The IWW welcomes the release of an important new book by union member and organiser, Panos Theodoropoulos.
Within ‘The Precarious Migrant Worker: Socialisation of Precarity’ Panos shares both their personal experiences, as well the voices of many other migrant workers, in Glasgow’s warehouses, factories and kitchens.
The book offers a unique view into the precarious lives of precarious workers within the neo-liberal landscape of modern Britain.
Panos digs deeply and critically into a terrain of ideological dispossession within capitalist modernity to understand the challenges faced by individuals and their communities, largely abandoned by trade unions and politicians.
The book tries to identify what has been lost by the labour movement withdrawing from the lives of precarious workers, the harmful effects of individualist mentalities towards work, and the possibilities for new forms of resistance and social connection to emerge.
This text can be a difficult read at times, not due to any academic elitism, but to the contrary because it expresses so clearly the scars of capitalism on real people’s lives.
Several IWW members have recently spoken at launch events for the book, including in Glasgow and London. These events have drawn crowds interested not only in using this academic research to better understand the frontlines of migrant organising but to find ways to get involved in changing these conditions.
This is a strong conclusion that you will be pushed towards by reading ‘The Precarious Migrant Worker’.
It is a call to action. An invitation to the radical labour movement to occupy the spaces that have been abandoned and for both organisers and precarious workers themselves to rediscover a class identity and social struggle that has always existed below the surface.
If you are a union member then this book is highly recommended by the IWW Organising Department.
You can order the book from Polity Press here.