Re-scaling collective bargaining: union responses to restructuring in the North American auto industry

Historically, political struggles to define the geographical scale at which labour relations and collective bargaining will be conducted have been of crucial significance to the labour movement. Today, workers and their unions face very difficult challenges. In many manufacturing industries changes in the organizational structure of production at different geographical scales have undermined the effectiveness of the organizing and collective bargaining strategies associated with traditional industrial unionism. This paper focuses on collective bargaining strategies developed by North American autoworkers’ unions to respond to the extensive restructuring of the automotive industry that took place during the 1990s. These strategies include innovations in the structure and content of collective bargaining and efforts to redefine the scale at which collective bargaining takes place. Following a brief discussion of the challenge posed by the integration of Mexico into a continent-wide production system, the analysis focuses on the strategies devised by the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union during the 1996 and 1999 rounds of collective bargaining to address issues raised by outsourcing and modular manufacturing. With outsourcing, the automakers are not so much eliminating jobs as they are deciding who gets to do them, at what price, and under what working conditions. With modular manufacturing, the organizational boundaries between firms are blurring and the terms and conditions of work in one firm arguably are becoming dependent upon management decisions made in another firm. The CAW’s response has been to develop new collective bargaining strategies including the concepts of ‘work ownership’ and ‘satellite bargaining’ which involves redefining the traditional geographical extent of the bargaining unit. While the empirical focus is on the North American automobile industry, the general issues related to the re-scaling of production, and especially outsourcing and modular manufacturing, are common across a range of manufacturing industries.     

Trade unions, coalitions and communities: Australia’s Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union and the international stakeholder campaign against Rio Tinto

There is a growing geographical literature on the significance of organised labour. A key theoretical and political question concerns the extent and nature of the engagement between trade unions and other groups in the broader community. The paper seeks to contribute to this debate by focusing specifically on the ways in which trade unions engage collaboratively with such interest groups over international corporate campaign issues. It draws upon a case study of the encounter between Australia’s Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and Rio Tinto, one of the largest privately owned mining companies in the world. This was conducted through a loose alliance co-ordinated by the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mining and General Workers Unions (ICEM). The campaign included the use of stakeholder reports aimed at influencing corporate shareholders. The main issues concerned the rights of indigenous peoples, environmental consequences of mining operations, and human rights in the workplace. The attempt to change these aspects of corporate culture led to union-inspired resolutions at the firm’s May 2000 Annual General Meeting, the first attempt to challenge a company through international union-led action in this manner. Although defeated, the resolutions were backed by a significant minority of leading institutional shareholders. The paper interprets this campaign in terms of broader debates over the spatiality of organised labour and the role of trade unions, at a time when increased significance has been attached to alternative political movements. It seeks to theorise the specific implications of internationally-grounded interest-based campaigns and take into account the ways in which these are both constrained by, and draw strength from, their constitution at this spatial scale.     

Aggregating dispersed workers: Union organizing in the “care” industries

This paper analyzes recent union efforts to organize low-wage workers in the home- and community-based segments of homecare, childcare, and services to people with developmental disabilities in the US. In these sectors, consumer demand has combined with privatization to create an army of “flexible”, part-time, poverty-wage workers, most of them women, people of color, and immigrants. This workforce is profoundly fragmented due to the preponderance of small nonprofit employers, widespread self-employment, and spatially atomized labor performed within myriad private homes. However, service sector unions have adapted creatively to these opportunities and constraints by implementing two interlinked scale-jumping strategies to overcome care workers’ spatial and organizational atomization. One is state-by-state policy advocacy to raise labor (and service) standards industry-wide and to aggregate employment through various organizational and legal interventions. The other is coalition building with consumers and advocates at the local, state, and national level to generate essential political support for these measures. We find that the success of this strategy has been shaped in large part by the political landscape of region and the political economy of distinct care industry segments. Finally, the resulting care industry unionism constitutes a distinct strand of an emergent public services unionism—in which consumers and workers struggle to define care labor as a socially necessary public good, and workers pushed into the nebulous zone between state and market struggle to define themselves as public workers.     

“[W]e do not lose our treaty rights outside the... reserve”: challenging the scales of social service provision for First Nations women in Canadian cities

Recent work in political geography has emphasised how scale plays a role in constituting relationships and identities. Historically, the Canadian federal government has taken responsibilities for social services for First Nations people on reserves, leaving this responsibility to provinces for First Nations people in cities. This constitutes First Nations women as individuals with Aboriginal rights only on reserves, and as part of mainstream society in urban areas. First Nations women have challenged the definitions of their identities embedded in these scales of service provision. In presenting alternative geographies for organising the provision of services, they demonstrate the importance of paying attention to the diversity of women’s everyday geographies in the city. This is a phrase from Vicki English’s (1993) presentation to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, where she argues that treaty rights to housing, education, medicare and other services should not be confined to the boundaries of reserves. I use the term “First Nations” to refer to people who identify themselves as such, including people who are and are not registered pursuant to the Indian Act. By “Aboriginal peoples” I mean the descendants of the indigenous people in Canada, including First Nations people, Métis and Inuit. The Census of Canada uses the term “North American Indian” to refer to First Nations people, and I employ this terminology for clarity in some cases.

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Migrant pathways to resource access in Lampung’s political forest: Gender, citizenship and creative conjugality

An important theme in studies of enclosure and resource access in Southeast Asian hinges on the concept of the ‘political forest’, a particular constellation of power constituted by ideas, practices and institutions that seek to regulate peoples’ access to resources, providing recognition and legitimacy to some, whilst excluding and criminalizing others. Whilst issues of class and ‘race’ underpin work in this vein, in Indonesia, much less attention has been directed towards the ways in which gender inheres in the regularisation of land and livelihood, and the ordering of upland spaces. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theorizing of the links between citizenship, recognition and hetero-normativity, and on analyses of the social relationships through which resource access is negotiated and realized, the paper presents a feminist political ecology of the gender dynamics inherent in the power plays of resource access as land-poor rural migrants negotiate a shifting landscape of enclosure in Lampung province. Through an analysis of three periods of resource governance and control in the province, the paper shows how the negotiation of resource access is simultaneously a process of self-regulation and subject-making that draws on particular ideas about family and conjugal partnership, inculcating gendered and hetero-normative ideologies of the “ideal citizen”. Through particular representational strategies - positionings - necessary to qualify for resource access, and through the material practices necessary to realize the benefits of resource access, conjugal partnership is reiterated and remade as an important social relationship through which resource access may be realised, for men as well as for women.     

“This is a Montreal Issue”: Negotiating responsibility in global production and investment networks

While geographers have increasingly focused on how global commodity and production networks create new ‘geographies of responsibility’ there has been little empirical work considering how responsibility is worked into management systems and social activism in such networks. Drawing on literature from global production networks, geographies of responsibility and other literatures, this paper explores the dynamic and contested ways in which concepts of responsibility can play a role in network regulation. Both foreign direct investment and commodity networks (here referred to as ‘global production and investment networks’) are subject to complex negotiations and compromises involving corporate social responsibility and sustainability initiatives as well as shareholder activist, human rights, labor, and environmental activism. This is illustrated by reference to conflicts in Canada over Alcan, Inc.’s investments from 1993 to 2007 in the Utkal Alumina Project in Orissa, India. The project involved significant socio-environmental conflict. In Canada, Alcan’s investment was met by civil society campaigns that tested the company’s commitments to sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The case study suggests revising theories of geographies of responsibility. While foreign direct investment can create new relationships between distant others, these are fluid and contingent and not necessarily desirable. Rather than see networks as a source of responsibility we should work to ensure that the relationships that networks foster be structured to ensure our deeper values are respected.     

FDI policy and political spaces for labour: The disarticulation of the Bolivian petroleros

Recent literature asserts that labour movements worldwide have been disempowered as a result of the various processes and discourses linked to economic globalisation. But there is a need to explore more carefully the mechanisms by which these processes and discourses affect resources for and constraints on effective union organisation. The purpose of this paper is to understand the construction of political spaces for organised labour and how these have been influenced by one such discourse: the policy discourse on foreign direct investments (FDI). It analyses the relationship between this policy discourse and political spaces for Bolivian petrolero unions through a case study of the period from 1984 to 2006. The policy discourse shifted the function of the state, fragmented symbols of collective identity, introduced flexible contracts, decentralised negotiations, rewarded individual achievement, and fostered competition rather than cooperation between employees. The shift towards an internationally integrated, FDI-driven economy shapes political spaces that allow collective action to be restructured from the workplace-based demands of unions to demands for democratic and indigenous rights of NGOs and other non-labour civil society organisations.     

Moving workers with the work: State selection, key workers and spatial development policy in post-war Britain

Spatial and planning policies in Britain have increasingly become focused on regional inequalities and the creation of mixed, sustainable and balanced communities. Within these new policy paradigms the category of the key workers has emerged as an essential element in the socio-economic sustainability of any bounded area programmes have been introduced to support their needs. Yet, defining key workers is an inherently political process as it necessitates the selection of essential and non-essential workers. Theoretical approaches that highlight state selectivity and the ways in which key policy subjects and objects are identified and mobilised have become increasingly popular across the social sciences and key worker support programmes provide a clear example of these processes in action. This paper draws on archival research to explore the formation of the category ‘key’ worker as an object of government in spatial development policies of the post-war period. It examines how key worker programmes were established to tackle the economic problems of Development Areas. It argues that definitions of key workers were forged in and through particular social, political, and economic contexts and that their emergence as an object of government presupposed and reinforced the existence of different classes of workers and different types of citizens. The paper highlights the significance of such historical work in assessments of contemporary policy and academic debates concerning the changing character of sustainable communities and citizenship, regional development, and changing modes of state regulation.     

Building the ‘competitive city’: labour and Toronto’s bid to host the Olympic games

Toronto’s quest to host the Summer Olympic Games has dominated both contemporary planning discourse and practice. For some, the pursuit of the games embodies Toronto’s transformation into a ‘competitive’ global city. Relatively unexplored in this discourse are the contradictory roles that labour plays in contemporary urban development. I argue that the new labour geography can provide some interesting insights into such processes. Specifically, labour geographers have given workers with divergent interests greater agency in shaping economic landscapes and have noted the multi-scalar organisation of labour. The paper looks at the contradictory and conflicting positions held by different labour unions in Toronto toward the city’s bid to host the 2008 Olympics. The case study suggests that labour is an active agent in processes shaping contemporary Toronto and support the bid for complex reasons ranging from the promise of jobs to potential future organising opportunities.     

Reconciling indigenous need with the urban welfare state? Evidence of culturally-appropriate services and spaces for Aboriginals in Winnipeg, Canada

Despite the increasing urbanization of the Aboriginal population in Canada over the past 50 years, most municipalities have not developed services and programs designed to meet their unique social and cultural needs. Faced with numerous health and social problems, the Aboriginal population is mainly forced to rely on the non-Aboriginal social services sector. However, little is known about the extent to which such sectors seek to accommodate Aboriginal populations in their programming. We examine the extent to which the recovery system makes space for Aboriginal healing through the provision of culturally-appropriate services and programming. Through the use of 24 in-depth interviews with staff members at seven treatment facilities in Winnipeg (Canada), we find an entrenched reluctance, indifference and lack of desire to create Aboriginal spaces of healing in treatment, save for one facility where Aboriginal healing spaces serve as a focal point of treatment. We discuss the implications in terms of the effectiveness of the non-Aboriginal recovery system (along with other social services) in meeting the needs of Canada’s urban Aboriginal population.     

‘Unionising’ the new spaces of the new economy? Alternative labour organising in India’s IT Enabled Services-Business Process Outsourcing industry

This paper explores the lived experiences and aspirational social constructions of call centre work and employment in India’s high profile IT Enabled Services-Business Process Outsourcing (ITES-BPO) industry; the ways in which they differ from those previously documented amongst call centre workers in the Global North (specifically the UK); and the consequences of that geographical reconfiguration of offshored call centre work for the replicability in India of workplace collective bargaining strategies successfully developed in some UK call centres. These issues are analysed using new empirical evidence from a regional survey of 511 non-unionised ITES-BPO workers and 42 in-depth interviews in India’s National Capital Region. Based on this analysis, the paper then discusses the operation, outcomes and ongoing challenges faced by the newly formed ‘Union for ITES Professionals’ (UNITES Pro) in developing an alternative occupational organising model better suited to the particular needs, motivations and preferences of India’s young, mobile, call centre workers. The empirical analysis presented in the paper is located, therefore, within wider debates on the role of geographical context in shaping possibilities for organising white-collar service workers at different ends of global service chains in the new economy.     

Labour’s lines of flight: Rethinking the vulnerabilities of transnational capital

This article investigates the possibilities for diffusing trade union power across space through the lens of the Driving Up Standards (DUS) campaign, a public transport sector initiative between two American unions, the SEIU and IBT, and the British T&G. I argue that the DUS highlights the continuing resonance of scalar analysis, despite recent criticisms of combining topological and territorial understandings of space (Marston et al., 2005). By expanding the scale of their resistance to transnational corporations, the unions involved multiply the connections amongst countervailing forces and thus also the points of corporate vulnerability which can be targeted. Moreover, although the possibilities for transnational industrial action may be minimal, this does not give a full account of unions’ strategic position. Comparing recent developments in union campaigning methods to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of lines of flight, the article traces the campaign’s many micro-segmentations as it seeks to exploit the contingencies of space by leveraging not only the uneven distribution of union power in a TNC, but also the uneven practices and expectations of states, consumers, and shareholders in different national environments. The paper concludes by emphasising the importance of combining spatial and temporal lenses, as the inconclusive outcomes of the campaign illustrate the protracted character of transnational labour struggles and the importance of attrition.     

‘They took our beads,it was a fair trade,get over it’: Settler colonial logics,racial hierarchies and material dominance in Canadian agriculture

Canada is in a liminal space, with renewed struggles for and commitments to indigenous land and food sovereignty on one hand, and growing capital interest in land governance and agriculture on the other. While neoliberal capital increasingly accumulates land-based control, settler-farming communities still manage much of Canada’s arable land. This research draws on studies of settler colonialism, racial hierarchy and othering to connect the ideological with the material forces of settler colonialism and show how material dominance is maintained through colonial logics and racially ordered narratives. Through in-depth interviews, I investigate how white settler farmers perceive and construct two distinctly ‘othered’ groups: Indigenous peoples and migrant farmers and farm workers. Further, I show the disparate role of land and labour in constructing each group, and specifically, the cultural and material benefits of these constructions for land-based settler populations. At the same time, settler colonial structures and logics remain reciprocally coupled to political conditions. For instance, contemporary neoliberalism in Canadian agriculture modifies settler colonial structures to be sure. I argue, however, that political economic analyses of land and food production in Canada (such as corporate concentration, land grabbing and farm consolidation) ought to better integrate the systemic forces of settler colonialism that have conditioned land access in the first place. Of course, determining who is able to access land—and thus, who is able to grow food—continues to be a territorial struggle. Thus, in order to shift these conditions we ought to examine how those with access and control have acquired and maintained it.     

Defending community? Indigeneity, self-determination and institutional ambivalence in the restoration of Lake Whakaki

Conservation practitioners have scrutinized the credibility and effectiveness of community-based natural resource management, noting its romantic misconceptions about communities and their capacities. Early approaches failed to acknowledge the heterogeneity of collective agents, the synergy between decentralization and neoliberalism, or the need to affirm rural peoples’ entitlements to resources. A Maori community’s attempt to restore Lake Whakaki on New Zealand’s east coast confirms many of these critiques. The restoration confronts institutional ambivalence, obstructive forces from beyond the zone of Maori influence and non-correspondence between community and catchment dynamics. Fulfilment of the project requires exogenous resources and authority, but state conservation agencies are ambivalent towards local demands for self-determined development. Nonetheless, an uncommon degree of agency which is grounded within community aspirations for sovereignty suggests that the motivational characteristics of community retain their importance in debates about integrated conservation and development.     

Labour imperialism in India: The case of SEWA

The Self-Employed Women’s Association is almost universally praised for its work in organizing women in India’s informal sector but has never been examined from a critical perspective. In this study, we critically assess the SEWA movement both in terms of its big picture strategy and the grass roots of its movement. We find that the strategies and tactics employed by SEWA expose the Indian working class to significant imperialist intervention through donations by highly politicized groups, which have given these groups significant leverage over the organization. We will argue that SEWA as an organization is a product of hegemonic forms of imperialism, both in terms of the trade union and hegemonic imperialism. SEWA’s rise to significance can be seen in the spread of SEWA to various parts of India, but also importantly, to different countries in the global South and on the international stage in the UN apparatus and in the international trade union movement. The case of SEWA as a model of trade unionism is therefore an extremely important one to consider in terms of its impact in India but also on global labour politics.     

For the sake of the children: coping strategies of women in Swaziland's domestic service sector

This article examines the coping strategies of domestic workers in the city of Manzini. The Swaziland government has made many efforts to improve the social and economic conditions of the Swazi people after independence in 1968. Yet a failure to recognise domestic work as paid employment has minimised the effect of government policy in improving the lives of women who dominate this sector. The anomalies that it raises as paid housework has meant that conditions in the domestic service sector have changed little since the colonial era. Domestic workers are in practical terms, not protected by legal systems of labour relations. Coupled with other barriers that prohibit their access to land and shelter and dismally low wages, they have adopted many coping strategies in the city to maintain their families and their dignity.     

Claiming space and community: rural women’s strategies for living with, and beyond, fear

Following the well-established literature on women’s fear in urban contexts, a small but important literature has also begun to document accounts of boldness, fearlessness and empowerment. We extend this work by considering ways in which women live with, and beyond, experiences of fear. We argue that fear and fearlessness are not discrete and separate states, but rather they are often simultaneous conditions that women negotiate in complex ways. Moving away from a sense of victims and passivity, we suggest that women have spatial and social strategies that can be adopted when they face fear or take up forms of action that might be termed ‘bold’ or ‘courageous’. Consequently, this work draws on Koskela’s [Gender, Place and Culture 4 (1997) 301] previous discussion of ‘bold women’ in Finland to develop a notion of agency and highlight strategies that some rural women adopt in New Zealand.     

Labouring geography: Negotiating scales, strategies and future directions

In our editorial introduction to this themed issue on labour geography, we outline some important on-going debates in the relatively young field of labour geography and suggest future directions for research. First, there is the key question of labour as an active agent in the production of economic landscapes. The agency of labour will likely remain a defining feature of labour geography, but perhaps it is not as important to construct theoretical analytical boundaries as it is to define labour geography as a political project. Second, debates continue surrounding the production of scale and the multiscalarity of organized labour. Third, labour geographers have yet to engage in any sustained fashion with unpacking the complex identities of workers and the way in which those identities simultaneously are shaped by and shape the economic and cultural landscape. Fourth, there is some debate on the costs and benefits of a ‘normative’ labour geography which emphasizes what workers and their organizations ‘could’ or even ‘should’ do. Lastly, we challenge the assumption that labour geographers have not yet asserted themselves as activists in their own right. We conclude the editorial by introducing the articles included in the issue. While these articles may not address every gap in the literature, they do contribute in significant ways to move the labour geography project forward.     

Detailing spaces and processes of resistance: Working women in Dundee’s jute industry

Recent and ongoing calls within labour geography and social and cultural geography have highlighted the importance of resistance, its spatial productions and manifestations. However, within this work, the geographical history of the factory system has been largely overlooked. Drawing upon Foucauldian theorisings in the fields of management and organisation, together with recent writings on the geographies of resistance, this paper takes Dundee’s jute industry at the turn of the twentieth century as its focus and explores how the workplace itself, and the very workplace discipline used to ensure a productive, efficient and hardworking workforce, engendered workplace protest among the industry’s working women. Writing through a number of modes and scales of protest within the workplace, within and between work groups, departments, mills and factories, and across the city, this paper adheres to an approach that carefully details the spaces and processes of resistance, paying careful attention to how union and non-union resistances operated and the geographies they worked through and created.