Narrating refusals of work: Feeling through two European novels and the organizing potential of sharing stories

This article is about telling stories about refusals of work. It investigates storytelling about refusals of work as powerful political responses to precarization. Workers, this article posits, learn through listening to each other’s refusal narratives about (1) the conditions of their work, (2) the precariousness it organizes, and (3) the possibilities for refusal. Through storytelling, this learning also happens on an affective level: possibilities can be made to feel real. To work through this problem in more detail, the article focuses on learning from the narratives in two literary works: Heike Geißler’s Saisonarbeit, translated from German to English as Seasonal Associate (2018), and Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001). The article concludes that in telling stories about refusals of work, workers may find a potential for collaborative political action and potentially collective action in a time when unions are struggling and it is becoming harder for workers to survive.