Tuesday, April 29, 2025
11:30am - 1:00pm
Labor Education Center, Room 115
For more information, contact Tobias Schulze-Cleven at tobias.schulzecleven@rutgers.edu.
Abstract
Union‐cooperative collaborations, which first emerged in the 18th century, have witnessed a resurgence in recent years. Across the world, they have created new jobs, safeguarded worker‐owners facing exploitation, and reinvigorated community and labor movements. By combining cooperatives' democratizing ideals of self‐reliance and social security with union ideals of empowerment and mass organization, union‐cooperative collaborations hold immense potential for social transformation. It is no wonder that union‐cooperative collaborations have sparked rich, new scholarly attention. But our understanding of these collaborations deserves more depth. Therefore, this review draws on the extant literature and the case of SEWA from India to build a more globally relevant framework that can deepen future analyses of the potential and contradictions undergirding union‐cooperative collaborations. Our framework articulates three levels of collaboration, three mechanisms through which such collaborations yield benefits, and a key condition for successful and transformational collaboration. Underlying successful collaborations is a contradiction that needs to be addressed‐‐namely the challenge to democracy that comes with scale.
About Our Speaker
Rina Agarwala is a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Agarwala publishes and lectures on international development, labor, migration, gender, social movements, and Indian politics. Agarwala is the author of the award-winning books The Migration-Development Regime: How Class Shapes Indian Emigration (Oxford, 2022) and Informal Labor, Formal Politics and Dignified Discontent in India (Cambridge, 2013), as well as the co-editor of Whatever Happened to Class? Reflections from South Asia (Routledge, 2008, 2016). Agarwala has worked at the United Nations Development Program in China, the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India, and Women’s World Banking in New York. She holds a BA in Economics and Government from Cornell University, an MPP in Political and Economic Development from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a PhD in Sociology and Demography from Princeton University.
