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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how workers adapt to an oppressive labour regime that forecloses collective resistance. It argues that workers and employers reach a negative class compromise, tacitly accepting individual resistance. I propose that these acts carry significant meanings and negotiate oppression.

Paper long abstract

Industrial work in a contractor-run match factory in north-western Pakistan is organised through oppression (zulm) and virtue (sawab). Oppression encompasses physical violence, unpaid labour (begaar), the usurpation of state benefits (haq khwarral), terror, and inhumane working conditions. Virtue, on the other hand, denotes a moral economy of charities, worker solidarity, and the foreman’s discretionary leniency. This paper asks how oppressive labour regime affects the struggle (possibilities?) for collective organisation—including kinship solidarities and unionisation—and how workers adapt their methods of resistance when collective action is foreclosed. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork as a manual worker in the factory, alongside archival data and in-depth interviews with trade unionists, activists, state officials, and female workers, I argue that the state and management deploy terror to rule out collective resistance. Workers, however, continue to resist harsh working conditions through idiomatic expressions and everyday practices. The idioms blend political, moral, religious, ethnic, and, rarely, radical narratives, while practical resistance is aimed at temporal sabotage and temporary relief. Hence, such acts pose little threat to oppressive labour regimes because they can be contested and accommodated by the factory management. This accommodation produces a negative class compromise in which resistance does not end, but is individualised. This individual resistance, then, is tacitly accepted as the status quo by workers and employers. The paper concludes that while acts of individual resistance do not subvert oppressive labour regimes, they carry significant meanings and negotiate exploitation and oppression in workplaces.