Milan Bhan

Nicolas Chesneau
email: nicolas.chesneau@ekimetrics.comjean-noel.vittaut

Jean-Noël Vittaut

Marie-Jeanne Lesot
email: marie-jeanne.lesot@lip6.fr

Enhancing textual counterfactual explanation intelligibility through Counterfactual Feature Importance

Textual counterfactual examples explain a prediction by modifying the tokens of an initial instance in order to flip the outcome of a classifier. Even under sparsity constraint, counterfactual generation can lead to numerous changes from the initial text, making the explanation hard to understand. We propose Counterfactual Feature Importance, a method to make non-sparse counterfactual explanations more intelligible. Counterfactual Feature Importance assesses token change importance between an instance to explain and its counterfactual example. We develop two ways of computing Counterfactual Feature Importance, respectively based on classifier gradient computation and counterfactual generator loss evolution during counterfactual search. Then we design a global version of Counterfactual Feature Importance, providing rich information about semantic fields globally impacting classifier predictions. Counterfactual Feature Importance enables to focus on impacting parts of counterfactual explanations, making counterfactual explanations involving numerous changes more understandable.

Introduction

The recent development of the Transformer architecture [START_REF] Vaswani | Attention is all you need[END_REF] has led to great advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The inherent complexity of these widespread black box models comes along with the difficulty to understand their predictions. The field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to develop methods to interpret and explain such model behaviour [START_REF] Molnar | General Pitfalls of Model-Agnostic Interpretation Methods for Machine Learning Models[END_REF]. A first main category of XAI methods is called local feature importance. It consists in computing the impact of each input feature in the decision made by the considered machine learning system. A second family explains contrastively by identifying When counterfactual examples involve numerous modifications in the initial instance, despite considering sparsity constraints, the identification of important token changes becomes difficult. In this paper we introduce the notion of Counterfactual Feature Importance (CFI), to quantify the impact of each feature modification from an initial instance to its counterfactual example. For example, given a movie genre classifier and a specific counterfactual example provided with a given method, CFI highlights important modifications (see Figure 1) to explain the label flipping.

The main contributions of this paper are summarized as follows:

1. The concept of Counterfactual Feature Importance is presented.

2. Two instantiations of CFI are proposed, depending on the available information about the classifier and the used counterfactual generator.

3. Global counterfactual feature importance (g-CFI), summarizing the information contained in local CFI, is introduced.

This paper first recalls some basic principles of XAI in NLP with a focus on counterfactual generation in Section 2. We then formalize the CFI method at a local and global scale and propose two ways of computing CFI in Section 3. We finally illustrate the relevance of CFI experimentally on counterfactual examples previously obtained to explain two different classifiers.

XAI Background

In this section, we recall some basic principles of XAI methods and existing counterfactual generation methods in NLP.

Local feature importance

Let f : X → Y be a NLP classifier mapping an input space X of token sequences to an output space Y of classes. Let x 0 = [t 1 , ..., t d ] ∈ X be a sequence of tokens of interest of maximum size d with f (x 0 ) = y 0 . Each token belongs to a dictionary D. A local feature importance operator g : X → R d explains the prediction through a vector [z 1 , ..., z d ] where z i is the contribution of the i th token.

Two very common local feature importance methods are LIME [START_REF] Tulio Ribeiro | why should i trust you?" explaining the predictions of any classifier[END_REF] and SHAP [START_REF] Scott | A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions[END_REF]. LIME relies on a local approximation of f by an explainable linear model whereas SHAP computes feature contribution through an approximation of Shapley values. Integrated Gradients [START_REF] Sundararajan | Axiomatic attribution for deep networks[END_REF] constitute another method specific to deep learning models that approximates the gradient integral of the classifier outputs over the straight line between the instance to explain and a userselected baseline x * . The definition of the baseline is essential since it strongly impacts the resulting explanation. Integrated Gradients can only be computed on ML systems allowing gradient computation, such as deep learning models.

Counterfactual explanation

Counterfactual explanations emphasize what should be different in an input instance to change the outcome of a classifier.

Their interest in XAI has been established from a social science perspective [START_REF] Miller | Explanation in artificial intelligence: Insights from the social sciences[END_REF] in particular.

The counterfactual example generation can be formalized as a constrained optimization problem. For a given classifier f and an instance of interest x 0 , a counterfactual example x cf must be close to x 0 to highlight minimal changes leading to label flipping. Formally it is defined as:

x cf = argmin z∈X c(x 0 , z) s.t. f (z) ̸ = f (x 0 ) (1)
with c : X × X → R a cost function integrating several constraints to ensure various desirable properties briefly discussed below. The lower the cost function, the better the counterfactual explanation. The simplest case is when c is a distance function.

Many desirable properties for counterfactual explanations have been proposed [START_REF] Guidotti | Counterfactual explanations and how to find them: literature review and benchmarking[END_REF][START_REF] Mazzine | A Framework and Benchmarking Study for Counterfactual Generating Methods on Tabular Data[END_REF] to ensure their informative nature. Sparsity measures the number of elements changed between the instance of interest and the generated counterfactual example. It is defined as the l 0 norm of x cf -x. Plausibility encompasses a set of characteristics to ensure that the counterfactual explanation is not out-ofdistribution [START_REF] Laugel | The dangers of post-hoc interpretability: Unjustified counterfactual explanations[END_REF], while being feasible [START_REF] Poyiadzi | FACE: Feasible and Actionable Counterfactual Explanations[END_REF] and actionable.

Textual counterfactual

This section focuses on the case of textual counterfactual generators, presenting two categories in turn.

Text editing heuristics.

A first family of methods addresses the problem introduced in Eq. 1 by slightly modifying the input text to be explained with heuristics.

Model specific methods depend structurally on the models they seek to explain. CLOSS [START_REF] Fern | Text counterfactuals via latent optimization and shapleyguided search[END_REF] focuses on the embedding space of the classifier to explain. After generating counterfactual candidates through optimization in the classifier latent space, the most valuable ones are selected according to an estimation of Shapley values. MiCE [START_REF] Ross | Explaining NLP models via minimal contrastive editing (MiCE)[END_REF] sequentially masks parts of the initial text and performs span infilling using a T5 [START_REF] Raffel | Exploring the limits of transfer learning with a unified text-to-text transformer[END_REF] fine-tuned on the corpus of interest. MiCE targets tokens with high predictive power using gradient attribution metrics. TIGTEC [START_REF] Bhan | Tigtec : Token importance guided text counterfactuals[END_REF] proposes a model-agnostic and -specific version by targeting important tokens with local feature importance method such as SHAP or attention coefficient from Transformer-like models. It sequentially replaces tokens by decreasing order of importance using a BERT mask language model. At each step, replacement is made to ensure proximity to the initial instance and to target label flipping.

Generating counterfactual examples shares similarities with generating adversarial attacks, aiming to incorrectly flip the prediction by minimally editing the initial text. Numerous heuristics have been proposed differing in constraints, text transformation methods and search algorithms [START_REF] Morris | Textattack: A framework for adversarial attacks, data augmentation, and adversarial training in nlp[END_REF]. Contrary to counterfactual explanations, adversarial attacks seek to fool intentionally a model. Therefore, the resulting text is not generated with an explanatory purpose.

Text generation with large language models

A second category of methods generates counterfactual examples in NLP with large pre-trained generative language models. A first approach [START_REF] Madaan | Plug and Play Counterfactual Text Generation for Model Robustness[END_REF] applies a Plug and Play language model [START_REF] Dathathri | Plug and play language models: A simple approach to controlled text generation[END_REF] methodology to generate text under the control of the classifier to explain. It consists in learning latent space perturbations from encoder-decoder models such as BART [START_REF] Lewis | BART: Denoising sequence-to-sequence pre-training for natural language generation, translation, and comprehension[END_REF] in order to flip the outcome.

Polyjuice [START_REF] Wu | Polyjuice: Generating counterfactuals for explaining, evaluating, and improving models[END_REF] proposes to finetune a GPT-2 [START_REF] Radford | Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners[END_REF] model on a set of predefined tasks. It results in a generative language model capable of performing negation, quantification, insertion of tokens or sentiment flipping based on prompt engineering. Polyjuice needs to be trained in a supervised way on ground truth counterfactual examples in order to be able to generate the expected text.

Counterfactual feature importance

This section introduces the notion of Counterfactual Feature Importance (CFI). We present two instantiations of CFI, based either on gradient computation from the classifier or inherent information from the counterfactual generator initially used. We propose a modelspecific approach based on Integrated Gradients called IG-CFI and a method-specific one called TIGTEC-CFI directly resulting from the TIGTEC loss evolution during counterfactual search. Finally we define the notion of global Counterfactual Feature Importance to compute pairwise token importance at a global scale.

Motivation and definition

As presented in the previous section, sparsity is an expected attribute of counterfactual examples. Sparsity ensures counterfactual explanation intelligibility by highlighting few changes leading to label flipping. However, this constraint is not equally addressed among the different existing counterfactual generators.

MiCE succeeds more than other methods to find counterfactual examples to explain a sentiment analysis classifier, while generating less sparse explanations than CLOSS and TIGTEC (see [START_REF] Bhan | Tigtec : Token importance guided text counterfactuals[END_REF]). Non-sparse counterfactual examples are difficult to understand, since the label flipping can be explained by the numerous substitutions in the initial instance. Therefore, we propose a method to quantify the importance of each change in order to better understand the explanation provided by a counterfactual example. We call such a method Counterfactual Feature Importance.

We follow here the notations introduced in Section 2. Given a classifier f : X → Y, an instance of interest x 0 ∈ X and a counterfactual example x cf generated with a counterfactual generator M, h is a counterfactual feature importance operator, h : X × X → R d . This operator explains a prediction by computing the importance of each token change between x cf and x 0 with a vector of importance. The i th component of this vector is the contribution of the i th token substitution to the label flipping. Then, CFI can be seen as a pairwise feature importance between an instance and its counterfactual explanation. Therefore, unchanged tokens between the initial instance and its counterfactual example must have a null CFI. In the following, we formalize the two different CFI instanciations by assuming that each initial token from x 0 is replaced by only one token to reach x cf . However, these two approaches could also be applied with token substitutions of various length, following the same logic.

CFI goes one step further, as compared to classical XAI methods, in the explanation of a classifier prediction by applying local feature importance attribution to counterfactual explanation.

IG-CFI

We define here a first instanciation of CFI based on Integrated Gradients computation.

As introduced in Section 2, Integrated Gradients are defined as a local feature importance explanation. Their purpose is to explain the difference between an instance of interest and a chosen baseline x * by assigning classifier output gradient integrals to instance modifications.

We propose to define Integrated Gradients Counterfactual Feature Importance (IG-CFI) as the Integrated Gradients obtained when setting as baseline x * = x 0 . Therefore, IG-CFI consists in computing the integral of gradients of the classifier's output over the straight-line between x 0 and x cf . Formally, for the counterfactual explanation x cf of x 0 , the IG-CFI related to the i th token change is defined as:

IG-CFI i (x 0 , x cf ) = (e x cf i -e x 0 i ) × 1 α=0 ∇ i f e x 0 i + α × (e x cf i -e x 0 i ) dα (2)
where e x i is the embedding of the i th token of a sequence x obtained from the classifier f and ∇ i denotes the gradient along the i th dimension.

This way, Integrated Gradients are computed with respect to embeddings from the classifier latent space to ensure derivability. This instantiation of CFI ensures that the unchanged tokens have a null counterfactual feature importance.

IG-CFI is a model-specific approach since it needs to have access to the parameters of the classifier to compute gradients. On the other hand, IG-CFI is method-agnostic since it is applicable to counterfactual examples obtained via any counterfactual generation method. However, computing gradients over straight-line in latent space can be text unrepresentative due to the inherent discreteness of text. The CFI instanciation introduced in the next section proposes to address such text unrepresentativeness.

TIGTEC-CFI

In this section, we introduce a CFI instantiation depending on the counterfactual generator used to compute the considered counterfactual examples. Some textual counterfactual generators search for counterfactual by sequentially modifying the input text until a stop condition is reached (see Section 2). We present how the text sequence breaking down the change from x 0 to x cf from such text editing heuristics can provide CFI. We illustrate this approach by considering such a counterfactual generator, namely TIGTEC [START_REF] Bhan | Tigtec : Token importance guided text counterfactuals[END_REF]. It can be applied with any other sequential text editing heuristics, such as MiCE [START_REF] Ross | Explaining NLP models via minimal contrastive editing (MiCE)[END_REF].

Let

x 0 φ 1 -→ x 1 φ 2 -→ ... φ p-1 ---→ x p-1 φp -→
x cf be the text sequence breaking down the change from x 0 to x cf during the counterfactual search, φ i the index of the modified token at the i th step and c : X × X → R the cost function to minimize to generate counterfactual examples as introduced in Equation 1.

For TIGTEC, c is defined as an aggregation of the target class probability score and semantic distance to the initial instance. We propose to define TIGTEC Counterfactual Feature Importance (TIGTEC-CFI) as the cost difference induced by sequential token modifications during counterfactual search. Formally, TIGTEC-CFI is defined as:

TIGTEC-CFI i (x 0 , x cf ) = ∆c(x k , x 0 ) if φ k = i 0 otherwise. (3) with ∆c(x k , x 0 ) = c(x k-1 , x 0 ) -c(x k , x 0
) the cost difference between x k and x k-1 . Figure 2 shows an example of TIGTEC-CFI with the following movie review predicted as negative and its token changes highlighted in box and in bold to switch the label to a positive sentiment:

"i think i will make a movie next weekend oh → no wait im workingoh im sure i can fit it → this in it looks like whoever made this film fit it in i hope the makers of this crap → world have day jobs because this film → movie sucked → deserves it looks → kind like → as someones home movie and → that i dont think more than 100 was spent making it total crap who lets this stuff be released".

In this example TIGTEC-CFI is almost null at the first step when performing the oh → no substitution because it only induces a small variation of cost, whereas the crap → world replacement decreases sharply the cost, making the counterfactual candidate acceptable. Two other token substitutions are evaluated as important: looks → kind and sucked → deserves . This way, TIGTEC-CFI emphasize three token substitutions, which is lower than the nine token changes initially suggested.

This approach is inexpensive compared to IG-CFI since it can be directly measured during the counterfactual search. TIGTEC-CFI also differs from IG-CFI as it computes CFI with texts without referring to any latent space, which avoids text nonrepresentativeness and limits the risk of considering out-of-distribution instances.

Global-CFI

IG-CFI and TIGTEC-CFI both are local explainers, as they explain the prediction for a given instance of interest, x 0 . This section turns to the generation of explanations at a global scale. We present g-CFI that provides information about a given token couple (t 1 , t 2 ), computing the importance of substituting t 1 with t 2 for the considered classifier.

We propose to build global Counterfactual Feature Importance (g-CFI) by summing up local CFI on the whole dataset. Following the previously introduced notations, we denote the instance of interest x 0 and its counterfactual example x cf obtained with a counterfactual generator M, and the counterfactual feature importance operator h that measures the importance of a token change noted h(x 0 , x cf ) = h(x 0 , M(x 0 )) in the label flipping.

Considering a specific pair of tokens (t 1 , t 2 ), its related g-CFI can be formalized as follows:

g-CFI(t 1 , t 2 ) = x∈T i≤d l(x, i, t 1 , t 2 )
where T is the text corpus of interest in which g-CFI is computed, and l(x, i, t 1 , t 2 ) is defined as:

l(x, i, t 1 , t 2 ) = h i x, M(x) 1 (x i ,M(x) i )=(t 1 ,t 2 )
This way, g-CFI is defined as a global pairwise token importance that evaluates which token pairs are the most important at a global scale to switch label.

Such a definition of g-CFI tends to emphasize frequent token changes. Global CFI could also be aggregated by computing the average local CFI. However, we assume that rare token changes are globally less informative about a classifier than frequent ones. Besides, we believe that g-CFI is more informative than a simple token pair frequency calculus. By weighting frequency by CFI, recurrent token pairs with low/middle average CFI appear less important at a global scale.

Experimental results

This section presents the experimental results obtained on two data sets with two binary classifiers. IG-CFI and TIGTEC-CFI are computed and compared based on two related sets of counterfactual examples generated with TIGTEC. Then we compute g-CFI in order to assess which token pairs impact globally the most these classifiers.

Experimental Setup

We apply TIGTEC on two DistilBERT [START_REF] Sanh | DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter[END_REF] binary classifiers. The first classifier performs sentiment analysis on the IMDB database [START_REF] Maas | Learning Word Vectors for Sentiment Analysis[END_REF] containing movie reviews. The second is trained on movie genre classification on a dataset of horror and comedy synopses from

IG-CFI vs. TIGTEC-CFI

IG-CFI and TIGTEC-CFI can lead to different explanations. Figure 3 gives an example of an instance classified as comedy and its related counterfactual example classified as an horror synopsis. In this case, TIGTEC-CFI and IG-CFI attribute different token change importance by emphasizing in blue different tokens. The zombie → super substitution is assessed as more important by IG-CFI than TIGTEC-CFI to explain label flipping. However, TIGEC-CFI considers zombie → superman as more important than IG-CFI.

We compare important tokens based on IG-CFI and TIGTEC-CFI approaches. We apply each method on the two sets of counterfactual texts previously introduced and compare them. IG-CFI and TIGTEC-CFI are compared through their resulting token ranking by order of CFI. Nonmodified tokens are filtered out to focus only on token subject to CFI computation. Counterfactual examples obtained with only one token substitution are not considered either since their resulting CFI rankings necessarily perfectly match. Following the example presented Figure 3, Table 1 illustrates the two resulting rankings obtained with IG-CFI and TIGTEC-CFI.

Ranking comparison is done with Spearman and Kendall rank correlations (see Table 2). Movie genre IG-CFI and TIGTEC-CFI rankings are globally more similar than the ones obtained from IMDB. Finally, IG-CFI and TIGTEC-CFI seem complementary although moderately correlated.

Global-CFI results

The results obtained with IG-CFI and TIGTEC-CFI are aggregated at a global scale. Each token CFI is aggregated with respect to its related label. For example, the → this is considered differently if the predicted label of the initial instance is positive or negative. However, token CFI is aggregated in a symmetric way, which makes love → hate equivalent to hate → love . From this perspective, g-CFI enables to build label-specific semantic fields and their interactions. In the following, considering two different tokens t 1 and t 2 , we denote (t 1 ,t 2 ) equivalently to (t 2 ,t 1 ).

Figure 4 shows the 35 most important token pairs relatively to the global TIGTEC-CFI on sentiment analysis. Global TIGTEC-CFI is provided for movie genre classification in Appendix A. The most important token pairs on sentiment analysis are (best, worst), (good, bad) or (liked, hated). In this 35 token pairs, mainly two types of token modification stand out: a sentiment-oriented token is replaced by its antonym, and an indefinite article is replaced by a negation adverb. Considering more token pairs could bring up unexpected tokens and target biases or classifier errors. Token pairs could also be aggregated at a highest level of abstraction by lemmatizing tokens, merging for example "loved" and "love" CFI.

Discussion

In this paper we have introduced the concept of counterfactual feature importance in textual framework. The purpose of CFI is to assess the impact of every feature modification, from an initial instance to its counterfactual example.

When counterfactual examples are not sparse, CFI highlights important modifications, making the explanation more competitive. CFI can be aggregated at a global scale, giving valuable insights about the most important token pairs to switch label.

While CFI-based explanations may appear intuitive, it is important to verify this through a human-in-the-loop evaluation before making any definitive conclusions. CFI can be built in different ways: two approaches have been developed, respectively based on Integrated Gradients and the TIGTEC counterfactual generator. We believe that CFI can also be computed in other ways. Other local feature importance methods such as LIME and SHAP can be used to compute CFI by computing decomposition difference of x cf from that of x 0 . Loss break down from other sequential counterfactual generators such as MiCE can be used as well.

Besides, g-CFI can help in comparing textual counterfactual generators. Since these generators differ how they target important tokens and generate new text, g-CFI could bring to light differences in the resulting semantic fields. Such analyses could lead to a better understanding of textual counterfactual methods and foster their enhancement.

Finally, the diversity of CFI approaches raises the need of their comparison beyond the similarity analysis performed above.

Moreover, the qualitative assessment of the explanations provided by CFI requires human intervention. Humangrounded experiments would enable to compare the quality of CFI explanations to classical counterfactual examples.

Conclusion

Textual counterfactual generators sometimes fail to provide sparse explanations. The high number of changed tokens between the initial instance and its counterfactual example make the explanation difficult to understand.

We have proposed Counterfactual Feature Importance (CFI) to assess which token changes are the most impactful. CFI enables to focus on important tokens, which is especially useful in the case of non-sparse explanations. Such explanations can be aggregated at a global scale in order to assess the most important token pairs leading to label flipping. In this papier We have only focused on counterfactual explanations. However, CFI can also be applied to adversarial attacks in order to evaluate the token changes that have the most impact on label flipping to fool a model.

CFI is one step further in the understanding of NLP classifiers. We believe that the concept of CFI is also applicable to image and tabular data, as long as counterfactual explanations are previously generated. Therefore, CFI can benefit to any classifier by making counterfactual explanations easier to understand. The generalizability of CFI makes this concept particularly promising.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Example of an initial instance classified as comedy and its counterfactual example classified as horror synopsis. The raw x cf is the counterfactual example whose modified tokens are highlighted. Counterfactual feature importance enables to highlight important changes when counterfactual examples are not sparse. Here, CFI highlights a → dark and femme → vampire whereas others changes are not outlined anymore.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Example of TIGTEC-CFI with nine consecutive changes from negative sentiment x 0 to a positive sentiment x cf . CFI is defined as the cost difference induced by each token substitution during TIGTEC counterfactual search. The crap → world change has the highest TIGTEC-CFI considering the resulting impact on the cost function.

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure3: TIGTEC-CFI and IG-CFI example on a counterfactual example classified as an horror synopsis. Tokens highlighted in blue in the raw counterfactual example are those that have replaced initial ones. Below, the more pronounced the shade of blue, the higher the CFI.

Figure 4 :

 4 Figure 4: Top 35 important token pairs relatively to TIGTEC-CFI and sentiment analysis. The left side corresponds to tokens associated with positive IMDB reviews, while the right column is related to negative sentiments. The stronger the link between two tokens, the higher the importance of the pair.

Table 1 :

 1 IG-CFI and TIGTEC-CFI ranking comparison on an example involving nine changes. The two CFI methods only agree on four token modifications (highlighted in bold).

	Token change	IG-CFI ranking	TIGTEC-CFI ranking
	a → with		8	3
	zombie → super		1	4
	apocalypse → smashvillpower	2	2
	begins → was		7	7
	zombies → thugs		5	5
	zombies → villains		4	6
	the → for		6	8
	zombie → superman		3	1
	senses → self		9	9
	Correlation IMDB Genre
	Spearman	0.26*	0.42*
	Kendall	0.21*	0.53*
	Table 2: IG-CFI and TIGTEC-CFI ranking correlations
	on counterfactual examples from sentiment analysis
	(IMDB column) and movie genre classification (Genre
	column). Values with * are statistically significantly
	different from 0 at a risk level of 1%.
	Kaggle 1 . More information about the datasets, the
	performance of the classifiers and the TIGTEC
	hyperparameters used are provided in Appendix A.
	Respectively 982 and 419 counterfactual examples
	are generated from IMDB and the genre synopses
	datasets from TIGTEC in which we compute IG-
	CFI and TIGTEC-CFI.

https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/movie-genreclassification/overview

Ethics Statement

Like any XAI methods, CFI explanations must be taken with caution. Such methods only provide insights about what is important according to a specific classifier. These explanations do not necessarily reflect what one would consider as important. We plan to share our code to make it accessible to everyone. We will do this once the anonymity period is finished. Each DistilBERT is initialized as a DistilBERT base uncased from Hugging Face on PyTorch. The text preparation and tokenization step is performed via Hugging Face's DistilBERT tokenizer. The forward path is defined as getting the embedding of the classification token to perform the classification task. A dense layer is added to perform the classification and fine-tune the models. Each classifier has therefore 66 million parameters and is trained with 3 epochs, with a batch size of 12. The loss for the training is a CrossEntropyLoss, and the optimization is done using Adam with initial learning rate of 5e -5 and a default epsilon value to 1e -8. The performances of the classifiers are presented in Table 3.

A.2 TIGTEC hyperparameters

We follow here the notations from the original paper.

• g = attention

• M = M f t where M f t is a BERT mask language model fine-tuned on the corpus in which the classifier f has been trained.

• α = 0.3

• topk = 50

• beam_width = 4

• mask_div = 4

• strategy = evolutive

• margin = 0.15

• s = sentence_transformer The stronger the link between two tokens, the higher the importance of the pair.


Labour unions in the Global South in times of neoliberalism

Introduction Bettina Engels, Alexis Roy

The effects of neoliberalism on the world of work and trade unionism have been subject for much debate (Webster, 2015). Neoliberalism, according to David Harvey, can be understood as a theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade (Harvey, 2007, 22). Yet these overall characteristics just constitute a template from which neoliberalism in its empirical forms of appearance varies in manifold ways, among historical and spatial contexts as a "bricolage of practices and ideas" (Hataway, 2020, 315), in a way a "collective thought" (Mirowski, 2009;Dean, 2014). The actual practices of neoliberalism, as Harvey notes, "vary from this template [as depicted above]" (Harvey, 2007, 22). The spread of neoliberalism, which is simultaneously part of, and is also accelerating, capitalist globalization, has considerably impacted the international division of labour. While extractivism and dependency on raw materials (mineral, fossil, and agricultural) remain a major feature of the economies of many countries worldwide, we are also witnessing, particularly in Asia, the expansion of labour-intensive industrial production (textiles, automobiles, low-cost products) (Autrepart, 2014/1). Of course labour dynamics vary among countries and regions; yet on the whole, in the 'emerging' and 'developing' economies, the share of agricultural jobs has decreased significantly during the 1980s, and again in the period 2000-2015, whereas the service sector has expanded. At the same time, the share of manufacturing jobs remained almost stable at just under 10 per cent in many countries (IMF, 2018, 134). These same countries have been the laboratories of neoliberal reforms. While in the 20 th century, many analysts assumed that the South would follow the path set by 'developed' countries, this perspective is currently being reversed, leading to the question of whether the variants of (often informal and precarious) work in the South are now becoming increasingly prevalent in the North. Does the 'uberization' of the economies in the centres of global capitalism reflect the diffusion of the precarious self-employment and self-exploitation that characterizes the situation of many workers in the South? It is assumed that workers no longer need a factory and a boss, but instead have room for their own individual initiative, for entrepreneurial manoeuvring and resilience.

It is a feature of neoliberalism to conflate "political freedom with freedom of the market and of trade" (Harvey, 2019, 8). "The labour market was 'freed' from regulatory or institutional restraints (trade union power, for example)." (ibid., 9) It would be misleading, and even grist on the mills of the proponents of neoliberalism, to conclude that the rise of neoliberalism inevitably comes along with the decline of workers' organization and collective agency. It is instructive rather to examine the various and specific effects that neoliberal policies, privatization, deregulation and financialization have on workers, their organizations, and namely trade unions. Workers and trade unions are not just passively affected, or victims of neoliberalism; they play a role in shaping neoliberal policies, adopt or challenge neoliberal discourses. And, most importantly, they oppose and resist it in various manners, as the case studies presented in this issue demonstrate.

Studying trade unionism without fetishizing it

In this introduction to the special issue on "labour unions in the Global South in times of neoliberalism", we argue that neoliberalism does not come along with the end of class formation and class struggle, and that trade unions continue to be important organizations of mobilizing workers, defending their rights and making claims to improve their conditions of live and work.

However, trade unionism has emerged from a historical specific context: The expansion of wage labour and proletarization as a result of the industrial revolution, the mode and relations of production linked to it. Trade unionism has than spread around the world, and is being adapted to various contexts and conditions. Today, workers and their organisations are affected by neoliberalism, that is omnipresent in almost all context but varies in its manner of appearance. With this in mind, we conceptualize trade unions not as a fixed model shaped by industrial relations and the related historical experiences of the Global North. Rather, we understand trade unions as a form of organization and a socioeconomic and political institution that is contingently appropriated and formed by the working classes in various contexts. This also means that trade union are on no account organizations exclusively formed by, and representing wage workers in formal, relatively secured employment relations.

Trade unions and trade union research in the Global North are frequently, and somehow rightly, considered to be on the downgrade, as the increase in informal and precarious labour also in the centres of global industrial capitalism, diminishes 'classical' trade union clientele. Indeed, most people in the Global South (and probably, in many settings in the North likewise) are not engaged in formal and relatively secured wage labour. They are peasants, craftsperson, artisanal miners, pursue 'informal' activities in petty trading, transport, agriculture, care work and other sectors, and they do unpaid reproductive work. Around 85 per cent of African workers are engaged in the so-called informal economy, and even in South Africa, the obviously most 'advanced' industrialized economy on the continent, more than 40 per cent of all employment is precarious and irregular in some way (Bernards, 2019, 294).

That large numbers of people are engaged in formal, relatively secured employment, is rather an historical exception than the norm in global capitalism (Breman & van der Linden, 2014). Informal, precarious, unfree and unpaid labour is, and has always been, key to capitalism. Thus, "our picture of capitalism -whether as a system of 'accumulation on a world scale' or more narrowly as a set of spatially and temporally bound relations of production -[is never] complete without taking such forms of work into account" (Bernards, 2019, 296).

If precarious and informal work is on a tear, this does not mean "the end of trade unionism as we know it" (Rizzo & Atzeni, 2020, 1114). Prominent authors on precarity (predominantly focussing on the North) as Guy Standing (Standing, 2011; see also Gallin, 2001) assume that trade unions are unable to defend the rights of precarious workers and struggle for improving their conditions of work and live. Informal workers are indeed sparsely represented in trade unions but are present in a range of other organizations, both progressive and neoliberal (Britwum & Akorsu, 2017): workers' associations, women's associations, cooperatives, civil society organizations, advocacy organizations, and othersranging from scattered local groups to well-organized transnational networks. In some cases, selforganizations of informal workers, with regard to their organizational forms and repertoires, resemble trade unions but do not identify themselves as trade unions. With regard to the African continent, numerous case studies explore the organizing of informal sector workers, but predominantly in urban settings, e.g. transport (Rizzo & Atzeni, 2020), private security services (Omolo &Odhong, 2017), port workers, andstreet andmarket vendors (Lindell, 2010). Britwum and Akorsu (2017) present the noteworthy exception of casual workers in the palm oil production in Ghana, who have organized themselves alongside their regularly employed colleagues in two competing trade unions. Lerche (2010) points out that underprivileged classes particularly workers who are facing risks when organizing, such as migrant workers and 'illicit' workersare more likely to organize in other organizations beyond traditional unions. Indeed, trade unions are highly institutionalized actors in industrial relations in the Global North. Yet their institutionalized status is likewise a strength of trade unions: They have access to resources, to arenas of decision-making, they are provided with particular rights and opportunities. In view of their tradition and historical experiences, they dispose socioorganizational know-how, trans-sectoral and transnational networks that other organizations of the working classes are unlikely to have at their disposal. This is not to say that trade unions are the only, and not necessarily the best organizations to represent the labouring classes and claim workers' rights. However they are important and particular collective actors to do this, in most contexts around the globe and on all scales.

With this in mind, we can, and should study trade unions in their empirical appearances, rather than as a template shaped by the history of Northern industrial relations. It is instructive to study organizations in the South that define themselves as trade unions but do not represent and organize wage labourers, such as student or peasant organizations and associations of informal workers or self-employed in various sectors. Studying trade unions, and namely those in the Global South, from such a perspective, goes beyond the "fetichism of the trade union form" (Atzeni, 2021). Studying trade unions in the South, as the authors do in their contributions to this special issue, allows us precisely this: Instead of reifying some sort of trade union template, we study the various forms of its appropriation by the working classes, including poor peasants, artisanal miners, casual workers, self-employed, etc. Trade unions are by far not a homogenous category of actors; and they are not monolithic collective actors. Trade unions are "a field involving individuals […] These individuals are the heart and soul of union militancy at key moments" (Freund, 2019, 526). This being said, we suggest to understand trade unions as a form of organization, a tool and variant of mobilization and claim making, without attributing to it pre-conceived forms, roles and functions. How is trade unionism as a form of organization and political institution appropriated in various contexts, namely in the Global South, outside its milieu of historical origin? And how do organizations that understand themselves as trade unions evolve in, and adapt to, restrictive conditions such as authoritarian and repressive regimes that curtail labour rights, to the lack of resources (limited membership fees, no access to institutional funding and institutional representation, no permanent staff)?

Examples from the South demonstrate that the share of formal wage earners is not necessarily linked to the socio-political relevance of trade unions within a society: In Burkina Faso and Nigeria, for example, formal wage earners are clearly a minority, and trade union members are probably a minority of these wage earners. But trade unions are influential actors in national politics, intervening clearly beyond labour related issues, and they are widely accepted as such both by state and social actors. However, informal and casual workers are hardly represented in the trade unions; the biggest and most visible trade unions are typically those represented the public services, including the education and health care sector, and from the extractive industries (miners and oil workers). Historically, African trade unions in many cases have been key actors in struggles for national liberation, decolonialization, against racist regimes and apartheid, respectively (Beckmann & Sachikonye, 2010;Freund, 2019). This meant extending their concerns and mandate beyond workplace issues and labour-related matters. It required their engagement in wider social and political alliances, both with similarminded groups in civil society and with political parties whose programmes reflected the concerns and interests of the workers (Beckmann & Sachikonye, 2010, 5).

Studying unionism in context

To understand and evaluate the role trade unions play in a society, we study them embedded in the respective socio-political setting, notably their relations to other organizations, political parties and social movements, their social base and embedding, their ideology and positioning.

Studying trade unions, in this view, means to make visible, too, "the real processes of struggle and organization that exist outside/in parallel/around the union form" (Atzeni, 2021, 2).

Social movement unionism (Seidman, 2011;Waterman, 1993) has been promoted as the intimate interlinkage of trade unions with the movements of other non-unionized or nonunionizable working classes or categories (petty-commodity sector, homeworkers, peasants, housewives, technicians, and professionals; [and with other] non-or multi-class democratic movements (base movements of churches, women's, residents', ecological, human rights and peace movements. (Waterman, 1993, 267) While it is true that "research on alternative forms of organization of workers other than trade unions […] has not led to a theoretical reconceptualization of the status of relevant actors in industrial relations" (Nowak, 2021(Nowak, , 1337)), social movements, just as little as trade unions, should be fetishized. Neither the one nor the other are as such more radical, authentic or legitimate. Trade unions have some comparative advantages in organizing workers and claiming their class interests, given their historical experiences and institutional status, and (resulting from this) resources and institutional power. It remains an empirical question in how far and how trade unions use these resources to push through working class interests and claims, whose interests and which claims they fight for, and how radical their struggles are. Indeed, industrial relations as an academic field examine trade unions and other working-class organizations, and anti-capitalist mobilization in general, in some kind of a symbiotic relationship with capital accumulation (Atzeni, 2021;11;Harvey, 2015). But maybe this holds less true for the Global South, precisely because working-class mobilization, in many contexts, has a tradition of fighting against colonialism and apartheid (which are, of course, closely linked to capital accumulation), for national liberation and democratization.

The articles in this issue: studying varieties of trade unionism in times of neoliberalism

Trade unions can, and should be, investigated in their diversity; their study has to be anchored in empirical contexts and thus be localized and historicized. Contributions to this issue are not only concerned with the engagement of trade unions in work-related struggles on the one hand, and broader popular struggles against authoritarianism and for national liberation and independence on the other (Freund, 1988;Kraus, 2007). They critically engage "with the argument that the growing precariousness of work represents the end of trade unionism as we know it" (Rizzo & Atzeni, 2020, 1114). All authors are aware that trade unions all over the world, and particularly those in the Global South, have extended and continue to extend "their concerns and mandate beyond workplace and labour-related matters" (Beckmann & Sachikonye, 2010, 5). Yet this special issue is also interested in the variety of trade union activities; not limited to strikes and other more or less conflictual forms of collective claimmaking, but also everyday trade union activities. In other words, trade unions at work and in the worlds of work take centre stages in this issue. 1Juan Pedro Massano's article goes back to the period when neoliberalism was pushed through in Latin America, on the first world where neoliberalism's triumph kicked off. The case study outlines the importance of historicizing the empirical forms of appearances of neoliberalism, and demonstrate that its implementation does not go without resistance. The author analyses the failed attempt to reform the labour bill in Argentina during a period of structural adjustment. In a context of economic crisis and through a rhetoric of "modernization", this labour bill reform under the Raúl Alfonsín government (1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989) is characteristic of neoliberal logics: attacking collective bargaining (while allowing some negotiations to be carried out at the company level); trying to limit the right to strike; the creation of a loan guarantee fund to cover severance pay, etc. In a country with a strong trade union tradition, Massano explains why Alfonsin had to give up his reform and finally integrate trade unionists into his government, even appointing a trade unionist to the Ministry of Labour, reconnecting with the Peronist model. However, the author emphasizes the ambivalence of the situation. If the resistance of a powerful union movement was able to temporarily limit the damage, the neoliberal steamroller did not stop. Articles by Jan Brunner and Oscar Soto and Facundo Martin focus on agriculture, a sector that has likewise substantially been impacted by the development of neoliberalism in Latin America. While Brunner demonstrates how neoliberalism resulted in complication labour mobilization and class struggle, Soto and Martin outline that it can, quite the contrary, also give rise to new forms of mobilization, collective actors and alliances, therewith helping trade unions to adopt to changing conditions and revitalize.

Brunner examines how workers and their unions have been affected by the mechanization and growth of the agro-industrial sugar cane sector in the federal state of São Paulo in Brazil over the last two decades. The development of the sector has been promoted by the state and international investors. At the same time, harvesting has been largely mechanized, diminishing the need of labour, especially for manual and lower-skilled jobs. As a consequence, rural unemployment has increased, as has the division among workers, namely between higherpaying jobs such as machine and truck drivers, and lower-paying manual jobs. These developments resulted in a fragmentation of the trade union landscape, and at the same time workers' need of, and wish for, collective organizing. The number of strikes decreased, and the demands were more focused on defending rights than on obtaining improvements. The agricultural unions failed to effectively ally with other social movements, such as the movement of landless workers (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST). Collaborations with transnational organizations, such as the global umbrella organisation of industrial unions industriALL remained episodical. Brunner thus concludes that the transformation of the Brazilian sugar cane sector has altogether worsened the situation of the majority of workers.

Oscar Soto and Facundo Martin investigate trade unionism in agriculture in Argentina, Brazil and Chile. They likewise outline important transformations in labour relations in rural areas under the pressure of neoliberalism. In contrast to Brunner's case, Soto and Martin observe that neoliberalism and its impact on small peasants and rural workers gave rise to new unions and new forms of interaction and collaboration between unions and social movements.

These new actors and alliances, such as the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo-CLOC-La Vía Campesina call into question the boundaries between trade unions, other organizations and social movements. Agrarian associations and peasant movements potentially bring forth new forms of socio-political articulation, and therewith contribute the renewing and revitalizing trade unionism, according to the authors.

While the articles discussed so far focus on how workers and unions are impacted by neoliberalism, how they oppose it, and how they adapt to it, Laurent Fourchard, presents quite a contrary case of a trade union that has seized neoliberalism: the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) in Nigeria. Fourchard explains how the union took advantage of the privatization of transport from the 1980s, imposed by the International Monetary Fund, to take control of the sector. It than has gradually replaced the bureaucratic state and local governments in regulating the sector and collecting taxes. Moreover, the union has incorporated neoliberal norms into its own organization, squeezing the lowest rungs of the union and the sector, the collectors and drivers. Yet Fourchard, in his case study, also exposes the false pretense of neoliberalism. If its promoters cheer the free market, in practice liberalization and privatization produce more or less unexpected effects. While transport vehicles are managed by the private sector, the NURTW's control over the sector allows it to maximize the profits it generates. The union succeeded in appropriating the opportunities opened up by neoliberal policies and incorporated neoliberal logics in its own organization, while subverting the deregulation of the sector to its advantage.

Two further articles examine unions in neoliberal and authoritarian contexts. Alpkan Birelma traces the conditions that allowed workers in a Turkish textile company to create a union against the odds of a rather hostile context. Several decades of neoliberal reforms resulted in a decline in workers' rights and a strong regression of trade unions. Nevertheless, as the case presented by Birelma demonstrates impressively, workers manage to mobilize from below. The author outlines the decisive role of one communist activist around whom a militant core was formed in the factory. This was particularly important when faced with repression. Besides, the local mobilization benefitted from transnational support. Mehmet Erman Erol and Çağatay Edgücan Şahin, based on the examples of Egypt and Turkey, show how neoliberalism and authoritarianism converge, as opposed to the assumption that the latter would favour political liberalism. The authors in detail trace the history of trade unions in both countries over the past 50 years and outline a range of relationships and strategies adopted by the state to restrain the trade union movement: repression, clientelism, co-optation, coercive measures limiting labour and union rights, criminalization of labour and social protests. In both countries, the state plays an important role in the economy, which brings the authors to discuss its place in neoliberalism.

The articles presented in this issue raise more broader questions on the effects of recent developments in neoliberalism, which have been characterized as "authoritarian developmentalism" (Arsel et al, 2021), notably on workers, their mobilization and trade unions.

While some cases, such as the one presented by Alpkan Birelma demonstrate that courageous and persistent mobilization can be successful even under restrictive conditions, altogether the current weaking of democratic, social and labour rights allover the world seems rather unfavorable to trade unionism. In the current phase of neoliberalism, workers around the globe face restrictions and attacks both by corporate and state actors. Yet in contrast to the discourse on the alleged decline of trade unionism, the contributions to this issue show that, as so often, realities are much more complex and differentiated. With that said, trade unionism rather than a fixed institutional and organizational form, is a tool that provides manifold possibilities of adaption. It is appropriated by workers and activists; and studying the forms it takes and the processes of its adaption, also outside its milieu of historical origin, allows us to widen our comprehension of the organization, mobilization and claims raising by workers worldwideincluding those who do not work in relatively secured forms of wage labour.

Les syndicats du sud global à l'ère néolibérale

Introduction Bettina Engles, Alexis Roy

Les effets du néolibéralisme sur le monde du travail et le syndicalisme ont fait l'objet de nombreux débats (Webster, 2015). Le néolibéralisme, selon David Harvey, est une théorie d'économique politique considérant que le bien-être humain peut être amélioré par la maximisation des libertés entrepreneuriales dans un cadre institutionnel caractérisé par les droits de propriété privée, la liberté individuelle, les marchés libres et le libre-échange (Harvey, 2007, 22). Pourtant, ces caractéristiques générales ne constituent qu'un modèle à partir duquel le néolibéralisme, dans ses formes empiriques, varie de multiples façons, selon les contextes historiques et spatiaux, comme un "bricolage de pratiques et d'idées 2 " (Hataway, 2020, 315), à partir d'une "pensée collective" (Mirowski, 2009 ;Dean, 2014). Les formes réelles du néolibéralisme, comme le note Harvey, " varient à partir de ce modèle [tel que décrit ci-dessus] " (Harvey, 2007, 22). L'expansion du néolibéralisme, qui s'inscrit dans la mondialisation capitaliste tout en l'accélérant, a eu un impact considérable sur la division internationale du travail. Si l'extractivisme et la dépendance aux matières premières (minérales, fossiles et agricoles) restent des caractéristiques majeures des économies de nombreux pays dans le monde, on assiste également, notamment en Asie, à l'expansion de la production industrielle à forte intensité de main-d'oeuvre (textile, automobile, produits à bas coût) (Autrepart, 2014/1). Bien sûr, les dynamiques du travail varient selon les pays et les régions ; pourtant, dans l'ensemble, dans les économies " émergentes " et " en développement ", la part des emplois agricoles a considérablement diminué au cours des années 1980, et à nouveau sur la période 2000-2015, tandis que le secteur des services s'est développé. Dans le même temps, la part des emplois manufacturiers est restée à peu près stable, à un peu moins de 10 %, dans de nombreux pays (FMI, 2018, 134).

Ces mêmes pays ont été les laboratoires des réformes néolibérales. Alors qu'au 20 th siècle, de nombreux analystes supposaient que le Sud suivrait la voie tracée par les pays "développés", cette perspective est actuellement inversée, ce qui amène à se demander si les formes du travail (souvent informel et précaire) dans le Sud ne sont pas en train de devenir de plus en plus répandues dans le Nord. L'"ubérisation" des économies dans les centres du capitalisme mondial reflète-t-elle la diffusion du travail indépendant précaire et de l'autoexploitation qui caractérisent la situation de nombreux travailleurs du Sud ? On suppose que les travailleurs n'ont plus besoin d'une usine et d'un patron, mais qu'il faut au contraire laisser place à leur propre initiative individuelle, à l'entrepreneuriat et à leur résilience.

C'est une caractéristique du néolibéralisme que de confondre " la liberté politique avec la liberté du marché et du commerce " (Harvey, 2019, 8). "Le marché du travail a été "libéré" des contraintes réglementaires ou institutionnelles (le pouvoir des syndicats, par exemple)" (ibid., 9). Il serait trompeur, et même de nature à apporter de l'eau au moulin des partisans du néolibéralisme, de conclure que la montée du néolibéralisme entraîne inévitablement le déclin (Bernards, 2019, 294).

Le fait qu'un grand nombre de personnes soient engagées dans un emploi formel, relativement sécurisé, est plutôt une exception historique que la norme dans le capitalisme mondial (Breman & van der Linden, 2014). Le travail informel, précaire, non libre et non rémunéré est, et a toujours été, la clé du capitalisme. Ainsi, "notre image du capitalisme -que ce soit en tant que système d'"accumulation à l'échelle mondiale" ou, plus étroitement, en tant qu'ensemble de relations de production liées dans l'espace et dans le temps -[n'est] jamais complète sans tenir compte de ces formes de travail" (Bernards, 2019, 296).

Si le travail précaire et informel a le vent en poupe, cela ne signifie pas pour autant " la fin du syndicalisme tel que nous le connaissons " (Rizzo & Atzeni, 2020, 1114). D'éminents auteurs sur la précarité (principalement axés sur le Nord) comme Guy Standing (Standing, 2011 ;voir aussi Gallin, 2001) supposent que les syndicats sont incapables de défendre les droits des travailleurs précaires et de lutter pour améliorer leurs conditions de travail et de vie. Les travailleurs informels sont effectivement peu représentés dans les syndicats, mais sont présents dans toute une série d'autres organisations, tant progressistes que néolibérales (Britwum & Akorsu, 2017) : associations de travailleurs, associations de femmes, coopératives, organisations de la société civile, organisations de défense des droits, et autres -allant de groupes locaux épars à des réseaux transnationaux bien organisés. Dans certains cas, les organisations de travailleurs informels, en ce qui concerne leurs formes et répertoires organisationnels, ressemblent à des syndicats, mais ne s'y identifient pas comme tels. En ce qui concerne le continent africain, de nombreuses études de cas explorent l'organisation des travailleurs du secteur informel, mais principalement en milieu urbain, par exemple dans le domaine des transports (Rizzo & Atzeni, 2020), des services de sécurité privés (Omolo & Odhong, 2017), des dockers et des vendeurs de rue et sur les marchés (Lindell, 2010). Britwum et Akorsu (2017) présentent l'exception notable des travailleurs précaires dans la production d'huile de palme au Ghana, qui se sont organisés aux côtés de leurs collègues salariés dans deux syndicats concurrents. Lerche (2010) (Freund, 2019, 526). Cela étant, nous proposons de comprendre le syndicalisme comme une forme d'organisation, un outil et une variante de mobilisation et de revendication, sans lui attribuer des formes, des rôles et des fonctions préconçus. Comment le syndicalisme en tant que forme d'organisation et institution politique est-il approprié dans divers contextes, notamment dans le Sud, en dehors de son milieu d'origine historique ? Et comment les organisations qui se comprennent comme des syndicats évoluent-elles et s'adaptent-elles face à des conditions restrictives, telles qu'imposées par des régimes autoritaires et répressifs qui limitent les droits des travailleurs, et comment font-elles face à un certain manque de ressources (cotisations limitées, pas d'accès aux financements institutionnels et à la représentation institutionnelle, pas de personnel permanent) ?

Les exemples au Sud montrent que la part des salariés formels n'est pas nécessairement liée au poids sociopolitique des syndicats dans une société : Au Burkina Faso et au Nigeria, par exemple, les salariés formels sont clairement une minorité, et les membres des syndicats sont probablement une minorité de ces salariés. Mais les syndicats sont des acteurs influents dans la politique nationale, intervenant clairement au-delà des questions liées au travail, et ils sont largement acceptés comme tels par l'État et les acteurs sociaux. Cependant, les travailleurs informels et occasionnels sont à peine représentés dans les syndicats ; les syndicats les plus importants et les plus visibles sont généralement ceux qui représentent les services publics, en particulier les secteurs de l'éducation et de la santé, ainsi que les industries extractives (mineurs et travailleurs du pétrole). Historiquement, les syndicats africains ont, dans de nombreux cas, été des acteurs clés des luttes de libération nationale, des décolonisations, et contre les régimes racistes et l'apartheid (Beckmann & Sachikonye, 2010 ;Freund, 2019). Cela impliquait d'étendre leurs préoccupations et leur mandat au-delà des questions liées au lieu de travail et au travail. Cela nécessitait leur engagement dans des alliances sociales et politiques plus larges, à la fois avec des groupes de la société civile aux vues similaires et avec des partis politiques dont les programmes reflétaient les préoccupations et les intérêts des travailleurs (Beckmann & Sachikonye, 2010, 5).

Contextualiser l'étude du syndicalisme

Pour comprendre et évaluer le rôle que jouent les syndicats dans une société, nous les étudions dans leur contexte sociopolitique respectif, notamment leurs relations avec d'autres organisations, partis politiques et mouvements sociaux, leur base sociale et leur enracinement, leur idéologie et leur positionnement. Étudier les syndicats, dans cette optique, signifie également rendre visibles "les processus réels de lutte et d'organisation qui existent en dehors/en parallèle/autour de la forme syndicale" (Atzeni, 2021, 2).

Le syndicalisme de mouvement social (Seidman, 2011 ;Waterman, 1993) a été promu comme l'interconnexion intime des syndicats avec les mouvements d'autres classes ou catégories de travailleurs non syndiqués ou difficilement « syndiquables » (secteur des petits commerçants, travailleurs à domicile, paysans, femmes au foyer, techniciens et professionnels) et avec d'autres mouvements démocratiques multi-classes ou non (mouvements de base des églises, des femmes, des résidents, écologiques, des droits de l'homme et des mouvements pour la paix) (Waterman, 1993, 267). S'il est vrai que "la recherche sur les formes alternatives d'organisation des travailleurs autres que les syndicats [...] n'a pas conduit à une reconceptualisation théorique du statut des acteurs pertinents dans les relations industrielles" (Nowak, 2021(Nowak, , 1337)), les mouvements sociaux, tout aussi peu que les syndicats, doivent être fétichisés. Ni l'un ni l'autre ne sont en tant que tels plus radicaux, authentiques ou légitimes. Les syndicats disposent de certains avantages comparatifs pour organiser les travailleurs et revendiquer leurs intérêts de classe, étant donné leurs expériences historiques et leur statut institutionnel, ainsi que (ce qui en découle) leurs ressources et leur pouvoir institutionnel. La question empirique reste de savoir dans quelle mesure et comment les syndicats utilisent ces ressources pour faire valoir les intérêts et les revendications de la classe ouvrière, pour quels intérêts et quelles revendications ils se battent, et dans quelle mesure leurs luttes sont radicales.

En effet, les relations industrielles en tant que domaine académique examinent les syndicats et autres organisations de la classe ouvrière, et la mobilisation anticapitaliste en général, dans une sorte de relation symbiotique avec l'accumulation du capital (Atzeni, 2021 ;11 ;Harvey, 2015). Mais cela est peut-être moins vrai pour le Sud global, précisément parce que la mobilisation de la classe ouvrière, dans de nombreux contextes, a une tradition de lutte contre le colonialisme et l'apartheid (qui sont, bien sûr, étroitement liés à l'accumulation du capital), pour la libération nationale et la démocratisation.

Les articles de ce numéro : étudier la diversité du syndicalisme à l'heure du néolibéralisme Les syndicats peuvent, et doivent, être étudiés dans leur diversité ; leur étude doit être ancrée dans des contextes empiriques et donc être localisée et historicisée. Les contributions à ce numéro ne concernent pas seulement l'engagement des syndicats dans les luttes liées au travail d'une part, et les luttes populaires plus larges contre l'autoritarisme et pour la libération et l'indépendance nationales d'autre part (Freund, 1988 ;Kraus, 2007). Elles interrogent de manière critique "l'argument selon lequel la précarité croissante du travail représente la fin du syndicalisme tel que nous le connaissons" (Rizzo & Atzeni, 2020, 1114). Tous les auteurs sont conscients que les syndicats du monde entier, et en particulier ceux du Sud, ont étendu et continuent d'étendre "leurs préoccupations et leur mandat au-delà du lieu de travail et des questions liées au travail" (Beckmann & Sachikonye, 2010, 5). Pourtant, ce numéro thématique s'intéresse également à la variété des activités syndicales, qui ne se limitent pas aux grèves et autres formes plus ou moins conflictuelles de revendications collectives, mais tiennent aussi compte des activités syndicales quotidiennes. En d'autres termes, les syndicats au travail et dans le monde du travail occupent une place centrale dans ce numéro. 3 L'article de Juan Pedro Massano revient sur la période où le néolibéralisme a été imposé en Amérique latine, premier espace où il s'est déployé. L'étude de cas souligne l'importance d'historiciser les formes empiriques d'apparition du néolibéralisme, et démontre que sa mise en oeuvre ne va pas sans résistance. L'auteur analyse la tentative avortée de réforme de la législation du travail en Argentine pendant une période d'ajustement structurel. Dans un contexte de crise économique et à travers une rhétorique de " modernisation ", cette réforme de la législation du travail sous le gouvernement de Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989) Les articles présentés dans ce numéro soulèvent des questions plus larges sur les effets des récents développements du néolibéralisme, qui ont été qualifiés de "développementalisme autoritaire" (Arsel et al, 2021), notamment sur les travailleurs, leur mobilisation et les syndicats.

  The extractive sector is outstanding in terms of the advancement of neoliberalism in the Global South. Thomas McNamara, in his article, deals with corruption in the Zambian mining sector and notably in the respective trade unions. While the discourse on union corruption has been going on throughout Zambian history, it has been reshaped by neoliberal policies and the related changes in relationships between workers, employers and the state McNamara analyzes how discourses on union corruption are instrumentalized to discourage workers' mobilizations.By pointing a finger at corrupt trade unionists, the corruptors are spared, and even more the legal framework that limit wage negotiations, working conditions and the accumulation of wealth by shareholders are is discursively faded out. Individual petty corruption is given a disproportionate weight in explaining the dysfunction of the extractive sector. McNamara moreover highlights the perverse effects of attempts to regulate the activity of mining companies, by opposing corruption with the necessary implementation of 'Corporate Social Responsibility' (CSR): "By supplanting the union and government in the provision of services, CSR legitimised company control over resources and further lowered workers' expectations of what could be achieved through collective action or state intervention." (McNamara, in this issue, 16).

  de l'organisation et de l'initiative collective des travailleurs. Il est plus pertinent d'examiner les effets divers et spécifiques que les politiques néolibérales, les privatisations, les déréglementations et la financiarisation ont sur les travailleurs, leurs organisations, et notamment les syndicats. Les travailleurs et les syndicats ne sont pas seulement affectés passivement, ou victimes du néolibéralisme ; ils jouent un rôle dans l'élaboration des politiques néolibérales, adoptent ou contestent les discours néolibéraux. Et, surtout, ils s'y opposent et y résistent de diverses manières, comme le montrent les études de cas présentées dans ce numéro. Étudier le syndicalisme sans le fétichiser Dans cette introduction à ce numéro thématique sur les syndicats du sud global à l'heure du néolibéralisme, nous soutenons que ce dernier n'entraîne pas la fin de la formation des classes et de la lutte des classes, et que les syndicats restent des organisations importantes pour mobiliser les travailleurs, défendre leurs droits et revendiquer l'amélioration de leurs conditions de vie et de travail. Cependant, le syndicalisme a émergé dans un contexte historique bien spécifique, l'expansion du travail salarié et de la prolétarisation résultant de la révolution industrielle, et du mode et des relations de production qui y sont liés. Le syndicalisme s'est ensuite répandu dans le monde entier et s'est adapté à différents contextes. Aujourd'hui, les travailleurs et leurs organisations sont affectés par le néolibéralisme, qui est omniprésent dans presque tous les contextes, mais varie dans sa manière de se déployer. Dans cette optique, nous concevons les syndicats non pas comme un modèle fixe façonné par les relations industrielles et les expériences historiques connexes du Nord global. Nous comprenons plutôt les syndicats comme une forme d'organisation et une institution socio-économique et politique que les classes ouvrières s'approprient et forment de manière contingente dans divers contextes. Cela signifie également que les syndicats ne sont en aucun cas des organisations exclusivement formées par, et représentant les travailleurs salariés dans des relations d'emploi formelles et relativement sécurisées. Les syndicats dans les pays du Nord sont considérés (notamment dans les recherches sur ce sujet), souvent à juste titre, comme étant en déclin, car l'intensification du travail informel et précaire, y compris dans les centres du capitalisme industriel mondial, réduit la clientèle syndicale "classique". En effet, la plupart des gens dans le Sud (et probablement aussi dans de nombreuses régions du Nord) ne sont pas engagés dans un travail salarié formel et relativement sûr. Ils sont paysans, artisans, mineurs artisanaux, exercent des activités "informelles" dans le petit commerce, le transport, l'agriculture, les soins et d'autres secteurs, et font un travail reproductif non rémunéré. Environ 85 % des travailleurs africains sont ainsi engagés dans ce qu'on appelle « l'économie informelle », et même en Afrique du Sud, l'économie industrialisée la plus " avancée " du continent, plus de 40 % de tous les emplois sont précaires et irréguliers d'une manière ou d'une autre

  souligne que les classes défavorisées -en particulier les travailleurs qui sont confrontés à des risques lorsqu'ils s'organisent, comme les travailleurs migrants et les travailleurs " illicites " -sont plus susceptibles de s'organiser dans d'autres organisations que dans des syndicats traditionnels. En effet, les syndicats sont des acteurs hautement institutionnalisés des relations industrielles dans le Nord global. Ce statut institutionnalisé est un atout pour les syndicats : Ils ont accès à des ressources, aux arènes de prise de décision, ils bénéficient de droits et de capacités d'action. Compte tenu de leur tradition et de leurs expériences historiques, ils disposent d'un savoir-faire socio-organisationnel, de réseaux trans-sectoriels et transnationaux que d'autres organisations de la classe ouvrière ont peu de chances d'avoir à leur disposition. Cela ne veut pas dire que les syndicats sont les seuls, et pas nécessairement les organisations les plus appropriées pour représenter les classes laborieuses et revendiquer les droits des travailleurs. Cependant, ils sont des acteurs collectifs importants et particuliers pour le faire, dans la plupart des contextes à travers le monde et à toutes les échelles. Dans cette optique, nous pouvons et devons étudier les syndicats dans leurs dimensions empiriques, plutôt que comme un modèle façonné par l'histoire des relations industrielles du Nord. Il est ainsi très instructif d'étudier les organisations du Sud qui se définissent comme des syndicats, mais ne représentent ni n'organisent les travailleurs salariés, comme les organisations d'étudiants ou de paysans et les associations de travailleurs informels ou indépendants dans divers secteurs. L'étude des syndicats, et notamment ceux du sud, dans une telle perspective, va au-delà du "fétichisme de la forme syndicale" (Atzeni, 2021). L'étude des syndicats du Sud, comme le font les auteurs dans leurs contributions à ce numéro thématique, nous permet précisément cela : Au lieu de réifier une sorte de modèle syndical, nous étudions les différentes formes de son appropriation par les classes populaires, notamment les paysans pauvres, les mineurs artisanaux, les travailleurs occasionnels, les indépendants, etc. Les syndicats ne constituent ainsi pas une catégorie homogène d'acteurs ; et ils ne sont pas des acteurs collectifs monolithiques. Les syndicats sont " un champ impliquant des individus [...] Ces individus sont le coeur et l'âme du militantisme syndical à des moments clés "

  est caractéristique des logiques néolibérales : attaque de la négociation collective (en permettant que certaines négociations soient menées au niveau de l'entreprise) ; tentative de limiter le droit de grève ; création d'un fonds de garantie pour couvrir les indemnités de licenciement, etc. Dans un pays à forte tradition syndicale, Massano explique pourquoi Alfonsin a dû renoncer à sa réforme pour finalement intégrer des syndicalistes dans son gouvernement, allant jusqu'à nommer un syndicaliste au ministère du Travail, renouant ainsi avec le modèle péroniste. L'auteur souligne toutefois l'ambivalence de la situation. Si la résistance d'un puissant mouvement syndical a pu limiter temporairement les dégâts, le rouleau compresseur néolibéral ne s'est pas arrêté. Le secteur extractif est remarquable en termes de progression du néolibéralisme dans le Sud. Thomas McNamara, dans son article, traite de la corruption dans le secteur minier zambien et notamment dans les syndicats. Si le discours sur la corruption syndicale a traversé l'histoire de la Zambie, il a été remodelé par les politiques néolibérales et les changements connexes dans les relations entre les travailleurs, les employeurs et l'État. McNamara analyse comment les discours sur la corruption syndicale sont instrumentalisés pour décourager les mobilisations des travailleurs. En pointant du doigt les syndicalistes corrompus, les corrupteurs sont épargnés, et plus encore le cadre légal qui limite les négociations salariales, dégrade les conditions de travail et favorise l'accumulation de richesses par les actionnaires. La petite corruption individuelle a 3 Il s'est avéré impossible de couvrir tous les sujets que nous avons souhaité inclure, notamment en ce qui concerne la couverture géographique et les questions de genre. Il manque des études de cas en Asie ; quelques excellentes études sur le Cambodge, la Chine, l'Inde et l'Indonésie peuvent être trouvées dans Globalizations 18(8), 2021 (voir Bieler & Nowak, 2021). Nous sommes conscients et regrettons le fait que, malgré tous nos efforts, nous n'avons pas réussi à avoir un article sur les questions de genre, ni des contributions d'auteures féminines (à l'exception de cette introduction cosignée) dans ce numéro. un poids disproportionné pour expliquer le dysfonctionnement du secteur extractif. McNamara souligne d'ailleurs les effets pervers des tentatives de régulation de l'activité des entreprises minières, en opposant à la corruption la nécessaire mise en oeuvre de la " responsabilité sociale des entreprises " (RSE) : " En supplantant le syndicat et le gouvernement dans la fourniture de services, la RSE a légitimé le contrôle des entreprises sur les ressources et a encore réduit les ambitions des travailleurs quant à ce qui pouvait être obtenu par une action collective ou une intervention de l'État. " (McNamara, dans ce numéro, 16). Les articles de Jan Brunner, et d'Oscar Soto et Facundo Martin, se concentrent sur l'agriculture, un secteur qui a également été fortement touché par le développement du néolibéralisme en Amérique latine. Alors que Brunner démontre comment le néolibéralisme a entraîné une entrave à la mobilisation des travailleurs et à la lutte des classes, Soto et Martin soulignent qu'il peut aussi, au contraire, donner lieu à de nouvelles formes de mobilisation, d'acteurs collectifs et d'alliances, aidant ainsi les syndicats à s'adapter aux conditions changeantes et à se revitaliser. Brunner examine comment les travailleurs et leurs syndicats ont été affectés par la mécanisation et la croissance du secteur agro-industriel de la canne à sucre dans l'État fédéral de São Paulo au Brésil au cours des deux dernières décennies. Le développement du secteur a été encouragé par l'État et les investisseurs internationaux. Dans le même temps, la récolte a été largement mécanisée, ce qui a réduit les besoins en main-d'oeuvre, notamment pour les emplois manuels et peu qualifiés. En conséquence, le chômage rural a augmenté, tout comme la division entre les travailleurs, à savoir entre les emplois mieux rémunérés tels que les conducteurs de machines et de camions, et les emplois manuels moins bien rémunérés. Ces évolutions ont entraîné une fragmentation du paysage syndical et, parallèlement, affecté le souhait des travailleurs de s'organiser collectivement. Le nombre de grèves a diminué, et les revendications étaient davantage axées sur la défense des droits que sur l'améliorations des conditions de travail. Les syndicats agricoles n'ont pas réussi à s'allier efficacement avec d'autres mouvements sociaux, comme le mouvement des travailleurs sans terre (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST). Les collaborations avec des organisations transnationales, telles que l'organisation faîtière mondiale des syndicats industriels industriALL, sont restées épisodiques. Brunner conclut donc que la transformation du secteur brésilien de la canne à sucre a globalement aggravé la situation de la majorité des travailleurs. Oscar Soto et Facundo Martin étudient le syndicalisme dans l'agriculture en Argentine, au Brésil et au Chili. Ils décrivent également d'importantes transformations des relations de travail dans les zones rurales sous la pression du néolibéralisme. Contrairement au cas de Brunner, Soto et Martin observent que le néolibéralisme et son impact sur les petits paysans et les travailleurs ruraux ont donné naissance à de nouveaux syndicats et à de nouvelles formes d'interaction et de collaboration entre les syndicats et les mouvements sociaux. Ces nouveaux acteurs et alliances, comme la Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo-CLOC-La Vía Campesina, remettent en question les frontières entre les syndicats, les autres organisations et les mouvements sociaux. Les associations agricoles et les mouvements paysans sont potentiellement porteurs de nouvelles formes d'articulation sociopolitique, et contribuent ainsi à renouveler et à revitaliser le syndicalisme, selon les auteurs. Alors que les articles présentés jusqu'à présent se concentrent sur la façon dont les travailleurs et les syndicats sont touchés par le néolibéralisme, comment ils s'y opposent et comment ils s'y adaptent, Laurent Fourchard, présente un cas tout à fait contraire d'un syndicat qui s'est emparé du néolibéralisme : le National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) au Nigeria. Fourchard explique comment le syndicat a profité de la privatisation des transports à partir des années 1980, imposée par le Fonds monétaire international, pour prendre le contrôle du secteur. Il a ensuite progressivement remplacé les gouvernements bureaucratiques des États et des collectivités locales dans la régulation du secteur et la collecte des taxes. De plus, le syndicat a incorporé les normes néolibérales dans sa propre organisation, en mettant sous pression les échelons inférieurs du syndicat et du secteur, les collecteurs de taxes et les chauffeurs. Pourtant, Fourchard, dans son étude de cas, expose également les faux semblants du néolibéralisme. Si ses promoteurs acclament le libre marché, dans la pratique, la libéralisation et la privatisation produisent des effets plus ou moins inattendus. Alors que les véhicules de transport sont gérés par le secteur privé, le contrôle du NURTW sur le secteur lui permet de maximiser les profits qu'il génère. Le syndicat a réussi à s'approprier les opportunités ouvertes par les politiques néolibérales et a intégré les logiques néolibérales dans sa propre organisation, tout en subvertissant à son avantage la déréglementation du secteur. Deux autres articles examinent les syndicats dans des contextes néolibéraux et autoritaires. Alpkan Birelma retrace les conditions qui ont permis aux travailleurs d'une entreprise textile turque de créer un syndicat contre vents et marées, dans un contexte plutôt hostile. Plusieurs décennies de réformes néolibérales ont entraîné un déclin des droits des travailleurs et une forte régression des syndicats. Néanmoins, comme le démontre de manière impressionnante le cas présenté par Birelma, les travailleurs parviennent à se mobiliser par la base. L'auteur souligne le rôle décisif d'un militant communiste autour duquel s'est formé un noyau militant dans l'usine. Ceci était particulièrement important face à la répression. Par ailleurs, cette mobilisation locale a pu bénéficier d'un soutien transnational. Mehmet Erman Erol et Çağatay Edgücan Şahin, à partir des exemples de l'Égypte et de la Turquie, montrent comment le néolibéralisme et l'autoritarisme convergent, contrairement à l'hypothèse selon laquelle le néolibéralisme favoriserait le libéralisme politique. Les auteurs retracent en détail l'histoire des syndicats dans les deux pays au cours des 50 dernières années et décrivent une série de relations et de stratégies adoptées par l'État pour restreindre le mouvement syndical : répression, clientélisme, cooptation, mesures coercitives limitant les droits syndicaux et le droit du travail, criminalisation des travailleurs et des protestations sociales. Dans les deux pays, l'État joue un rôle important dans l'économie, ce qui amène les auteurs à discuter de sa place dans le néolibéralisme.

  Si certains cas, comme celui présenté par Alpkan Birelma, démontrent qu'une mobilisation courageuse et persistante peut réussir même dans des conditions restrictives, dans l'ensemble, l'affaiblissement actuel des droits démocratiques, sociaux et du travail dans le monde entier semble plutôt défavorable au syndicalisme. Dans la phase actuelle du néolibéralisme, les travailleurs du monde entier sont confrontés à des restrictions et à des attaques de la part des entreprises et des acteurs étatiques. Pourtant, contrairement au discours sur le prétendu déclin du syndicalisme, les contributions à ce numéro montrent que, comme souvent, les réalités sont beaucoup plus complexes et différenciées. Cela dit, le syndicalisme, plutôt qu'une forme institutionnelle et organisationnelle fixe, est un outil qui offre de nombreuses possibilités d'adaptation. Les travailleurs et les militants se l'approprient et l'étude des formes qu'il prend et des processus de son adaptation, même en dehors de son milieu d'origine historique, nous permet d'élargir notre compréhension de l'organisation, de la mobilisation et des revendications des travailleurs du monde entier -y compris ceux qui ne travaillent pas dans des formes relativement stables de travail salarié.

It turned out to be unfeasible to cover all topics that we have wished to include, particularly with regard to geographical coverage and gender. We are lacking a case study from Asia; a couple of excellent studies on Cambodia, China, India and Indonesia can be found in Globalizations 18(8),

(seeBieler & Nowak, 2021).We are aware and regretful of the fact that, despite all effort, we failed to have any paper on gender issues, nor contributions be female authors (except for this co-authored introduction) ready for publication in this issue.

Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), Rhodes University. ISER Working Paper 2015/1