LAUSR

Abstract This paper uses the context of Cambodia’s 2013/14 and 2015 minimum wage campaigns to demonstrate the translocally rural-urban nature of worker agency and activism within global production networks. In doing so, it first highlights the gendered and hierarchical nature of the Cambodian union movement, emphasising in particular the disjuncture between its thriving, inter-occupational grassroots support and the male dominated, top down hierarchies of the union leadership. Secondly, the authors present primary informant testimonies and quantitative figures produced from 13 years of secondary strike data to highlight the key role of agricultural pressures in motivating strike participation. This translocal perspective on protest is used, finally, to demonstrate how certain features of the Cambodian union movement – hierarchy, male predominance and structural disjuncture – are rooted not in abstract norms, but in the everyday mobilities of translocally rura-urban livelihoods, which have rendered grassroots activism largely independent of the structures that represent it.