Labor DANA L. CLOUD Syracuse University, USA Labor and communication “Labor” refers to the class of people in capitalist society who must work for others in order to survive. he word “labor” also refers to the activity of laborers, as well the movement defending their interests. he vast majority of the world’s population, across diferences of race, ethnicity, nation, gender, and culture, belongs to the category of labor. Calling attention to labor is to acknowledge that in many societies the major- ity depend upon their employers for their survival and do not share in the proits of their work. Interested in the possibilities for worker agency, the ield of critical organi- zational communication concerns itself with the question of how ordinary people resist the conditions of labor and achieve a degree of freedom. A key question for scholars of workplaces, then, regards how people come to a sense of their own agency – the capacity to control and transform the conditions of one’s life. Communication plays an enormous role in this process. he stories workers tell and the questions they ask are instrumental to the process of worker education, consciousness raising, and mobilization. Workers communicate together in the shared completion of a task. hey also socialize. Sometimes conversations are generative of a movement of people who have recognized their common interests. Today, workers both exist in institutions and historical situations that constrain them and possess the capacity to create and act on the basis of class consciousness. However, communication cannot make or transform the world of work without enlisting other kinds of power. Economic clout is essential to winning the material gains of wage and beneit increases, regular work hours, health care, pensions, and overtime pay. In the labor movement, this kind of power is manifested in workplace actions that disrupt, slow down, or shut down the workplace in a strike. Disruption of production and proits can pressure employers to bargain with workers in a union. However, attention to labor in organizational communication rarely has focused on a key site of worker agency: the labor union. In addition, the ield could improve its attention to the material exploitation of workers and the basic antagonism between employers and employees. he subield of critical organizational communication studies is the site of most work concerning the situation of employees in capitalist irms. his work emphasizes the ten- sion between techniques of control and sources of participation and voice as they unfold in communication. Organizational communication research has increasingly attended to the workings of these processes on a global scale. he International Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication. Craig R. Scott and Laurie Lewis (Editors-in-Chief), James R. Barker, Joann Keyton, Timothy Kuhn, and Paaige K. Turner (Associate Editors). © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/9781118955567.wbieoc123