necessarily contribute to a greater 
degree of consensus on policy, partly because what constitutes evidence is 
contestable and shaped by the power dynamics of the broader political context. 
How policy problems are framed, the identification of viable solutions, what is 
deemed to be acceptable or not, what instruments are chosen, are all reflections of 
where power is located and held by which policy actors. In this process, not all 
knowledge is created equal. Specific ideas are socially and culturally embedded in 
ways making them powerful or, on the other hand, not powerful (Strassheim and 
Kettunen, 2014). As a result, some forms are privileged and are readily utilized 
while other forms become relatively marginalized, a process that makes certain 
solutions appear more credible and/or legitimate than others. The relationship 
between power and ideas in the policy process remains difficult to conceptualize 
and empirically investigate, however, partially because it can be rather hard to 
“differentiate the effects of ideas themselves from the effects of the actors who bear 
them” (Campbell, 2002, 31). 

 While interest in the impact of ideas on the policy process had been 
rather limited until the 1980s, there has since grown a significant body of literature 
examining this issue by scholars who were/are skeptical of the assumption that 
was then dominant: “that politics are driven solely by actors operating according 
to a self-interested cost-benefit calculus” (Campbell, 1998, 377). A central 
research topic within this body of work is concerned with the different ways that 
ideas can be powerful in their own right and the main factors involved in shaping 
which ideas become influential (e.g. Hirshman and Berman, 2014; Campbell, 
1998, 2002; Béland, 2005, 2009; Walsh, 2000; Carstensen and Schmidt, 2016; 
Seabrooke and Wigan, 2016).  

 In order to contribute to efforts at more precisely measuring the impact 
of ideas on the policy process, Carstensen and Schmidt (2016) have distinguished 
between three forms in which ideas can be powerful. The first is power through 
ideas, which refers to the ability of particular actors to use ideas to convince others 
of the normative value or cognitive validity of their worldview in such a way as 
they alter their beliefs about how the world works or how it should be (Carstensen 
and Schmidt, 2016, 325-6). Power over ideas concerns the ability of actors to define 
what certain ideas mean and to gather enough legitimacy around their view so that 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 15



they can avoid having to consider alternate definitions of the same idea or 
competing ideas. Finally, power in ideas refers to quality that certain ideas can 
possess, once they have become sufficiently widely accepted, that they end up 
“structuring thought at the expense of other ideas” (Ibid, 329). It is this dimension 
of power in ideas that we are primarily interested in this paper.  

One illustration of this ideational power is provided by Widmaier in a 
series of papers examining the impact of what he calls ‘intersubjective 
understandings’ – but which we can describe as socially and politically dominant 
ideas about how the world works – on policies meant to deal with economic crisis 
(2003), international cooperation on monetary and financial regulation (2004), 
and the relative balance of price and wage guidelines and monetary policies as the 
primary mechanism of US economic policy (2007). Widmaier’s main point is that 
in dealing with different economic crises, a central role is played by the broad 
‘intersubjective understandings’ through which policymakers construct their 
understanding of when they began, what caused them, and how best to deal with 
them (2007, 46). For example, Widmaier explains, from the end of the Second 
World War up to the 1970, dominant Keynesian ‘intersubjective understandings’ 
of inflationary crises and price fluctuations as ‘market failures’ meant that they 
could be plausibly dealt with through government intervention in the form of the 
adoption of wage and price guidelines.  

In contrast, beginning in the 1970s, neoclassical ‘intersubjective 
understandings’ of inflationary crises were caused by the failure of state policies 
so that they could only plausibly be dealt with through fiscal and monetary 
austerity (Widmaier, 2007, 47-49; 2004; 2003). This should not be taken to imply 
that material forces and events are unimportant but rather that it is only by giving 
meaning to the ‘material trends’ through the lens provided by the dominant 
‘intersubjective understandings’ of a period that policymakers can identify the 
existence of a crisis, its causes, and then ‘react’ appropriately to deal with it 
(Widmaier, 2003, 64; 2004, 450). But how should we understand and analyze the 
processes through which certain ‘intersubjective understandings’ (what we shall 
simply call ideas) come to gain the authority that enables them to structure 
“thought at the expense of other ideas”?  

One avenue could be to explore this topic through the lens of ideology 
which, as it is typically used in Marxist terms, refers to how certain ideas shape 
perceptions of the existing order to minimize the desirability of any possible 
alternative that erodes the power of the dominant class (Marx, 1932; Berman, 
2017). One particularly influential contribution to public policy that adopts this 

16 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



approach is the work of Lukes which highlights how power is exercised by 
preventing people “from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, 
cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing 
order of things” (2005, 11, 28).  

However, despite proposing some useful amendments to address the 
problems of traditional work on ‘false consciousness’, Lukes’ work remains 
theoretically very close to conventional work on ideology (Hay, 1997). As a result, 
it is of limited use for our purposes as it both tends to depict ideas in an 
instrumental manner as well as leave relatively little room for a consideration of 
the agency of policy makers. Therefore, we proceed in a manner similar to Konings 
(2018, 29) who suggests that it is important to consider how we might understand 
neoliberalism “even if we assume little about the ability of capitalist elites to 
capture state institutions or the minds of policymakers”. From this perspective, 
rather than understanding state officials as being either “corrupted by private 
interests” or intellectually captured by the dominant ideology, they come to be 
viewed as being “primarily disposed to stabilize the economic system” by relying 
on a set of ideas that seemingly provides a “degree of cohesion at the level of 
practice” (Konings 2018, 29) The central question then becomes how some ideas, 
and not others, come to be understood as providing the best policy options.  

For our purposes, Peter Hall’s (1993) work on the concept of policy 
paradigms provides a useful lens through which to examine this issue. For Hall, a 
policy paradigm is “framework of ideas and standards that specifies not only the 
goals of policy and the kind of instruments that can be used to attain them, but 
also the very nature of the problems they are meant to be addressing” (1993, 279; 
Béland, 2005, 5). Broadly speaking, what policy paradigms do is form the 
background view of how the world works and the kinds of causal relations that 
exists within it and, as a result, they constrain the range of possibilities considered 
as plausible or likely to succeed by policy makers (Campbell, 2002).   

In specifying how this operated in practice, Hall distinguished his 
approach from work drawing on Heclo’s (1974) concept of ‘social learning’ in 
which policy makers were understood to be perpetually ‘fine tuning’ the design of 
their policies based on a process of accumulating evidence of past policy successes 
and failures (Hall, 1993, 277). The problem for Hall was this approach suggested 
a view of how policy-makers learned from their experiences that was insufficiently 
attentive to the power dynamics involved in struggles over how to interpret the 
meaning of past policy experiences. The concept of policy paradigms is meant to 
address this weakness by foregrounding the interpretive process through which 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 17



past experiences are evaluated and given meaning by incorporating them into a 
coherent account of what the world is like. From this perspective “policy 
paradigms guide learning processes through which existing policy legacies are 
evaluated and criticized” (Béland, 2009, 705). In policy construction terms, the 
concept of policy paradigm is thus useful to conceptualize the way that ideas can 
shape how a policy problem is constructed in a way that makes the problem 
intelligible, so that it can be understood by political decision makers and policy 
makers, in one way rather than another.  
 One of the primary advantages of adopting this approach in analyzing 
policy construction is that it provides the tools necessary to examine how power 
shapes the policy process beyond its manifestations in 'normal' electoral politics 
and the struggle over control of governments (Béland and Cox, 2013, 194). These 
power dynamics are most clearly visible in situations in which an established 
paradigm is challenged by a competitor; i.e. in cases of ‘paradigm shift’. In the 
original Kuhnian sense, paradigm shifts are understood to occur when the 
accumulation of anomalous evidence that cannot be convincingly included into 
the view of the world espoused by a paradigm reaches a tipping point, and the 
search begins for an alternative view of the world in which the (so-called) 
anomalies can be convincingly integrated.  
 Once this happens, once a new view of the world is discovered that can 
more convincingly integrate the ostensibly anomalous facts than the view 
espoused by the previous paradigm, then we can speak of a ‘paradigm shift’. In 
policy paradigms, however, the processes involved in paradigm shifts are more 
complicated and are crucially related to the role of power (Blyth, 2013; Henriksen, 
2013). Power plays such a central role in policy paradigm shifts because since 
“each paradigm contains its own account of how the world facing policymakers 
operates and each account is different, it is often impossible for the advocates of 
different paradigms to agree on a common body of data against which a technical 
judgment in favor of one paradigm over another might be made” (Hall, 1993, 
279). 

As a result, what is considered to be evidence and what evidence means 
is inherently contestable. Simply stated, this means that “discrediting a policy 
paradigm is a much more contested and interpretive process than the one which 
lies behind scientific refutation” (Wilder and Howlett, 2014, 187). This implies 
that (1) the process of their replacement is likely to be more social and political 
than scientific, (2) issues of competing authority are likely to be central to the 
process of (policy) paradigm shift and, (3) that “the movement from one paradigm 

18 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



to another ... is likely to involve the accumulation of anomalies, experimentation 
with new forms of policy, and policy failures that precipitate a shift in the locus of 
authority over policy and initiate a wider contest between competing paradigms” 
(Hall, 1993, 280). In supporting this view policy paradigm shifts, Blyth proposes 
that the fact that the 2007-8 global financial crisis did not cause a paradigm shift 
seems to demonstrate the strength of the this account of paradigm shifts (2013, 
206), since while the crisis represents the failure of decades of received wisdom of 
the neoclassical policy paradigm, no paradigm shift has taken place; quite the 
contrary (Quiggin, 2011; Mirowski, 2013). Thus, Blyth explains, “it is politics, not 
economics, and it is authority, not facts, that matter for both paradigm 
maintenance and change” (Blyth, 2013, 210). But how does this play out in 
practice? How do certain ideas come to exert influence on the policy-making 
process while others are marginalized?  

In exploring this issue, Widmaier’s (2016) “staged theory” of ideational 
power provides a useful starting point. In this account, ideas that were initially 
used as rhetorical instruments to defend a particular policy can sometimes take 
on “structural weight” that makes them function “at a deeper level than [mere] 
policy ideas” as the “unarticulated … background knowledge” that limit the range 
of policy options that are understood as being potentially acceptable (Widmaier, 
2016, 345). Although the process wherein specific ideas come to be embedded in 
this way is clearly shaped by power relations, once specific ideas come to be 
embedded into important institutions, they can have a significant impact on the 
manufacture of policy in their own right. 

In this process, the struggle over who gets to occupy those sites which 
really matter in interpreting events and anomalies and imposing meaning onto 
the facts is central. The work of policy takes place within ‘gated’ policy 
communities. Policy paradigms operate, are fought over, maintained or 
overturned, within specific social, material and institutional 'locations'. While 
policy expertise is distributed both in and outside of the state apparatus, policy 
decision makers, those who ultimately construct a policy, and in the process 
determine what will be done or not done and how, are employed within the formal 
state apparatus. It is here that the work of policy is conducted. This means that the 
kinds of ideas which come to form the core of policy paradigms, the role of experts 
in maintaining, transferring, and applying these ideas, and the strategies that are 
used by those seeking to foster or preclude a policy paradigm shift, are all crucially 
centered on and shaped by these locations.  

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 19



The policy-making process is often quite unresponsive to influences 
originating outside of the specific 'locations' from which public policy is 
manufactured. Policy work, and those who conduct the crafting, insulate the 
policy function of the state apparatus from unorthodox policy alternatives. 
Alternatives are filtered out through a dense network of ideational relays 
including think tanks, consultants, and various policy entrepreneurs within or 
well-linked to the state from the outside. As a result, the composition of these 
'locations', and the social, technological, political, and institutional networks to 
which they are connected, significantly shape how policy paradigms operate. To 
borrow from Blyth’s (2013) formulation above, while it is indeed ‘politics and not 
economics’ that “matter for both paradigm maintenance and change”, an 
important aspect of this is the inherently political struggle over paradigm 
maintenance and change which is shaped by the institutional terrain. To gain a 
better understanding of the power dynamics involved in maintaining or replacing 
a policy paradigm, it is important to more closely consider not only the 
composition of the ‘locations’ within the state apparatus in which policies are 
constructed but also the specificity of their connections with the social, political 
and academic actors outside of the state apparatus. In the next section, we examine 
the relationship between the current neoliberal policy paradigm and the 
institutional structure of the post-welfare state apparatus.  
 
Transforming the Structures of the State Apparatus and the Neoliberal 
Paradigm 

The Keynesian welfare state apparatus3 emerged out of a period defined 
by the events of the Great Depression and the Second World War that had 
provoked a re-thinking of how business, labour, and government could work 
together in ensuring economic stability within the context of overall growth. 
Through these formative events, governments had “learned a great deal about the 
practical problems of macroeconomic management” and broader views 

 
3 In this paper, we use the concept of the ‘state apparatus’ in order to forestall the tendency 
to reify the state as a homogenous, unified and rational actor. The state apparatus refers to 
the administrative bureaucracies, legal systems, and military and police organizations, 
among others, that are involved in regulating social and economic relations (Miliband, 
1972). These are the “legally defined organizations that wield state authority, that is, 
organizations whose goals and modes of action are defined within the law-making process, 
and that can mobilize state force, bureaucratic, judicial and physical force to implement 
their decisions” (Gran, 1994, 65).  

20 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



concerning the role of government in the administration of the economy had 
become generally more positive (Drache, 1996, 32). The welfare state apparatus 
served this purpose as it organized political power and administrative capability 
“in an effort to modify the play of market forces” through the provision of social 
security programs such as insurance against unemployment, illness, accident, and 
old age (Briggs, 2000, 18).  Consequently, “this new system also demanded new 
institutions, a new politics, and major changes in the role of the state” (Ross and 
Jenson, 1985/86, 24). As is well documented, the Keynesian Welfare state began 
to wobble and undergo transformation through the 1980s (Alber, 1988; Peters and 
Savoie, 1993). In a context of increasing inflation and unemployment and the 
decline of both profitability and disposable income (Goldthorpe, 1984, 2), the 
welfare state slowly “unravelled” (Banting and Hoberg, 1997, 410). Its decline was 
accelerated and celebrated by Reagan and Thatcher’s ascendant brand of ‘New 
Right’ thinking which counter-posed its values of economic liberalism, 
individualism, and inequality to those associated with the postwar social contract 
of collectivism, social rights and equality (Farnham and Horton, 1996, 12).  

It was in this context that the ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) 
movement arose as the “domesticated, depoliticized version of the New Right or 
market liberal policy analysis, made somewhat more technical, consensual and 
generic” (Dunleavy, 1997, 17). The key characteristics of NPM include: 1) a shift 
in focus from inputs and processes and towards outputs and outcomes (results); 
2) a shift towards more measurement and quantification; 3) a preference for more 
specialized lean, flat and autonomous organizational forms; 4) replacing  
hierarchical relationships with contract relationships; 5) use of market or market-
type mechanisms (MTM’s) for the delivery of public services; 6) an expanded 
concern with service quality and a consumer orientation; 7) a blurring of the 
separation between the public, private and non-profit sectors; and 9) a shift in 
core values away from universalism, equity, and security and towards efficiency, 
economy, effectiveness and individualism (Pollitt, 2003, 27-28). Within this 
perspective, the proper role for government came to be redefined as one where 
the objective was to “reduce or relinquish their previous responsibilities for 
maintaining full employment and a comprehensive system of state welfare; … 
privatize public services or their delivery whenever practicable; and … reform 
their own operations in accordance with market concepts of competition and 
efficiency” (Self, 1993, ix). As such NPM “provides a label under which private 
sector disciplines can be introduced to the public services, political control can be 
strengthened, budgets trimmed, professional autonomy reduced, public service 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 21



unions weakened and a quasi-competitive framework erected to flush out the 
natural inefficiencies of bureaucracy” (Pollitt, 1990, 49). In this sense, NPM can 
be thought of as a transmission belt for the transfer of neoliberalism into public 
sector organizations (Spronk, 2007).  

While there are definitional debates regarding neoliberalism (Cahill and 
Humphreys, 2019, 2), it can generally be defined as a paradigm applying a market 
approach to governance and as such represents an ideological shift in the role of 
government. Harvey suggests it is a theory “proposing that human well-being can 
best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an 
institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual 
liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade” (2007, 22). In policy, it manifests 
itself as market liberalization, deregulation, privatization and an erosion of worker 
and social protections (Larner, 2000). While neoliberalism is often presented as a 
force hostile to the state, actually existing neoliberalism is a paradox where the 
“state is to be simultaneously rolled back and rolled forward. Non-interventionist 
and decentralised in some areas, the state is to be highly interventionist and 
centralised in others” (Gamble, 1988, 28). This is the paradox of “centralized 
decentralization” (Hoggett, 1996, 74, 9-32).  It is necessary to centralize power in 
order to dismantle state-provided social protections and to use state power to 
advance the neoliberal project. This is the central paradox of the neoliberal state 
apparatus and it is absolutely critical to an understanding that despite the rhetoric 
of ‘rolling back the state,’ building the neoliberal state in fact requires that the state 
be reorganized as an active instrument for marketization (Gamble, 2006, 21-2; 
Harvey, 2007, 22).   

This paradox at the heart of neoliberalism manifests itself in the effects 
of NPM on structure of the state apparatus. Rather than simply diminish the state 
apparatus, therefore, NPM reconfigures the distribution of power within and 
between its component parts and its relationship to forces outside of it such as 
capital, labour and other civil society movements (Harvey, 2005, 78). More 
specifically, the implementation of market fundamentalist interventions requires 
a concentration of authority at the centre of the state. Thus, while NPM is 
identified with decentralization, that is so with respect to delivery. The assertion 
of a new managerialism within the neoliberal state apparatus renews the old 
concept of the politics-administration dichotomy by empowering managers but 
also gives greater control over policy to central agencies, the executive and the 
political arm of government (i.e. ministerial offices and staff) (Savoie, 1994).  

22 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



NPM was thus no mere effort at tinkering but rather sought a 
transformation within the public sector and the public sector’s relationship to 
government and economy and so “aims at the replacement of the traditional 
model altogether” (Hughes, 2003, 50; Clarke and Newman, 1997). The new model 
of public administration was explicitly directed at “achieving more frugal, more 
efficient…more effective…governments” (Lynn, 2006, 104). Since these views did 
not sit comfortably with the post-war state inhabited by a closely-knit set of senior 
public servants and political leaders who shared common values respecting the 
mixed economy and the welfare state (Heclo and Wildavsky, 1981, 30), it was 
necessary to co-ordinate the political/managerial resources required to overcome 
resistance (e.g. Pusey, 1991). On an ideational level, the legitimacy of the policy 
proposals espoused by NPM and proponents of the neoliberal state apparatus 
rested largely on the authority of the world view espoused by neoclassical 
economics. Economics, more so than any other social science, has been an 
exceptionally powerful academic discipline in its ability to inform public policy 
(Schneider and Kirchgässner, 2009, 324). Economists are in this respect 
“gatekeepers” occupying a strategic location for providing the theoretical 
rationale informing the allocation of public resource (Markoff and Montecinos, 
1993, 52). In addition, because of this preponderance, “(a)spects of economic 
theories and techniques become embedded in real-life economic processes, and 
become part of the equipment that economic actors and ordinary citizens use in 
their day-to-day economic interactions” (Fourcade et al., 2015, 109). As a result, 
the indirect influence of economists is often just as important as their direct 
influence in reshaping “how non-economist policymakers understand a given 
issue” (Hirschman and Berman, 2014, 780). In short, they frame problems and 
thus establish the range of policy interventions to be considered. 

Though the prominence of economics is not in itself new, the discipline 
itself has changed substantially since the end of WW2. Indeed, through the Great 
Depression and the post-war era, a “generation of Keynesian trained economists 
and policy analysts came to the fore and populated a growing state apparatus 
(Evans, 2005, 25). However, even as that paradigm wobbled, economists 
continued to work as key policy actors but with “newer ideas of economic 
management” that “now come with an impressive variety of complex and esoteric 
models of their own and require equally elaborate technical staffing” (Markoff and 
Montecinos, 1993, 43). The influence of economists assumes an intellectually 
hegemonic location of this discipline over other social sciences. The scientization 
of economics, referring to the application of empirical testing, typically by various 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 23



mathematical methods, provides the methodological foundation for this status as 
the ‘queen of the social sciences’. Economists have thus perceived their role as 
above sectional politics as theirs is a discipline “whose intellectual achievements 
are held to be in the refinement of beautifully abstract and highly mathematized 
models” (Markoff and Montecinos, 1993, 51).  

This scientization works to depoliticize economic policy (Dyson and 
Marcussen, 2009) and so contributes to insulating the prevailing orthodoxy from 
alternative models. More than this, scientized economics reduces the debate to 
one based on purely technical, and therefore apolitical, solutions which share the 
same assumption respecting macroeconomics. This depoliticization through 
scientization is not unique to the neoliberal state. Indeed, policy problems were 
framed by Keynesian economics as “technical questions to be solved by economic 
experts. Because the problems are understood as merely technical ones, they 
appear to be beyond the political sphere” (Wisman, 1991, 118). As a result, 
contemporary neo-classical economic theory thus function “mainly as a surrogate 
ideology for the market economy” (Keen, 2011, 4) and economists have at times 
been described as 'carriers' of the neoliberal market ideology (Evans, 2017, 226-
31).  

Despite initial rumblings that the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) 
would lead to a decline in the authority of economics and potential shift away 
from neoliberalism (Collignon, 2008), outside of relatively minor changes to 
prudential financial regulation, the longstanding prestige and influence of 
neoclassical economics within the policy making process has not significantly 
diminished since the GFC (Mirowski, 2013, 158; Crouch, 2011; Quiggin, 2011). 
This progressive institutionalization of neoclassical economics and its ability to 
withstand substantial opposition and empirical evidence (the GFC) suggesting 
that many of its central assumptions are flawed or simply false, finds many echoes 
with Widmaier’s (2016) ‘staged theory’ of ideational power, discussed above. 
What has so far remained largely unexamined is the role played by changes in the 
state apparatus in enhancing the stability of the neoliberal policy paradigm. In the 
next section we examine this issue by drawing on previous and recent semi-
structured interviews. 
 
The Neoliberal State Apparatus, the Centralization of Power, and the Policy 
Process 
 In many Western countries, policy often had what could be characterized 
as an 'upward' movement within state bureaucracies; with policies being 

24 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



developed in departments by public sector advisors before being presented to 
members of the executive for appraisal and decision (Evans, 2017, 10). This 
process allowed for input from various sources and included an important role 
for public sector policy analysis (Good, 2013, 213). However, the centralization of 
political control discussed above has been accompanied by a movement to 
repoliticize the state by concentrating policy making authority in specific strategic 
centres operating largely under the direct control of the executive branch (Aucoin, 
2010; Savoie, 1994). The public policy expertise upon which governments rely is 
thus increasingly centered outside of the civil service.  Public policy work becomes 
politicized as work which had been the purview of the public service is “turned 
over to … partisan policy advisors, to think tanks and to lobby firms for advice” 
(Savoie, 1993, 21-2). Policy work within the neo-liberal state is one in which 
influence over the design and manufacture of policy is now limited to a limited 
number of central actors and in which “public service advisors are either shunted 
aside or are recruited for their ‘political’ fit” (Evans, 2017, 233). Whitehall scholar 
Peter Hennessey observed of the Thatcher era that the expanding role of external 
policy advice has produced “an era when the Armani-clad minds in the penumbra 
of fad-and-fashion prone private think tanks can be preferred (especially if their 
advice comes gift-wrapped and suitably politically tinted) to that more sober, 
sometimes inconvenient fare served up by the tweed-clad minds in the career 
bureaucracy” (1997, 4-5).  This has created formidable barriers that effectively 
exclude alternative ideas from having any influence on the formal policy process.  
 For instance, in a series of interviews with Ontario government policy 
analysts and policy managers conducted in 2005, a number of themes emerged 
respecting how policy work was restructured through the 1990s and beyond. 
These themes included an observed diminishment of research capacity within the 
public service and the increasing centralization of power in the executive (Evans, 
2005, 34). In addition, the interviews identified the overt politicisation of the 
policy agenda and the decline of research and evidence in the policy process 
(Evans, 2005, 37). The decline in policy capacity was understood to be linked to 
the centralisation of power in the Premier's Office as well as the “marginalisation 
of the public service from participating in policy formulations which had been a 
central function in the post war period” (Evans, 2005, 35). Commenting on these 
changes, one former executive noted that the “OPS had lost its capacity to say 'no' 
in the Harris years” (Evans, 2005, 35). The reference to Harris being to Mike 
Harris who served as Premier from 1995 to 2002 and whose government 
pioneered the most radical and aggressive neoliberal policy agenda in Ontario’s 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 25



modern history. Echoing this view, one senior policy manager observed that 
senior executives have increasingly “seen their role as facilitating the political 
agenda in an expeditious 'make it so' manner without full due diligence” and that 
“decisions are made through a political filter not a technical one” (Evans, 2005, 
38). Another executive ranking informant commented on the “growing policy 
role of politicians and their 'external advisors' and the commensurate 
marginalisation of the public service” as having “moved (the public service) from 
being architects to being contractors” (Evans, 2005, 35). 

These findings are echoed by a 2012 survey of 1510 government and 
non-government policy workers in three Canadian provinces provides some 
insight into the centralized and insular nature of the policy making process. 
Survey responses revealed that approximately 30 per cent of non-government 
respondents indicated they were never invited to consult with government and 
between 6 and 13 per cent were invited on a monthly basis to engage in a policy 
dialogue. Moreover, more than 46 per cent indicated that they worked with 
government on a policy issue only after all key design issues were decided or were 
limited to an implementation role (Evans and Sapeha, 2015, 258). A related 
research project entailed 31 semi-structured interviews with government and 
non-government policy and program staff working in the immigrant settlement 
field. The interview probed the working relationship between the government and 
non-government actors in this specific field. The general view of non-government 
staff was that “policy consultations were largely predetermined … Their 
experience of policy engagement with government was often simply frustrating. 
Despite providing what they viewed as relevant information and perspectives that 
would benefit policy design, this was too often not heeded” (Evans and Shields, 
2014, 122). Interviews with 18 trade union-based researchers also struck a rather 
negative experience in dealing with government. Indeed, all informants 
“characterized the climate for labour policy advocacy as ranging from “chilly” to 
“hostile,” (Evans and Ross, 2018, 340). In addition, all experienced a decline in 
their ability to access policy makers accompanied by a “prevailing sense that the 
message was not being heard by simply putting forward evidence” (Evans and 
Ross, 2018, 340). 

These conclusions find additional support from eight more recent 
interviews, carried out in March, April and May 2018 with former and current 
public service policy advisors and senior managers whose careers were in the 
Ontario Public Service (OPS), the permanent, non-partisan governmental 
bureaucracy.  Most participants touched on the decrease in the role of expertise 

26 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



in the process and the increased prevalence of centralized top-down policy 
manufacture. Thus, one participant noted that “knowledge and expertise were 
valued more in the 1990s” but that, “over time” it had become “less valued” and 
that they felt that they had become primarily a “typist” rather than a “knowledge 
worker” (Interview 1). Another participant, having been a long-time public 
service employee (26 years), observed that during their time in government they 
had “witnessed the degradation in the use of knowledge in the policy process” 
(Interview 2). During the Peterson government (1985-1990), they noted, 
government “consulted widely with experts” and “this insight was shared and 
discussed among the policy staff” (Interview 2).  

However, this is “no longer the practice” and now things are “driven by 
political expediency” with decisions being made in the assistant deputy minister's 
office or the deputy minister's office and policy staff's job being limited to “build 
around what is given” (Interview 2). One participant admitted that they saw the 
role of knowledge and expertise in the policy process as being “generally 
perfunctory”; noting that there is an 'obvious' tendency to 'curate' “evidence to 
support a (given) policy direction” (Interview 3). This view was echoed by 
participant 4 who noted that while evidence plays a role, if it does “not support 
the political direction then we curate that evidence to align with the political 
direction” (Interview 4). Similarly, a former senior policy manager observed that 
“evidence is contestable. There are so many competing interests to weigh. For 
decision-makers evidence can then be tricky. There is a critical role for evidence 
in problem identification but then it must align with stakeholder definitions of the 
problem and their solutions to some degree. And evidence must reflect the 
priorities of the government or it will be ignored” (Interview 8).  

From this perspective, they continued, “research is not really important. 
You make the data/evidence fit the political direction” (Interview 4). They 
concluded that they had had “no experience where the evidence swayed the 
position of political leaders” (Interview 4). One participant was even more blunt 
in making this point, noting simply that ““politics trumps evidence-based policy 
making” (Interview 5). In the words of another, “political congruence was always 
more important than superior data” (interview 1). From this perspective, as two 
participants noted, policy expertise was often limited to the creation of narratives 
using data to support policy directions communicated by the central agencies or 
the minister's office (Interview 5; Interview 6). Though one participant did 
highlight a recent “push to a more evidence based approach to policy work” in the 
OPS, they did nonetheless add that the process is largely driven by political 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 27



decisions by elected leaders, where decisions about which policies to pursue often 
emerging out of high level meetings and, from the perspective of public sector 
employees, seemingly coming “out of no where” (Interview 7). This same 
participant did note however that the role of expertise is related to the issue area, 
with specialized forms of knowledge playing more important role in highly 
technical issues dealing with things like radiation and asbestos, but less so in 
economic policy, which is less technical (Interview 7). This supports previous 
arguments made in this direction by Hirschman and Berman (2014). 

Overall, these accounts largely supported the view that most of the 
important policy decisions were informed by political considerations and that 
direction nearly always came from the premier or minister’s office, the deputy 
minister or the assistant deputy minister or from some other central agency 
(Interviews 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8). Two participants noted that the Ministry of 
Finance and the Treasury Board were the most important actors involved in 
deciding which policies were pursued (Interview 1 and 2), and that they essentially 
were the “veto point” deciding which initiatives were taken up and transformed 
into policies (Interview 2). These claims support previous findings by Blakeney 
and Borins that governments also have a tendency to only accept advice from 
public servants when it is either “consistent with the broad outlines of government 
policy” or it is in an area “where the government doesn’t have strong policy ideas” 
(1998, 49). 
  In general, these interviews support arguments in the literature about 
the increasingly centralized nature of the policy making process and the resulting 
marked decline in the role played by public sector expertise and knowledge as an 
independent driving force in the manufacture of policy. However, we would 
maintain that this does not simply imply that knowledge and expertise does not 
matter for the policy making process, nor that policy paradigms do not have an 
impact on the manufacture of policy, having been replaced by explicit and overt 
politically led direction from central agencies and the offices of ministers, deputy 
ministers, and/or assistant deputy ministers. Rather, what it does appear to 
support is the view that struggles over the content of policy paradigms in the era 
of neoliberal market states now take place in a narrower set of 'locations' than they 
did in the era of the Keynesian welfare state apparatus. The kinds of knowledge 
and expertise that matter are narrow(er than they used to be) and those that do 
not have the right characteristics or institutional origins are filtered out or not 
listened to in the (now) highly centralized locations from which policies are 
manufactured in practice.  

28 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



 What we propose is thus not only that the dominance of the neoliberal 
policy paradigm constrains policies by making some options less credible but also 
that the neoliberal state-apparatus has altered the composition and environment 
of the institutional 'locations' from and through which public policies are 
manufactured. These changes have fostered a situation in which the policy making 
process is increasingly insulated from the influence of ideas that either originate 
from outside of the very select locations from which they are usually drawn or are 
composed of content that goes against the core ideas of the neoliberal policy 
paradigm. This has important implications for how we understand the causal 
mechanisms underlying the change or stability of policy paradigms. For instance, 
it implies that the process of overturning and/or replacing current (neoliberal) is 
not simply a matter of achieving electoral success.  
 The central ideas of the neoliberal policy paradigm appear to have 
become sufficiently embedded that it is often politically expedient for successive 
governments to draw on it when manufacturing their policies even when they 
might genuinely desire adopting alternative policies. In many cases there are 
actually mechanisms in place, like credit rating agencies for example (Sinclair, 
2004), that push against the incorporation of alternative or counter-hegemonic 
ideas into the highly centralized location from which policies are manufactured. 
This can mean that governments seeking to draw on alternative or heterodox 
ideas can find themselves being coerced or pushed in various ways to avoid doing 
so and to stick with ideas from the dominant policy paradigm This also means 
that focusing attention on changing the beliefs of public sector experts is likely to 
meet with only limited results since for the most part ideas that are popular 
outside of the centralized locations in which policies are manufactured tend to not 
be allowed to cross these important boundaries.  
 
Conclusion 
 Here we have explored the relationship between policy paradigms and 
changes in the structure of the state apparatus. It is argued that an important, but 
mostly unexplored dimension in understanding the dynamics involved in the 
struggle over policy paradigms, is the institutional structure of the state within 
which they are embedded. Through this, we sought to contribute to the 
development of a better understanding of both the role of expertise in the 
manufacture of policy as well as the broader relationship that exists between 
policy paradigms and the institutional structure of the state apparatus within 
which the policy process is embedded. Thus we argue that transformations in the 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 29



structure of the state apparatus within which the manufacture of policy is 
embedded appears to have altered the role played by expertise and knowledge in 
the policy process. The shift in policy paradigms (from Keynesianism to 
neoliberalism) that led to significant changes in the structure of the state but also 
altered the ground on which struggles over policy paradigms takes places.  
 
References 

 
Alber, J. 1988. Is there a crisis of the welfare state? Crossnational evidence from 

Europe, North America, and Japan. European Sociological Review, 4(3), 
181-205.  

Aucoin, P. 2010. “Canada”. In Partisan Appointees and Public Servants: An 
International Analysis of the Role of the Political Advisor. Chris Eichbaum 
and Richard Shaw eds., Northhampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar. 

Banting, K. G., & Hoberg, G. 1997. Degrees of freedom: Canada and the United 
States in a changing world. McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP  

Béland, D. 2009. Ideas, institutions and policy change. Journal of European Public 
Policy, 16(5), 701 –18.  

Béland, D. 2005. Ideas and social policy: An institutionalist perspective. Social 
Policy & Administration, 39(1), 1-18. 

Béland, D., & Cox, R. H. 2013. The politics of policy 
paradigms. Governance, 26(2), 193-195.  

Berman, E. P. 2017. How Experts Can, and Can’t, Change Policy: Economics, 
Antitrust, and the Linked Evolution of the Academic and Policy Fields. 
Working Paper.  

Berman, S. 2013. Ideational theorizing in the social sciences since “policy 
paradigms, social learning, and the state”. Governance, 26(2), 217-237.  

Blakeney, A. & Borins S. 1998. Political Management in Canada, 2nd ed. Toronto: 
University of Toronto Press. 

Blyth, M. 2013. Paradigms and paradox: The politics of economic ideas in two 
moments of crisis. Governance, 26(2), 197-215.  

Blyth, M. 2002. Great Transformations. New York: Cambridge University Press. 
Briggs, A. 2000. The welfare state in historical perspective. The welfare state 

reader, 2.  
Cahill, D. & Humphrys, E. 2019. Rethinking the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ 

thesis. Globalizations, Winter, 1-18. 

30 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Campbell, J. L. 2002. ‘Ideas, Politics, and Public Policy’, Annual Review of 
Sociology, 28, 21 – 38. 

Campbell, J. L. 1998. Institutional analysis and the role of ideas in political 
economy. Theory and society, 27(3), 377-409. 

Clarke, J., & Newman, J. 1997. The managerial state: Power, politics and ideology 
in the remaking of social welfare. Sage.  

Collignon, S. 2008. “The Dawn of a New Era: Social Democracy after the Financial 
Crisis”, Social Europe, vol. 4, no. 1: 9-13. 

Crouch, C. 2011. The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge UK: Policy 
Press. 

Drache, D. 1996. From Keynes to Kmart: Competitiveness in a Global Age. States 
Against Markets: The Limits of Globalization. London/New York, 
Routledge. 

Dunleavy, P. 1997. The globalization of public services production: Can 
government be ‘best in the world’? In Globalization and marketization of 
government services: Comparing contemporary public sector 
developments, ed. Andrew Massey. New York: St. Martin's Press.  

Dyson, K and Marcussen, M. 2009.  “Scientization of central banking: The politics 
of apoliticization.” In Central Banks in the Age of the Euro: 
Europeanization,Convergence and Power, edited by Kenneth Dyson and 
Martin Marcussen, pp. 373-90. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Evans, B. 2017. Constructing Economic Policy Advice In an Age of Austerity. In 
McBride, S. and Evans, B. (eds). The Austerity State, Toronto: University 
of Toronto Press, pp.219-241. 

Evans, B. 2005. How the State Changes its Mind: A Gramscian Account of 
Ontario’s Managerial Culture Change. Philosophy of 
Management Special Edition, Marx, Marxism and Global 
Management, 5(2), 47-68. 

Evans, B. and Sapeha, H. 2015. Are Non-government Policy Actors Being Heard? 
Assessing New Public Governance in Three Canadian Provinces”, Canadian 

Public Administration, 58 (2), pp. 249–270 
Evans, B. and Shields, J. 2014. “Nonprofit engagement with provincial policy 

officials: The case of NGO policy Voice in Canadian Immigrant 
Settlement Services”. Policy and Sociey, vol. 33, pp. 117-127. 

Evans, B. and Ross, S. 2018. “Policy analysis and advocacy in the Canadian labour 
movement: When the force of argument is not enough”. in Larent 

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 31



Dobuzinskis and Michael Howlett editors, Policy Analysis in Canada, 
Bristol UK and Chicago: Policy Press, pp. 331-350. 

Farnham, D., & Horton, S. 1996. “Public service managerialism: A review and 
evaluation”. In Managing the new public services (pp. 259-276). Palgrave, 
London.  

Fourcade, M., Ollion, E., & Algan, Y. 2015. The Superiority of 
Economists.  Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(1), 89–114 

Forshey, J. M. 2005. “Game. Set. Budget”. Journal of Policy Analysis and 
Management, 24(2), 428–433. 

Gamble, Andrew. 1988.  The free economy and the strong state: The politics of 
Thatcherism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

Gamble, A. 2006. “Two faces of neoliberalism”. In The neo-liberal revolution: 
Forging the Market state, ed. Richard Robison. London: Palgrave 
Macmillan. 

Gamble, A. 2001. Neo-liberalism. Capital and Class 75: 127-134. 
Goldthorpe, J. 1984. The End of Convergence: Corporatism and Dualist 

Tendendes in Modern Western Societies.  
Good, D. 2013. “The New Bureaucratic Politics of Redistribution”. In Banting, K., 

& Myles, J. (Eds.). Inequality and the fading of redistributive politics. UBC 
Press, 210-33.   

Gran, T. 1994. The state in the modernization process: The case of Norway 1850-
1970. Norway: Ad Notam Gyldendal AS. 

Hall, P. 1993. Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of 
Economic Policymaking in Britain. Comparative Politics, 25 (3), 275–96.  

Harvey, D. 2007. Neoliberalism as creative destruction. The ANNALS of the 
American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610 (1), 21-44. 

Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University 
Press. 

Hay, C. .1997. “State of the art: Divided by a common language: Political theory 
and the concept of power”. Politics, 17(1), 45-52. 

Heclo, H., & Wildavsky, A. .1981. The private government of public money: 
Community and policy inside British politics. Springer.  

Henriksen, L. F. 2013. Economic models as devices of policy change: Policy 
paradigms, paradigm shift, and performativity. Regulation & 
Governance, 7(4), 481-495.  

Hirschman, D., & Berman, E. P. 2014. Do economists make policies? On the 
political effects of economics 1. Socio-Economic Review, 12(4), 779-811.  

32 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Hoggett, P. 1996. “New modes of control in the public service”. Public 
Administration 74 (Spring): 9-32. 

Hughes, O. 2003. Public management and administration: An introduction. 3rd ed. 
Hampshire, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. 

Keen, S. 2011. Debunking economics: The naked emperor dethroned?. Zed Books 
Ltd..  

Larner, W. 2000. “Neo-liberalism: Policy, Ideology, Governmentality,” Studies in 
Political Economy, 63: pp. 5-25. 

Lidman, R. & Sommers, P. 2005. The ‘Compleat’ Policy Analyst: A Top 10 List. 
Public Administration Review, 65(5), 628–634. 

Lukes, S. 2005. Power: A Radical View, 2nd edition. Hampshire UK: Palgrave 
Macmillan. 

Lynn Jr, L. E. 2006. Public management: Old and new. Routledge.  
Marx, K. 1994. Selected Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. 
Markoff, J., & Montecinos, V. 1993. The ubiquitous rise of economists. Journal of 

Public Policy, 13(1), 37-68. 
Miliband, R. 1972. The State in Capitalist Society: The Analysis of Western System 

of Power. London: Quartet Books. 
Mirowski, P. 2013. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism 

Survived the Financial Meltdown. London and New York: Verso.  
Peters, B. G., & Savoie, D. J. (eds). 1998. Taking stock: Assessing public sector 

reforms. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 
Pollitt, C. 1990.  Managerialism and the public service: The Anglo American 

experience. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Pollitt, C. 2003. The essential public manager. Maidenhead,  Philadelphia: 

Open  
 University Press. 
Poulantzas, N. 1973. Political Power and Social Classes. London: Verso. 
Pusey, M. 1991. Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation Building State 

Changes its Mind, New York: Cambridge University Press.  
Quiggin, J. 2010. Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us. 

Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 
Raadschelders, J., & Rutgers, M. 1996. The evolution of civil service systems. In 

Civil service systems in comparative perspective, ed. Hans Bekke, James 
Perry, and Theo Toonen, 67-99. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

Ross, G., & Jenson, J. 1985. Post-war class struggle and the crisis of left 
politics. Socialist Register, 22(22).   

Policy Paradigms and the Structure of the State Apparatus | 33



Savoie, D. 1994. Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In search of a new bureaucracy. 
Toronto: University of Toronto Press  

Savoie, D.1993. Globalization and governance. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for 
Management Development.  

Schneider, F., & Kirchgässner, G. (2009). Financial and world economic crisis: 
What did economists contribute?. Public Choice, 140(3-4), 319-327. 

Self, Peter. 1993. Government by the market: The politics of public choice. London: 
Macmillan. 

Sinclair, T. J. 2004. The New Masters of Capital: American Bond Rating Agencies 
and the Global Economy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press  

Spronk, S. 2007. “The Politics of Water Privatization in the Third World,” Review 
of Radical Political Economics, 39:1: pp. 126-131. 

Strassheim, H., & Kettunen, P. 2014. When does evidence-based policy turn into 
policy-based evidence? Configurations, contexts and 
mechanisms. Evidence & Policy: A Journal of Research, Debate and 
Practice, 10(2), 259-277.  

Waldo, D. 1948. The administrative state: A study of the political theory of public 
administration. New York: Ronald.  

Widmaier, W. 2016. The power of economic ideas – through, over and in – 
political time: the construction, conversion and crisis of the neoliberal 
order in the US and UK. Journal of European Public Policy, 23(3), 338–
356.  

Widmaier, W. 2007. Where You Stand Depends on How You Think: Economic 
Ideas, the Decline of the Council of Economic Advisers and the Rise of 
the Federal Reserve. New Political Economy, 12, (1), 43-59. 

Widmaier, W. 2004. The Social Construction of the ‘‘Impossible Trinity’’: The 
Intersubjective Bases of Monetary Cooperation. International Studies 
Quarterly 48, 433–453. 

Widmaier, W. 2003. Constructing Monetary Crises: New Keynesian 
Understandings and Monetary cooperation in the 1990s. Review of 
International Studies 29, 61-77. 

Wilder, M., & Howlett, M. 2014. The politics of policy anomalies: bricolage and 
the hermeneutics of paradigms. Critical Policy Studies, 8(2), 183-202.  

Wisman, J. 1991. “The Scope and Goals of Economic Science”. In Economics and 
Hermeneutics, edited by Don Lavoie, 113-33. London and New York: 
Routledge. 

 

34 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Social Innovation Labs: A Neoliberal Austerity Driven Process or Democratic 
Intervention? 

 
Meghan Joy4, John Shields5 and Siu Mee Cheng6 
 

ABSTRACT: Social Innovation Labs (SILs) are a recent 
policymaking development that are spreading rapidly in many 
different countries. SILs are said to address difficult and 
complex social policy problems that have been resistant to 
solutions. To date, there has been limited scholarly analysis of 
SIL development, with many questions in need of critical policy 
assessment. This paper seeks to conceptualize SILs in the 
Canadian context by mapping the sector and exploring how 
these labs fit within the broader ecosystem of policy innovation. 
We consider why SILs have become so popular in this particular 
socio-political moment. We contend that the SIL trend speaks 
to a dual and contradictory desire on the part of governments 
for more participatory policymaking and cost saving. Thus, 
while SILs may create opportunities for the democratization of 
social policy, they are also motivated by efforts to do more with 
less in an environment shaped by austerity and neoliberalism. 
This suggests that SILs could equally result in the marketization 
and depoliticization of social policy. This paper highlights these 
tensions conceptually with the purpose of guiding empirical 
studies that explore how these contradictions may manifest in 
policy practice and perhaps offer openings for policy that 
addresses both the roots and symptoms of complex social policy 
problems.  
 

 
4 Meghan Joy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Concordia 
University. 
5 John Shields is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at 
Ryerson University. 
6 Siu Mee Cheng is a PhD Candidate in the Policy Studies Program at Ryerson University. 

Social Innovation Labs | 35



KEYWORDS: social innovation labs; social innovation; 
austerity; neoliberalism; new public management; social impact 
bonds; democratizing policymaking 

 
Introduction 

Social Innovation Labs (SILs) represent a new policymaking process that 
has spread rapidly since the 2008 financial crisis (Westley, Goebey & Robinson, 
2012). SILs are experimental social innovation mechanisms designed to tackle 
complex social policy and service design problems, such as poverty, that 
government is increasingly thought to be incapable of solving on its own 
(McGann, Blomkamp & Lewis, 2018). These labs create learning communities out 
of a group of “multi-disciplinary teams and diverse stakeholders” drawn from 
government, the social sciences, technical experts, civil society, citizens, and the 
business community who share an interest in solving the problem (VanAptwerp, 
2014, np; Tiesinga & Berkhout, 2014). Such collaboration takes place in a physical 
space that separates these stakeholders from their usual environment and 
especially away from government bureaucracy (Westley et al., 2015). It is in this 
space where facilitation and design processes that provide direction on how 
solution-finding will be undertaken, outside the sphere of ‘government speak’, 
occurs (Westley et al., 2015).  

A core component of this process is the requirement that all participants 
“let go of their preconceived ideas about the problems that exist and the best 
solution(s) to them” (Westley et al., 2015, 12), so they are able to embrace ‘change 
thinking’. Deep collaboration without the constraints of traditional institutional 
structures is said to be made possible in this environment (VanAptwerp, 2014) 
and it is in such a creative space, proponents contend, that innovation and radical 
solutions can be directed to “our most pressing social problems” (Hassan, 2014, 
2-3). In this way, SILs are said to address “complex societal challenges that require 
systems change” (VanAptwerp, 2014, np). Diverse social actors are convened in 
the SIL process because they are thought to encompass a relevant representation 
of the system that needs to shift. This gathering presents an opportunity to 
identify the unintended consequences of policy and the associated adjustments 
that need to be made to initiate a radical system shift. As addressed below, SILs 
have emerged in different sectors (public, university, for-profit and non-profit) in 
response to these developments.  

To date, there has been limited scholarly analysis of both the emergence 
and practice of SILs. Several articles propose potential drivers for SIL emergence, 

36 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



but these have not been examined in depth. Gregoire (2016) posits that the retreat 
of government from addressing social problems arising from neoliberal policies 
and the ongoing practice of New Public Management (NPM) and its most recent 
iteration, New Public Governance (NPG), has helped to drive the emergence of 
SILs. The Public Policy Forum’s (2013) report aligns SIL development in Canada 
with the rise of austerity and the “need to do more with less” in government and 
an emphasis on independent problem-solving autonomous from state 
bureaucracy (1-2). This argument is furthered by Van den Steenhoven (2016), 
who claims that SILs have permitted a shift in problem-solving from government 
to society. This is said to democratize social policymaking in both the public and 
non-profit sectors (BC Healthy Communities, 2016; Carstensen & Bason, 2012). 
New systems thinking is said to be a key element of SILs, an approach which is 
thought to break down the silos in and rigidities of government processes and 
result in a more comprehensive approach to problem-solving. The inclusion of 
different societal stakeholders in the SIL process can be understood as an 
implementation of the ‘nothing about us without us’ idea from social justice. 

This paper seeks to conceptualize SILs in the Canadian context by 
mapping the sector and exploring how these labs fit within the broader ecosystem 
of policy innovation. There is a need for in-depth theoretical and empirical 
exploration as to why SILs have emerged so quickly and extensively in this socio-
political moment. While the two core drivers of neoliberalism and the 
democratization of policy-making appear present in the push for SILs, their 
analysis is piecemeal and cursory, undertheorized, and lacks empirical 
assessment. We posit that these drivers are unlikely to be weighed equally and are 
in fundamental conflict. For instance, meaningful participatory processes can be 
costly and time consuming and can result in demands for substantial public 
investment in social welfare and private sector regulation to address the roots of 
policy problems such as poverty, homelessness, and precarious employment. This 
paper offers a preliminary conceptual exploration of the SIL drivers of 
neoliberalism and democratization, highlighting how these are in tension in 
theory and offering critical questions for future empirical investigation. We begin 
by mapping the development of SILs in Canada to establish key trends, identify 
different conceptual approaches to understand their emergence, and highlight 
potential contradictions that merit further empirical analysis. 
 
 
 

Social Innovation Labs | 37



Mapping the Canadian SIL Landscape  
A systematic search was undertaken on-line using the Google search 

engine for Canadian-based, English-language websites with the search terms 
“social innovation lab”. This produced 141,000 results. For the purposes of the SIL 
inventory, the following types of labs were included: 1) labs that appear to have a 
social problem focus and/or benefit for the public; 2) labs run by government, 
universities, non-profit organizations and the private sector; and 3) labs that 
provide their social problem-solving services for a profit. The components of 
diverse engagement, physical space, design processes, and retiring pre-conceived 
notions identified in the literature were used to further assess inclusion in the 
inventory. The search results and analysis yielded 59 SILs in Canada as of 
December 2017.   

Our survey shows that there has been a proliferation of SILs across 
Canada, with labs operating in the public, university, private and non-profit 
sectors. Overall, the maturity of these SILs vary as the majority do not meet all SIL 
characteristics as defined in the literature. We find that SILs may be internally 
operated by a larger public, private, or non-profit organization or may be a stand-
alone entity that offers its services to these organizations at no cost, or for a fee.   

Four SILs were identified in the for-profit sector, two in Ontario and two 
in Quebec. These SILs can be grouped in two categories: 1) labs that have been 
established by large private-sector companies that provide social impact funding, 
wherein funds are provided to implement policy solutions developed by 
participants; and 2) labs that provide services for a fee to clients in the community, 
government and private sectors. The common set of priorities amongst these SILs 
include urban innovation, information and technology, and healthcare. 

Canadian governments at all three levels have shown significant interest 
in SILs. Internal SILs are operating in the provinces of Alberta, Quebec and New 
Brunswick. CoLAB in Alberta is located within the Ministry of Environment and 
acts as an internal consulting firm, offering its expertise in systems-based 
approaches to policy design across ministries. In New Brunswick, the Economic 
Immigration Lab addresses issues associated with attracting newcomers in the 
province and intends to provide funding to solve social problems experienced by 
immigrants. In Quebec, Innovative Territories in Social and Solidarity Economy 
(TIESS) brings together players in the social and solidarity economy in different 
geographic areas, including research centers and academic institutes, to develop 
new projects and facilitate policy transfer and diffusion. One of the eight SILs is 
run by the federal government – the Impact and Innovation Unit – and acts as a 

38 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



consulting firm that works with “departments in applying innovative financing 
approaches, new partnership models, impact measurement methodologies and 
behavioural insights in priority areas for the Government of Canada” 
(Government of Canada, 2018). Three SILs are operating in the municipal 
governments of Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. The Vancouver City Studio is 
the most developed and has interests in active transportation, pollution 
abatement, developing the green economy and local food systems, and social 
inclusion. Both the Calgary and Toronto labs have yet to identify priorities but 
have city service knowledge sharing and innovation as their mandate. 

There is an even greater interest within the Canadian university 
landscape toward the SIL trend, with 19 labs identified. These labs have either 
been financially supported by private sector donors, and/or the public sector 
and/or internally by the universities. These labs generally lack clear mandates, 
scopes of operations, sets of priorities, and target audiences and overall, are loose 
and underdeveloped operations. Within the academic environment, several 
reasons for SIL development, distilled from their websites, are identified: to 
nurture and invest in student-led social entrepreneurial endeavors; to find 
solutions to social problems; and, to drive collaborations across faculty, the 
student body, and with external stakeholders in the public, private and non-profit 
sectors. They are also seen as initiatives that market universities as societally 
relevant organizations that offer their services to these external stakeholders.  

By far, the greatest number of SILs have been established in Canada’s 
non-profit sector. However, the majority of these 28 labs do not exist as stand-
alone entities and are supported by another non-profit organization, funding 
agency, university and/or government. This illustrates the hybrid nature of the lab 
concept. Unlike the labs headquartered in other sectors, non-profit SILs place 
emphasis on supporting their communities to address the social problems they 
identify. A common theme that has emerged among these labs is a focus on 
environmental/sustainability issues and healthy physical environments with 
respect to creating spaces that encourage healthier lifestyles, active transportation 
and social inclusion. Such civic actors have often been useful in identifying issues 
and pointing out possible grounded solutions to government policymakers and 
the wider public.  

Many of these non-profit-based SILs are more grassroots and democratic 
in character and often, aside from their interaction at the local level, are distanced 
from the actual centers of government decision-making. A striking exception is 
the MaRS Solutions Lab based in Toronto. This SIL has been well-financed and 

Social Innovation Labs | 39



connected to government, the business sector and communities of experts. For 
example, MaRS has been closely involved with so-called impact investing, noting 
that it “works to unlock the power of private capital to tackle persistent social 
challenges. It works with investors, governments, ventures and service providers 
to create funding solutions for projects that generate social and financial returns” 
(Kim & Farthing-Nichol, 2017, 2). MaRS is currently engaged in work with the 
Federal department of Immigration, Refugees, Citizenship Canada (IRCC) in a 
pay-for-performance project involving the settlement and employment of Syrian 
refugees (Kim & Farthing-Nichol, 2017). While MaRS is well linked into policy 
networks, it lacks organic grassroots grounding. The pattern seems to be that the 
more grassroots the SIL, the less connected to senior level policy circles (Henfrey 
et al., 2017).  

Only five of the SILs offer social impact funding to implement and 
evaluate solutions, three of which are university-based while the other two are 
non-profit and private. 42 of the SILs identified clear priorities that they were 
advancing, with respect to social problems that they wished to address. The SILs 
that possess the clearest mandates and sets of priorities are those situated in the 
non-profit sector, while those in other sectors are generally not as fully evolved. 
The lab trend is thus growing but still in its infancy in Canada and there is a clear 
need to theorize and conduct empirical research on SILs more broadly as well as 
within particular sectors. The following presents a first effort to 
theorize/conceptualize SILs through a critical policy frame based on the two core 
drivers identified in the literature: neoliberalism and democratizing 
policymaking.  
 
SILs as a Neoliberal Policy Process 

SILs can be understood through a lens of neoliberalism as an innovation 
to NPM and NPG in a context of austerity due to the 2008 financial crisis. It is 
important to note that the issue of public sector innovation is not new. Earlier 
public-sector reforms date back to at least the 1980s as part of the ‘reinventing 
government’ movement popularized by Osborne and Gaebler (1992) and NPM 
reforms which were about institutionalizing a more ‘entrepreneurial state’, 
breaking down bureaucracy, and bringing in market-like business practices to the 
public sector, including ‘doing more with less’ (Shields & Evans, 1998). 
Neoliberalism is the hegemonic policy paradigm that displaced Keynesian based 
public policy embracing market-centered ideas, approaches and solutions to 
societal problems. Harvey (2005) defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political 

40 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



and economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be 
advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an 
institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and 
free trade” (2). The state, under neoliberalism, is given a mandate to extend 
markets into realms in which they have been absent. NPM has served as the key 
mechanism transmitting neoliberal based managerialism and ‘market think’ 
throughout the public and non-profit sectors (Evans & Shields, 2018). 

Yanow (2007) explains that the NPM project also called for a “"scientific" 
basis for administrative practices, as well as of extensions of so-called evidence-
based medicine into the fields of management, social welfare, and so on” (117), to 
justify government spending. We see a similar drive working through the SIL labs 
that we mapped. Over the last three decades, NPM has shrunk the role of the state 
in collective service provision, limiting its policy capacity and marketizing service 
delivery by public, private, and non-profit actors (Evans & Shields, 2018). It is also 
a process that works to blur the lines of distinction between public, private and 
non-profit sectors as all are encouraged to adopt market-based and 
entrepreneurial values and approaches to their operations. Further, there is the 
embrace of the idea that citizens are really customers, clients, consumers and 
individual agents of human capital. Market values are usurping collectively 
oriented public values (Clarke et al., 2014). These trends have been extended more 
deeply into the social sector with the latest round of austerity (McBride & Evans, 
2017), and SILs may be a feature of this.  

NPG is a reform of NPM that gives emphasis to ‘new’ pluralistic 
relationships between the state and other societal actors. The idea of networked 
government is prominent where other organizations are brought into the 
policymaking process creating more horizontal and ‘democratic’ decision-making 
(Osborne, 2006; Craft & Howlett, 2012). SILs are cast as a prime example of the 
move to NPG, as are seeming shifts that highlight the adjustment from such things 
as: “structural adjustment to good governance”, “greed-is-good to markets-with-
morals”; “privatization to public-private partnership”; and, “conviction politics to 
best practice” (Peck, nd, np). There are questions as to how deep and 
transformative the move from NPM to NPG actually is and whether it has actually 
occurred at all (Evans & Shields, 2018). Phillips (2007) argues that the policy 
process is not “as open and as participatory as the model of ‘governance’ suggests” 
(497), a conclusion we also propose regarding SILs in this paper.  

The shift to an NPG discourse in government has overlapped with the 
neoliberal political management of the financial crisis of 2008. Neoliberal ideology 

Social Innovation Labs | 41



has proven itself particularly adaptive at taking advantage of crisis, flexibly 
adjusting its policies and persona while retaining pro-market and fiscally 
‘responsible’ approaches to governance (Peck et al., 2012; Peck, nd). In so doing, 
neoliberalism has demonstrated its hegemonic control over the policy agenda 
even under crisis conditions (Crouch, 2011). Neoliberalism’s use of SILs may very 
well be another reflection of its adaptive capacities. 

The drive to SILs serves to expand the ‘knowledge market for policy’ 
outside of government, which has resulted in a greater role for consultants like 
KPMG who compete with University and non-profit SIL actors to find the 
solution to complex problems. The value of so-called entrepreneurial approaches 
to problem solving that include stakeholders from the private sector is prevalent 
in SIL framing (BC Healthy Communities, 2016). Shrinking the state also meant 
shrinking the policy capacity of and in government itself (Baskoy et al., 2011), 
which is blamed on inherent government rigidities necessitating internal 
consulting agencies to find a fix as the Alberta CoLAB and the Federal Impact and 
Innovation Unit demonstrate. Cuts to social services and offloading policy 
responsibility onto municipal governments combined with the expectation that 
they engage in policy innovation is also likely a driver for local labs operating in 
Canada’s biggest cities and this merits further research. The associated decline in 
government authority, political polarization, and growing levels of plutocracy 
with the advance of income inequality is challenging pre-existing approaches to 
policymaking (Drezner, 2017). A major factor here is the belief that the state is no 
longer able to afford expensive social programs due to limited revenue capture 
(Bellefontaine, 2012). Furthermore, there is the anti-statist notion that 
government is inherently risk intolerant and thus incapable of addressing major 
policy problems through innovation (Bellefontaine, 2012). These factors are said 
to have placed complex social issues beyond the sole capacities of the state to solve 
and has made room for the creation of a social service market and with SILs, a 
social policymaking market. 

Interestingly, and perhaps revealingly, SIL popularity coincides with a 
trend that we have been tracking: Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) (Joy & Shields, 2013; 
2017; 2018a). SIBs are a tool that allows private investors to fund non-profit social 
service interventions with the promise of receiving a return from a government 
partner should the service achieve pre-defined measures of social value. This 
social value is defined as a cost saving to government, and presumably the 
taxpaying citizen, that results from the change in behaviour of the client group in 
question, be they mothers with inadequate support or citizens experiencing 

42 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



unemployment or homelessness, reducing their service requirements over time 
and shrinking government social spending. For instance, in a program targeting 
individuals experiencing homelessness, the investors might receive a return 
should these individuals reduce their demands for intensive service supports over 
a pre-defined time period (Sinclair et al., 2014).  

The turn to SIBs illustrates the desire among governments to shift from 
funding public services to funding policy outcomes. This requires finding out, to 
use a Blairist turn of phrase, ‘what works’; to push for new ways of thinking about 
social problems, to use the market in creative ways to fund and find solutions, and 
to approach social policy solutions in a pragmatic apolitical fashion. This suggests 
that the market is a neutral force that can be used in progressive ways. This notion 
is captured in a recent documentary directed and produced by Nadine Pequeneza 
on SIBs entitled ‘The Invisible Heart’ (2018), a play on Adam Smith’s famous 
‘invisible hand’ analogy, suggesting that hidden forms of altruism lay within the 
free market. Pequeneza’s documentary raises critical questions here, highlighting 
the power dynamics between investors like Goldman Sachs and RBC and the 
subjects of these policy experiments who are pressured to adopt behavioural 
changes that will trigger a profit for these financial actors. Profiting off social 
policy interventions can result in social good – the magic of the market at work – 
we are told by supporters of SIBs who frame themselves as ‘progressives’. In this 
market, social problems become commodified and governments contract with 
marketized players who can produce social value for money. In other words, these 
new market actors must prove that they can solve complex social problems. It is 
in this way that SILs can come to represent the policy design processes on which 
SIBs, and other market-based policy approaches, are based. SILs are an important 
mechanism by which these solutions are sought and, in this way, could represent 
a continuance of the state and policy reforms which have been tightly linked to 
neoliberal governance. SILs may encourage a further marketization and 
depoliticization of social policy and this is a crucial area of analysis for further 
empirical study.  

The social innovation drive was born in the period of neoliberal 
government cutbacks and restructuring, where state financial support for non-
profit organizations providing services to the community has been shrunk and the 
general social expectations on government greatly reduced (Struthers, 2018). 
Competitive funding, heavy reporting requirements, dependence on government 
funds with limits on policy advocacy, and employee turnover challenge the ability 
of actors in this sector to engage in problem solving more fundamentally (Evans 

Social Innovation Labs | 43



& Shields, 2018). It is significant that the advocacy role of non-profit providers 
has been systematically muted through NPM mechanisms (Evans & Shields, 2014) 
at the very time that SILs are being promoted. This raises serious questions 
regarding which voices in policymaking are being encouraged and heard. 

Increasingly, non-profits are contracted to deliver targeted support to 
those who have fallen through the cracks of a crumbling social welfare system; yet, 
are increasingly monitored in their ability to produce evidence of results so that 
these individuals become less costly (Joy & Shields, 2018a). As promoted by third 
sector journals like The Stanford Social Innovation Review, the turn to the 
employment of innovation and social finance as an alternative to the lack of 
government support to pursue social good in a period of austerity has come to be 
seen as the only way forward. In this way, the use of enterprise and markets for 
social ends are legitimated by some ‘progressives’, as has been the case with ‘third 
way’ advocates. This ‘realist’ perspective is challenged by the more ‘critical’ 
approach that we advance. We have critically argued, in contrast, that SIBs are a 
case of private agents ‘profiting from pain’, an immoral market-base process that 
commodifies citizens and ‘their problems’ and works to strip vulnerable 
populations of social rights and supports (Joy & Shields 2018b; 2016). This clash 
of perspectives by progressive voices remains a matter of ongoing contestation. It 
is crucial to study how such processes might be at work through non-profit SIL 
projects, but which may also provide an opportunity for those experiencing 
complex policy problems to have a right to define the problems they face (Bacchi, 
2009) and the appropriate policy solutions.  

One point of exploration is the extent to which complex policy problems 
are represented as behavioural in nature, with solutions focused on behavioural 
change that individualizes and thus simplifies social problems (Joy & Shields, 
2018a; Clarke, 2017). In this respect, social value is achieved by changing 
behaviours that reduce demands for costly policy programs. Westley et al (2015) 
have stated that the roots of SILs began in the 1950s, starting with the focus on 
group dynamics, group therapy and psychology that became the basis for 
organizational design and development. At the same time, this work was 
integrated with thought leadership on how groups can address systems change.  
In the 1950s and 1960s, E. Trist, a social scientist, furthered these concepts by 
stating that “mega messes” existed, and to address these broad problems, systems-
oriented solutions were required (Westley et al., 2015, 10).  

We contend that complex social problems are rooted in an intersection 
of systems such as global capitalism, patriarchy, racism, ableism, ageism, etc. that 

44 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



manifest in public institutions, the intermingled symptoms of which exist in local 
places. While it is crucial to recognize and address these symptoms at the scale of 
the local, the understanding of problems must be multi-scalar and intersectional 
in nature to tackle the public policies (or absence thereof) that have produced 
these problems in the first place (Gkiouleka et al., 2018). For instance, any 
program that aims to tackle homelessness must address real estate marketization, 
the privatization of public housing, and the inadequate public system of mental 
health supports. Yet, neoliberal approaches to social problems reject more holistic 
understandings of issues like poverty, homelessness and unemployment. Instead, 
these approaches isolate and individualize the sources of these problems and seek 
marketized solutions (Harvey, 2005). Requoting David Ingram, Sossin (1993) 
notes that “under capitalism, controversial questions regarding distributive justice 
must be removed from the democratic process and dealt with as technical 
problems requiring resolution by managerial elites” (379). Yet, with SILs, 
processes for addressing these questions are in theory opened-up for broader 
discussion. Again, where citizens fit into this discussion and how social justice and 
equity are considered in SIL problem solving are important areas for future 
analysis.  

We posit that the trend to SIBs and SILs may create dilemmatic spaces 
(Newman & Clarke, 2009) or openings where alternative democratic 
interventions to austerity may exist. We are thus interested in examining how 
tools like SIBs and SILs can open-up more democratic approaches to 
policymaking that may result in more socially progressive policy. In the abstract, 
there are two potentially progressive elements to these social innovation trends: 
1) SIBs and SILs are said to be about tackling the systemic roots of policy problems 
that are complex in nature; and 2) they also promise to involve/engage citizens 
and non-profit actors in policy design and delivery, democratizing the process, 
with an emphasis on achieving positive social outcomes that improve the lives of 
individuals (Struthers, 2018). The question is whether the use of entrepreneurship 
and markets in practice can in fact be value neutral or if they are imbedded within 
logics that compromise social justice goals and democratic processes (Roy & 
Hackett, 2016). Our own examination of SIBs points to how the profit motive 
works to pervert the potential progressive elements of such market-centered tools 
(Joy & Shields, 2018a). We establish the contours of these contradictory dynamics 
in the following section.  
 
 

Social Innovation Labs | 45



SILs as a Democratic Policymaking Intervention? 
SILs represent a reorientation of rationalist policymaking, which is in its 

essence about finding objective, technical and scientific solutions to policy 
problems that can be generalized across contexts (Torgerson, 1986). The intention 
of the rationalist project in policymaking was to bypass ideological and partisan 
conflicts that produced inefficiency by linking the problem not to politics but to 
the need for better problem-solving administration and technique (Fischer, 1989). 
Togerson (1986) explains that this was in fact a political strategy to separate 
problems from their socio-political context, subverting a deeper analysis and 
questioning of problems as linked to dominant ideological and material 
structures, and thus protecting prevailing structures and interests. While the SIL 
policy orientation is toward the dominant role of ideas in driving forth policy 
change, the notion of solving complex problems illustrates that there may be a 
limited understanding that if people simply adopt the right ideas – or truth – then 
problems can be fixed. Here, SILs may also pull on the notion that policy issues 
are primarily technical problems that can be solved by groupings of experts with 
applied knowledge and experience with the policy problem. As a policymaking 
technique, SILs “lay claim to universal or near universal application” (McGann et 
al., 2018, np) across policy domains, awarding them a magical fix kind of quality. 
Yet, social innovation is a concept that lacks firm definition, making “it highly 
adaptable to the shifting contours of policy directions and challenges” (McGann 
et al., 2018, np). The ambiguity and impression of the concept (Miller & 
Langhorst, 2017) also makes it at the same time about everything and nothing and 
thus not particularly helpful for dealing with complex policy problems.  

By the 1970s, the rationalist project was increasingly seen as unable to 
solve complex or ‘wicked’ policy problems, a term coined by Rittel and Webber in 
1973, in siloed government departments. The author’s state that “because there is 
no definitive single casual factor or factors for many wicked problems…the 
challenge resides both in determining all possible causes and in establishing 
causation to the social phenomenon” (Rittel & Webber, 1973, 162). While Rittel 
and Webber (1973) considered the search for all possible causes impossible 
because of value conflicts in defining wicked policy problems, noting that “social 
problems are never solved. At best they are only re-solved - over and over again" 
(169), the SIL emphasis on findings solutions through system change seems to 
refute this claim. This may be done by bypassing value conflict in problem 
representation and linking the impasse to government’s inability to learn from 
citizens as well as other sectoral actors from the private and non-profit sectors, its 

46 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



siloed nature where departments fail to communicate, its risk aversion, and its 
limited data collection and processing capability. Yet, Yanow (2007) explains that  

 
“technical-rational tools, such as cost-benefit analyses, and the 
combination of mass (or large 'n') surveys and high-speed 
computers held out to policy-makers the promise of solutions 
to knotty social problems. Forty years' experience with these 
promises have shown that they are useful for some situations, 
but complex problems require analytic tools that do not 
oversimplify social realities in order to force-fit them into 
restricted, and restrictive, models” (118).  

 
It is further crucial to examine whether there is a tendency to oversimplify causes. 
Stone (1989) offers this warning about problems linked to complex causes:  

 
“They postulate a kind of innocence, in that no identifiable 
actor can exert control over the whole system or web of 
interactions. Complex causal explanations are not very useful in 
politics, precisely because they do not offer a single locus of 
control, a plausible candidate to take responsibility for a 
problem, or a point of leverage to fix a problem. Hence, one of 
the biggest tensions between political science and real-world 
politics. The former tends to see complex causes of social 
problems, while the latter searches for immediate and simple 
causes” (289).  

 
With SILs, complex problems appear to be increasingly useful today and it is 
important to decipher why this is the case, particularly when one works from the 
understanding that causes are selected because they empower certain actors to 
‘solve’ the problem (Stone, 1989).  

SILs thus offer up the dual and enticing possibility of engaging in both 
more pluralist and rationalist approaches to social problem-solving. The 
rationalist project has also been critiqued for being undemocratic because public 
bureaucrats, understood as neutral technocrats, were the only actors to possess 
the scientific skills to find solutions to policy problems (Fischer, 1989). Sossin 
(1993) explains that “instrumental reason aspires to objective truth, but it makes 
intersubjectivity impossible by causing citizens to be treated as objects to be 

Social Innovation Labs | 47



administered” (375). He advises that it is this rationalist project that is the 
problem, and not bureaucrats per se, as many of these rules are in place to control 
the bureaucracy and eliminate their discretion. It is crucial to study whether SILs 
are about improving the bureaucracy by supporting discretion that enables 
communicative relationships with citizens (Sossin, 1993) or whether it is based on 
an essentialist understanding of the bureaucracy meant to sidestep government. 
There appears to be debate as to the role of government in SIL projects, as some 
writers emphasize reducing the government role in problem-solving (Van den 
Steenhoven, 2016) and others seek improvement to internal government 
policymaking (Carstensen & Bason, 2012). Whether the latter is more about 
producing evidence to prove value for money in service provision than 
democratic policymaking informed by citizen and non-profit voices requires 
further exploration in the SILs case.   

Crucial to SILs is an emphasis on the importance of the non-profit sector 
and locally centered initiatives for the future of social welfare (Bellefontaine, 
2012). The significant amount of SIL activity within the non-profit sector in 
Canada may be a reflection of how communities are seeking to problem-solve in 
a more democratic way, opening space for citizens to define the problem on their 
own terms (Bacchi, 2009). Some of these are grassroots initiatives led by citizens 
seeking to solve highly localized problems in their communities (Henfrey et al., 
2017). However, there may be a disconnect here between the localization and 
fragmentation of SIL projects and the emphasis on addressing the complex roots 
of problems and engaging in more comprehensive or systems-oriented 
policymaking. Approaches that emphasize fast testing to prove outcomes quickly 
(Peck & Theodore, 2015) continue to embody rationalist perspectives that may 
challenge engaging in conflictual discussions and critical thinking on wicked 
policy problems. This may be more likely the case if non-profits are contracted by 
governments to deliver social value for money, as here governments have often 
already defined the problem, which may be understood as more behavioural than 
structural in nature.   

While SILs theoretically open up interesting possibilities regarding 
participatory policymaking and the involvement of grassroots civil society, the 
question is whether SILs address issues of values and power that lie at the root of 
wicked social policy problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973). A crucial question is who 
is and is not dominant in SIL problem framing and what sorts of causal stories are 
presented as this informs the policy solution chosen (Stone, 1989). Are these 
primarily neoliberal and individually oriented storylines or ones that are centered 

48 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



within the broader context within which social problems originate? There is a risk 
that SILs ignore power with respect to who is defining the ‘right’ ideas about 
problem framing and potential ideas that may get silenced as well as who is 
considered an expert. In these ways, SILs can depoliticize the policymaking 
process (McGann et al., 2018). Furthermore, what counts as proof that the policy 
problem has been solved? The issue of what is being measured is critical and this 
is a value judgment linked to the defined cause of the problem. Quantitative 
analysis focused on measuring behavioural change to prove social value for money 
may be quite limiting if not combined with qualitative and community action-
oriented research on improved quality of life. 

Policy problems are often wicked because they are understood and 
represented differently by societal actors (Bacchi, 2009; Stone, 1989). For instance, 
indigenous poverty may be seen by some as an individual behavioural problem 
and by others as a more structural problem of colonial and neocolonial policy and 
racism. It is unclear how SILs as a process is going to address this. Again, this 
speaks to who has the power to define the problem and whether\how SILs 
embrace difficult conversations/argumentation about conflict. Here, Rittel and 
Webber (1973) suggest that “approaches of the "second generation" should be 
based on a model of planning as an argumentative process in the course of which 
an image of the problem and of the solution emerges gradually among the 
participants, as a product of incessant judgment, subjected to critical argument” 
(162). Here, the political context is fundamentally recognized by all involved in 
the policymaking process and not pushed under the table (Fischer, 1989). 
Exploring whether tangible mechanisms exist to support true socio-political and 
administrative change and whether this is being conducted in practice are 
important areas for future empirical research on SILs. 
 
Conclusion 

Our mapping research reveals that there is a clear social innovation 
agenda in place within Canada. This agenda exists at all levels of government and 
all sectors through the commitment and attention to SILs. We contend that it is 
no mere coincidence that the rise of SILs in Canada, especially in the non-profit 
sector, corresponds with the financial crisis and the continued hollowing out of 
the welfare state. SILs may illustrate a reoriented welfare state where problems are 
commodified as new market opportunities. This, in turn, may be driving 
problem-solving away from addressing systemic conditions and towards quick 
and easy testable solutions that remain small in scale and fragmented; a warning 

Social Innovation Labs | 49



presented by Rittel and Webber against rational policymaking almost fifty years 
ago. Further empirical research should explore trends and contradictions related 
to this strategy and how this affects particular policy outcomes chosen and the 
wider goal of social justice these labs claim to espouse. It should also explore how 
this might differ between government, private, university and non-profit labs. 

At the same time, SILs may create opportunities for democratic public 
policymaking that incorporates non-profit and citizen voices, who may push 
governments to address more systemic issues. Such democratic opportunities will 
remain at the level of possibility with marketized and austerity driven forces in the 
SIL driver seat. SILs represent an assemblage of contradictory rationales and 
interests of different players who have different levels of social, economic and 
political power to define so-called wicked problems. With the continued 
commitment and investment in SILs in Canada, further empirical research is 
needed to decipher how these conflicts play out in practice. The following research 
questions are crucial: Can the good intentions of the lab methodology be 
subverted and how exactly does this happen? Are the ‘right’ people gathered in 
the room and what are the conflicts that exist between them? What practices can 
social justice-oriented practitioners bring to specific lab processes that can guard 
against intentional or inadvertent exclusion? This analysis must look at power 
with respect to prevalent discourses about policy problems and solutions and the 
institutional positions of actors that support them. We suggest that any such 
examination must place these power dynamics within a policy environment where 
neoliberalism is a dominant political project, but one that is deeply contested and 
can be subverted.  
 
References 
 
Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to Be? 

Australia: Pearson. 
Baskoy, T., Evans, B. and Shields, J. (2011). Assessing Policy Capacity in Canada’s 

Public Services: Perspectives of Deputy and Assistant Deputy Ministers. 
Canadian Public Administration, Vol. 54, No. 2 June: 217-234. 

BC Healthy Communities. (2016, September 15). Social labs as a tool for change 
[Web blog]. Retrieved from: 
http://bchealthycommunities.ca/post/1007/display 

Bellefontaine, T. (2012). Innovation Labs: Bridging Think Tanks and Do Tanks. 
Ottawa: Policy  Horizons Canada. 

50 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Carstensen, H.V., & Bason, C. (2012). Powering collaborative policy innovation: 
Can innovation labs help? The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector 
Innovation Journal, 17(1), 1-25.  

Clarke, J. (2017). Articulating Austerity and Authoritarianism: Re-imagining 
Moral Economies. In Austerity: The Lived Experience. Bryan Evans and 
Stephen McBride, eds., 20-39. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 

Clarke, J., Coll, K., Dagnino, E. & Neveu, C. (2014). Disputing Citizenship. Bristol: 
Policy Press.  

Craft, J. and Howlett, M. (2012). Policy Formulation, Governance Shifts and 
Policy Influence: Location and Content in Policy Advisory Systems. 
Journal of Public Policy, 32, 79-98.  

Crouch, C. (2011). The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity 
Press. 

Drezner, D. W. (2017). The Ideas Industry. New York: Oxford University Press. 
Evans, B. and Shields, J. (2018). The Third Sector, the Neo-liberal State and 

Beyond: Reshaping Contracting and Policy Advocacy. In Christopher 
Dunn, ed., The Handbook of Canadian Public Administration, 489-500. 
Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press. 

Evans, E. and Shields, J. (2014). Nonprofit Engagement with Provincial Policy 
Officials: The Case of Canadian Immigrant Settlement Services and 
NGO Policy Voice. Policy and Society, Vol. 33(2): 117-127. 

Fischer, F. (1989). Beyond the Rationality Project: Policy Analysis and the 
Postpositive Challenge. Policy Studies Journal, 17(4): 941-951. 

Gkiouleka, A., Huijts, T., Beckfield, J. and Bambra, C. (2018). Understanding the 
Micro and Macro Politics of Health: Inequalities, Intersectionality & 
Institutions – A Research Agenda. Social Science & Medicine, 200 
(March): 92-98. 

Government of Canada. (2018). Impact and Innovation Unit. URL. Retrieved 
from: https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-hub.html 

Gregoire, M. (2016). Exploring various approaches of social innovation: a 
francophone literature review and a proposal of innovation typology. 
Revista De Administração Mackenzie, 17(6): 45-71. 

Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University 
Press. 

 
Hassan, Z. (2014). The Social Labs Revolution: A New Approach to Solving our 

Most Complex Challenges. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. 

Social Innovation Labs | 51



Henfrey, T. Maschkowski, G. and Penha-Lopes, G. Eds. (2017). Resilience, 
Community Action and Societal Transformation: People, Place, Practice, 
Power, Politics and Possibility in Transition. Hampshire, UK: Permanent 
Publications. 

Pequeneza, N. (2018). The Invisible Heart. URL: 
https://www.theinvisibleheart.ca/ 

Joy, M. and Shields, J. (2013). Social Impact Bonds: The Next Phase of Third 
Sector Marketization? Canadian Journal of Nonprofit and Social 
Economy Research, 4(2): 39-55. 

Joy, M. and Shields, J. (2016, October). The Immorality of Innovation – the Tale 
of Social Impact Bonds. Policy & Politics: Journal Blog. Retrieved from: 
https://policyandpoliticsblog.com/2016/10/05/theimmorality-of-
innovation-the-tale-of-social-impact-bonds/ 

Joy, M. and Shields, J. (2017). Austerity and the Non-profit Sector: The Case of 
Social Impact 

Bonds. In McBride, S. and Evans, B. eds. The Austerity State. Toronto: University 
of Toronto Press: 309-329. 

Joy, M. and Shields, J. (2018a). Austerity in the Making: Reconfiguring Social 
Policy through Social Impact Bonds. Policy & Politics, 46(4): 681-695.  

Joy, M. and Shields, J. (2018b, March). “Profiting from Pain: Social Impact Bonds 
and Social Policy”, Policy & Politics: Journal Blog. Retrieved from: 
https://policyandpoliticsblog.com/2018/03/21/profiting-from-pain-
social-impact-bonds-andsocial-policy/ 

Jaymin, K. and Farthing-Nichol, D. (2017, May). How Pay-for-Performance Can 
Improve 

Employment Outcomes for Syrian Refugees. Toronto: MaRS Centre for Impact 
Investing. Retrieved from: https://www.marsdd.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/06/MAR-CRP7342-IRCC-Syrian-Refugee-
Report7.pdf 

MaRS Solutions Lab. (nd). Our Approach. Retrieved from:  
http://www.nonprofitjourney.org/uploads/8/4/4/9/8449980/_periodic_t
able_of_systems_change.Pdf 

McBride, S. and Evans, B., eds. (2017). Austerity and the State. Toronto: 
University of Toronto Press. 

McGann, M., Blomkamp, E. and Lewis, J. M. (2018, March). The Rise of Public 
Sector Innovation Labs: Experiments in Design Thinking for Policy. 

52 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Policy Sciences. Retrieved from: http://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-018-
9315-7 

Miller, P. and Langhorst, C. (2017). The Giveback Economy: Social Responsibility 
Practices for Business and Nonprofit. Vancouver: Self-Counsel Press. 

Newman, J. and Clarke, J. (2009). Publics, Politics and Power: Remaking the Public 
in Public Services. London: Sage Publications. 

Osborne, D. and Gaebler, T. (1992). Reinventing Government: How the 
Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector. New York: 
Penguin. 

Osborne, S.P. (2006). Editorial: The New Public Governance. Public Management 
Review, 8(3): 377-387. 

Peck, J. (nd). Social Innovation … at the Limits of Neoliberalism. University of 
British Columbia. [Power Point Slides] Retrieved from: 
http://crises.uqam.ca/upload/files/Colloque/Pwpt_colloque/J_Peck_CR
ISES_2011.pdf 

Peck, J. and Theodore, N. (2015). Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the 
Threshold of Neoliberalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota 
Press. 

Peck, J., Theodore, N. and Brenner, N. (2012). Neoliberalism Resurgent? Market 
Rule after the Great Recession. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 
111(Spring):2. 

Phillips, S. (2007). Policy Analysis and the Voluntary Sector: Evolving Policy 
Styles. In Dobuzinskis, L., Howelett, M. and Laycock, D., eds. Policy 
Analysis in Canada: The State of the Art. Toronto: University of Toronto 
Press. 

Public Policy Forum. (2013). Change Labs and Government of Canada. Ottawa: 
Public Policy Forum. 

Rittel, H.W., and Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of 
planning. Policy Sciences, 4: 155-169. 

Roy, M.J. and Hackett, M.T. (2016). Polanyi’s ‘Substantive Approach’ to the 
Economy in Action? Conceptualising Social Enterprise as a Public 
Health ‘Intervention’. Review of Social Economy, 75(2): 1-23. 

Shields, J. and Evans, B. M. (1998). Shrinking the State: Globalization and the 
“Reform” of Public Administration. Fernwood: Halifax. 

Sinclair, S., McHugh, N., Huckfield, L., Roy, M. and Donaldson, C. (2014). Social 
Impact Bonds: Shifting the Boundaries of Citizenship. In Farnsworth, K., 

Social Innovation Labs | 53



Irving, Z., and Fenger, M. eds. Social Policy Review 26: Analysis and 
Debate in Social Policy. Bristol: Policy Press: 1-15. 

Sossin, L. (1993). The Politics of Discretion: Toward a Critical Theory of Public 
Administration. Canadian Public Administration, 36(3): 364-391. 

Stone, D. A. (1989). Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas. Political 
Science Quarterly, 104 (2): 281–300. 

Struthers, M. (2018, March). At Odds or an Opportunity? Exploring the Tension 
between the Social Justice and Social Innovation Narratives. The 
Philanthrophist. Retrieved from:   
https://thephilanthropist.ca/2018/03/at-odds-or-an-opportunity-
exploring-the-tension-betweenthe-social-justice-and-social-
innovation-narratives/ 

Tiesinga, H. and Berkhout, R., eds. (2014). Labcraft: How Social Labs Cultivate 
Change Through Innovation and Collaboration. London: Labcraft 
Publishing. 

Torgerson, D. (1986). Between Knowledge and Politics: Three Faces of Policy 
Analysis. Policy Sciences, 19(1): 33-59. 

Van den Steenhoven, J. (2016, June). Introduction to Social Innovation Labs 
[PowerPoint Slides]. Retrieved from: 
http://www.sigeneration.ca/home/labs/ 

VanAntwerp, S. (2014, January). Social Innovation Labs: Top Tips and Common 
Pitfalls [Web blog]. Retrieved from: https://www.marsdd.com/news-
and-insights/social-innovation-labs-toptips-common-pitfalls/ 

Westley, F., Laban, S., Rose, C., McGowan, K., Robinson, K., Tjornbo, O., and 
Tovey, M. (2015) Social Innovation Lab Guide. Canada’s Social 
Innovation Generation. 

Retrieved from: https://uwaterloo.ca/waterloo-institute-for-social-innovation-
and-resilience/sites/ca.waterloo-institute-for-social-innovation-and-
resilience/files/uploads/files/10_silabguide_final.pdf 

Westley, F., Goebey, S., and Robinson, K. (2012). Change Lab/Design Lab for 
Social Innovation. Waterloo: Waterloo Institute of Social Innovation and 
Resilience. 

Yanow, D. (2007). Interpretation in Policy Analysis: On Methods and Practice. 
Critical Policy Analysis, 1(1): 110–122. 

 
 

 

54 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



The Dimensions of Passive Revolution  
 

Gianmarco Fifi7 
 

ABTRACT: Responding to the recent season of studies on 
Antonio Gramsci’s notion of passive revolution, the present 
paper will argue that this could fruitfully contribute to a non-
deterministic understanding of capitalist dynamics. However, 
this relevance should be based on a renewed understanding of 
the concept itself. Against contemporary conceptualisations 
that tend to understand passive revolution as an instrument in 
the hands of the ruling classes, the present paper argues that this 
is better understood as originating from the shortcomings of 
the so-called subaltern groups. The focus should thus be placed 
on the passivity of a potentially transformative agency rather 
than on processes of change that are per se out of reach for 
revolutionary movements. Coming back to Gramsci’s Prison 
Notebooks, three overlapping dialectical relations are identified 
as being key to understanding both passive revolution and the 
struggle against it: at the ideational level, the dialectic between 
common sense and good sense; at the institutional level, the 
dynamic between bureaucratic and democratic centralism; at 
the level of class struggles, the dynamic between corporatism 
and universalism. Interpreted through these categories, passive 
revolution becomes a valuable tool both to overcome the 
fallacies of contemporary critical theory as well as to understand 
the challenges faced by anti-capitalist movements today.  
 
KEYWORDS: Gramsci; passive revolution; hegemony; critical 
political economy; critical theory 
 

Introduction 
One of the main theoretical references that critical scholars have relied 

upon in the last few decades in order to provide a non-deterministic 

 
7 Gianmarco Fifi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies 
at the University of Warwick.  

The Dimensions of Passive Revolution | 55



understanding of capitalist dynamics is the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio 
Gramsci. Since the translation of the Prison Notebooks into English and the 
publication of the complete critical edition edited by Valentino Gerratana, 
Gramsci’s thought has produced a polymorphous variety of interpretations and 
applications that testify both to the liveliness of his thought and to the 
contemporary value of investigating it. In particular, the present paper will 
consider the contemporary relevance of the concept of passive revolution, 
suggesting that this could be a fruitful tool to understanding changes and 
stabilities in the order of capital. The concept of passive revolution carries great 
political value. In fact, it tries to respond to a fundamental question: ‘if the 
proletariat had emerged in many European countries as a collective social and 
political actor in the wake of industrialisation, why had the deepest crisis of 
capitalism not led to a revolution, but rather to various forms of capitalist 
reorganisation?’ (Roccu, 2017, 538).  

Far from being an out-of-date problem, this is a crucial question today 
as the global financial crisis of 2007-8 has not been followed by any substantial 
paradigm shift. The relevance of the term, however, is far from being an original 
contribution of the present article. In fact, the notion of passive revolution is 
nowadays a constant point of reference not only for Gramscian scholarship but 
also for fields as diverse as historical sociology, ethnography and international 
relations (Allinson and Anievas, 2010; Bruff, 2010; McKay, 2010; Nash, 2013; 
Simon, 2010; Wanner, 2015). The variety and extension of the work provided on 
passive revolution in the last decade would in fact suggest a more conscious and 
parsimonious use (Callinicos, 2010). In what follows, I will argue that in order to 
conceive passive revolution as a relevant tool for understanding contemporary 
capitalism, we should firstly rethink its very connotation.  

According to Peter Thomas, passive revolution for Gramsci meant ‘a 
distinctive process of (political) modernization that lacked the meaningful 
participation of popular classes in undertaking and consolidating social 
transformation’ (Thomas, 2013, 23). Thomas argues that ‘[i]n a certain sense, the 
concept has almost become synonymous with modernity, which is now viewed as 
a melancholy tale in which the mass of humanity is reduced to a mere spectator 
of a history that progresses without its involvement’ (2006, 73). Coming back to 
the Prison Notebooks, I shall argue that in case we are to accept the former point 
– passive revolution as synonymous of modernity – we necessarily need to criticise 
the second one concerning the position of the so-called subaltern groups within 
the process. In this sense, responding to the recent season of studies on passive 

56 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



revolution, the present paper will suggest that this can be seen as a synonym with 
modernity only so long as the passivity of the masses is not conceptualised as 
imposed by exogenous forces, but always-already incorporated in their everyday-
praxis. In particular, three main interrelated dialectical relations will be identified 
as being key to understanding both passive revolution and the struggle against it: 
at the ideational level, the dialectic between common sense and good sense; at the 
institutional level, the dynamic between bureaucratic and democratic centralism; 
at the level of class struggles, the dynamic between corporatism and universalism. 
A close investigation of these categories in Gramsci’s oeuvre is essential in order 
to see how the different dimensions of passivity are not merely imposed on 
subaltern groups, but rather represent the effect of their own shortcomings, that 
can always be turned into a revolutionary upheaval.  

The present paper will be structured as follows. Firstly, I will discuss 
current approaches to the concept of passive revolution, particularly focusing on 
its recent reception in studies in critical political economy. Secondly, I will provide 
a critique of current approaches to the term and, coming back to the Prison 
Notebooks, I will suggest an alternative reading revolving around the 
aforementioned categories. In particular, I shall argue that it is only by seeing the 
seeds of capital restructuring already at play in the every-day practice of the 
subaltern groups, that Gramsci is able to think their potential for emancipation. 
Ultimately, I will conclude by summarising the possible contribution of a renewed 
understanding of passive revolution for both studies in critical theory and for 
redefining the challenges of anti-capitalist movements today. 

 
Domination Without Hegemony? Passive Revolution in the Literature 

 
Recent scholarship touching upon the notion of passive revolution, 

particularly within critical political economy, has revolved around the issue of 
how far we can extend this concept and the extent to which this is an apt 
representation of how changes and stability work in contemporary capitalism. 
Three main interventions have been recently made in this regard. Firstly, Adam 
Morton suggests that passive revolution today is a ‘portmanteau concept that 
reveals the continuities and changes within the order of capital’ (2007, 68). In this 
sense, Morton agrees with Peter Thomas in arguing that passive revolution has 
become almost a synonym with modernity, and a particularly apt notion to 
explain both capitalist state formation and maintenance (Morton, 2010, 322; see 
also McKay, 2010).  

The Dimensions of Passive Revolution | 57



In critiquing such an approach, Alex Callinicos argues that this 
definition brings about an issue in terms of distinguishing different situations. In 
this sense, passive revolution would lose its own specificity thus becoming ‘a 
distinction without difference’ (2010, 505). Relying on Gramsci’s uses of the term, 
Callinicos argues that, for example, the analogy between Risorgimento and 
Fordism fails to recognise a crucial difference between the two processes. Only the 
former seems in fact to appear as a plausible representation of passive revolution 
inasmuch as ‘the ancien régime has given way to a society in the capitalist mode 
of production prevails’ (Ivi, 498). It is thus argued that the emphasis should be 
placed on the passage from one mode of production to another, not extending the 
use of passive revolution to transition within capitalism.  

In fact, Callinicos continues, neither fascism nor Fordism produced a 
systemic transformation and thus these are better seen as ‘counter-revolutionary 
projects that seek to manage the structural contradictions of the capitalist mode 
of production, not the accomplishment of socialist transformation by other 
means’ (Ibidem). Callinicos thus concludes that what we need is a more restricted 
understanding of passive revolution, in order not to make it interfere with other 
concepts such as that of counter-revolution. A third approach that tries to 
integrate the previous two interpretations is the one delineated by Roberto Roccu, 
who criticises Morton for the over-extension of its use of the term while at the 
same time contesting the idea that passive revolution somehow needs to produce 
a transition to a new mode of production, as in Callinicos. In particular, Roccu 
stresses the importance that the partial fulfilment of people’s demands has in what 
Gramsci defines as passive revolution – something that finds only limited echo in 
Morton’s formulation (Roccu, 2017, 549).   

Whilst such a discussion is certainly of theoretical relevance, I shall argue 
that the extension or limitations of passive revolution can only be rethought via a 
renewed understanding of Gramsci’s usage. Notwithstanding the differences 
highlighted in the previous conceptualisations, in fact, the three authors tend to 
agree in understanding the outcome of passive revolution as being ultimately in 
the hands of the ruling classes – something that seems in contrast with Gramsci’s 
treatment in the Prison Notebooks. The existing literature acknowledges that the 
phenomenon of passive revolution originates from the limits of bourgeois rule 
(Morton, 2013, 55). In this sense, the process is seen to represent a response to 
dynamics that ruling circles do not directly control. These dynamics can vary from 
crisis-induced contradictions amongst ruling class fractions in which its 
progressive force tends to deteriorate (Q1§44, 42), to external shifts in the 

58 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



accumulation process forced by uneven tendencies in capitalist development 
(Morton, 2011, 36), or from subaltern challenges to the established hegemonic 
bloc. Nevertheless, the outcome of passive revolution is often seen as heavily 
dependent on ruling classes’ power.  

In his book on Mexico, Morton proposes two definitions of passive 
revolution: first, ‘a revolution without mass participation, or a “revolution from 
above,” involving elite engineered social and political reform that draws on 
foreign capital and associated ideas while lacking a national-popular base’ (Ivi, 
38); second, a situation in which ‘a revolutionary form of political transformation 
is pressed into a conservative project of restoration’ (Ivi, 39). Although, the two 
definitions are in some respects different, they both imply a top-down force that 
produces a conservative form of change, either by not including the subalterns in 
the process or by displacing their demands. This might be only a matter of 
emphasis. In fact, Morton acknowledges that in the process of passive revolution 
a significant role is played by the shortcomings of counter-hegemonic projects. 
For example, he argues that, 

 
[i]n the case of Italy, the “passive” aspect refers to the restrictive 
form of hegemony that emerged out of the Risorgimento 
because of the failure of potential ‘Jacobins’ in the Partito 
d’Azione to establish a program reflecting the demands of the 
popular masses and, significantly, the peasantry (Morton, 2013, 
52). 
 

In addition, many of Morton’s analyses of Gramsci’s texts as well as applications 
to concrete examples remark the importance of acknowledging the limits of 
movements of opposition vis-à-vis capital, and of not considering bourgeois rule 
as a ‘quasi-automatic’ process (2011, 46). This is shown, for example, by his 
sensitivity towards the backwardness of the Italian peripheral forces in Southern 
Italy before the Risorgimento (2007, 62), as well as towards the lack of a united 
front based on the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry during the 
revolutionary upheaval in Mexico (2011, 45-6).  

Yet, Morton never theoretically elaborates on what the key features of 
such shortcomings are and on the extent to which these influence and facilitate 
capitalist restructuring itself. For this reason, passive revolution is ultimately seen 
as a process in the hands of the ruling bloc – that, although at times is forced to 
accommodate requests from below, it always does so within the existing social 

The Dimensions of Passive Revolution | 59



formation given its privileged position within the state (Ivi, 53; Sassoon 1987, 
207). In analysing the Italian Risorgimento, for example, whilst acknowledging 
the deficiencies of the Action Party, Morton ultimately sees passive revolution as 
representing ‘the inability of the ruling class to fully integrate the producer classes 
through conditions of hegemony’ (Morton 2007, 68). Given the absence of 
hegemony, he adds, the state becomes crucial in order to further capitalist 
dominance (Ivi: 102). Morton applies similar considerations to the process of 
capitalist developments in Mexico, where the peasants’ revolution ended up being 
offset by ‘Mexican populism’ that had ‘counterrevolutionary roots based on the 
domination and manipulation of the masses behind the façade of revolutionary 
rhetoric’ (Morton, 2011, 48). In this sense ‘passive revolution … is a revolution, 
marked by violent social upheaval, involving a relatively small state class engaging 
with “the acceptance of certain demands from below” in order to restrict class 
struggle, while insuring the creation of state power and an institutional framework 
consonant with capitalist property relations’ (Morton 2013: 54; original 
emphasis). In Morton’s account is implied something that we will see developed 
more clearly in Callinicos and Roccu: namely, a juxtaposition (rather an 
interrelation) of the revolutionary upheavals of the subaltern and the potential for 
the ruling classes to restructure order and hegemony. Rather than seeing the 
former as limiting (and potentially impeding) the possibility of the latter, Morton 
seems to argue that the more requests from below become pervasive the more the 
ruling classes’ privileged access to the state becomes crucial in order to restructure 
society. This point will be better explained by referring to the arguments made by 
Callinicos and Roccu.  
 
Postulating or Presupposing? The Antithetical Treatment of the Antithesis 

Roccu attempts to move beyond Morton’s interpretation, suggesting that 
the emphasis should be placed on the partial fulfilment of people’s demands 
which, he argues, is exactly the means that produces masses’ passivity. He 
acknowledges the ambivalence of Gramsci’s application of passive revolution, as 
in some occasions this ‘is presented as a residual strategy deployed to maintain 
power when hegemony is lacking (“dictatorship without hegemony”)’, whilst in 
other passages of the Prison Notebooks ‘passive revolution seems to occur under 
conditions of limited, fractured, hegemony, when a class or fraction thereof is 
hegemonic towards some others but not across society’ (2017, 546). Such a 
remark, however, does not result in a sceptical position as in Callinicos. In fact, 
Roccu is convinced that we can extrapolate a core from Gramsci’s multi-facet 

60 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



engagement with passive revolution. This core is made of four elements, of which 
the first two are presuppositions, the third has to do with its specific method, and 
the fourth with its outcome.  
        The first element is linked to the international situation that in periods 
of structural changes requires ‘from specific state formations an attempt to 
developmental catch-up through transition, both from a non-capitalist to a 
capitalist mode of production…and between different regimes of capital 
accumulation’ (Ivi, 545). Secondly, Roccu refers to Gramsci’s use of Hegel’s 
categories in order to contend that passive revolution also presupposes a thesis 
that, despite its limitations, ‘develops to the full of its potential for struggle’ 
(Q15§11), while the antithesis is incapable of doing the same. Thirdly, in terms of 
method, Roccu argues that crucial for passive revolution is an heavy reliance on 
state power by the ruling classes in order ‘to weaken and defuse the political 
potential of subaltern classes’ (Roccu, 2017, 545). Lastly, as it pertains to the 
outcome, passive revolution combines a real transformation, ‘either towards or 
within capitalism’ (Ivi, 546), and, at the same time, the ‘partial fulfilment and 
displacement of the demands raised by the embryonic subaltern bloc’ (Ibidem).  

This attempt at extrapolating the core of passive revolution from Gramsci’s 
writings is certainly valuable if one wants to define the limits and potentiality of 
the term, perhaps moving beyond both Morton’s overextension and Callinicos’ 
excessive scepticism vis-à-vis its use. Yet, what is puzzling in Roccu’s formulation 
is that the weakness of the antithesis is emphasised as being both a presupposition 
and a result of the process. This already makes it difficult to understand what the 
contribution of passive revolution would be, if the passivity that this is supposed 
to impose on the subaltern bloc (Ivi, 550) is in fact there from the beginning. On 
the other hand, this basic presupposition is questioned by Roccu himself. In fact, 
when criticising Morton for under-appreciating the role played by the partial 
fulfilment of popular demands, he argues that much more emphasis should be 
placed on ‘the presence of a vigorous antithesis prior to a passive revolution’ 
(Ibidem; my emphasis). Also Callinicos (2010, 501) makes the same point, as he 
argues that actually the vigorous antithesis is a basic feature to a passive 
revolution. The justification for this idea is found in a quote from Notebook 15, 
where Gramsci (Q15§62, 1827) argues that ‘the conception [of passive revolution] 
remains a dialectical one – in other words, presupposes, and indeed postulates as 
necessary [presuppone, anzi postula come necessaria], a vigorous antithesis which 
can present intransigently all its potentiality for development.’ Callinicos seems to 
completely misread the meaning of this formulation, as he takes it to suggest that 

The Dimensions of Passive Revolution | 61



in order to have a passive revolution we need a strong antithesis. Gramsci’s 
position is actually the opposite: it is in order to avoid a passive revolution that the 
antithesis needs to develop to its full potential.  

This is clear already from the quoted note Q15§62, where Gramsci 
provides the aforementioned argument in order to prevent any ‘historical 
defeatism’ and ‘fatalism’ associated with the term passive revolution, particularly 
in reference to the Italian Risorgimento. In fact, he also adds that passive 
revolution is not to be understood as a political program, but rather as ‘criterion 
of interpretation in absence of other active elements in a dominant manner’ 
(Ibidem). This becomes even more evident when looking at Gramsci’s treatment 
of the Risorgimento and the relation between the Action Party and Cavour’s 
project of modernisation. Borrowing an expression of Vittorio Emanuele II, he 
argues that the Moderates had their opponents in their pockets, given the latter’s 
inability to form a real hegemonic alternative to Cavour’s leadership (Q1§44, 41-
2). In fact, ‘the Moderates represented a relatively homogenous class … whilst the 
Action Party was not based on any historical class and the oscillations that its 
governing bodies experienced ultimately followed the interests of the Moderates’ 
(Ivi, 40-1).  

 For Gramsci, the moderate bloc should be understood as being a 
dominant class in two manners: ‘it is leading [dirigente] of the allied classes and 
dominant [dominante] of the opposing classes’ (Ivi, 41). The distinction between 
leading and dominant is often understood as marking two opposite alternative 
forms of government, which would give the ruling classes the option to choose 
according to the specific situation to use coercive mechanisms in order to retain 
power when hegemony is absent. Nevertheless, Gramsci promptly remarks that a 
certain class must possess political hegemony before taking governmental power, 
and also once it has become dominant ‘it continues to be “leading”’ (Ibidem). The 
example of the Risorgimento proves exactly this. In fact, the Moderates ‘continued 
to lead [dirigere]’, and not merely to dominate, ‘the Action Party also after 1870.’ 
It is, thus, exactly thanks to this cultural and political subalternity of the antithesis 
that the ruling bloc is capable of using the state as a means to integrate also the 
sporadic active elements in the opposing forces (for example, through the 
phenomenon that Gramsci names trasformismo).  

The emphasis on the presupposition of a strong antithesis seems also to 
remove one of the two preconditions that Roccu argued were constituting the core 
of Gramsci’s concept: namely, a lacking antithesis. In this sense, passive revolution 
seems to describe two possible situations. On the one hand, a situation in which 

62 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



both capitalist class and its opponents are weak; on the other hand, a condition in 
which they are both powerful at the same time. This schematic and abstract 
representation already shows something interesting regarding current approaches 
to the term: namely, the fact that thesis and antithesis are not dialectically related, 
but rather abstractly juxtaposed. The growing power of the antithesis does not per 
se reduce the potential for the thesis to respond, but rather surprisingly increases 
it. Conversely, the weakness of movements of opposition is not seen as necessarily 
implying a relative position of dominance for the ruling classes. The result is that 
passive revolution is invoked to represent a situation of relative equilibrium 
between opposing fractions, with the necessary clause that at the end the struggle 
is going to be solved by the favourable position of the ruling bloc within the state.8 
This is further proved by the fact that both in Callinicos and Roccu passive 
revolution is seen as opposed to counter-revolution and hegemony, two situations 
in which the capitalist class is thought as being relatively stronger than its 
opposition. Failure to link the lack of a strong antithesis to the empowerment of 
the dominant class, ultimately forces us to view passive revolution as ‘a backup 
strategy for a ruling class that fails to be hegemonic and thus relies on its control 
of state power and a favourable balance of political forces to perpetuate its own 
political dominance under new structural conditions’ (Roccu, 2017, 556; my 
emphasis). 
 
Hegemony and Passive Revolution: The Zero-Sum Game of Political Struggles 
        Degenerations of such an approach could be found, for example, in Ian 
Bruff’s account of Agenda 2010 in Germany, where passive revolution is explicitly 
contrapposed to hegemony (Bruff, 2010; see also Coutinho, 2007 and Losurdo, 
1997, 155). It is true that Gramsci himself refers to certain historical developments 
to be the result of a condition of ‘dictatorship without hegemony’ (Q15§59); yet, 
if taken literally, this formulation can be highly misleading. The reason for this 
can be exposed by looking at Gramsci’s treatment of the disaggregation and 
reconstruction of the hegemonic group after World War I. Gramsci’s line of 
thought is the following: 
 

 
8 This approach can be seen also in Roccu’s (2017, 555) treatment of the Tunisian 
restructuring after Ben Ali’s overthrowing, considered as exemplary of what Gramsci calls 
passive revolution. Roccu, in fact, seems not to consider the absence of a Jacobin moment 
in Tunisia as the primary reason for capitalist restructuring. 

The Dimensions of Passive Revolution | 63



First of all, why has it disaggregated? Perhaps because a strong 
collective and antagonistic political will has developed? If that 
was the case, the problem would have been solved in favour of 
this antagonistic force. It has disaggregated, rather, because of 
purely mechanic causes of different type: 1) because great 
masses, previously passive, started moving [sono entrate in 
movimento], but in a chaotic and disorganised movement, 
without direction, i.e.: without a precise collective political will; 
2) Because the middle classes that during the war had a position 
of leadership and command, have lost it during the time of 
peace … 3) Because the antagonistic forces resulted incapable 
of organising for their own advantage such disorder (Q7§80: 
912-3; author’s translation and emphasis).  
 

It is certainly true that there is a substantial difference between a purely a-critical 
mass of people that passively accepts the ruling order (thus fully accepting its 
position of leadership and command) and one that moves against it, though in a 
chaotic and un-organised manner. However, as it is clear from this passage, the 
absence of an organic collective will is the ultimate reason why oppositions do not 
manage to move beyond, and thus end up re-precipitating into, the previous 
hegemonic bloc. Here it is probably worth referring to what Ernesto Laclau and 
Chantal Mouffe, in a rather critical account of Gramscian understanding of 
hegemony, define as the ‘zero-sum game of political struggles […] where a failure 
in the hegemony of the working class can only be followed by a reconstitution of 
bourgeois hegemony’ (2014, 59).  This means that passive revolution, in Gramsci, 
should not be seen as opposed to hegemony; but rather as describing a situation 
in which failures to produce a creative moment force the subaltern to recapitulate, 
nolens volens, into the previous hegemonic bloc. 

As it has been argued in this section, current approaches to passive 
revolution not only are at times philologically inconsistent with Gramsci’s text but 
they also present at least three issues in the conceptualisation of movements of 
opposition and their relation vis-à-vis capitalist restructuring. Firstly, the great 
emphasis placed on the potential of the ruling bloc to use state power seems to 
undermine (both theoretically and practically) any potential for revolutionary 
politics. Secondly, and connected to the first point, the aforementioned 
approaches are unable to account for strengths and weaknesses of movements of 
resistance vis-à-vis capitalist restructuring, mainly because they do not see the two 

64 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



realms as dialectically interrelated, and a strengthening of the former could always 
be repressed by impositions from the later. In fact, and this is the third point, the 
strong antithesis of the subaltern, even when emphasised, appears as being never 
enough when compared to capital’s ability to restructure the social order. In what 
follows, I will suggest that engaging with Gramsci’s notion of passive revolution 
could be useful to move beyond these fallacies. In particular, I shall argue that it is 
only by seeing the seeds of capitalist restructuring always-already at play in the 
every-day praxis of the subaltern classes, that Gramsci is able to conceptualise the 
potential for revolutionary politics.  
 
Passive Revolution in the Prison Notebooks: Passivity Revisited 

Given the aforementioned criticisms to current approaches to passive 
revolution, this section will argue that Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualisation of 
changes and stability within the capitalist society has the potential to re-establish 
a connection between struggles and socio-historical development. Against the 
general conceptualisation of current studies that think the Gramscian analyses of 
passive revolution as a process that is ultimately in the hands of the ruling classes, 
I suggest that this is better understood as being based on the passivity of a 
potentially transformative agency. The notion of passive revolution was firstly 
formulated by Vincenzo Cuoco, who employed it in order to understand the lack 
of involvement of the popular masses in the Neapolitan revolution of 1799.  
        Gramsci argues that whilst Cuoco meant it as a ‘warning to create a 
national mood of greater energy and popular revolutionary initiative’, the term 
was soon converted by the Moderates and the neo-Guelphs ‘into a positive 
conception, into a political programme’ that concealed ‘the determination to 
abdicate and capitulate at the first serious threat of an Italian revolution that 
would be profoundly popular, i.e.: radically national’ (1971, 59f, Q10§6, 1220). 
The idea of passive revolution as a process crucially dependent on the 
shortcomings of subaltern groups is well encapsulated in a note that Gramsci 
writes in Notebook 8, where he criticises the idea of mechanicism as explaining 
capitalist stability. Gramsci argues that: 
 

when the subaltern becomes diligent and responsible, 
mechanicism appears sooner or later as an imminent peril […] 
the limits and the dominance of the force of things are 
restricted, why? Because, at the end, whereas yesterday the 
subaltern was a thing, today he is not a thing anymore but a 

The Dimensions of Passive Revolution | 65



historical person; whereas yesterday he was irresponsible 
because he resisted an external will, today he is irresponsible 
because he does not resist, despite being an active agent. But has 
he ever been mere resistance, mere thing, mere irresponsibility? 
Certainly not, and that is why it is always necessary to 
demonstrate the futility of mechanic determinism (Q8§205, 
1064; author’s translation). 
 

Stability is thus not the product of external impositions, rather it is dependent on 
the passive role played by the subaltern groups that (actively) help in reproducing 
the current system of exploitation.9 In fact, Gramsci warns us that ‘it is never to 
be forgotten that historical development follows the laws of necessity only so long 
as the initiative has not decisively passed on the side of those forces that aim at the 
construction according to a plan, of pacific and sympathetic division of labour’ 
(Q14§68, 1729; author’s translation).  
        Passivity is thus related to the lack of political initiative of the subalterns. 
In this sense, Gramsci not only provides us with useful theoretical tools to criticise 
the vulgar materialism associated with Nikolai Bukharin that understands the 
subaltern classes as ontologically deprived of will. The Prison Notebooks conversely 
criticise the idea that the masses are always-already active. In fact, as he argues in 
a famous passage, ‘the philosophy of praxis […] is not an instrument of 
government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent of and exercise 
hegemony over the subaltern classes; it is the expression of these subaltern classes 
who want to educate themselves in the art of government and who have an interest 
in knowing all truths, even the unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the (impossible) 
deceptions of the upper class and – even more – their own’ (Gramsci, 1995, 395-
6; Q10§41xii, 1320). Continuity in the order of capital is thus not rooted in 
external impositions or in the rationalisation of society operated by institutional 
apparatuses, but rather in the self-deception of potentially oppositional social 
groups. Therefore, a strong antithesis, rather than being the basic condition for a 
passive revolution, as Callinicos and Roccu would have it, is the primary antidote 
to it.  
        It thus becomes crucial to understand what is involved in the passage 
from a state of passivity to one of creative activity. Returning to the Prison 
Notebooks, three overlapping dialectical relations are identified as being key to 

 
9 For a similar argument see Finocchiaro, 1973.  

66 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Gramsci’s understanding of this relation: at the ideational level, the dialectic 
between common sense and good sense; at the institutional level, the dynamic 
between bureaucratic and democratic centralism; at the level of class struggles, the 
dynamic between corporatism and universalism. This analysis is not meant to 
suggest an abstract fragmentation of Gramsci’s holistic thought.  

As I will show, in concrete situations, these dimensions are indeed very 
much interrelated. The purpose of analysing them separately, however, can be 
seen as threefold. First, it will help me to emphasise Gramsci’s treatment of the 
manifold roots of popular passivity and its implication for rethinking popular 
agency. Secondly, I will be able to demonstrate that such passivity is not seen as 
being imposed on the subaltern through the backup strategies of the ruling class, 
but rather it is always part of dynamics internal to the subaltern themselves. 
Thirdly, I will argue that Gramsci takes such passivity as the main reason why the 
ruling class is capable of keeping and reinforcing its position of dominance. I will 
thus argue that it is on these levels that the Prison Notebooks identify the 
challenges faced by revolutionary projects, that do not limit themselves to accept 
the already established structures, but want to engage in the creation of a new 
state. For the reasons highlighted in the previous section, these dimensions can 
also be seen as different levels on which the ability of the subalterns to emancipate 
themselves from pre-established hegemonies – and thus create their own – is 
articulated. In turn, I will take into consideration both the role that they play in 
the perpetration of capitalist dominance as well as the political project that they 
point towards if one wants to overcome it.   
 
Common Sense and Good Sense  
        As anticipated, the struggle against passive revolution at the ideological 
level is identified with the dialectic between common sense and good sense. In 
Gramsci, this dichotomy is at the core of the relationship between intellectuals 
and people-nation. Whilst common sense is an incoherent stage of opinion 
formation, good sense is realised once people begin to think coherently and 
organically to their everyday life experience, thus producing their own 
intellectuals. In the Prison Notebooks good sense is thus the embodiment of 
philosophy in society. Gramsci significantly argues for a strict connection between 
philosophy and common sense, suggesting that we would need a history of 
common sense in order to investigate the genesis of the problems that are reflected 
only in a minimal part in the history of philosophy. This would ultimately ‘help 
to demonstrate their real value (if they still have one) or the significance that they 

The Dimensions of Passive Revolution | 67



have as overcome links of a chain and to individuate the new and actual problems 
or the actual stage of old problems’ (Q11§12, 1383; author’s translation).    
        The value which is alluded to here is that coming from the connection 
‘between intellectuals who “know” and the “people-nation” that merely “feels”’ 
(Fontana, 2015, 57). These two are strictly connected, as there is no ‘high culture’ 
that has not germinated from everyday-issues and, conversely, no philosophical 
speculation is meaningful if it is unable to speak to people’s problems. The Prison 
Notebooks thus recognise both the importance of and the necessity to overcome 
common sense, thought as both being the necessary point of departure of critical 
intellectual activity and, at the same time, as one of the main obstacles that keep 
the subalterns in their position of passivity and prevent them from becoming 
hegemonic.  

Therefore, not only is there a common ideological feature shared by both 
fragmented common sense and what Gramsci calls ‘high culture’ (alta cultura) – 
that proper to those intellectuals that construct a coherent philosophy detached 
from the masses and functional to socio-political domination. More radically, for 
Gramsci, these are two sides of the same coin: ‘high culture’ can be coherently 
articulated and used as a means of dominion only so long as common sense is 
fragmented and incoherent. The Prison Notebooks thus radically detach 
themselves from the physiological readings of ideology à la Bukharin, also 
developed by the idéologues. It is ultimately the recognition of the historical, thus 
potentially criticisable, nature of ideas to give the ‘philosophy of praxis’ its non-
deterministic character. Ideology, for Gramsci, is not a pre-constituted set of ideas 
that is to be merely installed by the dominant groups into the minds of the 
subaltern classes. This is ultimately far from a coherent monolith: ‘[s]ome 
participate in ideology because of their position in the world of production, others 
for their participation in disaggregated world of common sense; there are those 
that produce ideology from their position as great intellectuals and those that do 
so as simple “clerks of the dominant group”’ (Filippini, 2012, 94; author’s 
translation).  

This manifold manifestation of the ideological production points also to 
the fact that the incoherent rejection of the ruling class’ intellectual production, 
per se, does not imply a complete emancipation. An example can be found in 
Notebook 3, where Gramsci discusses the position of peasants in Southern Italy 
(defined as morti di fame, the ‘starvelings’) and their ‘generic’ hate for the so-called 
‘masters’ (Q3§46, 323) matured in conjunction with the highly uneven 
development of the Italian state since the beginning of the 19th century. The 

68 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



polemic position of the peasantry, Gramsci argues, can be seen as a primary level 
of rejection of the constituted order; but at the same time it is insufficient to build 
‘class consciousness’ inasmuch as ‘not only does it not have an exact 
consciousness of its own historical personality, but it does not even have the 
consciousness of the historical personality and limits of its opponent’ (Ivi, 323-4). 
This also escalates into the collaboration of the most productive sections of the 
morti di fame (those that aspire to small municipal jobs or to positions of clerk in 
the city) with the local bourgeoisie against the peasantry. The backward praxis of 
peripheral groups is thus understood as giving rise to a vague ‘cosmopolitanism’ 
that proves inadequate to build a revolutionary position based on a thorough 
knowledge of the state and on an organic class consciousness. Gramsci ultimately 
attributes a stage on ‘non-activity’ (linked to the lack of ‘comprehension of one’s 
own role’) to the sporadic and subversive actions of the morti di fame, and argues 
that this needs to be linked to ‘“subversion” from above, thus … an arbitrary 
politics and of a personal or group clique [cricca personale o di gruppo]’ (Ivi, 326-
7; author’s translation).  

This makes clear that, in Gramsci, the leading position of restricted groups 
is always mirrored (and in some sense is the epiphenomenon of) the cultural 
passivity of the subalterns. Or, as Robert Jackson puts it, ‘the sedimented layers of 
the anachronistic tradition continue to be reproduced not simply from above, but 
by the very groups that stand to benefit from the negation of their influence’ 
(Jackson, 2016, 221). As it is clear from the example of the morti di fame, Gramsci 
connects the inconsistent intellectual production of subaltern groups both to the 
fragmentation of struggles and to the bureaucratisation of politics that leaves 
coercive power in the hands of a restricted group of people. These other 
dimensions on which passivity is articulated and reproduced will be analysed in 
the following sub-sections.  

 
Bureaucratic Centralism and Democratic Centralism 
 Gramsci defines bureaucratic centralism as the dominion of a part over 
the whole, whilst democratic centralism is ‘centralism in motion’ [centralismo in 
movimento], thus a continuous adjustment of the organization to the real 
historical development’ (Q9§68, 1139; author’s translation). Bureaucracy plays a 
crucial role in ensuring the continuity of capital as it is ‘the most dangerous 
habitual and conservative force’ (Q13§23, 1604; author’s translation). 
Institutional dynamics are therefore a primary example to be taken into 
consideration if we are to understand the ‘non-contemporaneity of the present’ 

The Dimensions of Passive Revolution | 69



(Thomas, 2009).  In this emphasis on the connection between bureaucracy and 
the continuation of capitalist dominance, Gramsci shares a concern that is 
common among contemporary critical studies – particularly those that highlight 
the role played by strong institutions in ensuring the endurance of capital’s laws 
(Bonefeld, 2015, 2017; Ryner, 2015).  
        Yet, the identification of the sources of such bureaucratic structure seem 
to be radically different in the two cases. Whilst the reference to strong institutions 
usually alludes to the displacement of an otherwise already democratic stance of 
change, for Gramsci bureaucracy is possible only in virtue of masses’ passivity. In 
fact, he argues that ‘it needs to be stressed that the unhealthy manifestations of 
bureaucratic centralism occurred because of a lack of initiative and responsibility 
at the bottom, in other words because of the political immaturity of the peripheral 
forces, even when these were homogeneous with the hegemonic territorial group’ 
(Gramsci, 1971, 189; Q9§68, 1139). In synthesis, it is only by seeing the seeds of 
bureaucracy in the everyday shortcomings of potentially transformative agency 
that Gramsci is able to conceive an overcoming of bureaucratic centralism. 
Against such static structures, in fact, 
 

democratic centralism offers an elastic formula, which can be 
embodied in many diverse forms; it comes alive in so far as it is 
interpreted and continually adapted to necessity. It consists in 
the critical pursuit of what is identical in seeming diversity of 
form and on the other hand of what is distinct and even 
opposed in apparent uniformity, in order to organise and 
interconnect closely that which is similar, but in such a way that 
the organising and the interconnecting appear to be a practical 
and ‘inductive’ necessity, experimental, and not the result of 
rationalistic, deductive, abstract process – i.e.: one typical of 
pure intellectuals (Gramsci, 1971, 189; Q13§36).  
 

Democratic centralism, therefore, can be seen as the truest realisation of the unity 
of theory and praxis, which involves an organic connection between the 
intellectual strata and the popular masses as well as between the rulers and the 
ruled (Gramsci, 1971, 190). Gramsci thus points towards the need to move beyond 
bureaucratic systems, beginning with the awareness of the main reasons that 
brought about bureaucracy in the first place and, therefore, identifying the aspects 
on which the subaltern can work to overcome it.  This will ultimately give 

70 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



collective subjects, rather than isolated individuals, the possibility to produce real 
historical change (Filippini, 2017, 51). This critically shows the interrelations 
between the overcoming of bureaucratic centralism and the need to move both 
beyond occasional and fragmented opinion and beyond disaggregated forms of 
struggles, in order to create a collective subjectivity. This will be best understood 
by looking at the following sub-section. 
 
Corporatism and Universalism 
 
       In a note called Alcuni aspetti teorici e pratici dell’ ‘economicismo’, 
Gramsci argues that movements of resistance should not be solely studied via the 
lenses of economic activity, ‘as this affirms an immediate element of force, thus 
the availability of a certain financial supply direct or indirect… and that’s it. Too 
little. Also in this case, the analysis of the different degrees of relation [gradi di 
rapporto] of forces cannot but culminate in the sphere of hegemonic and of 
ethico-political relations’ (Q13§18, 1597; author’s translation). In fact, Gramsci’s 
understanding of revolutionary politics should be understood as articulated on 
three levels (see Frosini, 2010). Firstly, an organization based on an homogeneous 
social group linked to professional relations within a certain group. Here we have 
the mere corporatist phase typical of the organizzazioni di mestiere. Secondly, the 
group develops the consciousness of solidarity but still purely within the 
economic realm. Thirdly, we have a phase in which  
 

consciousness of one’s corporatist interests…overcome the 
corporatist realm of the economic circle, and can and should 
become the interests of other groups subordinated. This is the 
phase more explicitly political… determining beyond the 
economic unity and politics also the intellectual and cultural 
unity, not on a corporatist realm, but rather on a universal one, 
of hegemony (Q4§38, 457; author’s translation).   
 

Praxis par exellance in Gramsci is thus not that of economic activity, but rather 
the ethico-political production. It is only through the creation of a new hegemony 
that the ‘structure ceases to be an external force which crushes man, assimilates 
him to itself and makes him passive; and it is transformed into a means of 
freedom’ (Gramsci 1971, 367; Q10§6, 1244).  

The Dimensions of Passive Revolution | 71



       Such a dynamic was already emphasised in Gramsci’s polemic against 
trade unions for remaining still within the realm of economic competition, and in 
the comparison with the Factory Councils which were more apt to create a 
revolutionary alternative, based not only on the competition between classes, but 
on a new ethico-political system and on the self-government of the working class 
(Gramsci, 2016). In particular, whilst trade unions were acknowledged as being a 
positive organism to move beyond workers complete subalternity vis-à-vis capital, 
their action was necessarily also conservative as their very organisation made 
sense only within the borders of a capitalist system. In Gramsci’s (2000, 93) words, 
‘[t]he emergence of an industrial legality is a great victory for the working class, 
but it is not the ultimate and definitive victory.’ For this reason, Gramsci criticised 
the approach to unionism of organisations such as the Confederazione Generale 
del Lavoro (CGL) and its metal-mechanic affiliate, the Federazione Italiana Operai 
Metallurgici (FIOM). This is again a situation in which a purely passive and 
alienated mass of workers can be distinguished from forms of organisations, such 
as unions, that help in producing a critical consciousness of one’s position.  
        Yet, in both cases the antithesis tends to fall back into the previous 
hegemonic bloc, in as much as it does not create a hegemonic moment of its own. 
This idea in Gramsci is ripped of any form of determinism, as he argues that ‘[t]he 
trade union is not a predetermined phenomenon. It becomes a determinate 
institution, i.e. it takes on a definite historical form to the extent that the strength 
and will of the workers who are its members impress a policy and propose an aim 
that define it’ (Ivi, 92). Gramsci also adds that 
 

[i]f the trade-union officials regard industrial legality as a 
necessary, but not a permanently necessary compromise; if they 
deploy all the means at the union's disposal to improve the 
balance of forces in favour of the working class; and if they carry 
out all the spiritual and material preparatory work that will be 
needed if the working class is to launch at any particular 
moment a victorious offensive against capital and subject it to 
its law then the trade union is a tool of revolution, and union 
discipline, even when used to make the workers respect 
industrial legality, is revolutionary discipline (Ivi, 93). 
 

Ultimately, the success or failure of trade unionism to sublate itself and develop 
into a revolutionary movement is dependent on the capacity of hegemonic 

72 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



production of the workers and people that compose it. In the same manner, the 
defeat of the Factory Councils in the 1920s proved that the absence of 
coordination of revolutionary forces makes it possible for moderates to 
incorporate them into a conservative project (Salvadori, 2018, 151-61).  
 
Conclusion 
        As previously remarked, in 1933 Gramsci suggested that passive 
revolution should not be confused for a political project, but it can guide praxis 
only to the extent that it ‘assumes, or postulates as necessary, a vigorous antithesis’ 
(Q15§62, 1827).10 In Gramsci, the historical subject is thus not shaped by pre-
existing structures but proves its autonomy in actively recomposing and 
overcoming given conditions, crucially emancipating itself ‘from  the fallacies of 
representation and perception of life that that subject, being subaltern, necessarily 
possesses in itself at the beginning’ (Finelli, 2011; author’s translation). Objective 
historical conditions are, therefore, never the ultimate explanatory tool to 
understand the failure of a revolutionary project, and conversely only a project 
capable of moving beyond immediate reality to produce a creative moment of its 
own can overcome passivity and become hegemonic. In fact, 
 

[m]ass action is not possible while the masses remain 
unconvinced of the purposes it is pursuing or the means to 
achieve them. If it is to become a governing class, the proletariat 
must rid itself of all the residue of corporatism, of every 
syndicalist prejudice. What does this mean? It means that not 
only must the divisions between different jobs be overcome, but 
that to achieve consensus and to win the trust of the peasants 
and some of the semi-proletarian urban masses some prejudices 
have to be addressed as well as elements of egotism which still 
persist among workers even when they have left behind craft 
particularisms. The metal worker, the carpenter, the building 
worker will need to learn to see themselves as members of a class 
that will lead the peasants and the intellectuals, a class that can 
only win and build socialism if it is supported and followed by 
the majority of society. If it does not achieve that […] it will give 

 
10 For accounts that consider passive revolution as a political project see e.g.: Callinicos, 
2010; Vianna, 1998. 

The Dimensions of Passive Revolution | 73



the state the possibility of crushing the rising tide of workers’ 
struggles and breaking the movement (quoted in Robaina, 
2006; my emphasis). 
 

The link is thus evident between the potential for the bourgeoisie to impose 
coercively its own control over society and the fallacies of subalterns’ attempt to 
become true organic subjectivity (Badaloni, 2014, 102). The coerciveness of 
capital restructuring would in fact not be possible if it was not for the ideological 
(common sense), organizational (bureaucratic centralism) and interest-based 
(corporatism) fragmentation of potentially revolutionary social groups. Gramsci 
seems to reverse the general insight of critical theorists according to whom we can 
understand the continuation of capitalist practices as the result of increasing 
rationalisation and coerciveness of the capitalist system.  

In this light, future studies should point not only to the significance of 
Gramsci in grappling with crucial theoretical concepts which allow us to 
overcome the fallacies of contemporary critical studies. At the same time, the 
Prison Notebooks could be a fruitful source to point in the direction of alternative 
lines of research that not only focus on how mechanisms of government tend to 
impose capitalist dynamics but also to how such logics are asserted, reproduced 
and can potentially be contested from the subalterns themselves. This challenges 
us to identify and perpetrate the forms of praxis that are capable of offsetting the 
dead mechanisms that seem to mechanically rule over our everyday life. Having 
this as an objective, the concept of passive revolution can be an important tool 
both to guide political praxis and to provide a coherent understanding of the 
connection between capitalist dominance and its potentially contested nature.  
 
References 
 
Allinson, J. and Anievas, A. (2010) The uneven and combined development of the 

Meiji Restoration: A passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity. 
Capital & Class, 34(3): 469–490. 

Badaloni, N. (2014) Gramsci and the problem of the revolution. In Mouffe, C. ed., 
Gramsci and Marxist Theory (pp. 80-110). London: Routledge. 

Bonefeld, W. (2015) Crisis, Free Economy and Strong State: On Ordoliberalism. 
European Review of International Studies, 2 (3), 5-14. 

Bonefeld, W. (2017) The Strong State and the Free Economy. London: Rowman & 
Littlefield International.  

74 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Bruff, I. (2010) Germany’s Agenda 2010 reforms: Passive revolution at a 
crossroads. Capital & Class, 34(3), 409–428. 

Callinicos, A. (2010) The Limits of Passive Revolution. Capital & Class, 34 (3), 
491-507.  

Coutinho, C. N. (2007) L’Epoca Neoliberale: Rivoluzione Passiva o 
Controriforma? Critica Marxista: Analisi e Contributi per Ripensare la 
Sinistra, 2, 21-6.   

Del Roio, M. (2012) Translating passive revolution in Brazil. Capital & Class, 
36(2), 215–234. 

Filippini, M.  (2012) Tra Scienza e Senso Comune. Dell'Ideologia in Gramsci. 
Scienza & Politica, 25 (47), 89-106.  

Filippini, M. (2017) Using Gramsci: A New Approach. London: Pluto Press.  
Finelli, R. (2011) Antonio Gramsci. La rifondazione di un marxismo senza corpo. 

Consecutio Rerum: Rivista Critica della Postmodernità. Available at: 
http://www.consecutio.org/2011/05/antonio-gramsci-la-rifondazione-
di-un-marxismo-senza-corpo/. 

Finocchiaro, M. (1973) Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  

Fontana, B. (2015) Intellectuals and Masses: Agency and Knowledge in Gramsci. 
In McNally, M. ed., Antonio Gramsci (pp. 55-75). London: Palgrave 
Macmillan.  

Frosini, F. (2010) La Religione dell’Uomo Moderno: Politica e Verità nei «Quaderni 
del Carcere» di Antonio Gramsci. Roma: Carocci. 

Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by 
Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishar London: 
Lawrance & Wishart.    

Gramsci, A. (1975) Quaderni del carcere (ed. V. Gerratana). Turin: Einaudi. 
Gramsci, A. (1995) Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and 

translated by D. Boothman. London: Lawrence and Wishart.  
Gramsci, A. (2000) The Gramscian Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, edited by 

D. Forgacs. New York: New York University Press.  
Gramsci, A. (2016) Masse e Partito: Antologia 1910-1926, edited by G. Liguori. 

Rome: Editori Riuniti.  
Jackson, R. (2016) Subalternity and the Mummification of Culture in Gramsci’s 

“Prison Notebooks”. International Gramsci Journal, 2(1), 201-225. 
Laclau E. and Mouffe C. (2014)  Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a 

Radical Democratic Politics. 2nd ed. London: Verso. 

The Dimensions of Passive Revolution | 75



McKay, I. (2010) The Canadian passive revolution, 1840-1950. Capital & Class, 
34(3), 361–382. 

Morton, A. D. (2007) Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in 
the Global Political Economy. London: Pluto Press.  

Morton, A. D. (2010) The continuum of Passive Revolution. Capital & Class, 34 
(3), 315-342. 

Morton, A. D. (2011) Revolution and the State in Modern Mexico: The Political 
Economy of Uneven Development. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.  

Morton, A. D. (2013) Traveling with Gramsci: The Spatiality of Passive 
Revolution. In M. Ekers et al. (eds) Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics. 
Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 47-64.  

Nash, F. (2013) Participation and passive revolution: The reproduction of 
neoliberal water governance mechanisms in Durban, South Africa. 
Antipode, 45(1): 101–120. 

Robaina, R. (2006) Gramsci and revolution: A necessary clarification. International 
Socialism 109. Available at: http://isj.org.uk/gramsci-and-revolution-a-
necessary-clarification/  

Roccu, R. (2017) Passive revolution revisited: From the Prison Notebooks to our 
‘great and terrible world’. Capital & Class, 41 (3), 537–559.  

Ryner, M. (2015) Europe's Ordoliberal Iron Cage: Critical Political Economy, the 
Euro Area Crisis and its Management. Journal of European Public Policy, 
22(2), 275-294.   

Salvadori, M. L. (2018) Storia d’Italia: Il Cammino Tormentato di una Nazione, 
1861-2016. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore.  

Sassoon, A. S. (1987) Gramsci’s Politics.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 
Press. 

Simon, R. (2010) Passive revolution, perestroika and the emergence of the new 
Russia. Capital & Class, 34(3), 429–448. 

Thomas, P. D. (2006)  Modernity as ‘Passive Revolution’: Gramsci and the 
Fundamental Concepts of Historical Materialism. Journal of the 
Canadian Historical Association, 17 (2), 61-78. 

Thomas, P. D. (2009)  The Gramscian Moment. Philosophy, Hegemony and 
Marxism. Leiden: Brill. 

Thomas, P. D. (2013) Hegemony, Passive Revolution and the Modern Prince. 
Thesis Eleven, 117 (1), 20-39.  

Vianna, L. W. (1998) A Revolução Passiva: Americanismo e Iberismo. Rio de 
Janeiro: Revan. 

76 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Wanner, T. (2015) The new ‘Passive Revolution’ of the Green Economy and 
Growth Discourse: Maintaining the ‘Sustainable Development’ of 
Neoliberal Capitalism. New Political Economy, 20(1), 21–41. 

Williams, G. (2008) Struggles for an Alternative Globalization: An Ethnography of 
Counterpower in Southern France. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Dimensions of Passive Revolution | 77



Precarity as the New Reality? Millennials’ Representation in the Changing 
Workplaces Review Policy Process 
 
Jordyn Perreault-Laird11 and Susan Silver12 
 

ABSTRACT: Millennials, comprising the majority of the 
Canadian labour market, have come of age in a time of 
shrinking safety nets and precarious work. The Changing 
Workplaces Review (CWR) in Ontario was commissioned to 
explore how work conditions have shifted in line with 
globalization, neoliberalism, labour market restructuring, and 
the gig economy. The final report offered a golden opportunity 
to suggest legislative adjustments to employment standard and 
labour relation legislation in a way that strengthened workplace 
and employment conditions for millennials. Considering the 
unique barriers facing this generation, this paper proposes a 
scale for categorizing the type of representation this group 
received within the consultation phase of the policy process of 
the review. Findings demonstrate that the most salient aspects 
of precarious work which specifically target millennials 
received a small, but substantive representation from 
community groups, labour unions, and other allies within 
community consultations. However, our analysis revealed that 
the substantive representation was not reflected in either the 
final report or in the ensuing legislation. We conclude that a 
small clustering of substantive representation, while an 
important contribution to the public debate, can be overlooked 
by policy makers, especially when concerns run counter to the 
dominant framing of the group and issue. 
 
KEYWORDS: intersectional policy analysis; millennials; 
precarious work; policy process; changing workplaces review 

 
11 Jordyn Perreault-Laird recently completed a Master of Social Work at McMaster 
University. Email: perreauj@mcmaster.ca 
12 Susan Silver is Associate Professor of Social Work at Ryerson University. Email: 
ssilver@ryerson.ca 

78 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



 
Introduction 

The topic of millennial workers has received growing attention from 
academia, (Broido, 2004; Standing, 2011; Twenge, 2006; Worth, 2016) business 
management (Ng, Lyons, & Schweitzer, 2017; Pînzaru, Vatamanescu, Mitan, 
Savulescu, Vitelar, Noaghea, & Balan, 2016), and marketing (Goldman Sachs 
Global Investment Research, n.d.; Norris, 2015). This generation’s workplace 
values, goals, and characteristics are commonly conceived as an anomaly to be 
studied and explained (Bonfiglio, 2008; Deal, Altman, & Rogelberg, 2010; Holt, 
Marques, & Way, 2012; Kuron, Lyons, Schweitzer, & Ng, 2015). Interestingly, 
however, there does not exist one common definition for millennial (Ng et al., 
2017). The generation born after 1980 has had a number of names: Generation Y, 
Gen Me, Gen Next, Generation Squeeze and Millennials (Kershaw, 2017; Ng et 
al., 2017; Twenge, 2006). Media representations of millennials have contributed 
to the confusion of how we understand this cohort.  For example, Mirrlees (2015) 
has identified four media representations of millennials that include, “a member 
of a youth cohort, a sovereign consumer, a worker to be managed, and an 
immiserated victim of hard times” (p. 278).  While these representations reflect 
the diversity of the group’s constructed identities, we use the popular designation 
of millennial as introduced to academia by Howe and Strauss (2000) who defined 
the cohort by their age range, as being born between the years 1982 to 2002 (aged 
18-37). 

Ontario finds itself at a pivotal point for millennials who are just entering 
the labour market or are searching for an end to precarious employment. For the 
first time in 25 years, the Ontario government has struck a commission that will 
impact the Employment Standards Act, 2000 (ESA) and the Ontario Labour 
Relations Act, 1995 (OLRA). The Changing Workplaces Review (CWR) was 
commissioned by the Ontario Liberal Government in 2015 to explore the 
changing nature of work in Ontario and how labour laws may need to adjust in 
accordance. As the provincial government is intent on moving forward with 
alterations to legislation (Ministry of Labour, 2017), the CWR provides a unique 
opportunity to examine how millennials are represented in relation to discussions 
of their participation in the Ontario labour market. Such a review further offers 
the possibility to ensure that the voices and concerns of the most precarious 
workers are represented and remedied. 

Although millennials are a diverse cohort with varying life goals, 
oppressions and privileges, the one constant that remains is their inevitable and 

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 79



necessary participation in the Ontario labour force13 (Ng, Lyons, & Schweitzer, 
2017).  While most will participate in paid work, their participation will occur in 
different ways in the labour force, ways that range from low wage labourers to 
employers.  Statistics Canada (2016) identified that Ontarians, between the ages 
of 15-34, have reached over 2 million. Nationally, they have become one of the 
largest age group in the labour force, surpassing the Baby Boom Generation 
(Norris, 2015). The value of focusing on millennials can be explained by their 
many years of future labour force participation14. If labour and employment law 
policy reform are to occur, it must adequately address the needs and challenges of 
a generation entering a labour market that is increasingly characterized by 
contract, temporary and precarious forms of employment.      

This study seeks to explore the different types of representation that this 
cohort received in the policy process. More specifically, we aim to understand how 
millennials and their labour force options and experiences are represented in the 
submissions to the CWR and the final report. We recognize that, while this cohort 
is defined by age, their multiple constructions (Mirrlees, 2015) and lived 
experiences pose challenges in how they are represented in the policy process. 
Based on the nature of their representation in this policy process, we explore the 
degree to which millennials are a serious consideration of labour policy, and as 
such, if they are viewed as a group deserving of this attention. 

This paper will argue that addressing the challenges of millennials in the 
Ontario labour force is an important policy goal. It will then identify the 
significance of representation in the policy process in relation to an 
intersectionality-based policy analysis (IBPA), followed by examining the depth 
of precarity for this demographic and a brief timeline of the events leading up to 
the CWR. Four codes were developed to operationalise representation in the 
policy process, and these will be used to explore the research questions. Following 
this analysis is a discussion of how representation is taken up in the submissions 
to the CWR and in the final report and the implications of the degree of 
representation achieved. The paper concludes with opportunities for future 
research that links representation and intersectionality.  

 

 
13 Here is it important to note that the authors are in full support of those who exist outside 
of that labour force due to health-related issues or otherwise. 
14 For more information on the experiences of Baby Boomers and their experiences of 
precarious work; please see Standing (2011) and Silver, Shields, Wilson, & Scholtz (2005). 

80 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Representation in the Policy Process and Intersectionality-Based Policy 
Analysis 

In 2016, Federal Minister of Finance Bill Morneau told a group of 
Canadian youth that they should expect "job churn" (characterised by short-term, 
temporary employment) throughout their lifetime (Canadian Press, 2016). The 
comment led to an action by members of a Canadian Labour Congress youth 
labour forum who turned their backs on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 
peaceful protest against the Minister's remarks (Pedwell, 2016). A demonstration 
such as this reveals that some members of the 18 to 37 cohort are deeply 
disappointed with the current conditions of work and the lack of political 
responses.  

The peaceful protest against the Prime Minister and Minister of 
Finance’s comments highlighted the disapproval of precarity as the new status quo 
for millennials. As explained by André and Depauw (2017) disagreement between 
constituents and their political representatives is a predictable aspect of politics; 
however, when the opinions of elected officials are found consistently 
incongruent with their constituents, citizens are likely to be discontent with their 
policies. This discrepancy reflects the increasing importance of representation in 
the policy process (André & Depauw, 2017). 

On the topic of representation and community participation in the 
policy process, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 
(OECD; 2001) outlines a number of benefits. Significantly, the report explains 
how engaging citizens in policy-making contributes to strengthening public faith 
in governments and creates better policy. Results of the report note “higher levels 
of implementation and compliance given greater public awareness of policies and 
participation in their design” (OECD, 2001). Moreover, “allowing governments 
to tap wider sources of information, perspectives, and potential solutions" 
improves the quality of policy (OECD, 2001, 19). The report further highlighted 
the importance of ensuring representation with respect to diversity as a vital 
aspect of robust policy creation. In short, representation is important for good 
policy. 

Recognizing the diversity and complexity of a group’s lived experiences 
is another important aspect of policy creation and is one of the central tenants of 
an intersectionality-based policy analysis (IBPA). In a discussion of 
intersectionality and public policy, Hankivsky and Cormier (2011) argue for a 
policy process that considers the unique experiences of social locations that are 
context dependent and fluid. An intersectional analysis, informed by social 

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 81



location, gained recognition when it was articulated by Crenshaw (1991) in her 
seminal work in the field of law. Crenshaw examined the ways gender, Blackness, 
and class interlock creating unique experiences of oppression for Black women in 
the legal system. Intersectionality has since gained popularity in academic fields 
including public policy (Bishwakarma, Hunt, & Zajicek, 2007; Hankivsky & 
Cormier, 2011; Hankivsky, Hunting, Giesbrecht, Fridkin, Rudrum, Ferlatte, & 
Clark, 2014). In the area of social policy, "intersectionality conceptualizes social 
categories as interacting with and co-constituting one another to create unique 
social locations that vary according to time and place. It is these intersections and 
their effects that are of concern in an intersectionality analysis" (Hankivsky et al., 
2012, 35). To do so, IBPA uses three components in policy analysis. The first 
element is concerned with the interrogation of diverse sources of information and 
knowledge, and the implicit assumptions, historical context, and relationships of 
power that frame the policy issue, (Hankivsky et al., 2014). The second component 
speaks specifically to issues of representation and how policy issues impact 
specific populations; while the third highlights areas for advocacy efforts 
(Hankivsky et al., 2014). When using an IBPA, these three components are 
applied to and guide the entire policy process. 

 In this research project, we focus specifically on how millennials are 
represented in the submissions to the CWR. While this consultation is only one 
aspect of the policy process, it is the most publicly accessible aspect where issues 
of representation can be readily introduced. Therefore, the focus of this analysis 
will centre upon this early stage of policy formulation wherein proposals for 
addressing policy issues are provided and policy actors engage in community 
consultation processes (Biskwakarma et al., 2007). Focussing on this area of the 
policy cycle, our research is grounded in the assumption that “to fully understand 
who is at issue also requires…the voices of vulnerable and marginalized 
individuals and groups be represented within the policy-making process” 
(Hankivsky & Cormier, 2011, 219). If a group is not represented, then by 
extension it would be challenging to create a policy that addresses their concerns. 
Further, without effective representation, the analysis cannot move to a reflexive 
consideration of the “meaning-making processes of privilege and exclusion in 
policy making and ultimately lead to the reconstruction of harmful and oppressive 
policies” (Hankivsky & Cormier, 2011, 219). 

When working with communities, Code (1995) asks what type of space 
is created for community members to express their ideas. The author argues that 
“our concern should not be directed at what is said but more significantly, what is 

82 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



heard, discussed and considered?  Whose voices and concerns have ‘a reasonable 
expectation of take-up’" (Code, 1995, xiv). The first step in this process is to 
identify if the voices of millennials were represented, if the group was heard, were 
their issues considered or discussed and subsequently if they were taken up in a 
meaningful way in the final policy. 
 
Why Millennials? 

Globally, millennials are encountering substantial barriers to accessing 
the labour market in the wake of the financial recession of 2008 (International 
Labour Organization, 2013). The International Labour Organization (ILO) 
estimates the global youth unemployment rate was at 12.6 per cent in 2013; 
accounting for approximately 73 million young people. Prolonged 
unemployment is leading many young people to take on jobs that are temporary 
to generate income (ILO, 2013). Compounding this crisis is a skills mismatch 
wherein young people are overqualified for the job they are doing leaving the 
benefits of their skills lost on society (ILO, 2013, 1). In response, the ILO is calling 
for nations to implement “creative, wide-ranging policy solutions” (2) to break 
this damaging cycle.  

Canada is among the nations impacted by this crisis. The Canadian 
labour market has undergone a drastic transformation, through the 1990s, 
producing high levels of unstable, part-time precarious work (Cranford, Vosko, 
& Zukewich, 2003b; Silver, Shields, & Wilson, 2005). Since then, Canadians have 
experienced the proliferation of non-standard and precarious work (Lewchuk, 
2017). Precarious employment is defined by "atypical employment contracts, 
limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, job insecurity, low job tenure, 
low earnings, poor working conditions and high risks of ill health" (Cranford et 
al., 2003, 455b). Notably, a recent Statistic Canada analysis reveals 5.6% of 
Canadians were involuntarily employed part time, while 12% found themselves in 
temporary work, and 15% were self-employed (as cited in Fleury & Cahill, 2018).  

Workers’ perceptions of their employment situation are an important 
indication of the impact of precarious employment that reach beyond the 
workplace. Lewchuk and colleagues' (2013) Employment Precarity Index 
measures precarious employment through indicators that include the relationship 
between the employer and employee, earning and hours of employment, when 
and how workers are paid (including on missed days), sense of confidence in 
articulating concerns without fear of losing their job, and personal perception of 
job permanence. Cranford and colleagues (2003a) add the dimension of legislative 

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 83



protection to this definition by underscoring the lack of employment standard 
coverage for precariously employed workers. Although there are circumstances 
where part-time employment is desirable and non-precarious, many workers are 
interested in full-time permanent opportunities (Shier, Graham, Giotam, & 
Eisenstat, 2014). The dismantling of full-time, secure, unionised employment 
favours the interests of business and capital (Stanford, 2008), dramatically 
affecting workers' quality of life. 

The lack of security afforded by precarious work has adverse impacts on 
the future of Canada as millennial workers will soon be the largest cohort in the 
labour force. There are 6.8 million young Canadians between the ages of 15 – 2915 
; of which one-third find themselves in temporary employment (Canadian Labour 
Congress [CLC], 2016, 6). Although there is a proliferation of part-time work, 
"over 230,000 young workers would rather work full-time hours but business 
conditions [do not] allow for it" or they could not locate full-time employment 
(CLC, 2016, 8). This is in sharp contrast to the core working age group16 as young 
workers are twice as likely to be unemployed (CLC, 2016, 7). Nationally, Ontario 
has been cast as one of the worst places for youth unemployment and limited full-
time job prospects (Kershaw, 2017). 

In 2013, Geobey outlined the reality of youth unemployment in Ontario, 
a valuable analysis which illuminates the experiences of a subset of the millennial 
category (i.e., those 18- 24 years old). The report highlights the challenge young 
workers aged 15 to 24 encounter when accessing the labour market post-
recession. The report indicates Ontario’s youth are faring worse than other 
provinces at rates that are “twice as high as the overall provincial unemployment 
level” (Geobey, 2013, 5). More troubling was the finding that youth 
unemployment is “turning out to be chronic, rather than a short-term result of a 
global economic crisis” (Geobey, 2013, 7). The Law Commission of Ontario 
(LCO; 2012) explored this actuality explaining the compounding effect of their 
challenges in accessing the labour market and their desire for employment, 
resulting in young workers being pushed into non-standard jobs (characterised 
by temporary, part-time, contingent work). As a result, young people are 
overrepresented in temporary, part-time employment. An additional factor in 

 
15 Statistics Canada does not use the 18–37 age group but instead 15-19, 19-24, and 24 and 
over.   
16 Statistics Canada identifies the core-age labour force as 25-54. 
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-001-x/10906/9297-eng.pdf  

84 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



analysing the unemployment rate is the increase of unpaid internships outside of 
the degree-specific requirements which add to this generations' level of precarity. 
Unpaid labour has broader and longer-term negative impacts on the Ontario 
economy (LCO, 2012).  In response to these economic circumstances, the LCO 
identified younger millennials as a vulnerable group within the labour market. 
 These findings are echoed by Kershaw (2017) who argues Ontario is one 
of the worst performing economies in Canada for people under 45. Employment 
vulnerability has adverse impacts on millennial's short – and long-term quality of 
life. The standard of living for millennials has deteriorated, impacting this 
generation's ability to secure good-paying jobs as "Ontario is the only province in 
Canada to report a decline in full-time earnings for the typical 25– 34-year-old 
since 2003" (Kershaw, 2017, 3). Home-ownership is increasingly challenging, 
taking an average of 15 years to secure a 20 percent down payment; a stark contrast 
to the five years it took in 1976 – 80 (Kershaw, 2017). High levels of personal debt 
are burdening the futures of young generations, which has risen by $19,000 since 
1999 for Ontarians under 35 (Kershaw, 2017). This reality has adverse impacts not 
only on the quality of life of millennials but also for Ontario as the downward 
pressure of a dwindling middle class leads to less purchasing power and re-
investment of capital back into the economy (Kershaw, 2017).  

Millennial’s vulnerability and uncertain future is heightened as they are 
less likely to be covered by the ESA. Vosko, Noack, and Thomas (201617) explain 
that “[m]ore than a quarter of young [aged 15 to 29] employees (27%) have special 
rules relating to public holiday pay, compared to only 20% of employees overall. 
Young employees’ relatively short job tenure also results in lower levels of access 
to vacation time as well as termination and severance pay” (p. 4). This is 
particularly acute in sectors where millennials are overrepresented, such as 
construction and hospitality which are characteristically precarious. Due to the 
nature of their work, young employees find themselves exempt from the ESA on 
issues related to vacation time, termination and severance pay (Vosko et al., 2016). 
In this way, the ESA has created enforcement loopholes that lead to exploitive 
employment practices impacting this group. Many labour organisations and 
community activists have long advocated for increasing the provincial minimum 
wage and codifying stronger workers’ rights in law.18 

 

 
17 Report commissioned for the Changing Workplaces Review 
18 See http://workersactioncentre.org/ 

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 85



Chronology 
Over the past decade, there have been a number of reports examining the 

issue of precarity and its relationship to poverty, poor health, and family cohesion. 
Beginning in 2007, the United Way produced the report Losing Ground: The 
Persistent Growth of Family Poverty in Canada’s Largest City. Drawing attention 
to the considerable increase in poverty within the Greater Toronto Area the 
report. Evidence pointed to precarious employment and the deteriorating social 
safety net as among the causes of this disparity. Calls for changes to the labour 
force were heralded by academics, activists, organised labour and charities alike 
(Kalleberg, 2011; Law Commission of Ontario, 2012; Lewchuk et al., 2013; 
Workers Action Centre, 2011). Focussing on vulnerable workers in precarious 
labour, the Law Commission of Ontario (LCO; 2012). The authors put forward 47 
recommendations to address the disadvantages faced by groups through 
legislative changes. In Southern Ontario, an Lewchuk and colleagues’ (2013) 
report reinforced the overwhelming impact of precarious employment and 
poverty on the social, community, financial, physical, and mental well-being of 
residents in the region.   

The ongoing conversation about precarity garnered attention in the 
political realm with Premier Wynne’s 2014 Speech from the throne (Office of the 
Premier, 2014) wherein she committed to consulting with Ontarians to consider 
what could be done to address the changing workplace within the context of 
Ontario’s labour and employment laws. Soon after, Minister of Labour Michael 
Flynn received his Mandate Letter from Premier Wynne. Therein, he was charged 
with leading a review of the province’s employment and labour standards. In 
spring of 2015, the CWR was launched. The Advisors C. Michael Mitchell and 
John C. Murray were mandated to:  

 
“… consider the broader issues affecting the workplace and 
assess how the current labour and employment law framework 
addresses these trends and issues with a focus on the LRA and 
the ESA. In particular, the Special Advisors will seek to 
determine what changes, if any, should be made to the 
legislation in light of the changing nature of the workforce, the 
workplace, and the economy itself, particularly in light of 
relevant trends and factors operating on our society, including, 
globalization, trade liberalization, technological change, the 
growth of the service sector, and changes in the prevalence and 

86 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



characteristics of standard employment relationships” (Ontario 
Ministry of Labour, 2017, para 15). 
 

Excluded from the consultations were labour provisions for the construction 
industry, the minimum wage, and issues that other policy reviews are already 
addressing (Ontario Ministry of Labour, 2017). 

The pieces of legislation governing employment relationships in Ontario 
under review are the OLRA and the ESA. The OLRA is the law that regulations 
relations between employers and employees in workplaces including collective 
bargaining. There have been a number of revisions to the act, however, no major 
changes have occurred since 2005. The ESA establishes the minimum standards 
of workplaces in Ontario and underwent a major review in 2000-2001. As these 
critical guiding statues have not undergone a comprehensive revision in over a 
decade, the CWR provided a valuable opportunity to enhance labour protections 
in response to the onset of widespread precarious employment. Given its broad 
scope and mandate, issues related to millennials' engagement in the labour market 
would thus have the possibility of being addressed (Government of Ontario, 
2016).  

Over two years, the Advisors held public consultation sessions across the 
province and received submissions from various interest groups, community 
organisations, and independent establishments. During Phase 1 of the public 
consultations, the review received 217 in-person and written submissions from 
May 2015 to September 2015 (Government of Ontario, 2017). The Advisors also 
reviewed academic literature in preparing their report. After the release of the 
interim report in July 2016, public consultations were held. Phase 2 submissions 
responded to the CWR interim report and the added issue of personal emergency 
leave coverage (PEL). A total of 210 submissions were received for Phase 2, 
bringing the total public, written submissions to 427. The final report was released 
in May 2017. 
 
Methodology 

To examine how millennials were represented in the CWR, this study 
used content analysis to analyze the submissions to the CWR and its final report 
(2017). Content analysis is a methodology which is a “careful, detailed, systematic 
examination and interpretation of a particular body of material in an effort to 
identify patterns, themes, biases, and meanings” (Berg, 2007, 304). Remaining 
consistent with the methodology, Berg (2007) notes the criteria of selection must 

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 87



be sufficiently rigorous and established prior to the analysis. The decision to use 
submissions to the CWR was founded upon the desire to understand the type and 
degree of representation millennials received in the consultation process and to 
explore the ways in which their concerns were discussed. Equally important was 
the presence of this cohort in the final report which helped inform the final 
legislation (Ontario Ministry of Labour, 2017).  
 At the first stage of analysis, we identified where millennials appeared in 
the 427 submissions by developing a list of descriptive search terms. In accordance 
with content analysis, Berg (2007) explains categories that emerge through the 
process of developing criteria should reflect all aspects of the messages, using exact 
wording when possible. As such, an inductive approach was used to create search 
terms by examining two submissions from groups that explicitly identified 
themselves as representing young workers and millennials: Ontario Public 
Services Employees Union Provincial Young Workers Committee 
(OPSEUPYWC; 2015) and Ontario Economic Development Society (OEDS) 
(Dedier, 2015). Within these two submissions, young workers and millennials 
were described using terms indicated in Table 1. In this way, search terms were 
not selected arbitrarily but rather in accordance with the subject group’s self-
identification.  Further, these search terms were very stable in that when these 
terms appeared in the submissions, they were always referencing millennials. 
 
Table 1: Search Terms Used in Submissions and the Changing Workplaces 
Review Final Report 
 

Population demographic characteristics 
Young* 
Youth 
Millennial 
Generation* 
Student 

Note: an asterisk indicates any variation on the term, e.g., generations, younger. 
 

Submissions were manually searched using the terms from Table 1, 
resulting in a sample of 109 submissions that contained any or all of these terms. 

88 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Only submissions that were directly related to the CWR were included19. From 
this group, three submissions were withdrawn resulting in the inclusion of 106 
submissions in the final sample used for our analysis. Further, the word student 
had multiple meanings that did not exclusively refer to post-secondary students 
(such as students under 18, or the student minimum wage). These occurrences 
were therefore excluded as they did not meet the inclusion criteria of the 18 to 37 
age range. 

When exploring the representation of millennials, it was important to 
first consider the physical presence of the demographic identifiers in the text. 
Manifest content analysis is an approach that examines what is physically 
countable and present in the sample (Berg, 2007). As this study is investigating 
the extent to which millennials are represented in the text, the number of times 
the identifiers occurred was counted to evaluate the frequency and magnitude of 
their presence. Our categories of representation where then applied to the total 
sample of 106 submissions which is inclusive of Phase 1 and Phase 2 consultations. 
The frequency distribution of these search terms and the corresponding category 
of representation is presented below, starting in Table 4. 
 
Definition of Categories 

To examine the degree of representation in the community consultation 
process this research proposes a methodology for categorising a group's presence 
in policy submissions. Each category of representation indicates an increasing 
recognition of the group.  Our methodology consisted of coding both the type and 
frequency with which millennials are identified and their labour force experiences 
recognized.  Rather than coding an entire report or submission, coding was 
initiated by the appearance of a demographic identifier and then the type of 
representation was determined by considering the surroundings words and 
sentences. Table 3 illustrates the definitions of the categories of representation, 
followed by an in-depth explanation of each category, including sample quotes 
from the submissions to illustrate how the coding was conducted. 

 
 

 
19 The above-noted letters from OPSEUPYWC and OEDS were excluded they were used to 
shape the conversation and search terms. Additionally, the submission made by Trillys 
Systems was withdrawn as it was a transcript of a debate in the provincial government on 
Bill 139. 

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 89



Table 2: Definition of Categories of Representation 
 

Type of 
Code 

Mere 
mention 

Nod Substantive Recommendation 

Definition Appearance 
in a list 
connected 
to other 
groups; or, 
used as an 
example 

Come 
into 
focus as 
a stand-
alone 
group 
with 
unique 
experie
nces; no 
in-
depth 
discussi
on of 
issues 

Group’s 
issues are 
discussed in 
detail; issues 
relate directly 
to the labour 
market and 
labour laws 

A recommendation 
to change the ESA 
or OLRA is made 
which name's the 
group and is in 
relation to an issue 
affecting the 
demographic 

 
Mere Mention 

The excerpts compiled within this category were chosen based on a 
demographic characteristic’s appearance in a list (e.g.: racialized people, women, 
young people, disabled people, etc.) or as an example of a broader issue. This often 
occurs in the context of identifying a list of those who are considered vulnerable 
in the labour market. For instance: 

 
“It is a similar story in Thunder Bay as it is elsewhere in the 
province for precarious workers. They are living on the edge. 
Many go to the food bank regularly. Inadequate wages and 
benefits exacerbate mental and physical health problems. 
Children’s lives are restricted. There is little time to participate 
in community activities. Precarious low wage jobs are heavily 
represented by women (many single mothers), Aboriginal 
people, recent immigrants and young people” (Poverty Free 
Thunder Bay, 2015, 3). 
 

90 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



This quote demonstrates the way young people are mentioned as part of a list of 
people experiencing precarity. By doing so, the authors are speaking more to the 
issue of precarity rather than the specific experiences of millennials. This occurs 
again when they are used as an example: 
 

“Recent research on the economic and labour market impact of 
EPL has found that strict EPL can reduce job flows, negatively 
impact the employment prospects of some vulnerable groups 
(e.g. youth), reduce productivity, and impede economic 
growth” (Apotex, 2015, 11). 
 

If the submission or report only identifies the group through a mere mention, then 
it would be difficult to develop an intersectional policy response as they are taken 
up as part of a group rather than a unique demographic requiring their own 
analysis.  
 
Nod 

This category was applied to sections of text in which millennial 
characteristics appeared as a stand-alone problem, and not attached to other 
groups of people or issues. Millennials are spoken about as a unique group with 
their particular issues regarding participation in the workforce. When millennials 
are discussed in this context, they suddenly come into focus as a group 
experiencing vulnerability and precarity in a unique way.  Below are a number of 
examples to illustrate this appearance: 

 
“Compared to other Ontario employees subject to the ESA, a 
more significant percentage of employees in small firms are 
employed part-time (25%) or on a temporary basis (17%). And 
young employees (ages 15-29) are also concentrated in small 
firms. In short, the current exemption for PEL exacerbates 
labour market insecurity for employees already experiencing 
social disadvantages and precariousness in employment” 
(Closing the Employment Standards Gap 1, 2016, p 38).  
 
“The growth of so-called non-standard employment is itself a 
symptom of the growing power imbalance between employers 
and workers. With good jobs hard to find and a tattered safety 

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 91



net, people must take whatever is offered – temporary jobs, jobs 
where agencies rake a commission off their wages, jobs offering 
too few hours, multiple jobs, jobs without benefits or even 
meeting minimum standards, or accepting contract or phony 
“self-employment” status at the cost of ESA protections. Young 
workers are particularly vulnerable” (International Association 
of Machinist and Aerospace Workers1, 2015, 4).  
 

The excerpts in this category highlight the way millennials are spoken about as a 
distinct group with their own experiences of marginalization in the labour force.  
 
Substantive   

This category extends beyond an acknowledgement of the stand-alone 
nature of the group and represents a substantive discussion or elaboration of an 
issue related to millennials. This is where the seeds an intersectional analysis 
would appear. The excerpts identify concrete employment issues, barriers, and 
strategies. They reflect an analysis of the concerns this group has about their 
futures and how the current laws impact their participation in the workforce. It 
also highlights different perspectives on millennials' labour force participation 
from industry and employers who discuss the role millennials occupy as their 
employees, and the perceived benefits of part-time and temporary employment 
for this group.  

 
“In addition, among the women we have interviewed, there is a 
shared desire for job-protected sick leave. "I worry about 
making ends meet…paying for the rent, transportation and the 
other necessities. There isn't anything left. I feel bad about 
getting sick and that I have to choose between work and health. 
If I lose hours or any of my jobs, I'm afraid we will end up in 
one of the shelters." The above expression of anxiety is spoken 
by a younger refugee woman, a university graduate who is 
juggling 3 part-time jobs in order to support her parent with 
disabilities and her siblings, as well pay her student loan” (Ng, 
2016, 2). 

 
“Expected long tenure with one employer may be high for 
incumbent older workers, but many new entrants to the 

92 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



workforce cannot expect to have “lifetime” long-tenured jobs 
and a semblance of job stability with the same, often unionized, 
employer as did earlier generations. Younger workers can 
expect to start off in limited-term contracts or in internships 
(sometimes unpaid), or self-employment, and can expect to 
change careers often working for different employers” (Murray 
& Mitchell, 2017, 54). 
 

The issues presented in the above excerpts highlight the realities of millennials 
and a declaration that their experiences of precarity need to be addressed.  
 
Recommendation  

This category is applied when demographic characteristics are named as 
part of a recommendation or solution. All submissions were coded for 
recommendations but it was beyond the scope of this study to determine whether 
substantive appearances lead to recommendations. For instance:  

“Unifor strongly recommends that the exemptions and 
variations listed in category 1 of Existing Exemptions (page 
161) should be removed immediately and workers in these 
seven categories (IT workers, pharmacists, managers and 
supervisors, residential care workers, building superintendents, 
janitors and caretakers, students and liquor servers) have the 
full protection of the ESA” (Unifor, 2016, 38). 

“Cover all classes of worker and employers under the ESA 
without any exemptions. That would include younger workers, 
farm workers, workers with shorter tenure and managerial 
staff” (Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, 2015, 10). 

Recommendations speak to specific changes that need to be made to the OLRA 
or ESA in order to address the substantive issues impacting millennials’ workforce 
participation. 
 
Findings 

The findings presented are discussed in relation to the two Phases in 
which the submissions were received by the CWR.  In the first Phase of 

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 93



submissions, the results reveal that demographic characteristics appeared a total 
of 300 times, whereas in the second Phase, they appeared 245 (for a total of 545 
times in all submissions in which demographic identifiers appeared), and 39 times 
in the CWR final report.  

Table 4 displays the cumulative count of both sets of submissions both 
by the terms searched and the type of representation. Of all the codes, the largest 
is substantive representation. Within this code, the terms used most frequently 
were: student (213) and young (161). However, it is important to note that the 
largest degree of substantive representation was clustered in only 19 submissions 
across both Phases. This indicates that millennials and their relationship to labour 
laws and the workforce were only discussed substantively in 4.4%20 of the 
submissions. 

Integral to the research question is whether the presence of group 
characteristics in the community consultation process made an impact on the 
subsequent policy document. To explore this question, the same codes were 
applied to the CWR final report. Table 5 demonstrates that within the CWR final 
report millennial demographics appeared 39 times, with the majority located 
within the substantive category. Students accounted for a larger portion of the 
substantive comments as there was an entire subheading addressing the issues of 
the ESA student exemption from the 3-hour21 rule which was followed by a 
recommendation to eliminate this from the labour laws. This was the only 
recommendation that was reflected in the submissions and the final report which 
used millennial demographic identifiers.   
 
Table 4: Total Frequency of Appearance of Demographic Characteristics in 
Phase 1 and 2 Submissions to the Changing Workplaces Review 
 

Terms/
Type Mention Nod Substantive Recommendation 

Total 
by 

Terms 
Student 22 21 145 25 213 

 
20 Cluster of 19 substantive submissions divided by the total 427 submissions times 100 
equals 4.4% 
21 The 3-hour rule “establishes minimum pay for employees whose shifts are normally 
longer than three hours, but are sent home after working fewer than three hours” (Vosko, 
Noack, & Thomas, 2016, p. 61) 

94 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Young 33 40 79 9 161 
Youth 22 9 41 4 76 
Generat
ion 3 16 24 0 43 
Millenn
ial 0 0 52 0 52 
Total 
by Type 80 86 341 38 545 

 
Table 5: Frequency of Appearance of Demographic Characteristics in the 
Changing Workplaces Review Final Report  
 

Terms/
Type Mention Nod Substantive Recommendation 

Total 
by Type 

Student 3 1 15 1 20 
Youth 4 3 2 0 9 
Young 4 1 3 0 8 
Generat
ion 0 1 0 0 1 
Millenn
ial 0 1 0 0 1 
Total 
by 
Terms 11 7 20 1 39 

 
 Notably, the top terms used to describe millennials in the submissions 
were student, young, and young. Constructing the group in this way connotes a 
temporary state of being in the labour market. Madison (2005) highlights the 
importance of representation in research. The author argues the way people are 
represented is often how they are taken up. These labels signify phases of life that 
someone can move through. Such a temporality may allow policymakers to 
normalize precarity during these periods as passing and therefore resistant to 
make an effort to change the outcomes for these groups.  Whereas a more fixed 
term such as millennials identifies a generational group that continues to suffer 

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 95



the impacts of precarious labour throughout their lifetimes. The next section will 
discuss the implications of these findings on millennials.  
 
Discussion          

Representation in the policy process was a principle concern in this 
research. As such, the study sought to operationalise representation through the 
development of four categories that reflect a scale of representation. The study 
asked if millennials are represented in submissions to the CWR and the final 
report, and if so, to what degree and how. We found that millennials were 
represented in a quarter of all submissions to the review22. While they appeared in 
a quarter of the submissions, the substantive representation was clustered in only 
4.4% of all submissions (or 19 submissions in both Phase 1 and Phase 2). Further, 
Phase 2 submissions revealed a stronger presence of substantive comments. This 
finding could be attributed to the nature of Phase 2 submissions as responses to 
the interim report. It is possible that the public responded to the lack of 
representation in this interim report with more substantive comments regarding 
millennials in the second round of consultations. This may explain why they were 
only discussed substantively 20 times in the CWR. In the CWR, these occurrences 
were in seven paragraphs of a 420-page report.      

At the policy level, the limited presence of substantive representation 
across the submissions would suggest that millennials are being grouped under 
the heading of vulnerable or precarious along with other groups. Although many 
groups may face similar concerns, this resulted in a nominal consideration of 
millennials as facing unique challenges. Another reason for the liminal presence 
is the way millennials were predominantly framed as young, youth, and students; 
therefore, inhabiting a temporary state of precarity. As one would expect, this 
similar pattern of nominal consideration was reflected in the CWR final report 
which only came forward with one recommendation aimed explicitly at 
millennials: the elimination of the student exemption to the 3-hour rule.  

Using the lens of an IPBA, it is vital that the voices of the most vulnerable 
be present in the consultation process to create a nuanced, accurate response to 
the issues identified by marginalized communities (Hankivsky & Cormier, 2011). 
These findings have implications for an IPBA as millennials were nominally 
present in the final report and appeared in only one recommendation. This can 

 
22 Number of submissions in which demographic characteristics appeared (108; includes 
OECD and OPSEUPYWC) divided by total submission (427) times 100 equals 25.29 

96 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



suggest a connection between a low frequency of appearance in the community 
consultation process of policy formulation and limited uptake of the group's 
concerns in the final policy document. Additionally, this policy was not 
intersectional as it did not reflect the experiences and challenges for millennials 
that were well articulated in the substantive excerpts. It is worrisome that this 
group was not given specific attention as it will soon become one of the largest 
demographics in the labour force.  

Further, this study responds to the research question: how are 
millennials and the employment concerns they face taken up in the CWR final 
report? As there is only one recommendation that used millennial demographic 
characteristics, it was unlikely their issues would have been taken up in a way that 
would make an impact on subsequent policy decisions. Given their intense but 
limited representation in these policy documents, millennials are not represented 
as a serious consideration of labour policy. Consequently, although millennials 
received substantive representation in this policy process, their outcomes are 
limited to modest gains afforded to the larger category of those in precarious 
work.     

Shortly after the release of the CWR, the Ontario Liberal government 
passed new legislation on November 22, informed, in part, by the CWR final 
report. Bill 148 – the Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act 2017, provides amendments 
to the OLRA and the ESA. Notable changes included a rise in the Ontario 
minimum wage to $14 per hour in 2018 and $15 per hour in 2019 followed by 
yearly adjustments to the minimum wage in line with inflation. Additional 
provisions regarding notification of scheduling changes, equal pay for part-time 
and temporary help workers, regulation around employee misclassification, and 
redress some of the more limiting aspects of union certification, among others, 
were also implemented (Ontario Ministry of Labour, 2017). A number of labour 
organisations have lauded many of the proposed changes to the OLRA and ESA. 
The Ontario office of the Canadian Centre for Policy’s Alternatives’ analysis of the 
report noted that the rise in minimum wage will universally support vulnerable 
Ontarians (Macdonald, 2017). Other aspects of the proposed legislation will 
support equal pay for equal work and dis-incentivize employers from using temp 
agencies (Block, 2017). The new legislation addresses some of the most 
egregiously exploitative practices that millennials encounter in the precarious 
labour market. 

The community consultations for the CWR was an important aspect of 
the policy process that led to Bill 148. A significant ongoing challenge for 

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 97



millennials will be disrupting the idea of precarity as the permanent economic 
status, as the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance suggested. There are already 
traces of this discourse in the CWR final report. One of the most telling statements 
is found in the comments made within the CWR final report by the Advisors in 
regards to employment tenure:  

 
“Expected long tenure with one employer may be high for 
incumbent older workers, but many new entrants to the 
workforce cannot expect to have "lifetime" long-tenured jobs 
and a semblance of job stability with the same, often unionised, 
employer as did earlier generations. Younger workers can 
expect to start off in limited-term contracts or in internships 
(sometimes unpaid), or self-employment, and can expect to 
change careers often working for different employers” (Mitchell 
& Murray, 2017, 54).   
 

The notion that precarity is the new “reality” must be disrupted to protect the 
future of the millennial generation and the Ontario economy as a whole.   

As millennials were grouped under the label of vulnerable workers, any 
benefit this group gains will be experienced by millennials in some capacity. This 
is primarily based on ideas put forward by intersectionality policy theorists that 
demonstrate how recognizing common issues and barriers across identity groups 
that can be collectively addressed through policy responses (Hankivsky & 
Cormier, 2011; Parken, 2010). However, to truly address the complexities of 
millennials’ access and engagement in the labour market, their issues must be 
represented more fully in policy and then monitored to detect and remedy 
problems of inequality. Intersectional policy creation seeks to attend to the unique 
experiences of different groups and thereby “prevents the distinctions between 
forms of inequalities from being lost and provides for an inquiry that would 
capture both individual and group disadvantages" (Hankivsky & Cormier, 2011, 
266). Using this approach, policymakers would actively examine the challenges 
facing a group of people by placing their uniqueness at the fore of the policy 
process.  
 As stated earlier, this study does not seek to essentialize a group as 
diverse as the millennials.  Instead, our research demonstrates that without an 
intersectional analysis, achieved through effective representation, millennials’ 
unique experiences of marginalisation are not addressed in the policy process. 

98 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Our study suggests that effective representation must be substantive and appear 
extensively in the policy process. As we found, a small clustering of substantive 
representation, while important, can be overlooked by policymakers, especially 
when concerns run counter to the dominant framing of the issue.  As we will see 
below, any degree of representation can be disregarded and erased with changes 
in the political landscape.   
 
Conclusion 

This research presents a methodology for evaluating the types of 
representation that appear in the policy process. We offer this scale as the 
beginning of an IBPA in the area of community consultation. The results suggest 
a correlation between weak representation at the community consultation phase 
and the outcomes in the final policy. Although the subsequent proposed 
legislation could benefit millennials, the opportunity for an IBPA that considers 
the unique experiences within this cohort was missed.  

Millennials were represented in the submissions to the CWR and the 
final report through a cluster of substantive comments. Though they appeared in 
only a quarter of submissions, their concerns were heard by the Advisors through 
the tireless activism of community groups, labour organizations, and other allies. 
Importantly, millennials and their allies have challenged the status quo of 
precarity and seek to disrupt its damaging presence in the lives of workers.   

Many of the proposed changes to the ESA and OLRA were brought to 
the fore by activists, labour unions, and anti-poverty organizations who worked 
tirelessly to identify the acute realities of precarity and mobilise for change. Future 
research would do well to compare the policy outcomes of Bill 148 with the 
demands of these organisations through a social movement and class lens. This 
also provides an opportunity to consider how the different arguments about 
precarity and millennials were constructed, and whether we can move towards 
understandings that can form the basis for collective class action. 

Although Bill 148 – Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs is a move in the right 
direction, with the recent election of a majority Progressive Conservative 
government in Ontario in June 2018, labour gains have been severely impacted.   
Premier Doug Ford has set a path of cancelling and eliminating many Liberal 
reforms in the name of reducing Ontario’s debt.  Cuts have targeted young people, 
French language programs, Indigenous education training, midwifery, women, 
low wage earners and the environment (Beattie, 2018).   

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 99



With respect to labour reforms, the PC government introduced Bill 47, 
Making Ontario Open for Business Act, on October 23, 2018. This new legislation 
has repealed many of the “modest” workplace changes introduced by Bill 148, 
including the elimination of the two paid sick days and pay equity for part-time 
and casual workers.  Most notably, any planned increases to the $14.00 minimum 
wage have been deterred until October 2020, with current projections indicating 
that the increase to $15.00/hour will now not occur until 2024 as they will be 
linked to inflation. Instead, the Ford government has eliminated income tax on 
incomes of these than $30,000, though this clearly disadvantages low-income 
earners that would have been better off with an increase in the minimum wage 
(Rushowy & Mojtehedzadeh, 2018). 

While Ontarians brace themselves for new levels of precarity and 
vulnerability, the importance of representation and intersectionality-based policy 
analysis have never been more important.  Further research that monitors and 
documents the new legislation, Bill 47, and its path of deepening precarity is 
necessary, along with on-going advocacy and activism.  Otherwise, we risk the 
very real fear that millennials and other vulnerable groups will continue to be left 
behind in this era of "progressive" policy. 
 
References 
 
André, A & Depaux, S. (2017). The quality of representation and satisfaction with 

democracy: The consequences of citizen-elite policy and process 
congruence. Political Behavior, 39(2), 377–397.  

Apotex (2015). Changing workplaces review submissions. Retrieved from 
http://lancasterhouse.com/pdf/ontario-cwr/individual-
employers/Apotex-CWR-submission.pdf  

Beattie, S. (2018, December 21). The winners and losers of Ontario Premier Doug 
Ford’s  spending cuts so far. Huffington Post Canada. Retrieved from 
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/12/21/doug-ford 
cuts_a_23624751/  

Berg, B. (2007).  Qualitative research methods for the social sciences (6th ed.). Long 
Beach: California State University. 

Bishwakarma, R., Hunt, V., & Zajicek, A. (2007). Educating Dalit women: Beyond 
a one-dimensional policy formulation. Himalaya, the Journal of the 
Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 27(1), 27 – 39.  

100 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Block, S. (2017). A $15 minimum wage in Ontario: A game changer. Canadian 
Centre for Policy Alternative Ontario: Behind the Numbers. Retrieved 
from http://behindthenumbers.ca/2017/05/31/15-minimum-wage-
ontario/#comments  

Bonfiglio, R. A. (2008). Shorthanded or shortsightedness? The downside of 
generational  labeling. About Campus, 13(3), 30 – 32.  

Broido, E. M. (2004). Understanding diversity in Millennial students. In M. D. 
Coomes, & R. DeBard (Eds.), Serving the Millennial generation (pp. 73-
85). San Francisco: JosseyBass. 

Canadian Labour Congress (2016). Diving without a parachute: Young Canadians 
versus a precarious economy. Retrieved from 
http://documents.clcctc.ca/sep/YoungWorkersReport.pdf  

Canadian Press (2016, October 22). Get used to multiple careers, finance minister 
says.  Toronto Star. Retrieved from 
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/10/22/finance-minister-
says-canadians- should-get-used-to-short-term-employment.html  

Closing the Employment Standards Enforcement Gap (2016). Improving 
employment standards and their enforcement in Ontario: A research brief 
addressing options identified in the interim report of the changing 
workplaces review. Retrieved from 
https://cirhr.library.utoronto.ca/sites/cirhredit.library.utoronto.ca/files/
ontario_workplace_review_phase2/Closing%20the%20ES%20Enforce
ment%20Gap%20%281%29.pdf  

Code, L. (1995). Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations. New York & 
London: Routledge. 

Cranford, C., Vosko, L., & Zukewich, N. (2003a). Precarious employment in the 
Canadian labour market: A statistical portrait. Just Labour, 3, 6 – 22.  

Cranford, C., Vosko, L., & Zukewich, N. (2003b). The gender of precarious 
employment in Canada. Relations Industrielles, 58(3), 454 – 482. 

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, 
and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241-
1299. 

Deal, J.J., Altman, D. G., & Rogelberg, S.G. (2010). Millennials at work: What we 
know and what we need to do (if anything). Journal of Business and 
Psycholgy, 25(2), 191–199.  

Dedier, J. (2015). Ontario Economic Development Society: Employment Standards 
Act, 2000 reform guidance. Retrieved from 

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 101



https://cirhr.library.utoronto.ca/sites/cirhr.library.utoronto.ca/files/ont
ario_workplace_review/Ontario%20Economic%20Development%20So
ciety.pdf   

Fleury, D. & Cahill, E. (2018, November 21). Precarious employment in Canada: 
An overview. HillNotes: Research and Analysis from Canada’s Library of 
Parliament. Retrieved from https://hillnotes.ca/2018/11/21/precarious-
employment-in-canada-an-overview/   

Geobey, S. (2013). The young and the jobless: Youth unemployment in Ontario. 
Toronto: Between the Lines Press. 

Goldman Sachs (n.d.). Millennials coming of age. Retrieved from 
http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/pages/millennials/   

Government of Ontario (2016). Mandate letter progress: Labour. Retrieved from 
https://www.ontario.ca/page/mandate-letter-progress-labour  

Government of Ontario (2017). Terms of Reference – Changing Workplaces 
Review. Retrieved from 
https://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/about/workplace/terms.php  

Hankivsky, O. & Cormier, R. (2011). Intersectionality and public policy: Some 
lessons from existing models. Political Research Quarterly, 64(1), 217 – 
229.  

Hankivsky, O., Grace, D. Hunting, G., Ferlatte, O., Clark, N., Fridkin, A., 
Glesbrecht, M., Rudrum, S., & Laviolette, T. (2012). Intersectionality-
based policy analysis. In Hankivsky, O. (Ed.). An Intersectionality-Based 
Policy Analysis Framework. Vancouver, BC: Institute for 
Intersectionality Research and Policy, Simon Fraser  University. 

Hankivsky, O., Grace, D., Hunting, G., Giesbrecht, M., Fridkin, A., Rudrum, S., 
Ferlatte, O & Clark, N. (2014). An intersectionality-based policy analysis 
framework: Critical reflections on a methodology for advancing equity. 
International Journal for Equity in Health, 13(119), 1 – 16.  

Holt, S., Marques, J., & Way, D. (2012). Bracing for the millennial workforce: 
Looking for ways to inspire generation Y. Journal of Leadership, 
Accountability and Ethics, 9(6), 81 – 93.  

Howe, N., & Strauss, W. (2000). Millennials rising: The next great generation. New 
York: Vintage Books. 

International Labour Organization (2013). Global employment trends for youth 
2013: A  generation at risk. Retrieved from 
http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@dcomm/docu
ments/publicati on/wcms_212423.pdf  

102 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (2015). 
Submission to the Ontario changing workplaces review by the 
International Association of Machinists  and Aerospace Workers. 
Retrieved from http://lancasterhouse.com/pdf/ontario-cwr/trade-
unions-employee-assoc/International-Association-of-Machinists-and-
Aerospace-Workers-1.pdf  

Kalleberg, A. (2011). Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious 
Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s. New York: 
Russell Sage Foundation. 

Kershaw, P. (2017). Code red: Ontario is the second worst economy in Canada for 
younger generations. Generation Squeeze. Retrieved from 
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/gensqueeze/pages/136/attach
ments/original/1491359455/GS_CodeRed_ON_second_worst_econom
y_2017-04-04.pdf?1491359455  

Kuron, L. K. J., Lyons, S. T., Schweitzer, L., & Ng, E. S. W. (2015). Millennials’ 
work values: Differences across the school to work transition. Personnel 
Review, 44(6), 991-1009.  

Law Commission of Ontario (2012). Vulnerable workers and precarious work: 
Final report. Retrieved from http://www.lco-cdo.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/vulnerable-workers-final-report.pdf   

Lewchuk, W. (2017). Precarious jobs: Where are they, and how to they affect well-
being? The Economics and Labour Relations Review, 28(3),402 – 419.  

Lewchuk, W., LaFleche, M., Dyson, D., Goldring, L., Meisner, A., Procyk, 
S.,Vrankulj, S. (2013). It’s more than poverty: Employment precarity and 
household well-being. Retrieved from 
https://pepsouwt.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/its-more-than-poverty- 
feb-2013.pdf  

Macdonald, D. (2017). Ontario needs a raise: Who benefits from a $15 minimum 
wage?  Toronto: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative Ontario 
Office. Retrieved from https://www.policyalternatives.ca/on-needs-raise 

Madison, D.S. (2005). Introduction to critical ethnography: Theory and method. 
In Critical ethnography: Methods, ethics and performance. (pp. 1-16). 
Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.    

Mitchell, C. M. & Murray, J. C. (2017). The changing workplaces review: An agenda 
for  workplace rights final report. Retrieved from 
https://www.ontario.ca/document/changing-workplaces-review-final-

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 103



report?_ga=2.17213689.1104755073.1503587882-
1830860145.1503330308  

Mirrlees, T. (2015). A critique of the millennial: A retreat from and return to class. 
Alternate Routes, 26(1), 277 – 304.  

Ng, E., Lyons, S., & Schweitzer, L. (2017). Millennials in Canada: Young workers 
in a  challenging labour market. In Parry, E. & McCarthy, J. (Eds.) 
The Palgrave Handbook of Age and Diversity and Work (pp. 325 – 344). 
London: Palgrave Macmillan Publishers UK. 

Ng (2016). Precarious Work Precarious, Health Research – Centre for Labour 
Management Relations Ryerson. Retrieved from 
https://cirhr.library.utoronto.ca/sites/cirhredit.library.utoronto.ca/files/
ontario_workplace_review_phase2/Precarious%20Work%2C%20Preca
rious%20Health%20Research%20-%20CLMR%20Ryerson.pdf  

Ng, W., Sundar, A., Poole, J., Karpoche, B., Abdillahi, I., Arat-Koc, S., Benjamin, 
A., &  Galabuzi, G.-E. (2016). “Working so hard and still so poor!” A 
public health crisis in the making:  The health impacts of precarious work 
on racialized refugee and immigrant women. Retrieved from 
http://www.ryerson.ca/content/dam/clmr/Publications/Final%20Repor
ts/Final%20Report%20%20A%20Public%20Health%20Crisis%20in%20
the%20Making%20The%20Health%20Impacts%20of%20Precarious%2
0Work%20on%20Racialized%20Refugee%20and%20Immigrant%20W
omen.pdf  

Norris, D. (2015). Millennials: The newest, biggest and most diverse target market. 
Environics Analytics. Retrieved from 
http://www.environicsanalytics.ca/docs/default-source/eauc2015-
presentations/dougnorris-afternoonplenary.pdf?sfvrsn=6%20 

Office of the Premier (2014). Building Ontario Up: Speech from the Throne to 
open the 41st Parliament of Ontario. Retrieved from 
https://news.ontario.ca/opo/en/2014/07/building-ontario-up-speech-
from-the-throne.html?_ga=2.240585603.1486175719.1495205643-
2000362590.1485628289 

Ontario Ministry of Labour (2017). Proposed changes to Ontario’s employment 
and labour laws. Retrieved from 
https://news.ontario.ca/mol/en/2017/05/proposed-changes-to-
ontarios-employment-and-labour-laws.html   

Ontario Public Service Employees Union Provincial Young Workers Committee 
(2015). The precarious generation: Submitted to the changing workplaces 

104 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



review. Retrieved from  
https://cirhr.library.utoronto.ca/sites/cirhr.library.utoronto.ca/files/ont
ario_workplace_review/OPSEU%20Provincial%20Young%20Workers
%20Committee.pdf  

Organisation for the Economic Co-operation and Development (2001). Citizens 
as partners: Information, consultation and public participation in policy-
making. Retrieved from http://www.internationalbudget.org/wp-
content/uploads/Citizens-as-Partners-OECD-Handbook.pdf    

Parken, A. (2010). A multi-strand approach to promoting equalities and human 
rights in  policy making. Policy & Politics, 38(1), 79 – 99.   

Pedwell, T. (2016, October 25). Trudeau heckled, booed at youth labor forum in 
Ottawa.  Toronto Star. Retrieved from 
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/10/25/trudeau-heckled-
booed-at-youth- labour-forum-in-ottawa.html  

Pînzaru, F., Vatamanescu, E.-M., Mitan, A., Savulescu, R., Vitelar, A., Noaghea, 
C., &  Balan,  M. (2016). Millennials at work: Investigating the 
specificity of Generation Y versus other generations. Management 
Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy, 4(2),  173 –192.  

Poverty Free Thunder Bay (2015). Submission to the special advisors for the 
changing workplaces review. Retrieved from 
http://lancasterhouse.com/pdf/ontario-cwr/anti-poverty-advocacy-
groups/Poverty-Free-Thunder-Bay.pdf  

Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (2015). RNAO’s response to the 
changing workplaces review: Submission to the Ministry of Labour. 
Retrieved from http://lancasterhouse.com/pdf/ontario-cwr/other-
misc/Registered-Nurses-Association-of-Ontario.pdf  

Rushowy, K. & Mojtehedzadeh, S. (2018, October 23). Ontario moves to hold 
minimum wage at $14 and end paid sick days. Toronto Star. Retrieved 
from https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/2018/10/23/ontario-
moves-to-hold-minimum-wage-at-14-and-end-paid-sick-days.html    

Silver, S., Shields, J., Wilson, S., & Scholtz, A. (2005). The excluded, the vulnerable 
and the reintegrated in a neoliberal era: Qualitative dimensions of the 
unemployment experience. Socialist Studies, 1(1), 31 – 56.  

Shier, M., Graham, J., Goitam, M., & Eisenstat, M. (2014). Young adult 
experiences with securing employment: Perceptions of and experiences 
with employer discrimination and expectations hinder successful labour 
market attachment. Canadian Review of Social Policy, 70(1), 48 – 63.  

Precarity as the New Reality?  | 105



Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: 
Bloomsbury Academic. 

Stanford, J. (2008). Economics for everyone: A short guide to the economics of 
capitalism. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing; Ottawa: Canadian Centre for 
Policy Alternatives. 

Statistics Canada (2016). Table 051-001: Estimates of population, by age group and 
sex for July 1, Canada, provinces and territories, annual (persona unless 
otherwise notes), CANISM (database). Retrieved from 
http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/cansim/a26?id=510001   

Twenge, J. M. (2006). Generation me: Why today’s young Americans are more 
confident, assertive, entitled--and more miserable than ever before. New 
York: Free Press. 

Unifor (2015). Building balance, fairness, and opportunity in Ontario’s labour 
market:  Submission by Unifor to the Ontario changing workplaces 
consultation. Retrieved from http://lancasterhouse.com/pdf/ontario-
cwr/trade-unions-employee-assoc/Unifor.pdf  
Vosko, L., Noack, A., and Thomas, M. (2016). How Far Does the 
Employment Standards Act, 2000, Extend and What are the Gaps in 
Coverage? Retrieved from 
https://cirhr.library.utoronto.ca/sites/cirhr.library.utoronto.ca/files/rese
archprojects/Vosko%20Noack%20Thomas-5-
%20ESA%20Exemptions.pdf.  

Worth, N. (2016). Feeling precarious: Millennials women and work. Society and 
Space, 34(4), 601–616.   

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

106 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Building Justice in the American Labor Movement 

Biko Koenig23 & Deva Woodly24 
 

ABSTRACT: To what extent does the American Labor 
Movement conceive of justice in ways beyond narrow 
economic benefits? To assess the notion of justice in discourse 
and practice, this paper examines cases from three dominant 
models of labor organizing in the United States: traditional 
unions, worker centers, and the hybrid form of the Fight for 
$15. Over four case studies, we use interviews with workers and 
organizers, analytical accounts of the differing organizational 
structures of these labor advocacy groups, and discourse 
analysis of organizational materials of each to illuminate the 
strengths and weaknesses of each model. Through this 
examination, we show that across all organizing forms relatively 
little attention is paid developing and articulating the reasons 
why a strong labor movement is necessary and beneficial to 
either workers as a class or society as a whole. We then submit 
that if labor is to be a movement, rather than a collection of 
service organizations, then it is important to put forward an 
idea of “labor justice” which can help members of the polity 
reconceptualize the relationship between work, leisure, care, 
dignity, productivity, and prosperity.  
 
KEYWORDS: labor unions; worker centers; labor movement; 
justice; inequality 
 

 
 
 

 
23 Authors presented alphabetically. Biko Koenig is Assistant Professor of Government and 
Public Policy at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, USA. Email: 
Biko.Koenig@fandm.edu 
24 Deva Woodly is Associate Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research in 
New York City, NY, USA. Email: WoodlyD@newschool.edu 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 107



Introduction 
Over the course of more than a century, the US Labor movement has 

been one of evolving strategy, membership, and politics. From the shop and trade-
based strikes of the 19th century to the Federations and Employee Unions of the 
20th, the espoused values, human composition, and goals of labor have shifted in 
numerous ways. During the early 20th century, workers made significant gains, 
not only winning the legal right to collective bargaining, but perhaps more 
importantly, altering expectations about treatment, compensation, and work 
schedules. Indeed, the greatest success of the American labor movement may have 
been changing common understandings about how society ought to evaluate 
work and working conditions (Woodly 2015). Labor organizers mobilized to 
establish a new common sense about what employers owed workers (including 
reasonably safe working conditions and a family wage for white male workers) as 
well as what workers deserved as members of society (e.g., 8 hours of work, 8 
hours of sleep, and 8 hours of leisure per day).   

However, during in the mid-20th century, after the hard-won common 
sense of the labor movement was codified into law in the National Labor Relations 
Act and took on institutional life as the National Labor Relations Board, the vision 
of the labor movement evolved once again. Labor unions became more stable, 
winning many contractual victories from the 1930s to the 1970s. At the same time, 
the movement’s focus on changing the way that the general public thinks about 
work, its conditions, and what workers deserve, gave way to more targeted 
concerns about servicing members and narrow electoral claims. In many ways, 
the social movement aspect of labor movements dwindled under the obligations 
of becoming part of the federal bureaucracy (Piven and Cloward 1977, Fantasia 
1988). Today, modern labor organizations are diverse in their commitment to 
organizing new categories of workers, especially the women, people of color, and 
immigrants who increasingly constitute American service workers, as well as 
whether and how they articulate the benefits of organized labor to both potential 
members and the general public (Fine 2006, Milkman 2006, Warren 2010). 
However, overall, 21st century labor organizers and leaders have focused much 
less than their earlier counterparts on communicating a vision of work and 
workers that contributes to fair working and living conditions for all.  

Like previous scholars, we are interested in the processes that would lead 
a collection of unions and union-like groups to function like a dynamic social 
movement, to "reconcile the short-term and economistic demands of [union] 
workers with longer-term concerns for generalized social and economic justice" 

108 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



(Levi 2003, 46). In particular we are interested in the ability of developing and 
deploying discursive frames and concrete practices that actively transcend the 
interest-based economistic framework of unions-as-bureaucracies in order to 
push toward a new understanding of labor justice.  

In the following, we argue that for labor to become a vibrant and 
influential force in American politics, the movement needs to claim explicitly 
political space in line with their common-sense arguments of the early 20th 
century. This goes beyond throwing financial support behind political parties and 
endorsing candidates. Labor must instead articulate a political vision that aims to 
persuade both potential union members and the general polity that rethinking the 
meaning of labor and prosperity is necessary political work. We propose that labor 
organizations could accomplish this by developing and deploying a political 
philosophy, what we dub labor justice, that explains why workers must organize 
as well as what that organizing accomplishes in broad terms. Crucially, the 
audience for these claims needs to target society at large, rather than workers 
already within or directly adjacent to labor organizations. Promisingly, labor 
already has the makings of such a political vision in some of the discourse that 
unions and workers centers have been using in recent years. We see this in public 
opinion research where the importance of unions and key policy issues such as 
the $15 per hour minimum wage has increased, particularly among people 18-29 
(Maniam 2017). However, labor activists and unions must continue to move 
towards more consistently speaking and acting in ways that move beyond wage 
claims and member service. Previous research has shown that when social 
movements make resonant arguments consistently over time they are able to 
change the common sense governing public debate thereby creating a more 
favorable political environment for their claims. Below, we develop a notion of 
what labor justice might look like while evaluating its presence across a number 
of labor organizations.  

First, a definition of terms. Labor justice is a concept that centers the 
dignity that all workers are due and insists on certain rights of self-determination 
for the entirety of society, such as work-life balance, dignified treatment, and the 
power to participate in setting the terms of employment. Importantly, labor 
justice points to the need for all people to have the ability to holistically flourish 
in society, and not simply have higher wages. What organized labor requires, if it 
is to be a political force akin to a movement, is a set of values that speaks not only 
to economic justice in the distributive register, but one that speaks to the 
capability of all workers to live lives free of oppression, the “institutional 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 109



constraint on self-development” (developing capabilities) and domination the 
“institutional constraint on self-determination” (choosing actions) (Young 1990, 
37). Finally, in providing a framework for an equitable society, labor justice is 
intersectional because the oppression of working people operates through the 
structural relations of race, gender, immigration status, sexuality, and heritage. In 
light of these facts, economic justice, which is primarily concerned with wage 
distribution, is but one component of labor justice.  

This discussion should be set against a background of steady union 
decline. From the highpoint in the 1950s where almost a third of the economy was 
unionized, in 2018 only 10.5 percent of workers were in a labor union (U.S. 
Bureau of Labor Statistics 2019). This number is buoyed by the relatively high 
unionization rate of public employees at 33.9 percent. In the private sector, union 
density stands at 6.4 percent, the lowest in over a century (U.S. Bureau of Labor 
Statistics 2019). While the Democratic Party is typically seen as a union ally, 
membership dropped over 10 percent, or 1.5 million members, during President 
Obama’s two terms in office (Dirnbach, 2017). Absent a strong political vision, it 
should not come as a surprise that members have come to subscribe to widely 
varying worldviews, including reactionary positions on race, immigration, and 
nationalism seen in strong union support for Donald Trump in the 2016 
presidential election. And while worker centers have emerged as an innovative 
approach to the labor movement, their numbers remain small relative to that of 
traditional unions.  

Our arguments build off of ongoing discussions of the potential for 
revitalization in the labor movement, a topic that has garnered much attention by 
scholars and practitioners in the past few decades. A core argument in this thread 
is the need for unions to return to aggressive organizing, an approach that faces 
internal challenges of organizational conservatism where “many members have 
learned to view their union as quasi-insurance companies or lawyers” (Milkman 
and Voss 2004, 6). Several remedies to this challenge have been articulated by 
labor scholars, including attention to specific tactics (or combinations of tactics), 
broad strategies, organizational partnerships, and the structure of groups 
themselves (Bronfenbrenner, Friedman, et al. 1998; Sherman and Voss 2000; 
Bronfenbrenner and Hickey 2004; Milkman and Voss 2004; Ness 2014). Further 
scholarship has examined the role of low-wage and immigrant workers as a 
necessary component to revitalization (Apostolidis 2010; Milkman and Ott 2014; 
Adler, Tapia and Turner 2014). These arguments connect to scholarship on 
worker centers and “alt-labor” organizations that support immigrant and low 

110 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



wage workers but exist outside of traditional union models (Fine 2006; Eidelson 
2013; Milkman and Ott 2014). A further line of analysis called for “social 
movement unionism” focused on rank-and-file activism connected to broader 
movements in society that, together, would drive institutional change for issues 
like labor law and political economy (Freeman and Rogers 1999; Robinson 2000; 
Levi 2003; Fantasia and Voss 2004). 

The discussion below builds on these insights and shares an affinity with 
social movement unionism and its aim to build a labor movement that works on 
behalf of the entire society. Within this, our primary concern is that efforts that 
focus solely on economic redistribution for members, even when they are 
successful, have not been enough to transform the labor movement into a 
dynamic social movement with clear aims for social and economic justice. We 
make the case for labor justice both theoretically and empirically.  

In the following sections, we lay out the concept of labor justice and 
indicate what makes it both more expansive and more persuasive than the idea of 
economic justice. After making the theoretical case, we advance our argument by 
doing an empirical examination of the discourse and practices of four different 
labor organizations across the spectrum of organizational models from traditional 
union to workers center, including: Service Employees International Union 
(SEIU), Fight For $15 (FF15), Restaurant Opportunities Center - United (ROC), 
and the Laundry Workers Center (LWC). Our aim here is not to draw conclusions 
about the labor movement in general, nor to make causal arguments about the 
nature of movement work. Rather, we utilize interviews with leaders and 
participants in the organizations and content analysis of informational materials 
to answer the question: to what extent do these labor organizations express an idea 
of labor justice, and how can we see their ideas about the labor movement’s 
purpose carried out in their work?  
 
Theorizing Labor Justice 

Most labor appeals are in the frame of economic justice. Economic 
justice is an account of fairness that derives from what Iris Young calls the 
“distributive paradigm,” the view that what justice requires can be wholly fulfilled 
by focusing on the “the allocation of material goods […] and social positions” 
(Young 1990, 15). On this account, the problem of oppression can be solved by 
making sure each individual or group of individuals has a fair allocation of goods. 
A diverse array of theories of justice, from John Rawls’ liberalism to Karl Marx’s 
communism, are based on this premise. Young contends that while the 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 111



distribution of material goods and social position is a necessary component of 
what justice requires, it is not sufficient. Instead, Young indicates that we must 
pay attention to the social beliefs and institutional processes that have produced 
distributive patterns. Otherwise, distributive corrections only have short-term 
effects because the social beliefs and practices that made maldistribution seem 
inevitable, convenient, or even favorable, will cause people to re-inscribe old 
intent onto new policies in the way that they interpret or implement them. For 
this reason, it is important for social movements and others who seek to change 
the status quo to change the way people think about their issue(s) in addition to 
changing policy.  

In the case of labor, this means that a successful labor movement must 
change people’s ideas about what work requires and what all people who work for 
a living deserve at the same time that they seek specific wage increases or other 
benefits. As discussed below, this dilemma maps all too well onto the wage 
victories of the Fight for $15. If activists and unions focus almost exclusively on 
raising wages, they reproduce a neoliberal view of the worker which values them 
only as producers, possessors, and consumers of goods rather than people who 
create value not only through the work that they do, but also through the lives 
they live. From this perspective justice requires not only fair distribution of wages 
and benefits, but also non-material goods like decision-making power, practical 
opportunity (which is distinct from formal opportunities that may be difficult or 
impossible to access), self-respect, care, and leisure time. That means workers 
must have not only the right to negotiate the conditions of their employment but 
must also have a reasonable capability to exercise those rights. Effecting the 
capability of workers to determine the conditions of their labor would require re-
thinking how unions and other organizations in the labor movement 
conceptualize their task. Labor organizations would need to focus less on 
improving wages and conditions in particular workplaces and more on 
questioning and seeking to change the beliefs, practices, and institutional 
processes that create the conditions of oppression and domination that govern 
most people who work for a living, most of the time.  

In this way, labor justice requires respect for the labor of life, not only in 
terms of fair compensation for economic work, but also in terms of 
acknowledging and supporting non-economic labors such as care work, civic 
engagement, or play. Through this lens, having a predictable schedule, paid sick 
leave, accessible, quality healthcare and childcare, and affordable leisure are as 
important as having a higher hourly wage. This is because the acknowledgement 

112 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



and support of non-wage-earning labor is necessary to ensure that the full benefit 
of wage-related gains can accrue to people who work for a living. Labor justice, 
then, is not solely about the re-allocation of resources, but is instead about the 
elimination of domination and oppression from the institutions that govern work. 
Importantly, this framing makes it easier for labor to ally with other movements 
seeking to eliminate institutional domination and oppression.  

The elements of labor justice that we can glean from how workers 
describe what just relations might look like concretely: dignity, respect, fairness, 
work-life balance, and security. This deeper definition of labor justice is not only 
intrinsically important for the labor movement to better understand the 
appropriate scope of work required to improve people’s lives, but also is essential 
if the movement hopes to be politically persuasive. Recent research in political 
science has shown that when those who challenge the status quo are able to make 
resonant arguments consistently over time, they are able to shift common sense 
on the topic, thereby creating a political environment in which they can more 
effectively advance their claims (Baumgartner, DeBoef and Boydstun 2008; 
Woodly 2015; Jackson 2018; Williams 2018). For example, Deva Woodly has 
shown that marriage equality movement was able to change the political common 
sense on that issue over a 10 years period by making resonant arguments that 
reframed the status quo understanding of gay families and what counted as gay 
rights (2018). Similar findings indicating that those challenging the status quo can 
shift public understanding through the use of what Mustafa Menshawy has 
described as “effective’ discourse that [is] coherent, consistent, and resonant …, 
as well as a ‘credible’ discourse which combine[s] words with actions” have been 
produced across several topic areas including the gun debate (Kerr 2018) and 
foreign policy (Menshawy 2018). Put simply, the arguments that movement actors 
make have concrete impacts on their potential for societal change.  

 
An Examination of Discourse & Practice 

In the next section, we examine four different organizational formations 
in the labor movement to assess the presence of Labor Justice within their 
discourse and practices. We have intentionally selected a range of cases to gauge 
the presence of labor justice in a variety of contexts, and this is not intended to be 
a representative sample. The inclusion of two worker centers—ROC and LWC—
responds to the importance of the model in contemporary organizing, while the 
hybrid FF15 has achieved significant gains in minimum wage policy victories 
(Luce 2015). SEIU stands out for its sheer size in the movement as well as for its 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 113



role in creating the FF15. For each organization, we briefly describe the 
characteristics of their organizational form. Then, using interviews and public-
facing documents, we examine their understanding of what broad political 
philosophy underlies their work. In addition to scrutinizing their discourse, we 
observe the institutional habits and practices that either support or contradict 
their stated worldview. Finally, we consider whether and to what extent any of the 
organizations have a theory and/or practice of labor justice, as we have described 
it.  

In concrete terms, what would a labor justice approach to a campaign or 
an organization look like? In the first order, claims must be made to impact the 
material lives of working people: contract negotiations, higher wages, and 
improved benefits all fit into this category. While all labor campaigns involve this 
type of claim making, labor justice also looks to increase the power of working 
people relative to economic, political, and social institutions. Most labor 
movement work actively empowers insiders and members in this institutional 
struggle, but routinely frame this part of the work as secondary to the material 
ends of new policies or better contracts. For unions in particular, empowerment 
is typically limited to members. A labor justice approach should seek to empower 
working people broadly, and not only through policies, such as a higher minimum 
wage, that impact large numbers of people. This empowerment must also include 
the symbolic work of impacting widely held norms of work, life, and fairness. It 
may be the case that the institutional structures of formal labor unions mean that 
they have no choice but to make narrow distributive claims in service of a 
continually declining membership base. But as labor continues to lose density, it 
also continues to lose the normative war about what working life could be. If we 
are to move beyond the neo-liberal hegemony of work and society, we must 
construct our own framework of common sense to contest the status quo 
(Smucker 2017). That many labor organizations note these issues in their 
discourse is telling of their importance, but as the next section shows, few groups 
put them into practice with much strength.  
 
SEIU International 

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the largest 
U.S. labor unions in terms of membership size, organizes workers in three core 
sectors: health care, government, and property services. Like many labor unions, 
SEIU is organized as a federation, with an international branch that acts as the 
head and local unions that oversee most day to day operations with members. 

114 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Internationals do a great deal in terms of providing rhetorical leadership, setting 
national agendas for the union, and lobbying to political groups. Much of the 
energy for a renewed approach to organizing comes from international unions, 
who can set organizing mandates, provide funding for locals, and occasionally 
even directly organize workers in areas without a local union. Nonetheless, locals 
have a considerable amount of autonomy in regard to international unions, and 
are the main site of most organizing efforts and contact with workers.  

Given the ability of SEIU International to set the agenda, we look to how 
they frame the purpose and activity of the union. SEIU is an exemplary case of a 
union that is conscious of the need to organize new workers. While they have 
received much criticism for their efforts, beginning in the mid-1990s SEIU 
became the leader of new organizing efforts across the AFL-CIO (Estreicher 2006; 
Early 2009). This included the development of a new tactical repertoires for union 
campaigns, including strategic corporate research, working outside of NLRA 
union elections to win recognition, and running campaigns with community 
support outside of the workplace.  

As such it is no surprise that the discourse of SEIU International contains 
the strongest labor justice framings we found in the research. Of course, much of 
the language still contains economic justice frames that are geared specifically 
towards the benefits that unions provide only for their members, such as higher 
wages, benefits, and job security. We do not contend that such language should 
be absent, only that it be contextualized in a larger, principled and explicitly 
political framework. Some examples of this kind of framing include:  

 
"SEIU is a center of unity for underpaid workers who are 
demanding that our economy works for everyone - not just the 
rich" (SEIU N.D.). 
 
"Unions lead the fight today for better lives for all working 
people" (SEIU N.D. ). 
 
"When unions join together and behind advocating for better 
wages, non-union workers then see the power of unity and start 
demanding better treatment themselves. Unions help all 
working families a stronger voice in our communities, in the 
political arena, and in the global economy” (SEIU N.D.). 
 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 115



The common theme here is the universality of the appeals. Unions and the labor 
movement are going to make beneficial changes for everyone, not only members. 
Here, unions may lead but the ultimate aims are a society that provides both 
material and non-material benefits for workers regardless of membership. The 
economy that “works for everyone” will of course include “good jobs” and “better 
wages,” but it will also transform society through the “collective power” of the 
working class, that will have a “stronger voice” from local communities to global 
economies and overall “better lives.” 

The upshot is that the enactment of this discourse requires a set of 
practices much different from servicing union contracts and handing grievances. 
In fact, a labor justice practice needs to extend beyond narrow tactics that only 
seek to organize new members. Given the placement of the International, it is 
challenging to directly assess their practices. As such, we turn to two different 
SEIU local campaigns to add additional layers of analysis. The FF15 campaign acts 
as both an organization in its own right, and a yardstick for how SEIU 
International puts a labor justice framework into practice. We also look at SEIU 
healthcare campaigns in Pennsylvania, which are run by local unions but 
rhetorically folded into the FF15 national campaign by the international. Both 
show that, in practice, the economic justice frame guides union activity, while 
labor justice appeals are mostly rhetorical.  
 
The Fight for $15 

While the origin of the Fight for $15 in Chicago and Fast Food Forward 
is uncertain, SEIU began funding and directing fast-food worker organizing 
efforts of these and similar organizations across the country by 2012 (Brown 2013, 
Gupta 2013). By 2014, these groups coalesced under the universal name Fight for 
$15, and by 2015 SEIU had expanded the discourse to include low-wage workers 
across the economy, including healthcare workers, adjunct university professors, 
and child care workers.  

The demand of FF15 is straightforward: “$15 and a union!” As both a 
slogan and goal, the demand is easy to explain and provocative given current 
minimum wages and lack of union representation prevalent throughout low-wage 
industries. It presents itself as a demand to both government and employers. This 
has been especially effective in regards to minimum wage legislation, given that 
states and some cities are able to set their own wage floors and thus allow for a 
national slogan that can be tailored locally (Oswald, 2016). Tactically, FF15 uses a 
mix of labor strikes, direct action, and a savvy social media presence. The city or 

116 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



nation-wide one-day strike is the main tool of FF15: workers from across the low-
wage economy strike together on a single day, usually attending a march or a rally 
that includes progressive figures from religious groups, the local community, and 
elected government. Usually these strikes do not shut down entire stores, but draw 
small numbers of workers from individual locations across a city. The widespread 
but thin nature of strike participation means that low-wage workers are less able 
to use their economic power through impacts in production, but instead gain 
influence by raising awareness and striking blows against corporate reputations.  

Nonetheless, the discourse of FF15 is parallel to most labor unions in the 
call for economic justice. Given that the wage demand is in the name of the 
organization, it should come as no surprise that much of their language is 
connected to better pay, along with pointing out the bad job conditions that are 
typical of low wage work: 

 
“As underpaid workers, we know what it’s like to struggle to get 
by. 
We can barely pay our bills and put food on the table for our 
families. McDonald’s answer? Go on food stamps. … 
On top of it all, even McDonald’s knows it takes $15/hr to get 
by. 
We work hard and we’re still stuck in poverty. It’s not right. 
That’s why we fight back. 
It’s time to pay people enough to survive. 
It’s time to pay people what they deserve. 
It’s time for $15/hr and union rights” (Fight for $15 N.D.). 
 

FF15 touts its tactics, calling the hikes in minimum wage that it has won, “raises”:  
 

“We know striking works. By standing up and going on strike 
for $15/hr and union rights we won $62 billion in raises for 22 
million people across the country. 
We’ve taken the fight to more than 300 cities in the US and 60 
countries across the world on 6 different continents. 
Now, $15/hr is law in California and New York State. It’s law in 
Seattle, in Pennsylvania for nursing home and hospital workers, 
and for municipal employees in countless cities. Mayors, city 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 117



councils, and state governments across the nation have 
announced $15 initiatives. 
What’s the secret to our success? You. Me. All of us who have 
come together to tell our stories of what it’s like trying to live on 
low pay from corporations like McDonald’s. 
It’s important to remember that we don’t win because 
politicians or companies decide out of the goodness of their 
hearts to give us raises. We win because workers stand together 
to make them give us what we deserve” (Fight for $15 N.D.). 
 

Unlike the language of SEIU international, The Fight for $15 fits squarely into the 
economic justice frame: the power of its wage claim is real, but it is also its limit. 
What does FF15 offer workers who do not fall under the proposed wage floor? 
What goals exist outside of the higher wages? It is true that anyone can attend the 
strike events, escort workers to and from their work, or engage with social media 
campaigns. But to do so as an activist who is not a low-wage worker means that it 
is not your movement, and you remain on the outside. 

Though FF15 has won important increases in municipal and state 
minimum wages, these policy victories are limited. First, most of the legislated 
wage increases phase in over a period of 3 to 5 years. Ney York State, for example, 
passed a minimum wage increase in 2016. However, the $15 minimum wage won’t 
be fully phased in until 2021. Further, a family of four living in New York State 
where one person works full time making $15 an hour will still be impoverished. 
Further, the calls for union recognition have been less successful, with SEIU 
officials indicating they have no clear idea what unionization would actually look 
like in practice, and labor commentators noting there is no strategy in place for 
FF15 to transition into a labor union (Zahn 2016). 

The very nature of these victories shows the importance of the Labor 
Justice frame: higher minimum wages have not translated into broader social 
movements nor narrower union revitalization. In short, though these increases 
are incredibly important for workers in low-wage jobs, they illustrate the 
limitations of distributive claims—the $15 wage rate, while unimaginable before 
FF15 started demanding it 5 years ago, also doesn’t effectively address the problem 
of working poverty nor the structural issues that spur rising inequality. To put it 
differently, it does not attempt to construct new norms around work and society. 
After the $15 wage is won, what goal can organizers push for which will utilize the 
discursive and organizational foundation that they have laid? It remains unclear 

118 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



what will happen in locations that have won higher minimum wages, but the 
nature of the discourse means that there will be little room left to engage in new 
campaigns without a fundamental shift in mission and vision. Perhaps the “…and 
a union” component will lead to a second round of organizing, but this seems 
unlikely given the lack of planning and the fact that no workers have been directly 
unionized by the campaign.  

To be clear, this only becomes a problem when we assume that the 
economic claims of the FF15 will somehow lead to broader practices of Labor 
Justice. As a movement with a specific, and powerful, policy agenda, FF15 is 
incredibly successful. But if this is the upper limit of transformative political 
action, then more attention must be paid to how movements seek to change the 
status quo in the wake of policy victories.  

One might argue that we are calling for too expansive a notion of justice, 
and that the power of FF15 is in its narrowness and simplicity: $15 and a union. 
Why should a single campaign have to provide discursive and practical entry 
points for all workers? In response we offer that FF15 (and similar national 
campaigns such as UFCW’s OUR Walmart) is arguably the most innovative 
attempt at organizing workers that unions have used in modern times. However, 
the inability of FF15 to spur either a renewal in union membership or mass 
mobilization that leads to significant political changes, we must ask what is 
missing. As we see it, it is worth exploring a justice argument that has universal 
applicability for workers everywhere. A staffer from SEIU illustrates the limits of 
the FF15 frame in a discussion about outreach: 

 
“Fight for 15 is built around fast food workers … I was knocking 
doors around the election, and I knocked on the door of a 
woman who's a phlebotomist, and she started talking to me 
about, ‘I make 13 [an hour], and I'm a phlebotomist, I had some 
education to do this, why would anyone think that fast food 
workers should make 15? It’s totally outrageous!’” (SEUI Staff 
member, Interview, 2016). 
 
Their response to the woman was to draw on principle: fast food workers 

shouldn’t have to earn poverty wages. The challenge is that it sets up an 
insider/outsider binary. For a college educated phlebotomist making $13 an hour, 
increasing the minimum wage to $15 would likely be in her material interests. But 
without a discourse that is built to include her, she cannot square her own 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 119



experiences with that of other workers. A movement with a labor justice frame 
could have something to offer her, both in terms of a compelling argument as well 
as a pathway to participation. 

 
SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania 

Over 20,000 health care workers in Pennsylvania are members of SEIU 
Healthcare Pennsylvania (HCPA), including doctors, nurses, aides, and food 
workers in hospitals and nursing home across the state. As a local that is part of 
the SEIU federation, HCPA is more directly concerned with the day to day 
business of running a union: servicing members, processing grievances, and 
preparing for contract negotiations and their attendant mobilization campaigns. 
While national data suggests that unions today organize at lower rates, even the 
most conservative unions must routinely mobilize members during contract 
negotiations. SEIU stands as the most aggressive union when it comes to 
organizing new members, and locals are required to spend 20 percent of their 
budgets on organizers (SEIU Staff Member, Interview, 2017).  

Given SEIU’s commitment to organizing, we would expect the discourse 
of HCPA to be attentive to organizing new members, while at the same time 
focused on the clientelist aspects of member relations. HCPA frames its mission 
this way: 

 
“Nurses and healthcare workers are diverse, but we all we want: 
Wages that attract and retain professionals to do caregiving 
work, with no employer paying less than $15 an hour for any 
healthcare job; 
Union rights for all workers to organize and raise their voices 
to change the healthcare industry for the better; and 
Access to quality, affordable healthcare for everyone in our 
communities. … 
We want a more just and humane society. 
We won’t stop fighting until we get it” (Abromaitis 2016). 
 

The discourse here is mixed. There is language about what unionization offers its 
members in terms of higher wages and a stronger voice on the job. At the same 
time, there are principles of a “just and humane society” and a focus on the 
importance of healthy communities. The broader language around healthcare is a 
reflection of the industry. Interviews with HCPA staffers revealed that most 

120 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



contract and unionization campaigns are constructed in a narrative frame that 
emphasizes high standards of patient care as the primary concern, and better 
wages and job conditions as a necessary pathway to those high standards. While 
this framework is certainly strategic in negotiations with employers, staffers 
indicate that it also comes directly from workers—sometimes organizers must 
push workers to demand better wages alongside other problems of delivering 
quality care, such as high turnover and cheap materials. Such a challenge indicates 
the power of common sense to frame how people understand their economic 
situation.  

The question for our purposes is, how does this added layer of caregiving 
and a concern for healthcare intersect with the discourse and practice of justice? 
In the first instance, some of the language used by HCPA fits into a labor justice 
frame, especially calls for a just society and fairness for everyone. However, it is 
not clear how one might support the process of building a fair society save through 
joining the union as a health care worker. Further, even the caregiving language 
remains in a distributive frame seen mainly as a material benefit. One could 
imagine that healthcare and the patient-caregiver relationship present fertile 
ground for more emancipatory calls for justice, presenting entre for taking a 
position on an issue as topical as universal healthcare, for example. Instead we see 
a similar discourse to that of FF15: join a union, get better wages, improve your 
job, and somehow that might deliver us to a new future.  

We should note that many union workers are not necessarily interested 
in questions of labor justice as we discuss them: 

 
“I think some of our best nurses, our activist nurses, get it [the 
problem of low-wage work], but it doesn't speak to their core 
primary issue, which is staffing and nursing conditions … we 
have some of our best activist nurses who come out to our Fight 
for 15 rallies, and they understand the connection between 
poverty and health, and that's the other thing, when they deal 
with poor people, coming in, they understand the link between 
the healthcare system and inequality and poverty, but I 
wouldn't say that that's the majority of our nurse membership 
feels that way. I think that, like in many unions the majority of 
workers, speaking transparently, are focused on: how do we 
band together to improve our working conditions, and the 
healthcare system more broadly and so on, but the Fight for 15 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 121



doesn't speak as strongly to them certainly, as many other issues 
that the union tries to engage in” (SEIU Staff member, 
Interview, 2016). 
 

Nonetheless, staffers noted that in the 2016 contract, non-nurse workers at the 
bottom of the pay scale received the largest raises, upwards of $3 per hour. At the 
same time, senior nurse staff received very small raises. This came out of the drive 
to get all workers at or close to the $15 per hour wage, but required that nurses 
recognized and advocated for higher wages for support staff, even at the cost of 
their own raises. An organizer from SEIU explains how this played out during the 
contract negotiation: 
 

“… so that conversation happened first with organizers, then 
with the rank-and-file leadership, and when we're getting the 
point of trying to settle these contracts, we were having that 
same conversation with committees, and that same 
conversation during the ratification drive. You had really good 
rank-and-file leaders who are going to get a very small raise 
compared to other workers, who ‘we can't be working next to 
people who are living in poverty, because they can't provide 
good care. It affects our ability to provide good care.’ You have 
LPNs [licensed practical nurses] who are higher wage workers 
in the nursing home who will get small raises, who'll say, ‘I can't 
do my job next when I've got people next to me who are 
working double shifts, or two jobs.’ Really, in many ways, I 
found that to be one of the most fascinating parts of the 
campaign” (SEIU organizer, interview, 2016). 
 

Similar to the employers, this is explained through the power of the national FF15 
campaign in changing the norms on wages and poverty for workers inside the 
union. The way that the Fight for $15, the largest, most innovative labor 
movement campaign in modern times, has created real benefits for healthcare 
workers once again highlights both the value of the discourse as well as its real 
limits. Sparking solidarity between workers is no small accomplishment, 
particularly when it requires material sacrifice, such as the nurses who took a 
smaller raise.  

122 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



At the same time, it does not offer either a language or a practice geared 
towards mass mobilization and societal change: workers outside of the union. 
Rather, it finds its highest value in the narrow, nuanced world of contract 
negotiations. In its discourse, how does it offer a vision for a better world that is 
accessible to all workers? In its practice, how does it scale up and create spaces for 
participation outside of trade union membership? Union staffers themselves are 
concerned about these questions.  

 
"We're also trying to think how you get to scale, and how you 
create the space for people to participate in organizations that 
doesn't look like a traditional trade union necessarily. And the 
way we've been thinking about it in home care, what do you 
need to do that, you need a list or access to the workers, you 
need a way for people to self-sustain the organization, you need 
a way to build power and change" (SEIU Staff member, 
interview, 2016). 
 

As they put it, unions may have figured out how to raise the issue of minimum 
wage and impact the lives of some workers, but have not yet figured out the 
practice of mass mobilization, or as the staffer asks, "How does the union with its 
limited set of resources create a lot of doors for people to participate in lots of 
different ways?” Unions have not yet found an answer. 
 
Restaurant Opportunities Center - United 

ROC, founded by Saru Jayaraman and Fekkak Mamdouh in 2001, was 
initiated to help the survivors of the Windows on the World restaurant in the wake 
of 9/11. As a worker center, they do not organize people into collective bargaining 
agreements, but have historically run workplace justice campaigns to combat 
wage theft, discrimination, and unsafe working conditions at specific worksites. 
Their strategy has evolved significantly since that time, and today they seek to 
work on several things at once: informing workers about their rights, collecting 
research for campaigns, organizing employers to take the “high road to 
profitability,” and lobbying state legislatures for favorable policy. ROC is also 
explicitly collaborative and often works in coalition with other organizations, 
including acting as a founding member of the Food Chain Workers Alliance and 
forming a partnership for the “On Fair Wage” campaign with FF15 in New York.  

 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 123



The discourse and practice of ROC today is best summarized in their 
own words: 

 
“The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United) 
engages workers, employers and consumers to improve wages 
and working conditions in the restaurant industry. The ROC-
United model involves “surrounding the industry” by 
simultaneously: (1) Engaging workers through job training and 
placement […] (2) Engaging employers through our “high 
road” employer association RAISE [… and] (3) Engaging 
consumers through Diners United […]” (Restaurant 
Opportunities Center-United N.D.) 
 
As we see from their self-description, ROC has abandoned its more 

confrontational tactics of workplace justice campaigns to embrace an advocacy 
role and building relationships with owners and customers. A core tenant of this 
approach is the articulation of “high road” strategies for employers: paying higher 
wages, offering benefits, and building safe worksites. The highroad strategy is 
translated into action through programs like RAISE and the Restaurant 
Roundtable, which organize and bring together restaurant owners to learn about 
high road employment practices.  

Workers, for their part, are the focus of career training programs and 
know your rights political education. Although these activities are not ideological 
at all, Catherine Bennett of ROC describes her work in deeply principled terms:  

 
“At the end of the day, it’s about power. It’s about economic 
power and so many of us don’t have that … [Labor justice is 
about] fairness –its about dignity and professionalism being 
ascribed to the work, no matter what it is. We work to live, that 
should be valued and regarded as important. Work deserved to 
be lifted up, recognized and respected, especially the work of 
women and people of color [which is often denigrated].”  
 

She also describes the goal of ROC as having a balance between expert guided and 
worker-led initiatives. She admits that ROC does not always achieve that 
aspirational balance. “There is some tension. Some groups are more worker-led 
and concrete, while others are more top-down.” Further, sometimes people in the 

124 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



organization will say “in order to really be successful, we have to move legislation.” 
But Catherine wonders “do we?” She goes on to say, “we’re all struggling with the 
question of balance and we need to further interrogate it going forward.” 

She also notes that they don’t often “talk about structural change. We 
usually say ‘disruption,’ or ‘transformation,’ –amp up the rhetoric to ‘black-beret’ 
levels sometimes, but what we’re really talking about is structural change. Because 
we have to put changing the system, reinforcing solidarity, at the center of what 
we do. It’s not just about running trainings.”  

The practices of ROC are nonetheless limited in ways that are similar to 
FF15: their advocacy for abolishing the tipped minimum wage and training for 
employers to engage in high road employment practices can provide important 
material benefits to workers while offering little in the way of mobilization. 
Indeed, the place of workers as political agents for ROC’s work has been reduced 
over time, replaced with a focus on employers, consumers, and policy makers. At 
the same time, their advocacy programs, while drawing on languages of labor 
justice, do not surpass the distributive calls for wages that characterize the 
mainstream labor movement. 
 
Laundry Workers Center 

The Laundry Workers Center (LWC) is a worker center founded in the 
fall of 2011 to focus on worksite problems among low-income immigrant laundry 
workers throughout New York City. In short order, however, the LWC turned its 
attention to food retail, partnering with immigrant deli workers in the Hot and 
Crusty campaign, as profiled in the documentary The Hands that Feed. While 
their attention has remained in the food sector with campaigns at other 
restaurants, they have also successfully organized workers at two warehouses for 
B&H, a photography and video equipment company. Partnering with United 
Steel Workers (USW), LWC led a successful union drive that culminated in an 
NLRB election for over three hundred workers, though B&H ended up moving 
their facility out of state to escape the contract.  

In its discourse, LWC is worker-centric, with a bare-bones framework 
that focuses on fairness for workers in low-income industries. In most discussions 
of the work, the emphasis is on tactics and training, with a philosophy grounded 
in worker leadership and power.  

 
“Laundry Workers Center’s political philosophy is rooted in 
organizing workers and building their leadership skills and 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 125



political power through a variety of worker-led tools and tactics, 
including taking direct action at the workplace, serving as their 
own voice to media outlets, speaking out as member of the 
community, and acting as their own advocates at the 
negotiation table. Our members are primarily low-income 
immigrant workers who believe in social and economic justice. 
LWC campaigns are all member-led” (Laundry Workers Center 
N.D.). 
 

Here they present themselves as a tightly focused organization whose main 
concern is the hands-on training of workers in their core demographic.  

It is worth pointing out that the workers involved in LWC campaigns are 
often at the crossroads of multiple labor policy infractions similar to workers in 
the restaurant industry that are ROC’s focus. The demands of many LWC 
campaigns involve stopping illegal practices, such as unpaid or forced overtime 
and subminimum wages. For the B&H campaign, problems included erratic 
scheduling, the handling of chemical hazards without training or equipment, 
unsafe working speeds with heavy packaging, and overt harassment of immigrant 
employees. In typical fashion, the campaign was met with heavy resistance from 
the company, who fired organizers and refused to recognize the union. The 
upshot is that for most workers involved in LWC campaigns, their jobs involve 
some of the worst wages and conditions in our economy—simply getting 
minimum wages can be a big improvement in their lives. Further, many workers 
are afraid of speaking out due to fears of losing their jobs and, in some cases, being 
threatened with deportation. Given that these conditions tend to be standard 
practices in the low-wage economy, workers cannot easily move to a better job.  

The demographics of the workers combined with the employment 
challenges they face and LWC’s commitment to worker leadership leads to a 
unique model of organizing workers. As described to us by co-directors Rosanna 
Rodriguez and Mahoma Lopez, the core of the LWC model involves a training 
program called the Leadership Institute. The Institute provides the essentials of 
workplace organizing combined with political education: a history of the labor 
movement, how to speak with employers, engaging the media, and designing 
direct action campaigns. The institute is free, and attended by workers who come 
to LWC with a problem at their worksite. In fact, the only requirement attached 
to participating in the Institute is that workers must commit to putting what they 
learn into practice. Rather than acting as representatives of workers, the purpose 

126 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



of the LWC is to train and empower workers to develop and run their own 
campaign.  

 
“Well we cannot decide [what the campaign will look like] 
because it all depends on what the workers want. So we never 
decide beforehand. We always have the conversation, you 
know, ‘what do you want to see in your workplace?’ or ‘what is 
your ideal workplace?’ or ‘what is your goal? And then, we find 
a way to support that. But we never make the decision for 
workers” (Rosanna, Interview 2016). 
 

In and of itself, learning the details of organizing a labor drive can comfortably fit 
into an economic justice frame, especially when the main goals involve wages and 
benefits at specific worksites. However, while the goals of the workplace justice 
campaigns are focused on single worksites, their overall strategy recognizes that 
individual changes are not enough, something Mahoma noted in a previous 
interview: 
 

“Mahoma López, a leader at the [Hot and Crust Campaign] and 
now co-director of the center, remembers his first conversation 
with organizer Virgilio Aran. “He told us why it’s important to 
organize,” López said. Without organizing, even if you win back 
your stolen wages in court, “they will fire you, and you’ll go to 
some other place where you will be exploited” (Singh 2016). 
 

The goal of the Leadership Institute is thus to empower workers not only to lead 
campaigns at their worksite, but to become “liberated” in wider, dynamic sense. 
As Mahoma underlined, the direct-action component is key to this process.  
 

“…every time we launch a campaign, we occupy the workplace, 
the workers deliver a demands letter and, that's what we call 
Liberation Day. They have a lot of fear, and there is a lot 
pressure, it is a lot of... a lot of things together, inside of you… 
but that day when you go public, and you are the person who 
delivers the letter it’s like ‘okay, now it's my turn. I have a lot of 
people in the back support me.’ Every single worker who 
experiences that, that the liberation that's... everything changes. 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 127



You can see the people to next day with a new face, you know, 
‘okay, I did it!’ You know, they are waiting sometimes so many 
years. For some people who are exploited, they don't have that 
opportunity to confront [the employer] face to face. ‘I'm here, 
now it's my time. You have to respect me, and I am not gonna 
keep quiet’" (Mahoma, interview, 2016). 
 

Both Rosanna and Mahoma are explicit in that, while their campaigns involve 
important material benefits such as wages and better treatment, they also work 
within a justice framework geared towards empowering immigrant workers for 
the long-term. Political education and the actual work of campaigns are the tools 
of this empowerment. 
 

Rosanna: “I think like one of the way to break up the fear is 
more about political education. So, you know... that's the only 
way that people can understand. To empower people ... how 
they can, you know, take power. Ummm...and it is possible to 
break that fear … I mean, [justice and empowerment] can be 
about, you know, treatment. The treatment in the wages in term 
of having a living wage, and that the company respects and 
follows the law. It depends of all the necessity of the workers 
because every campaign is different. Even though we have 
common issues like wage theft or discrimination.  
 
Mahoma: “Yeah but also, when Laundry Workers Center says 
“justice,” It's just basically when the workers have the power. 
After a long process or at the end of the campaign the workers 
can step in front the boss and say, you know, ‘we need this, and 
we demand this, and we have no fear.’ You know, it's like just 
basically they become empowered. […] And yes that's justice 
because that person is not going to be oppressed no more. It's 
like, they are fighting for the people they represent themselves” 
(Rosanna and Mahoma, interview, 2016). 
 
Additionally, LWC makes strong efforts to bridge workplace justice 

issues with a wider political agenda. In the first place, they are involved in a range 
of wider political and policy issues, including legislation on wage theft and paid 

128 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



sick days. Given their roots in the immigrant community, they are also involved 
in a number of initiatives for immigrants that offer a wider justice framework: 

 
Mahoma: “The Laundry Workers Center, together with other 
organizations, we have launched a movement called 
Somos Visibles or “We are Visible.” We feel very proud to be 
part of this new movement. But we are part of this movement 
because want to fight for the recognition that all immigrant 
workers have the right to make decisions in their communities 
at the local level […] 
 
Rosanna: “So, it's not about the [2016 presidential election]. It's 
more about, if I am part of this community and I want to have 
a new school, or have a better park, or have better housing, I 
have the right to make a decision in my neighborhood and my 
community and be a part of that. Even though, if I'm an 
immigrant, or undocumented, I am living over here and I have 
the right to make decisions in my community” (Rosanna and 
Mahoma, interview, 2016). 
 

Drawing on the training of the Leadership Institute, Somos Invisibles uses 
community organizing and direct-action tactics to take their concepts of fairness 
out of the worksite and into the wider immigrant community.   
 
Conclusion  

Communication Workers of America (CWA) Regional Director Bob 
Master, quoting Martin Heidegger, puts the problem this way: “‘language is the 
house of being’ and people on the left have been homeless because we talk in veiled 
terms … Labor has underestimated the appeal of direct ideological challenge to 
the status quo, [but] it’s impossible to represent workers without a change in the 
entire power dynamic, that means an ideological fight.” Labor Justice is our 
proposed framework for this fight, one that must take place both conceptually and 
practically. Labor organizations must think together about what it means for 
people who work for a living to be able to live free of oppression and domination 
in the workplace and beyond. In addition, the practices of union organizing, 
campaigns, policy advocacy and other political engagement must make appeals 
beyond members and potential members, to society as a whole. Organizations 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 129



must think critically about their own practices and implement modes of 
organizing that open pathways for people from various social locations to 
participate. This is because, whether a person concerned with labor justice can be 
a member of the union, they should be able to be a member of the movement.  

 
References 
 
Abromaitis, Amelia. 2016. Forward Together – Our Statement of Purpose. 

November 16. http://www.seiuhcpa.org/2016/11/16/forward-together-
our-agenda-for-working-families/. 

Adler, Lee H., Maite Tapia, and Lowell Turner, . 2014. Mobilizing Against 
Inequality: Unions, Immigrant Workers, and the Crisis of Capitalism. 
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 

Apostolidis, Paul. 2010. Breaks in the Chain. Minneapolis, MN: University of 
Minnesota Press. 

Baumgartner, Frank, Susan DeBoef, and Amber Boydstun. 2008. The Decline of 
the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence. Cambridge University 
Press. 

Bronfenbrenner, Kate, and Robert Hickey. 2004. "Changing to Organize: A 
National Assessment of Union Organizing Strategies." In Rebuilding 
labor: Organizing and organizers in the new union movement, by Ruth 
Milkman and Kim Voss, 17-60. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. 

Bronfenbrenner, Kate, and Robert Hickey. 2004. "Changing to Organize: A 
National Assessment of Union Strategies." In Rebuilding Labor: 
Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement, edited by Ruth 
Milkman and Kim Voss. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 

Bronfenbrenner, Kate, and Tom Juravich. 1998. It Takes More than House Calls: 
Organizing to Win with Comprehensive Union-building Strategy. Ithaca: 
ILR Press. 

Bronfenbrenner, Kate, Sheldon Friedman, George W. Hurd, Rudolph A. Oswald, 
and Ronald L. Seeber. 1998. Organizing to Win: New Research on Union 
Strateies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 

Brown, Jenny. 2013. Fast Food Strikes: What's Cooking? June 24. 
http://www.labornotes.org/2013/06/fast-food-strikes-whats-cooking. 

Desilver, Drew. 2014. For most workers, real wages have barely budged for decades 
. October 9. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-
most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/. 

130 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



Dirnbach, Eric. 2017. Solidarity Forever? Union Membership Continues its Long 
Decline. Janurary 31. https://medium.com/@ericdirnbach/solidarity-
forever-union-membership-continues-its-long-decline-43d348b37b12. 

— 2017. Strike Out: The Number of Large Strikes Continues to Decline. February 
16. https://medium.com/@ericdirnbach/strike-out-the-number-of-
large-strikes-continues-to-decline-e9f505f79b60. 

Dubé, Lawrence E. 2016. NLRB Conducted More Elections in 2015, But Percentage 
of Union Wins Held Steady. March 2. https://www.bna.com/nlrb-
conducted-elections-n57982068022/. 

Early, Steve. 2009. "The Progressive Quandry about SEIU: A Tale of Two Letters 
to Andy Stern." Journal of Labor and Society 12 (4): 611-628. 

Elk, Mike. 2010. Sad, Startling Stats: Number of Union Elections, Strikes Continue 
Steady Decline. July 7. 
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6200/new_statistics_show_how
_much_power_the_labor_movement_has_lost/. 

Estreicher, Samuel. 2006. "Disunity within the House of Labor: Change to Win or 
to Stay the Course? ." Journal of Labor Research XXVII (4). 

Fantasia, Rick. 1988. Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and 
Contemporary American Workers. Berkeley, CA: University of California 
Press. 

Fight for $15. N.D. Why We Strike. http://fightfor15.org/why-we-strike/. 
Fine, Janice. 2006. Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the 

Dream. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 
Freeman, George B. , and Joel Rogers. 1999. What Workers Want. Ithaca, NY: 

Cornell University Press. 
Gupta, Arun. 2013. Fight for 15 Confidential. November 11. 

http://www.labornotes.org/2013/06/fast-food-strikes-whats-cooking. 
Jackson, Jenn M. 2018. "Black Americans and the "Crime Narrative": comments 

on the use of news frames and their impacts on public opinion formation 
." Politics, Groups, and Identities .  

Kalleberg, Arne L. 2012. "The Social Contract in an Era of Precarious Work." 
Pathways (Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality). 

Katz, Lawrence, and Alan Krueger. 2016. The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work 
Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015. NBER Working Paper 
Series, National Bureau of Economic Research. 

Kelber, Harry. 2005. ""AFL-CIO's 50 year organizing record under Meany, 
Kirkland, and Sweeny."." Truthout MAgazine. March 30. Accessed 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 131



November 13, 2013. http://www.truth-
out.org/archive/item/53349:aflcios-50year-organizing-record-under-
meany-kirkland-and-sweeney. 

Kerr, Selina. 2018. A Partisan Issue? Policy-Making and Guns in the United States. 
Glasgow, UK: Palgrave MacMillian . 

Laundry Workers Center. N.D. Our Mission. 
http://laundryworkerscenter.org/our-mission. 

Levi, Margaret. 2003. "Organizing Power: The Prospects for an American Labor 
Movement." Perspectives on Politics 1 (1): 45-68. 

Luce, Stephanie. 2015. "$15 per Hour or Bust: An Appraisal of the Higher Wages 
Movement." New Labor Forum 24 (2): 72-79. 

Maniam, Shiva. 2017. Most Americans See Labor Unions, Corporations Favorably 
. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/30/most-americans-
see-labor-unions-corporations-favorably/: Pew Research Center . 

Menshawy, Mustafa. 2018. "Constructing state, territory, and sovereignty in the 
Syrian Conflict." Politics .  

Milkman, Ruth. 2014. "Introduction: Toward a New Labor Movement? 
Organizing New York City's Precariat." In New Labor in New York, 
edited by Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 
Press. 

— 2006. L.A. Story: Immigrant worker and the future of the US Labor Movement. 
New York City, NY: Russel Sage Foundaiton. 

Milkman, Ruth, and Ed Ott, . 2014. New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers 
and the Future of the Labor Movement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 
Press. 

Milkman, Ruth, and Kim Voss, . 2004. Rebuilding Labor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell 
University Press. 

Mishell, Lawrence, and Will Kimball. 2015. Unions’ Decline and the Rise of the Top 
10 Percent’s Share of Income. Feburary 3. 
http://www.epi.org/publication/unions-decline-and-the-rise-of-the-
top-10-percents-share-of-income/. 

Moody, Kim. 2016. The State of American Labor. June. 
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/precariat-labor-us-workers-
uber-walmart-gig-economy/. 

Ness, Immanuel, ed. 2014. New Forms of Worker Organization. Oakland, CA: PM 
Press. 

132 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



O'Sullivan, Terry. October 26, 2016. "“To All Members of the LIUNA General 
Executive Board, District Councils, and Local Unions in the United 
States.” ." Open Letter, Laborers International Union of North America. 

Oswalt, Michael M. 2016. "Improvisational Unionism." California Law Review 87. 
Oxfam America. 2016. "Poverty in the US." Oxfam America. https://policy-

practice.oxfamamerica.org/work/poverty-in-the-us/low-wage-map/. 
Pew Research Center. 2016. The State of American Jobs. October 6. 

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/the-state-of-american-
jobs/. 

Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard Cloward. 1977. Poor People's Movements: Why 
They Succeed, How They Fail. New York: Pantheon Books. 

Restaurant Opportunities Center-United. N.D. Our Work. 
http://rocunited.org/our-work/. 

Rick, Fantasia, and Kim Voss. 2004. Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor 
Movement. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 

Robinson, Ian. 2000. "Neoliberal Restructuring and U.S. Unions: Towards Social 
Movement Unionism?"." Critical Sociology 26 (1-2): 109-138. 

SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania. 2016. "Forward Together - 2016 Annual Report." 
SEIU. N.D. . The Union Advantage. http://www.seiu.org/cards/5-good-reasons-

to-unite-at-work/the-union-advantage-is-substantial/p2. 
— N.D. Working together, union members have the strength. . 

http://www.seiu.org/cards/5-good-reasons-to-unite-at-work. 
Sherman, Rachel, and Kim Voss. 2000. "Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy: 

Union Revitalization in the American Labor Movement." American 
Journal of Sociology 106 (2): 303-349. 

Singh, Sonia. 2016. B&H Workers Train to Win . June 8. 
(http://www.labornotes.org/2016/06/bh-workers-train-win). 

Smucker, Jonathan Matthew. 2016. Hegemony How To: A Roadmap for Radicals. 
Oakland, CA: AK Press. 

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2017. Economic News Release - Employment 
Situation Summary. August 4. 
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm. 

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2019. Economic News Release - Union Members 
Summary. U.S. Department of Labor. 

— 2015. Monthly Labor Review. December. 
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/occupational-employment-
projections-to-2024.htm . 

Building Justice in the American Labour Movement | 133



Warren, Dorian. 2010. "The American Labor Movement in the Age of Obama: 
The Challenges and Opportunities of a Racialized Political Economy." 
Perspectives on Politics 8 (3): 847-860. 

Williams, H. Howell. 2018. "From Family Values to Religious Freedom: 
Conservative Discourse and the Politics of Gay Rights." New Political 
Science .  

Woodly, Deva. 2018. "The Importance of Public Meaning for Political 
Persuasion." Perspectives on Politics 22-35. 

— 2015. The Politics of Common Sense . New York: Oxford University Press . 
Young, Iris. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference . Princeton, NJ: Princeton 

University Press. 
Zahn, Max. 2016. In These Times. May 2. Accessed September 10, 2017. 

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/19094/fight-for-15-union-
minimum-wage-seiu. 

 
 

 

134 | Austerity and the Precarization of Everyday Life



www.alternateroutes.ca
Twitter: @ARjcsr

Alternate Routes: 
A Journal of Critical Social Research

Vol. 30, Issue 2 - 2019

In 2019, the International Labour Organization celebrated its 100th anniversary. The ILO 
used the occasion to renew calls for improved opportunities and working conditions, 
social protections and collective bargaining rights. There is a vast gap between this 
call for living wages and fundamental rights, and the reality most workers face in the 
workplace. For decades, employers have been attempting to increase profit margins by 
re-organizing work through the use of subcontracting, offshoring, converting full-time 
jobs to part-time and temporary, and reclassifying direct employees as independent 
contractors. In addition to employer-led demands for concessions, state power has often 
supported these measures by introducing anti-labour reforms: at times imposing austerity 
from above or leading the charge from below, and at other times creating the conditions 
for capital to lead an assault against working class institutions built up over generations. 
Although liberal democratic capitalism is losing legitimacy, what comes next may be a 
form of right-wing populism supported by nationalist politicians and movements looking 
to close borders and blame immigrants and trade for economic insecurity. Will unions 
look to protectionism or internationalism? Will working class movements be able to unite 
across borders to radically shift the balance of class power relations?

alternate
routesAR

 “In an era in which ‘progressive neoliberalism’ has frayed, reactionary populism 
is on the rise and climate breakdown is visibly accelerating, activists and activist-scholars 
need the insightful and penetrating analyses that Alternate Routes provides – if we are to 
understand and change our troubled world.” 

~ William K. Carroll, Professor of Sociology, University of Victoria, and author (with 
J.P. Sapinsky) of Organizing the 1%: How Corporate Power Works

 “Alternate Routes once again proves itself an invaluable resource to scholars and 
activists working to secure a more just world...[T]he authors in this issue push our thinking 
in precisely the right direction -- namely, toward a working class politics that extends across 
workplaces, across communities, and across borders.” 

~ Kafui Ablode Attoh, City University of New York, School of Labor and Urban Studies

 “[Alternate Routes is] one of the first and longest-lasting responses to the stifling 
effects of traditional academic journal publication practices in the social sciences.” 

~ Research Resources for the Social Sciences