ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the significance of workers' social practices in the area of Piraeus. It shows how they conceive the relationship between the way in which they are integrated within specific labour processes and the way in which they legitimate hierarchically the structures through which these processes take place. The chapter argues that, to the extent that the formulation of this relationship is carried out through an attempt to manage the terms of their social reproduction. People are not simply the passive recipients of various power structures. Citizenship develops in a context in which people are constantly witnessing structural transformations in the power and the nature of the welfare state in the Western world. The experience of local labourers regarding employment engenders scepticism about the legitimacy of impersonal and imposed institutions, such as the state, the European Union and the trade unions.
