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The insecurity and instability experienced by precarious workers, and their 'disconnect' from the established groups, are often intertwined in the perception that these workers are unorganisable. This paper challenges this perception through seven stories of collective organising, which show that pockets of collective resistance can emerge amongst various group of precarious workers, from both traditional and non-traditional sectors of the working class, despite the level of precarity and the level of repression and hostility in the context where collective organising takes place. Building on Kelly's mobilisation theory, this paper suggests four factors which facilitate the emergence of collective acts of (transformative) organising: a) an employer's concrete act of worsening working conditions which are experienced by workers as an infringement of their dignity; (b) a context of successful organising stories and/or visible trade unions/workers' organisations; (c) an organisation engaging in an empowering repertoire of collective action; and (d) a transformational leadership framing workers' struggles in broader class-societal terms. Generally speaking, in the presence of some sort of structures, the first two conditions are sufficient to facilitate the emergence of temporary acts of collective resistance by precarious workers. The other two conditions, however, are fundamental to transformative organising. They involve a shift from organising as a temporary strategy of addressing grievances and winning recognition for collective bargaining to organising as a long-term intentional political project of building independent worker power to advance a vision of social justice. By developing precarious workers into organic leaders and by constructing axes of solidarity across the highly mobile and fragmented precariat and beyond, transformative organising provides the space for empowering these workers to become not only actors, but potentially also authors of their own drama.

Capitalism is not the only form of economy. Alternative economies - people's economies - exist in which human needs and relationships are more important than competition and profit. Forms of solidarity economy built on the principles and values of cooperation, equality, self-determination and democracy, exist and are taking shape in many parts of the world. These forms include household economies, barter economies, collective economies including cooperatives, worker-controlled economies, subsistence market economies, community budgeting, participatory budgeting, community-based local currency exchange systems, and ethical trading, among others. Labor organizations have also provided spaces for building capacities in the struggle to defy capitalism. The paper aims to contribute to the discourse on alternatives to capitalism. We go about by first examining recent works dealing with the issue of alternatives to capitalism (and neoliberalism). We define `alternative' as an on-going multidimensional, non-deterministic process of people's economic and political struggle beyond the capitalist logic, whether macro, meso or micro, to change their circumstances and simultaneously transform themselves in the process. Full development of human potential based on equality, solidarity and sustainability through democratic participatory processes is at the core of an alternative. Then, we look at how various forms of peoples' solidarity economies and state-initiated democratic participatory schemes become spaces or provide spaces for the development of counter-consciousness (outside the capitalist `common sense') and concomitantly build capacities for the development of projects, initiatives and economies beyond the capitalist logic. By addressing changes in the mode of production and the labor process within their spaces, we argue that many of these organizations, projects and initiatives, are the 'materialization' or actual manifestation of non-capitalist alternatives. The first chapter provides an overview of recent discourses on possible alternatives to neoliberal globalization and capitalism. The second chapter looks at consciousness and counter-consciousness and how these processes relate to building capacities that enable the construction of `alternatives.' The third chapter analyses 13 selected cases (of peoples' solidarity economies, workers'/producers' cooperatives, alternative production systems and stateinitiated citizen democratic participation schemes) in terms of how they provide spaces for the development of counter-consciousness (outside the capitalist `common sense') and concomitantly capacities for the development of projects, initiatives and economies beyond capitalism. We also outline in this chapter the overall lessons and insights drawn from the case studies. Finally, in chapter four, we tie the main points underscored by literature we reviewed in chapter one, with the cases we analyzed in chapter three. We argue that the material practice of peoples' struggles fills the need for coherence on the alternatives to capitalism discourse. By bringing together and establishing a `dialogue' between theoretical debates and existing meso and micro social experiments and initiatives, we attempt to address the gap between macro level theoretical discourses and micro level practices. We argue that there are emancipatory and transformative elements that can be learned from people's practices and struggles, which allows for a more grounded framing of an alternative narrative beyond the capitalist logic. The chapter also recommends areas for further research.

If the recent global economic crisis has debilitated labour in many parts of the world, many segments of the trade union movement have been fighting back, combining traditional and innovative strategies and articulating alternatives to the dominant political and economic models. Trade Unions and the Global Crisis offers a composite overview of the responses of trade unions and other workers' organizations to neoliberal globalization in general and to the recent financial crisis in particular

The process of increasing informalisation of the labour market is creating a gap between trade unions and a growing number of workers who have no forms of collective representation at their places of work. This has been labelled the Representational Gap. In part this gap is the result of a trend towards the decentralization of production and the accompanying outsourcing of workers to a third party. In other cases it has arisen from the trend towards casualisation, part-time and temporary employment relationships. It is sometimes a result of retrenchment of workers in the face of international competition and the drive to cut labour costs. The result of these processes is a growing number of workers engaging in survival type activities in micro and small enterprises (MSEs). In particular workers in these workplaces have no form of collective representation. This project was initiated by the International Labour Organisation and is designed to identify obstacles and opportunities for closing this representational gap.

Die gedruckte Ausg. ist im Rainer Hampp Verlag, München, Mering (www.Hampp-Verlag.de) erschienen.