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Bringing the factory back in: The crumbling of consent and the molding of
collective capacity at work

Article  in  Mobilization · June 2017


DOI: 10.17813/1086-671X-22-2-155

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BRINGING THE FACTORY BACK IN: THE CRUMBLING OF CONSENT
AND THE MOLDING OF COLLECTIVE CAPACITY AT WORK*

René Rojas†

Scholarship on worker collective action has followed activists’ turn from labor process to
labor movement, privileging external opportunities for protest and resources for organizing.
Persuaded by growing appeals to examine the impact of capitalism on protest, I “bring the
factory back in” to analyze how the recent restructuring of a Bronx factory’s labor process
shaped employees’ capacities for sustained collective action. Employing participant obser-
vation and in-depth interviews within an extended-case framework, I trace the impact of work-
site reorganization on shop-floor “games.” I argue that workers sustained a surprisingly long
strike after a management offensive dissolved consent and unexpectedly generated a hori-
zontal class realignment. Combining opposing labor-process perspectives, my account is
predicated on the how the impact of deskilling interacts with worker behaviors patterned on
preexisting hegemonic factory institutions. Though similar cases of hegemonic breakdown will
not result in a resurgence of protest across American worksites, my research supports calls
for a resurgence of scholarship on production as one central factor shaping collective worker
behaviors.

For decades, social movement scholarship has largely ignored capitalism’s impact on col-
lective action (Hetland and Goodwin 2013). To correct this neglect Donatella della Porta
(2015) calls for an examination of how the precise dynamics of neoliberalism are shaping a
new wave of global protest. As the Great Recession and austerity spur a resurgence of protest
worldwide (Bernburg 2015; Diani and Kousis 2014; Rüdig and Karyotis 2013), movement
scholars are again paying attention to the ways that market crises drives mass insurgency. Few
scholars, however, are redrawing direct causal links between collective worker defiance and
capitalist production.
Like all effective protest, industrial insurgency requires shared latent power and the
collective organizational capacities for actuating this potential leverage. The transformation of
work via deindustrialization, automation, and flexibilization, coupled with a steep decline in
unionization, have undermined both conditions in the U.S. Surprisingly, in 2008, at the onset
of the largest destruction of manufacturing jobs since the early 1980s and just as private sector
union density reached a nadir, a group of Bronx workers from the Sole D’Oro cookie factory
deployed workplace-based power and associational capabilities and initiated a ten-month
walkout. This paper asks how, given both the secular and steep decline of U.S. unions and the
plant’s own prior restructuring, these marginalized and divided workers were able to sustain
such an inauspicious strike.
Whereas labor’s whittling organization and growing fragmentation have pointed scholars
to extraworksite factors when explaining anomalous strikes, I propose a return to labor-
process analysis to make sense of this recent case of protracted industrial action. Using in-

* Direct Correspondence to René Rojas, Department of Sociology, New York University, Puck Building, 295
Lafayette St., 4th Floor, New York, NY 10012-9605 (rer271@nyu.edu).
† This is an extensively revised version of a paper presented at SUNY Stony Brook’s 2011 How Class Works
conference. An earlier version was presented at NYU’s Economic and Political Sociology workshop. I thank my
workshop colleagues for their thoughtful comments. Reviewers and editors also provided incisive feedback. I am
mostly indebted to Jeff Goodwin and Vivek Chibber for their insights, suggestions and patience. Finally, without the
trust and collaboration of Sole employees, this article would never have materialized.

© 2017 Mobilization: An International Journal 22(2): 155-176


DOI 10.17813/1086-671X-22-2-155
156 Mobilization

depth qualitative methods, I show that the improbably enduring Bronx strike was rooted in
typically disadvantageous labor-process changes. In keeping with growing calls to incorporate
capitalist dynamics into accounts of collection action, I detail how shop-floor transformations
provoked by new investors’ profit compulsions laid the foundations for workers’ ability to
sustain an improbable strike. I argue that work reorganization at Sole precipitated not only
expected antagonism with management but, more surprisingly, newfound leverage and capa-
cities for enduring collective action.
Paradoxically, automation and deskilling did not further fragment and marginalize Sole
workers. Rather, employees, governed by the plant’s preexisting hegemonic shop-floor
principles, forged new horizontal associations that undergirded shared leverage for lasting
defiance. My contention is not that similar cases of hegemonic breakdown and sustained
protest are brewing across American worksites; I aim to restore the claim that production sites
continue to shape collective worker behavior and, notwithstanding the absence of labor’s
resurgence, merit a resurgence of scholarly attention.

A PUZZLE: THE ANOMALOUS SOLE ROSSO STRIKE

In mid-August 2008, 140 production workers represented by Local 60 of the Bakers, Tobacco
Workers and Grain Millers International struck after heated contract negotiations. The largely
immigrant workforce—who, for decades had produced cookies, crackers and breadsticks with
antiquated machinery in this holdover northwest Bronx factory—walked off their jobs when
Sole D’Oro’s new owners refused to yield on the concessions it demanded or to furnish
financial details justifying their intransigence. The occurrence of the strike was puzzling
considering national trends, sectoral realities and Sole workforce characteristics. More
surprising than the strike itself, however, was its duration. Like all collective action, strikes
endure when they combine efficacy and viability. Workers walk out and stay out when they
expect that withholding labor will impose costs on their employer and when they can count on
organizational capacities needed to coordinate such action and endure the costs that they, in
turn, incur. The long Bronx cookie strike is anomalous because Sole workers appeared to lack
this requisite associational strength and shop-floor leverage.
The Sole Rosso strike defied national trends. Yearly U.S. stoppages have declined from
466 in 1994 to 127 in 2013. Strikes among smaller workforces are even rarer: yearly strikes
involving fewer than 200 workers have fallen over the past two decades from 352 to a mere
83 (Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service [FMCS] 2015; see graph 1). Further, only a
third of these were in manufacturing. This reduction reflects precipitous declines in union
density and industrial employment through the 1990s (Wallerstein and Western 2000), which
reintensified during the 2000s (Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS]). Since then, the elimination
of thirty percent of surviving manufacturing jobs and a further twenty-one percent reduction
of an already-diminished unionization rate further crippled blue-collar workers’ leverage and
their organizational capacities. Dramatic restructuring of the food industry (Ollinger, Nguyen,
Blayney, Chambers, and Nelson 2005) further compromised workers’ ability to collectively
withhold labor in the sector.
Beyond the national and sectoral landscapes, features of Sole’s workforce militated
against the strike. Most significantly, the Bronx factory’s employees might be considered
“labor aristocrats.” Sole mechanics, for instance, earned thirty-five percent above the average
manufacturing maintenance wages (BLS website). Even the plant’s unskilled workers had
been shielded from wage declines that industrial restructuring has implied for minority
women (Branch and Hanley 2014). To illustrate, packers made $18.75 per hour in 2007 while
the industry’s regional average for comparable positions was under $14 (National Labor
Relations Board [NLRB] 2010; BLS website). Above-average remuneration, even among
less-skilled employees, suggests insurmountable pro-employer attitudes.
Bringing the Factory Back In 157

Table 1. Composition of Sole Workforce in 2008


No. No. Percent Modal Skill Avg. Years of
Country of Origin Workers Female Female Level Employment
Italy 34 11 32.4 Packer 30.1
Dom. Republic 22 16 72.7 Packer 12.4
Montenegro 11 4 36.4 Packer/Operator 28.3
United States* 10 3 30.0 Operator 22.5
Ecuador 6 5 83.3 Packer 20.0
Eritrea 6 3 50.0 Operator 22.2
India 6 1 16.7 Operator 22.0
Greece 5 3 60.0 Sanitation 17.6
Mexico 4 1 25.0 Packer 13.3
Puerto Rico 4 2 50.0 Sanitation 17.5
Romania 4 2 50.0 Sanitation 21.5
Cuba 3 2 66.7 Stock 17.0
Albania 2 1 50.0 Packer/Operator 20.5
Serbia 2 1 50.0 Packer/Sanitation 18.5
Chile 1 0 0.0 Sanitation 16.0
Colombia 1 0 0.0 Maintenance 20.0
Ghana 1 1 100.0 Packer 10.0
Guatemala 1 0 0.0 Maintenance 22.0
Guyana 1 0 0.0 Stock 23.0
St. Thomas 1 0 0.0 Sanitation 9.0
Venezuela 1 0 0.0 Packer 12.0
Vietnam 1 1 100.0 Sanitation 10.0
Missing 4 − − − −
Total 136 57 43.2† Packer 18.5
Notes: *At least two of the workers born in the U.S. are of Puerto Rican heritage. †Excluding 4 missing employees.

Obversely, the sharp segmentation of Sole’s workforce suggests an inability among its
divided workers to act cohesively. Despite high overall incomes, internally Sole exhibited the
gender segregation and interethnic wage inequality reported in the literature (Cotter, Hermsen,
and Vanneman 2003). A minority of skilled male workers, many from pre-1980s Puerto Rican
and Mediterranean migrations, earned considerably more than recently arrived unskilled, non-
European, noncitizen women employees. A comparison of the two largest national groups
offers a glimpse into the demographic cleavages running through the workforce (see table 1).
On average, thirty-four Italian workers had spent just over thirty years working at Sole
Rosso—only four had been employed for years or less; by contrast, the mean tenure of the
twenty-two Dominican workers was just over twelve years. Moreover, under a third of the
Italian workers were women, compared to almost three-fourths of their Dominican coun-
terparts. Labor historians and political sociologists have produced volumes demonstrating
how skill, race, gender and migratory status cleavages exacerbate intraworker competition and
discrimination that erode bases for solidarity and collective action (Briggs 1984; Cornfield,
Cavalcanti Filho, and Chun. 1990; Goldfield 2008; Gordon, Edwards, and Reich 1982;
Hartmann 1979; Milkman 1987; Vallas 2003a; Harrison and Lloyd 2013).
Observers and supporters alike attributed the puzzling strike to the actions of both local
union officials and management. Though bureaucratic unions eventually hinder protest (Piven
and Cloward 1977), scholarship maintains that formally organized unions are more likely to
strike than their less formalized counterparts, particularly under adverse circumstances such
158 Mobilization

as the current U.S. labor context (Martin 2010). The behavior of the union local supports the
contention that, all else equal, union leadership and resources contribute to increased strike
activity. Indeed, the local’s track record reveals a willingness to organize and lead stoppages; in
Sole’s case, union officials, despite skepticism, did not obstruct a strike vote once workers
rejected managers’ contract offer (Interview with Local 60 attorney; FMCS 2015).
Likewise, the actions of Sole management support claims that employers provoke strikes in
order to dissolve solidarity, undermine employee resolve and break unions. Research shows that
once initiated, bureaucracy-led strikes are vulnerable to outcomes controlled by employers
under market pressures (Zetka 1996). Management’s proposed contract seemed designed to
exacerbate shop-floor cleavages. Under the final contract offer, top categories would have re-
ceived a slight hourly raise while unskilled employees’ wages would have been slashed twenty-
five percent, lowering them to the industry’s mean (NLRB 2010: 18). The few relatively priv-
ileged men thus stood to lose considerably less than their expendable women coworkers. Sole’s
contract offensive and negotiating tactics point to an owner-induced, steered, and timed strike.
According to the local’s attorney, the differential deal aimed to ensure the quick collapse of an
eventual strike.
While plausible, these explanations of the strike’s initiation fail to account for its most
puzzling characteristic: workers’ ability to sustain it for nearly a year. Overall, as strikes have
become less frequent, they have also gotten shorter. From 2000 to 2009, out of 2293 total
strikes, only 800 (or thirty-five percent) lasted over a month and just 343 (fifteen percent) over
three months; a mere 167 (seven percent) have endured beyond a semester. A miniscule 1.5
percent of the decade’s strikes were in manufacturing, involved 200 or fewer workers and lasted
as long as the Sole strike. Indeed, in the other instance in which Sole’s relatively militant local
led a work stoppage involving a similar number of workers, the stoppage (at another plant it
represented) ended after a month. In short, though formal union organization and management
provocation may compel workers to walk out, sustained collective action requires other factors
undergirding enduring capacities. As leading students of worker behavior have put it, “unions
may facilitate strike activity, but only to the extent that they build on solidarities already realized
by workers on the shop floor” (Dixon, Roscigno and Hodson 2004: 4).
Attempts to explain the lasting solidarities and capacities of workers like the Sole strikers
mostly forego examinations of how these are realized on the shop floor. Some scholars even
assert that attention to workplace (along with labor market) leverage undermines labor protest
by cutting it off from indispensable, external sources of movement power (Sullivan 2009).
Consequently, the transformation of work over the past forty years (Kalleberg 2011) failed to
rekindle scholarship linking labor process to labor action. The result is an incomplete account of
labor struggles during neoliberalism’s mostly one-sided class conflict (Hacker and Pierson 2011;
Kalleberg 2009; Moody 2007).
This is an unfortunate, if understandable, gap in our approach to collective labor behavior’s
determinants. In what follows, I “bring the factory back in” in order to reexamine this neglected
dimension’s role in shaping Sole workers’ insurgency. After elaborating on dominant exogenous
models of collective labor action, I reintroduce relevant perspectives connecting labor process
and protest, paying special attention to hegemonic shop-floor regimes. Next, following a review
of my research methods and of the plant’s history, production process, ownership changes, I lay
out the findings of my inquiry into the foundations for the protracted Bronx strike. I first
describe the rise of hegemonic institutions at Sole, and then explain how deskilling at Sole
dissolved consent yet generated realignments that undergirded capacities for sustained collective
action.

APPROACHES TO COLLECTIVE LABOR ACTION

Labor insurgency is extraordinary. In disputes, employers enjoy built-in advantages over


employees who, facing a multiplicity of grievances and higher costs, must overcome steep
Bringing the Factory Back In 159

organizational barriers to collective action (Offe and Wiesenthal 1980). Aggravating these
associational obstacles, offshoring and fragmentation of production undercut leverage founded
on workers’ strategic position in industry. Financialization has additional disempowering
impacts as speculative capital and private equity firms reorganize production to extract value
beyond the “real economy” (Cushen and Thompson 2016; Thompson 2013, 2003). De jure
biases like the employers’ prerogative to hire permanent replacements (Logan 2008) further
erode the bases for work-rooted leverage. Aware of these barriers, scholars have made a “turn
from labor process to labor movement,” shifting their attention from the site of production to the
meso and macro strategies of a “social” union movement (Burawoy 2008).

Dominance of Exogenous Perspectives

A new wave of research on labor’s revitalization accordingly asks how worker protest
might circumvent work-centered barriers. Concerned with “union renewal” (Clawson and
Clawson 1999), scholars broadly replicate movement literature’s dual analytical axes by turning
their gaze to extraworksite opportunities for protest and resources for organizing (Ganz 2000;
Voss and Sherman 2000). The new focus departs from labor process scholarship in key ways: it
views community-based campaigns rather than the shop floor as the vehicles for labor’s
leverage and underscores the introduction of associational resources into labor rather than their
emergence out of the labor process.1
Social movement unionism (SMU) proponents argue that community-based groups
revitalize the labor movement by mobilizing workers in “spaces between . . . the inherent
limitation of the trade unions” (Sullivan 2010a: 810). The SMU approach is perhaps best ex-
emplified by Ruth Milkman (2006) who argues that strong roots in disenfranchised com-
munities, direct action targeting elected officials, and sympathetic public framing promote
worker protest. Janice Fine’s research (2005) on worker centers similarly underscores strategies
by precarious workers lacking industrial clout for forming extraworksite unions and targeting
public opinion and policymakers.2 Even perspectives reluctant to dismiss the centrality of the
worksite maintain that community movements are indispensable for labor’s renewal (Clawson
2003).
Besides identifying community-labor coalitions as engines for revitalized labor power,
recent scholarship emphasizes efforts of unions to import organizational resources, including
personnel and militancy into labor mobilization. Some allude explicitly to outside “innovators”
(Voss and Sherman 2000: 327-333). In Milkman’s words, “[t]he recent ascension of leaders
with both extensive formal education and activist experience in other movements to high-level
positions in key unions has injected dynamism in to the labor movement” (2006: 22). Steven
López (2004) illustrates how activists injected “movement-style tactics” into “postindustrial”
service sector organizing. Though López’s SMU model views “new collective solidarities”
arising in opposition to employers at work, worker mobilization depends on the strategic
interventions of external “self-conscious” staff-organizers (López 2004: 15).3 Protest, as it were,
flows into worksites, rather than out of production.

Bringing The Factory Back In

Labor-process scholars themselves contributed to the widely influential SMU approach by


demonstrating how shop-floor organization compromised workers’ power and organization.
Michael Burawoy (1979) classically argued that work was structured to block class solidarity.
For Harry Braverman (1974), deskilling subjugated employees by eroding shop-floor leverage.
Surviving labor process scholarship (LPS) scarcely takes up class conflict and collective action
at work, its foundational concerns, more frequently addressing questions of dignity and
satisfaction at work, and on occasion hidden forms of everyday resistance (Edwards, Collinson,
and Della Rocca 1995; Hodson 1995; Smith 1994; Thompson and Smith 2001, 2009; Tucker
1993).
160 Mobilization

Prominent labor scholars are nonetheless again pushing students of protest to reintegrate
transformations of production into explanations of collective action (Silver and Karatasli 2015).
Stephen Marglin’s seminal work (1974) established that technical transformations of production
are both cause and effect of class formation and conflict at work. More recent movement re-
search has compellingly restored production’s central impact on protest. Luders redirects
analysis of protest to endogenous economic opportunities structured by firm and sectoral vul-
nerabilities (Luders 2006). In an earlier departure from the SMU perspective, Dixon and
Roscigno’s argument (2003) that worker networks at the production site crucially impact strike
involvement decisions drew attention to associational resources for action arising from the labor
process.4
Such prospects, however, require overcoming the mechanisms obstructing collective
worker action, so compellingly substantiated by LPS founders. Advancing Braverman’s de-
skilling thesis, many scholars confirmed that managers control workers via technological
innovation and automation (Elger and Smith 1994; Knights and Willmott 1990; Zimbalist
1979). Appropriating craft knowledge, separating conception from the execution of work, and
atomizing tasks formerly performed in full by workers, they found, facilitated employer domin-
ation by undercutting employees’ shop-floor leverage. Others, like Clawson, agreed with
Braverman that “technological innovations were crucial capitalist weapons to help change the
balance of power” in production (1980: 51), but asserted the unpredictability of deskilling cam-
paigns fought “through the details of the work process.” Additional research highlighted the
contentiousness of management offensives (Edwards 1990; Edwards and Scullion 1982).
By contrast, Burawoy’s LPS model held that employers often rule through consent rather
than domination. The labor process itself is said to supply the bases for “manufacturing consent”
as routine tasks are structured to align individual workers’ and management’s interests
(Burawoy 1979: 81). Workers are drawn into and voluntarily constitute shop-floor institutions
and practices, or “games,” that fulfill employer ends, promote self-regulation, and undermine
solidarity. In sum, “the labor process is organized into a game, and the goals that the game
defines constitute the values current on the shop floor” (Burawoy 1979: 84). Hegemonic factory
regimes (Burawoy 1985) are founded on such practices and institutions that obscure class
antagonisms, and therefore block horizontal worker associational efforts and capacities.
Testing the “manufacturing consent” perspective, critics examined shop-floor institutions
that have transformed industry since the 1980s such as “quality circles” and “just in time”
schemes. For many these indeed amounted to hegemonic management strategies to subordinate
workers by promoting employer legitimacy and preempting opposition, even while exacting
higher productivity (Smith 1996).5 Yet they too noted the arrangements’ unpredictability,
pointing out that new work regimes often fail to garner consent; at times they delegitimized
employers, provoking new shop-floor tensions, personal disaffection, and even covert forms of
resistance (Smith 1997; Vallas 2003b). Steven Vallas’s case studies stressed that manufacturing
consent requires “structural moorings” for hegemony to take hold (2003: 219). Consent is
founded on shop-floor activities that effectively coordinate worker practices with employer
interests. In short, both LPS currents admit that, rather than domination and consent, reorganized
labor processes may provoke antagonism with employers.
Research on worker protest, however, must go beyond asserting that failed management
offensives provoke opposition and even resistance; it must precisely elucidate the shop-floor
circumstances under which employees acquire the necessary leverage and capacity for sus-
tained collective action. Moreover, scholars must draw causal links between more complex
labor process changes and worker behaviors. Since shop-floor transformations are rarely
unidirectional, research must trace unanticipated, less linear impacts of successful deskilling,
amid “moored” hegemony, on collective capacities. Such interactional, microprocess analysis
provides an understanding of how deskilling in the Sole plant paradoxically served to empower
workers and supply enduring associational capacities needed to carry out a prolonged strike.
In reconstructing the unpredictable impacts of technological transformations on collective
worker action, I follow Harley Shaiken (1986) who noted that deskilling campaigns for control
Bringing the Factory Back In 161

involve “no simple cause-and-effect relationship between the potential of new technology to
transform work and the final shape of workplace” alignments. Attentive to both Clawson’s
emphasis on work process details and Vallas’ attention to structurally moored shop-floor
institutions, he admonishes that any analysis of technological offensives “must be anchored in
the realities of the workplace: the real world of whirring cutters, electronic controls, managerial
directives, and worker activities” (Shaiken 1986: 11-13). Focus must be given to the decisive
interplay of managerial actions and worker responses unfolding through existing workplace
institutions.

METHODS

I employed a multimethod approach to trace links between shop-floor reconfigurations, the


breakdown of consent, and the emergence of collective capacity prior to the strike. Combining
participant observation, in-depth interviews, and secondary research, I develop an extended-case
approach that elucidates microlevel causal connections (worksite restructuring and striking) in
order to make claims about broader social phenomena (capitalist restructuring and class protest).
The extended-case method allowed me to generate empirical refutations that facilitate a
modification and deepening of existing theories of worker collective action (Burawoy 1998).
More generally, it mobilizes multiple observations of this single case to test existing theoretical
claims and offer alternative causal accounts (Rueschemeyer 2003).
I first collected qualitative data as participant observer on the picket lines and in com-
munity-labor support meetings during the last six months of the strike. I originally suspected
that strike-organizing tactics were crucial to its endurance. My observation of strikers’ inter-
actions and review of over forty hours-worth of notes intimated prior divisions overcome not in
the course of post-walkout strategizing but instead via common engagement through the work
process.6 Regular participation in support planning sessions allowed me to gain the confidence
of strikers and schedule open-ended interviews with them. Participation facilitated access by
fostering trust and close relationships with strike leaders, three of whom had worked in the main
production departments on which my analysis focuses. One in particular, Enzo, a mechanic
recognized by peers and supporters as an authority both of the strike and the plant’s labor
process, provided a personnel roster and aided my snowballing interview outreach.
To ascertain the causal links among their labor process realities, shop-floor realignments,
and the emergence of enduring workers’ capacities for protest, I interviewed a sample of 25
employees, chosen to provide the fullest understanding of the effects of management measures
to restructure production on the consent that had characterized worker attitudes for decades,
along with local officials and one department manager. My interviews, ranging from forty-five
minutes to two hours, were conducted in public spaces (including restaurants and parks) and at
respondents’ homes. I recorded, transcribed and when necessary translated them. I aimed to
cover at least fifteen percent of employees from the main production areas: supervision, baking,
packing and maintenance. I was unable to meet this quota in the packing department, though a
plurality of respondents (11) were packers (see table 2). Finally, along with the maintenance
supervisor, I interviewed the union local’s treasurer and attorney. Attempts to interview the
plant manager were unsuccessful. In-depth interviews were semistructured around labor biog-
raphies and spatial mapping.7 This visual tactic, besides promoting more detailed and objective
testimony, allowed me to probe answers pertaining to the labor process with more precision.
Rejection of my original hypotheses regarding the centrality of strike tactics significantly
reduced risks of interviewer expectation effects. To control for interviewee biases I designed my
questionnaire to reduce the likelihood that the strike experience influenced workers’ recol-
lections and that responses might be distorted to meet expectations of a former participant.
Throughout I use pseudonyms when presenting evidence from interviews, as well as in allusion
to the plant in question and the private equity company that acquired it. Finally, I complemented
my research with a historical review of the union, the firm, and the U.S. food and confectionary
162 Mobilization

sectors. Overall, the Sole case offers a token experiment for isolating and testing theorized
effects of successive labor-process changes on workers’ attitudes and behaviors.

Setting the Worksite: Industry, Labor and Sole Rosso

Whereas the food and confectionary sector’s restructuring was drawn out over decades,
reorganization of Sole’s shop floor was abrupt and came soon after the consolidation of a
peculiar work process. Changes leading up to private equity Icewater’s purchase of Sole thus
set the stage for the emergence of consent, its breakdown, and exceptional protest.
Founded in 1937, Sole Rosso, an independent Bronx manufacturer, produced traditional
kosher goods for local niche markets. For decades, paternalistic labor relations enjoyed
relative stability as the owners “took care of us workers” in return for loyalty. An interviewed
“old timer” estimated that up to the 1980s, Italian and Albanian workers from earlier migra-
tory waves comprised up to 90 percent of employees, some with “back-home” ties to the
owners. By the early 1990s, Latin American immigrant employees dramatically changed the
composition of an expanded workforce. Against the backdrop of a transforming confectionary
sector, Sole’s labor force contracted and stabilized into an ethnically segmented and gendered
work process.
Under family management, operations expanded into the 1980s. Plants opened in Illinois
and California, and the firm’s workforce grew to 575. Meanwhile, processing, packaging, and
marketing innovations allowed multinationals in the sector to concentrate and streamline
production through the 1970s and 1980s (Kim and Marion 1997; McCorkle 1988). In 1992,
when annual Sole sales reached $65M, original ownership sold the brand and factories to
Nabisco. A decade later Kraft acquired Sole as food manufacturing mergers accelerated and
after specialization led Nabisco to shutter the California plant. Kraft struggled with the niche
brand as sectoral rationalization intensified. After outsourcing the factory’s delivery system it
closed the Illinois plant, reducing Sole to the Bronx plant and its 180 workers. Streamlined
and freed from competition with major lines, Sole’s original production process unexpectedly
survived the industry’s unforgiving environment.
Thus insulated from competitive pressures, a distinct labor process consolidated at Sole
(see table 2). It included five lines divided into four successive stages—mixing, baking, table
packing, and box packing—and was organized around three key stratified departments. First,
the maintenance department, comprising three electricians and ten mechanics, operated as a
freely floating triage force.8 They possessed the skills required to maintain and improve the
plant’s technology. Depreciated machines, including 1940s and 1950s ovens and run by
approximately twenty mixer, oven and packing-machine operators, remained integral to
Sole’s production. Management avoided investing in new heavy machinery, doubtful that it
could replicate Sole’s product. In any event, reliance on the old machines erected barriers to
technological innovation of other segments of production lines. Further, replacement parts
were often unobtainable and repairs relied on human ingenuity. Most innovations were de-
signed and built on the premises by Sole’s mechanics. Upkeep and upgrades to the obsolete
machinery required a maintenance department with vast stores of knowledge and creativity.
Secondly, the plant’s technological configuration required a high ratio of foremen to
direct production employees. Sole’s nine foremen were typically assigned to entire lines and
tasked with ensuring a smooth flow of product across the main production segments.
Supervisory positions were required less for disciplining workers and more for supporting and
adapting production to idiosyncratic operating conditions. If the mechanics fixed problems,
foremen prevented, diagnosed and/or tweaked them. Together with mechanics, foremen were
upwardly mobile male veterans, most of whom began working at Sole under original
ownership. Similarly, they also enjoyed an unmatched position of privilege and expertise. Yet
rarely was it deployed to support management control.9
Finally, the old technology called for a complement of unskilled packing employees. As
the ovens churned out cookies and breadsticks, they were placed on conveyer belts. These in
Bringing the Factory Back In 163

turn transferred product to the packing table from which they were manually selected, placed
into trays and boxed. Packers comprised the bulk of the workforce. Sixty table packers
manually filled trays; twenty end-line packers closed the process by placing the trays in
boxes. Though veteran Italian packers remained, the department increasingly employed
recently arrived non-European, female immigrants.10 With mechanics and foremen, packers
constituted a sharply divided yet stable labor process.
When Icewater Partners purchased Sole in 2006, it immediately invested in new packing
machinery and moved to reign in the maintenance department, disturbing the segmented but
deeply rooted hegemonic order. Soon thereafter, alleging $1.5M in yearly losses, Icewater
adopted other strategies employed by private equity firms looking to “flip” acquisitions
(Applebaum and Batt 2012). It demanded severe concessions during 2008 contract talks,
aiming to recover its investment and restore its “distressed” investment to profitability.
Resorting to extortion, Icewater’s attorney, according to the NLRB, explained that “the
employees’ choice in bargaining is to have jobs at lower pay or no jobs at all.”11 The Board
confirmed that a plan to flip Sole was underway: “boasting new automated equipment . . . and
shorn of pension fund costs [it] would be more attractive to potential purchasers and
command a higher price” (NLRB 2011: 33-34).
Launching simultaneous shop-floor and contract assaults, Icewater sought to weaken
employees with the former in order to impose the latter. Successful automation and deskilling
might have disempowered Sole workers by undercutting any leverage they preserved. The
firm could subsequently force degraded wages and benefits onto impotent employees.
Alternatively, by dislocating the shop’s hegemonic institutions, the offensive threatened to
provoke tensions and perhaps even individual expressions of resistance. Even here, resultant
atomization might aggravate vertical segmentation, undercutting prospects for collective
capacities and portending disarray and submission. In the end, Icewater’s offensive produced
the least anticipated outcome: enhanced worker leverage and a prolonged capacity to mobilize
around it.
My empirical findings follow. The first subsection describes how consent emerged on the
Sole shop floor. I show that hegemony was founded on departmental practices, or games,
workers built atop the particularities of the plant’s production process. These institutions grew
out of worker responses to shop-floor opportunities yet were not undertaken as class
strategies. Next, the paper lays out the impact of Icewater’s offensive on established games;
significantly, workers again refrained from deliberate class responses. To explain Sole workers’
capacity for sustained collective action, I demonstrate that newfound horizontal leverage and
associational resources ironically grew out of behaviors governed by these threatened
hegemonic shop-floor institutions.

THE UNINTENDED EMERGENCE OF HEGEMONY AT SOLE ROSSO

Hegemony emerged after Nabisco dissolved the “family’s” frayed patrimonial regime.12 The
installation of moored consent under Nabisco was unplanned, unfolding as production settled
into the shop-floor practices constituted by workers. Employees organized work via games
that secured hegemony by aligning their interests with those of Nabisco; they acquired a stake
in observing game rules that simultaneously secured the firm’s profit requirements.
Commitment to these principles suppressed worksite class antagonisms, dissolving solidarity
and undercutting collective capacity. Three developments in the production process
contributed the installation of shop-floor games. Firstly, the maintenance department con-
solidated its privileged role in production. Secondly, the defeat of an assault on table packers
led to their secure incorporation into the emerging shop regime. Finally, both departments
devised informal institutions of coordination that addressed horizontal tensions generated by
sectional shop-floor games.
164 Mobilization

Games Skilled People Play

Consent-inducing games first appeared in the maintenance department and were


predicated on mechanics’ indispensable technical role and the flexibility of their assignments.
Strikingly, under Nabisco thirty of approximately 180 employees labored in maintenance, an
extraordinary ratio for light manufacturing. Given the prevailing technologies, continuous
operation required a cadre of mechanics and machine operators. Jack, head of maintenance,
explained the disproportion as reflecting the nature of the plant’s technology: “you need an
army of knowledgeable guys to keep these dinosaurs running.” Mechanics’ primacy in the
production process and their scheduling versatility promoted the establishment of shop-floor
games that benefitted them without challenging employer interests.
Mechanics’ unique role allowed them to set up “mechanical games” involving creative
and entertaining application of their knowledge. Their indispensability derived not only from
the demanding maintenance needs of the plant’s inherited technology; besides repairs,
mechanics tailored new machinery and improved existing machines. Given the obsolescence
of the plant’s technological mélange, management commissioned innovations, such as
efficient transfer systems to augment flow to packing.13 Solicitation of mechanics’ knowledge
helped generate friendly and entertaining competition. Not infrequently, mechanics them-
selves proposed upgrades to reduce turnaround. All three interviewed mechanics reported
having either pitched or contributed to such innovations. Amir, referred to in all departments
as the “brains of the machines,” was central to this exceptionalism. Among his accom-
plishments were designing an entire line and retrofitting ovens with software via his personal
laptop.
Enzo identified the manner in which such specialized knowledge facilitated the estab-
lishment of mechanical games:

Can you imagine what this guy meant to the bosses? He set it all up for them. Without his
expertise, the ovens didn’t work! Man, it was great. Really, all of us knew a lot. So much that
those machines could not work without us. Sure, it gave us a lot of freedom. It really helped us
out. Who else would they turn to?

Significantly, while their expertise made mechanics aware of their indispensability, none
of the workers interviewed report having contemplated leveraging it against management.
More pertinently, they recalled how pleasant work was under Nabisco’s regime.
Their centrality in production fostered scheduling flexibility, the other factor contributing
to hegemonic games in the department. Jack, having grasped the mechanics’ essential role,
explained that he allowed the department to function with exceptional latitude with respect to
time distribution. The age of the machinery required attention in the most unpredictable ways
and moments, hampering efforts to match shifts to regular maintenance needs. Further, the
mechanics themselves, aware of their vitalness and its basis, would hardly respond to rigidly
defined work-time rules. Thus, they distributed their time semi-independently. Jack would
simply assign lines and general projects to which mechanics could then adjust their schedules.

As long as safety standards were met, my guys were free to handle problems as they saw fit,
even if it meant bending management directives and contract rules. They could play cards, for
all I cared, as long as they got the job done. The thing about my guys is that they knew how to
get things done. I just had to let them get to it on their clocks.

Freedom to allot hours to other lucrative side jobs reinforced mechanics’ consent by
allowing them to “play around” with their schedule. With their supervisor’s assent, they could
intersperse regular chunks of time to freelance work around their Sole hours.
In sum, games organized around the indispensability, creativity, and flexibility of the
maintenance department all promoted the hegemonic incorporation of mechanics.
Maintenance workers and management alike had an interest in observing the informal, and
Bringing the Factory Back In 165

often unstated, rules of these games. Yet if mechanical games dissolved class antagonism with
management, their principles exacerbated tensions inherent in the plant’s segmentation. Far
from forging horizontal shop-floor relations, they conferred benefits upon a floating and self-
regulating cadre of privileged mechanics. In effect, as outlined by Burawoy, maintenance
games, while securing the consent of mechanics, deflected conflict toward other employees,
particularly packers.

Turning the Tables: Packing Rules

Mechanics’ conspicuous privilege threatened to promote opposition to management by


disadvantaged and disgruntled coworkers. Such antagonism, which could disrupt the plant’s
emerging hegemonic order, would likely have arisen among packers, the plant’s unskilled
majority. Instead, packers established and reproduced their own distinct set of departmental
games procuring, in turn, their consent. Hegemonic packing games were unexpectedly
founded on the instability-produced attempts at downstream incorporation of advanced
technology. Despite their vulnerability, packers’ unintended reversal of a deskilling offensive
laid the basis for their incorporation within the emergent shop-floor order. Their intervention
during the failed automation campaign unexpectedly facilitated the organization of games
centered around the packing table.
Before packers could benefit from the meritocratic order replacing the old scheme of
ethnic and national favoritism, Nabisco management, according to packing foreman Leo,
moved to half personnel on the busiest line by automating tray packing. Reflecting the
difficulties in installing modern technology reported by Burawoy in Manufacturing Consent,
the automated packer proved maladroit at substituting workers. Unfortunately for Nabisco, its
rigid specifications passed over most of the nonuniform output, leading to exorbitant wastage.
When packers were asked to step in, their salvage of the irregular upstream output compelled
management to abandon its automation campaign. The failure of Nabisco’s mechanization led
to packers’ integration via new institutions and practices arising from their supportive
response to the offensive.
Before abandoning the automated packer, management tried adjustments that might allow
the new machine to operate efficiently. During troubleshooting, a number of packers were
asked to return in order to back up the new machine. Flor, recognized by all as a packing
phenomenon, reported that her intervention increased packing rates back to the pre-
automation levels. Leo described the reaction of a nonproduction supervisor who visited the
floor to oversee manual coverage of the machine:

It was so funny. She was really in disbelief. I think she couldn’t imagine that they were so
good at what they did. I remember that she sat there and stared at Flor for a while without
saying anything. She really couldn’t say much because there was nothing she could ask them
to do any better. I remember that at one point she just turned around to leave and as she left
she said, “She must have magic in her hands.” We all laughed!

The episode underscored the adequacy of manual packing for Sole’s production process
and persuaded management to reinstate packers. When the machine was definitively dis-
carded and the old packing scheme resurrected, all table packers were brought back. Flor
estimated that, upon reinstatement, the table packers exceeded preautomation rates. With the
unevenness of the product, only human labor could proficiently select and place the cookies
into trays. Given the ovens’ age and the quasi-artisanal quality of the dough mixing, modern
downstream technology, involving exact specifications, proved unfit to handle incoming
production.
Recognition of packers’ competence compelled management to concede a degree of self-
organization on the shift. The new autonomy manifested itself in three ways. First, manage-
ment abandoned its prerogative to organize the packing table. This supported the second
166 Mobilization

manifestation of autonomy. Since they had complete freedom to choose positions at the table,
packers were able to establish independent reciprocal relief schemes. Finally, having
reasserted themselves, table packers were capable of commanding the pace of production.
Simply put, their hands picked cookies faster than ovens could produce them. Thomas, an
experienced line foreman confirmed that he regularly requested they decrease packing rates in
order to ease management pressures for elevated output.
All three developments supported the emergence of games. The potential to set the pace
ceiling, which far exceeded baking output, afforded a margin within which they could or-
ganize activities beyond actual packing. Usually, these consisted in covering for one another
during extended breaks and assuming portions of coworkers’ quotas in return for favors, both
on and off the shop floor. Initially, table supervisors maintained attempts at discipline. After
shrugging off immediate supervisors, packers obtained management’s commitment to more
formal rule: complaints would be filed in the most precise language possible and directed at
specific behaviors. Paradoxically, this strengthened the women’s position as, given
irreproachable table rates, write-ups were not worth the effort. As Jessenia recounted:

We were able to organize the table in the way that worked best for us, so we could do all the
things we needed to get done during the day. Like going to the bathroom, picking up children,
or even celebrating birthdays. We came to really enjoy our time at work. We didn’t have to
worry about the table supervisor rushing us; we packed so fast, they had no reason to complain
or reprimand us.

As noted, packers could leverage few formally recognized skills and, as recently arrived
immigrant women, they faced steep costs when airing grievances. Automation threatened to
marginalize them completely. Yet the awkward fit between the automated packer and the
entire production process resulted in both packers’ reinstatement and improved security;
simultaneously, it granted them a level of self-regulation which served as a practical bases for
their newly constituted games. It also ironically diffused friction with management, whose
disciplinary power, now redundant, had been compromised, redirecting it horizontally toward
upstream departments. In sum, the failed introduction of technology led to the establishment
of game rules for unskilled employees that generated consent rather than conflict with
management.

Molding Consent: Interdepartmental Coordination

Manufacturing consent at Sole also required interdepartmental coordination, as isolated


departmental games were insufficient for the installation of a hegemonic regime. Indeed, the
principles underlying games, as described above, generated frictions between segments
which, if left unaddressed, threatened to short-circuit production, thereby destabilizing
departmental activities. Besides constituting narrow institutions of consent, employees
developed mechanisms permitting smooth-flowing production, from baking to packing, amid
sectional flexibility and self-regulation.14
Mechanics’ relative comfort inevitably vexed less privileged employees. Though packers
recalled mechanics’ exploits with pride, routine maintenance activities were perceived to
disregard fellow workers in other departments. Four interviewed packers remembered feeling
aggrieved by mechanics. Jessenia explained:

While we looked up to them, they looked down on us. It’s as if they didn’t really take us
seriously. We thought very highly of them but it wasn’t like we were on the same team or on
the same level. While they did their thing, they seemed not to care about us.

More significantly, game rules in one department could hamper the material conditions
required for games in other departments and thereby threaten plant-wide consent. The main
impediments originated in mechanics’ frequent unavailability and packers’ outstripping the
Bringing the Factory Back In 167

factory’s average output rate. Roughly half of packers reported that while mechanics enjoyed
leisurely schedules, they or coworkers in other departments had been left unable to perform
their tasks to management’s satisfaction. Faith, a table packer, described a frustrating episode
in which ovens in need of repair churned out unbaked breadsticks (“little turds”) for hours
before a mechanic could be found to repair the thermostat. On the other hand, packers’ ability
to push the upper limits of output rates threatened mechanics’ self-monitoring of schedules.
To prevent threatening production failures, both packers and mechanics adopted a
commitment to coordinating the uninterrupted circulation of product. Coordination, however,
was not embraced to improve interdepartmental relations but rather to uphold steady output.
Indeed, the common productivist outlook reinforced plant segmentation and even promoted
collaboration with management when new technology was introduced. Four fifths of
interviewees, including packers facing lay-offs, reported trying to “make it work” and reduce
turnaround.15
Coordination across hegemonic shop-floor institutions could not yet lay the basis for
class opposition and collective action. While the mechanics were well aware of the leverage
they enjoyed and the packers all report feeling recognized following the failed introduction of
the packing machine, these attitudes did not support antimanagement realignment. Under
Sole’s technological mélange, however, any change in the labor process required a
corresponding adjustment in coordination between department games. These adjustments
contained the potential for oppositional realignment and interdepartmental collective
capacities.

“FLIPPING” CONSENT: THE EMERGENCE OF COLLECTIVE CAPACITY

A change in ownership introduced shocks to the consolidated hegemonic order that appeared
to forestall future and sustained collective action. Announcing $2.7M investments in
technological innovations, Icewater Partners undertook a rationalization campaign involving
specialization in three products, tight control of maintenance activities, and thorough
automation of packing. The new machinery and simultaneous drive to appropriate knowledge,
while provoking antagonism, also generated shared shop-floor leverage, and, crucially,
associational capacities. By taking full control of the production process Icewater unwittingly
laid the foundation for lasting collective action by constituting cohesive interdepartmental
production units out of formerly coordinated segments.

“Terminating” the Magic and Taking the Brains off the Shop Floor

The first Icewater measure that tested the shop floor’s delicately crafted and coordinated
hegemonic institutions was a move to fully automate packing, with one machine each for tray
packing, wrapping and boxing. The centerpiece of management’s innovation was a state-of-
the-art packing machine dubbed the “robot” due to its twelve sensor-directed arms. Packers
initially responded to the offensive by once more deploying their recently institutionalized
roles and flexible game rules to ease the new machine’s integration.
When this second, more advanced tray-packing technology was installed, mirroring their
attitudes under Nabisco, the women were cooperative. Immediately prior, packers had
forecasted their cooperation during Icewater’s preliminary introduction of boxing machinery.
In that instance, packers welcomed new technology as job loss was negligible and, most
significantly, had no immediate impact on the packing table. Coming at the end of the line,
without direct links to production, it also preserved their pace-setting prerogative and averted
coordination issues.
Interviewees, including those most imperiled by the machine, similarly reported no
inclinations to frustrate tray-packing automation. Predictably, however, the robot produced
the same results as Nabisco’s Canadian machine: product dimensions were too erratic for
168 Mobilization

sensors to transmit coherent commands to the arms. Over half the pincers would fail to grasp
product, depositing nothing into tray slots. With the help of mechanics, management made
numerous adjustments to bring the “robot” online. Throughout, managers were again
compelled to appeal to packers to facilitate the transition. According to Karen, a table super-
visor:

Once, when the robot was programmed to pack “toasts,” things got really bad. We used to fill
about seventeen pallets per shift. With the “robot,” only about four or five pallets would be
loaded. It just couldn’t grab the crackers. When they asked us to help out, we did it gladly.
And we figured out a way to get back to the same number of pallets. Instead of following
management’s instructions, we came up with something more logical. They asked us to
reposition the toasts coming off the belts, but this made no sense. The way we worked the
table, it made more sense to let the robot grab what it could, and then manually fill in the rest
of the tray. In fact, we ended up packing more this way than before the robot.

Restoring packing rates involved adhering to game principles and applying self-organized
flexibility. Disregarding management’s rigid directives, packers contrived a method better
suited to ongoing programming adjustments. Rather than hampering the overall pace by
repositioning cookies on conveyers, they treated the sensor-guided arms as a preselection
mechanism. This tactic allowed the robot to select the most uniform product, while packers
reorganized the table to pack efficiently the remainder.
Management simultaneously moved to appropriate mechanics’ task distribution. Though
the machinery’s age foreclosed comprehensive rationalization of maintenance, Icewater
sought to undermine mechanics’ shop-floor control by systematizing diagnoses and assign-
ments. Aware of mechanics’ power, even when reduced to fifteen by 2008, management
initiated concerted attempts to take control of the department’s scheduling.
As in packing, mechanics’ initial response was not class opposition, but rather a “neutral”
defense of autonomy and flexibility. Mirroring packers’ reaction, mechanics’ responses
pursued stable output via the continued practice of established games. As Joaquín recalled:

. . . they came after us without realizing that it would affect production. They needed to
understand that our way was the best way for these old ovens. They didn’t know how these
things worked. We had spent years on these machines. You couldn’t just give us orders and
expect us to follow exactly what they assigned us. It doesn’t work that way (emphasis in
original).

Caught in the middle yet committed to his department’s prevailing rules, Gene shielded
mechanics from the rationalization drive. “Let’s just say we found ways to get around them,”
he explained. By circumventing confrontation and avoiding disruptions, mechanics’ games
proceeded largely unchanged. In brief, Icewater’s offensive momentarily reaffirmed estab-
lished shop-floor values. Redoubled commitment to game rules, however, set the stage for the
turn from cooperation to opposition.

From Consent to Antagonism through Hegemonic Institutions

Hegemonic games paradoxically supplied the foundation for the shift from consent to
antagonism when observance of shop-floor game rules directed workers to confront the
offensive. Among packers, collaboration through the flexibility enshrined in the prior regime
eventually clashed with management’s recalcitrance. For mechanics, the shift to opposition
involved a more straightforward dispute over control and knowledge. Game-conforming
responses to automation provided solidary interdepartmental binds through production
process adjustments.
Management success in packing came as workers’ accommodation of the technology re-
inforced their commitment to game rules. When the robot came online, the majority of pack-
ers developed an awareness of the threat that it posed to shop-floor games. Eight of the eleven
Bringing the Factory Back In 169

packers interviewed communicated this growing consciousness as the new technology ful-
filled its deskilling and labor-saving function. Persistent upstream adjustments allowed for the
machine’s reprogrammed sensor and signal transmission systems to capture most of the
product. At that juncture packers began expressing defiance on the shop floor when, despite
“rescuing” the robot, management (in what was now perceived as a step toward termination)
reassigned workers away from the table. As Karen understood it, management exploited their
intervention only to parlay it toward an arrangement with the fewest deskilled employees
necessary. “We made it work,” she insisted, “and look at how they repaid us.” As Jessenia put it:

We just couldn’t understand why they were destroying what we worked so hard to set up. It
made us so angry...Our attitudes really changed at this point. I remember how my friend, she’s
also a packer, reacted. When a supervisor came down to check on the reprogramming of the
arms, she did like this [proudly punching her biceps] and said out loud, “there are no arms like
these arms!”

Contrasting with their reaction to the earlier automation episode, packers now displayed
contempt for the new technology. “We began calling it the ‘terminator,’” many remembered.
Packers’ rechristening of the machine reflected their reappraised interests now perceived to be
antagonistic to management’s aims.
Concurrent management efforts to pry control over machine operation and repairs set the
stage for class antagonism in maintenance. In a bid to minimize dependence on their exper-
tise, Icewater, unable directly to manage mechanics’ time and tasks, determined to acquire
proprietary rights over the ovens’ programming. As potential for conflict began to emerge,
Amir preempted access to “his brains” by disconnecting his laptop. “I came up with that
system so we could work better; they wanted to change everything up, so I took what was
mine,” he explained matter-of-factly. By doing so, however, he effectively left ovens “un-
programmed,” thereby increasing reliance on mechanics’ know-how. Management’s inability
to operate the ovens without Amir’s retrofitted software aggravated the campaign for uniform
production. The net result was underscored shop-floor leverage amid growing antagonism.16
In sum, labor process transformations promoted antagonism by sharply pitting com-
mitment to games against the openly class-biased efforts to quash their rules. Looming job
loss was an evident threat to their livelihoods; but workers’ testimony reveals that defense of
games served to rally and activate their opposition. Moreover, though consent had dissolved,
emerging resistance remained restricted to each department. Further, antagonism alone did not
supply a basis for collective action, as opposition to management might lead to atomized and
even competitive resistance behaviors. While mechanics saw their leverage heightened, it
remained isolated from packers who suffered increased marginalization. The persistence of
management’s offensive supplied the final component required for collective worker capacities.

Reconstituting Class Capacity through Interdepartmental Production Units

As it pushed through automation, management unintentionally promoted horizontal


realignment and common leverage across formerly divided departments. Icewater’s restruc-
turing generated interdepartmental ties, thereby directly binding the activities of employees
who now worked as single production units. Game rules that previously aligned employee and
employer interests now compelled workers to depend directly on one another. Instead of
deepened fragmentation, automation ironically generated mutual reliance across departments.
These binds of mutual reliance and common work supplied the bases for joint leverage and
collective organization. Horizontal links constituting cohesive production units developed
within the packing department, between packers and mechanics, and finally across the whole
labor process.
The first horizontal operational units emerged between packers and their supervisor.
While Joaquín reprogrammed the robot’s arms, Leo, a packing-machine operator, was in-
formally trained to operate the machine. As reliance on table packers grew during manage-
170 Mobilization

ment’s offensive, Leo shared his newly acquired knowledge with the women he felt required
familiarization with its operation. Since troubleshooting demanded a mix of active super-
vision of the robot and creative table organization, Leo began viewing his ability to perform
as closely tied to packers’ aptitude. He recalled analyzing the common implications of the
offensive for all employees, stressing that “I would sit with them as we handled the robot
together and give them advice on how to deal” with management’s restructuring. Prior to the
robot’s introduction Leo admitted he would have displayed a hierarchical attitude; now, com-
prising a single production unit with packers, he came to value their interests as aligned with his.
Mutually dependent work activities also developed between packers and maintenance and
similarly laid the foundation for interdepartmental interest realignment and collective
capacity. Such cooperative, horizontal links were reflected in the role Joaquín acquired among
packers when adjusting the new robot. Following management’s orders to reconfigure the
sensor-guided arms, he acknowledged being unable to proceed without direct coordination
with the table. Successful reprogramming required constant communication and intimate
coordination with the women’s flexible organization of packing. Jessenia explained that:

. . . we told Joaquín that he/it could not be/work this way [no podía ser así]. That those arms
would not accomplish anything if we could not back it/him up [mantenerlo] on the table […]
We got it and he also had to understand. The machine wasn’t much without us. He couldn’t do
his job without our skills and support.

Finally, the interventions of line supervisors and foremen seeking cooperation from
packers bolstered horizontally reconstituted units across the plant. Line foremen who had
acquired unparalleled, comprehensive shop-floor knowledge previously viewed packers as
second-class employees. To bake cookies compatible with automated packing they were
tasked with aligning the whole production process with packing requirements. Omar, a former
line foreman and one of two general production supervisors, assumed a leading role in the
overarching adjustment efforts. He nurtured an ongoing conflict with table supervisor Sarah
and had been distrusted by the packers. During the final months prior to the strike, however,
Omar developed a cooperative relationship with them. Forced to incorporate the final segment
of the process with the more expertise-based upstream tasks, Omar was compelled to
recognize packers’ contributions. As he put it, “I knew every single detail about how the factory
ran, everything! And sure, Sarah knew how to make packing happen no matter what [the
circumstances]. We ended up figuring it out together.” The changed relationship underscores
the emergence of horizontal cohesion across the shop floor.
Table packers, whose autonomy promoted intradepartmental bonds and collective
identity formation, took the lead in spreading solidary relations across the plant. Given the
stark segmentation between them and more privileged male employees, their success in
extending horizontal links to foremen was particularly consequential. María recounted the
birthday parties she and her peers would organize for Leo and others: “We came to love them
so much. It was our way of demonstrating our compañerismo [comradery] and showing how
much we appreciated their support.” This newfound solidarity was particularly evident with
respect to the packing machine operators and foremen as relations with mechanics never fully
consolidated.
Newfound collective leverage and capacity arose unexpectedly during the opening of
contract talks and management’s proposed reduction in packing wages. According to the
union local attorney’s analysis, management expected the now “dispensable” women to
compete among each other for surviving positions, and that, under assault, mechanics would
privilege defense of their sectional interests. New horizontal bonds across the production
process mitigated the potential for this competitive fragmentation. It also unexpectedly legit-
imated the authority of a layer of skilled workers who eventually became prominent leaders of
the strike. These links were further reinforced by the peculiar interdepartmental role of line
foremen and the collective bargaining agreement’s unusual institutionalization of their
position.
Bringing the Factory Back In 171

Juridical Facilitators

Formal arrangements that long governed hierarchical employee relations supported the
shift from emerging realignment to capacity for shop-floor collective. Foremost among these
juridical facilitators was the incorporation of the foremen into the contract. Unlike most
industrial contracts, the Sole bargaining agreement covered these supervisory workers.
Though the number of foremen had shrunk to roughly ten and their authority was rivaled by
the status of mechanics, their position remained pivotal. As employees who oversaw the
complete process and supervised coordination between areas, they were key figures around
whom shop-floor alignments could pivot.
Classical literature on foremen places them in contradictory class locations. Nichols and
Beynon (1977) describe how generational and life-trajectory differences along with top
management tactics pull foremen into its orbit or alternatively push them to identify with their
subordinates. Industrial relations scholars have historically focused on collective bargaining’s
impact on foremen authority and the risks of alienating them from top managers. In general
the literature continues to emphasize the need to reproduce and/or restore the disciplinary role
of foremen. As its frontline representatives, management aims to instrumentalize bargaining
agreements in order to redefine their role as employer agents (Slichter, Healy and Livernash
1973).
On the Sole floor, discipline was never foremen’s main function. The plant’s distinct
labor process made technical improvements their central concern. Foremen assisted machine
operators and packers rather than oversee them. Had the plant regime primarily required them
to play a disciplinary role, their inclusion in the agreement may have been inconsequential.
Yet given their de facto separation from management, the contract turned them into additional
stewards on the floor. “It is quite exceptional,” noted Clayton, the Local treasurer. “None of
the other shops we represent have this. At Sole, we didn’t have to worry about the foremen.
Some helped organize the workers.”
Just as only select foremen facilitated resistance, not all employees were active in
solidary networks cohering across the plant. Many chose to remain uninvolved in the new
opposition. Workers loyal to management tended to be veterans formed under the family’s
patronage system. They constituted a potential promanagement support base. Though only
one out of eleven interviewed packers, Olga, a thirty-year veteran packer, repeatedly stressed
her mistrust of the plant’s realignment. Where shop-floor changes failed to realign workers
against management, foremen contract provisions were a counterweight that bolstered an
emerging antimanagement alignment. Combined with the associational bonds arising out of
new horizontal shop-floor alignments, these provided the basis for sustained collective action
in spite of detractors.

DISCUSSION

Whereas Nabisco’s failed automation spawned the factory’s hegemonic regime, a subsequent
automation under Icewater pushed antagonized workers into horizontally aligned productive
units with common leverage and collective capacity for sustained class protest. Combining
competing labor process perspectives, I trace the interrelated impacts of managerial offensives
on established, consent-inducing shop-floor activities. The shift from consent to antagonism
to sustained defiance at Sole Rosso was driven by interactions between hegemonic shop-floor
games and an intensified management deskilling drive. Specifically, the crumbling of consent
and molding of collective capacity preceding the anomalous 2008-2009 strike were founded
on hegemonic practices rooted in a particular labor process. As such, the emergence and
breakdown of consent were both founded on a set of routine worker activities shaped by
distinctive shop-floor institutions.
172 Mobilization

Linking resistance to work institutions and activities has not been the exclusive domain
of labor process scholars. My explanation of the transition from Sole workers’ dissolving
consent to horizontal shop-floor realignment as a foundation for sustainable collective action
builds on past approaches yet supplies a crucial and missing intermediate step. Movement
scholars themselves have periodically paid close attention to this relationship. In his study of
class formation, for instance, Rick Fantasia describes solidarity as a precondition for col-
lective action, “forged in crisis” and developed as “cultural formations arise in conflict,
creating and sustaining solidarity in opposition to the dominant structure” (1988: 19). Yet
solidary consciousness emerges from the lived experience of mutual association and common
struggle. In this somewhat circular formulation, workers first experience shared resistance at
the local worksite. Fantasia inadequately explores the “crisis” conditions that give rise to
shared shop-floor resistance in the first place.17
In their classic work on insurgency, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward underscored
the impact of dislocation on protest behavior patterned on the institutions in which insurgents
are rooted and from which they withhold their regular contributions (1977). In the case of the
worker insurgency of the 1930s, strikes and sit-ins were driven by the destabilizing impact of
sharply declining hours and wages and structured by the disruptive potential that mass
industry conferred. Yet in emphasizing shocks to routines of subsistence and the broad
institutional configuration that structures resistance, they undertheorized the key link between
dislocated hegemonic micro-institutions and resulting collective action.
Fantasia’s focus on the particulars of worksite antagonism is welcome; Piven and
Cloward, in turn, usefully alert us to patterned responses emerging from institutional distur-
bances. Yet shared moments of shop-floor conflict are precisely what need to be explained,
and not all shocks effectuate potential insurgency. I argue that reordering of shop-floor forces
and capacities following the dissolution of consent depends on the precise impact that
technological innovation has upon preexisting, institutionalized employee practices. The rules
governing these behaviors are in turn established by departmental games founded on extant
shop-floor configurations.
At Sole, the unrelenting and concerted offensive by Icewater management was an
insufficient cause of resistance. Similar cases of automation, it is fair to assume, following
Braverman, typically disempower workers, generating vulnerability, individualized com-
petitive responses, and intensified domination. Even when employees reevaluate their inter-
ests relative to their employers’, they must first experience realignment that confers newfound
leverage and associational capacities before they can sustain collective action. In the Sole
case, workers developed a class response to Icewater’s concessionary demands not simply by
virtue of seeing their livelihoods threatened; they underwent the requisite empowering
realignment when their routine interventions unexpectedly forged horizontally cohesive units
of production. These provided the foundation for long-term solidarity. Crucially, this outcome
depended on the incongruous downstream introduction of state of the art technology in an
otherwise quasi-artisanal production process. Specifically and significantly, hegemonic col-
lapse and class opposition that followed were forged around mechanisms of interdepartmental
coordination, an area that has received insufficient attention in labor process studies. It is
largely assumed that intersectional divisions invariably reinforce consent; by contrast, seg-
mented relations between departments can become the fulcrum for horizontally reconstituted
units and the basis for joint leverage and lasting class solidarity.
The peculiarities of the Sole production regime underpinning worker action would appear
to limit the generalizability of a labor process approach. But the opportunities opened by
community campaigns and the resources injected by resilient labor bureaucracies are them-
selves weak predictors of worker action. The causal link between SMU and industrial action
remains tenuous as social justice-community campaigns seldom result in worker mobil-
ization and strikes (Moody 2013). Labor scholars must expand research that identifies
additional and interactive causal mechanisms that determine the courses of collective worker
action. In any event, the general decline of movements makes restricting our accounts of labor
Bringing the Factory Back In 173

insurgency to an SMU framework dubious. The fleeting nature of the Occupy movement
suggests that community campaigns will not revitalize the labor movement any time soon.
Ultimately, while it is unlikely that ubiquitous management offensives will confront Sole’s
particular labor process configurations, following Shaiken, we must remain agnostic regar-
ding the possibility that other interactions between innovation and preexisting shop-floor
regimes will dissolve consent, even as labor appears as powerless as ever. As “recovery” from
the Great Recession continues to transform industry, one set of resources and opportunities
for resistance may yet emerge from American worksites.

NOTES
1
Starting from a harsh critique of U.S. labor’s sectionalism and economism, some advocate for a broad “class
struggle” that transcends the workplace and production (Bronfenbrenner 1997; Fletcher and Gasparin 2008). Whether
faulting unions’ narrow outlook or not, all move away from the production process.
2
Unlike craft and industrial unions that combine workers along common skills or sectors, worker centers amalgamate
laborers along cultural affiliations, spatial demarcations, and social justice campaigns (Fine 2005: 160; Gordon 2005).
3
Adam Reich’s (2012) more recent analysis underscores the impact of Catholic hospital workers’ vocational
commitments on workplace culture.
4
Whereas Luders follows structuralist accounts (Marx 1976; Piven and Cloward 1977; Schwartz 1976) to examine
opportunities for elevating disruption costs, Dixon and Rosigno, following Fantasia (1988), trace micro-processes of
solidarity construction on the shop floor.
5
Many industrial relations scholars claimed that team-based specialization and knowledge genuinely restore
employees’ control of work (Cooke 1989; Florida and Kenney 1991).
6
Moreover, it is safe to assume that, at least in large metropolitan areas, most strikes quickly receive community
support and adopt the entire SMU tactical repertoire. Of course, very few manage to survive over long periods.
7
Tipped off by employees’ insistence on drawing shop-floor diagrams and influenced by Burawoy’s use of them
(Burawoy1979; Burawoy and Lukacs 1992), I began providing all interviewees a basic sketch of the plant’s lines,
which I asked them to fill in as interviews progressed. Interestingly, Fantasia (1988: 84, 86-87) also uses shop-floor
diagrams when describing phases of a wildcat strike at a New Jersey casting plant.
8
Over the years, the numbers of positions per category varied slightly depending on particular needs of the moment.
9
The packing machine operator functioned as a foreman overseeing groups of packers.
10
Packers were stratified not only along seniority and national status. Informally, packing shifts were led by the
packing machine operator (see above footnote) as well as the table forewoman who had risen from the packers’ ranks.
11
Using more colorful language, the NLRB’s brief reported that a managing partner “bluntly told union negotiators,
if the Union did not accept the Company’s proposed contract, his firm ‘would take its toy and leave.’”
12
The original owners’ patronage schemes began to fracture shortly before Nabisco’s acquisition of the plant after a
series of successful employment discrimination suits.
13
Innovations were often requested to introduce new products. Mechanics reported at least one instance in which
management’s commission resulted in the elaboration of an entirely new line devised on the plant premises. In fact,
after the strike ended and the plant closed, Amir negotiated the acquisition of one of these worker-fabricated
production lines.
14
This paper has focused its attention on the maintenance and packing departments. However, as will become
apparent below, other departments and hierarchical positions, namely production and foremen, also played an
important part in the emergence and collapse of Sole’s hegemonic shop-floor regime.
15
Considering Sole workforce attrition, packers, for instance, rather than resist innovation, felt that boosting
productivity was the best course for secure employment.
16
Soon thereafter, this issue triggered an intense legal fight between management and mechanics that extended well
into the strike. Besides targeting Mickey, a veteran electrician under other pretexts, Icewater sued Amin for
intentional property damage.
17
My analysis is fully consistent with Fantasia’s prescription that “analysis of class consciousness should be based on
actions, organizational capabilities, institutional arrangements, and the values that arise within them” (1988: 11,
emphasis added). Missing is a more systematic account of how these key factors result in protest. Indicative of this
gap is his otherwise illuminating treatment of wildcat strikes: “[a]s the action developed, unity and solidarity were
created in the process of interaction with the company and among participants” (1988: 90). The “action” that requires
explaining was already “developed.”
174 Mobilization

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