Early Stages of Collective Action and Their Visual Representations: An Emotions Driven Approach to the Struggle for Better Working Conditions

This chapter investigates the early stages of collective action through its visual representations. In so doing, it elaborates on a catalogue of images related to events that occurred between 1875 and 1914 in Europe and the Americas. Different kinds of images engage with emotions that such events triggered. In this chapter emotions workers experienced during those events have been organized around three couples: pain & despair, rage & anger, strength & hope. At turn, images and the narrative of this chapter are organized around those couples of emotions. Far from each other in time and place, events, images and emotions originate, all, from employers’ and public authorities’ disdain of workers’ needs and interests. The gratuitous violence the former did not hesitate to resort to against the latter constitutes a tragic fil rouge. The visual representation of collective action in its early path, of the emotions from which it originates and that it generates in the artists and through the artist in the public at large, not only contributes to a more effective understanding and commemoration of the events at stake by the society at large. It also magnifies those emotions and, by consequence, their effect on the decision-makers, being likely to trigger a change in their legal rationality towards the improvement of working conditions. At turn, visual representation, systematized as we did may help improving the understanding of the social environment in which collective action took place, its actors’ drives and the regulatory context in which they operate.