Mapping: a qualitative research technique for global labour studies

Governments around the world have been managing the Great Crisis by adopting the politics of austerity. Public spending cuts tend to have drastic effects on workers because they usually translate into social wages being slashed. They are often particularly harmful to people employed in the public sector who may be faced with redundancies, worsening working conditions and direct wage cuts. Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that large, disruptive strikes have been occurring frequently in nonindustrial settings in recent years. Complementing Silver's point that labour unrest travels when industries relocate, it can be observed that in many countries, militancy in the public and service sectors has been pronounced, sometimes more pronounced than in manufacturing. In various contexts, public and service sector unions take a leading role in their respective labour movements – and the workers involved do not conform with the image of the striker created by Hyman's book cover from the 1970s, which shows a White, middle- aged male miner (see Volume 1, Introduction).

In this chapter, I map labour disputes from around the world that have been taking place in the public and service sectors during the conjuncture of crisis. I take inspiration from my colleagues Franziska Müller, Simone Claar, Manuel Neumann and Carsten Elsner, who have mapped African renewable energy policies (Müller et al, 2020) – and from Silver's approach in Forces of Labor (2003), where she uses a dataset based on newspaper coverage of strikes to identify patterns of labour unrest. I understand mapping in a metaphorical sense, that is, as a qualitative research technique that creates systematic but heavily simplified and ‘flat’ representations of multi- dimensional objects, which are mostly linguistic. For example, mapping can take the form of a table where large numbers of cases are grouped according to patterns. Due to the simplicity of these representations, mapping is well- suited for producing the contextualizations that incorporated comparisons require. It allows one to cover geographical areas with large extensions.