Leo Strauss's Adherence to Nietzsche's “Atheism From Intellectual Probity”

Abstract

The role of labor unions has increasingly been the focus of scholarly analyses in recent years as the world has experienced the most encompassing wave of democratization. In his seminal article proposing a typology of four different modes of labor union behavior depending on their treatment by the former authoritarian regimes, J. Samuel Valenzuela (1989) observed that labor unions will best contribute to a successful consolidation of the new democracies if they do not press excessively for the satisfaction of narrow interests. Conversely, if their demands are too harshly denied by the new democratic elites, unions may be disloyal to new governments and thus undermine the transition process (Valenzuela 1989, 451). In a similar fashion, Adam Przeworski argued that the containment of excessive wage increase demands by unions is critical for the success of economic transition reforms (1991, 181). In her comprehensive comparative analysis of labor union and business roles in democratic transitions in Latin America and Eastern Europe, Joan M. Nelson concluded that in both economic and political reforms within the transition processes, unions can and do play crucially supportive roles but can likewise cause slowdowns, and stalemates (1994).     

Embedded Internationalisms: Building Transnational Solidarity in the British and Norwegian Trade Union Movements

There has been growing interest in the prospects for a new trade union internationalism in recent years, following the end of the Cold War and the coming together of the main national union organisations into one confederation, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). For the first time in decades, geopolitical straitjackets and defensive nationalistic postures are giving way to more open, internationalist perspectives as unions attempt to get to grips with global capitalism. However, despite some well‐publicised grassroots globalisation campaigns, effective international labour organising and networking remains thin on the ground. One of the reasons for this is that, despite the rhetoric of globalisation and the reality of multi‐layered governance, the "national" space remains the critical scale at which unions operate. Variations in both union organisation and the politico‐institutional context within which unions operate nationally continue to shape international solidarity activities. This theme is pursued in this paper through the contrasting cases of the UK and Norwegian trade union movements. Although both union movements have been subject to similar problems in recent years, in terms of membership decline and the pressures of increasing global economic integration, the different national political and economic contexts within which unions are embedded have been important in facilitating or constraining international strategies.     

Justice for Janitors: Scales of Organizing and Representing Workers

Low levels of unionization in the United States have led to much attention being devoted recently to the development of new models of organizing workers. In contrast to those which dominated for most of the past half century, the models currently being embraced by many labor leaders are typically grassroots and bottom‐up in nature and call for a high level of participation by rank‐and‐file workers. The Justice for Janitors (JfJ) campaign is an example of just such a model, one which has been widely lauded for its innovativeness and success. However, whereas the campaign is often thought of as representing a highly decentralized approach to organizing because of the sensitivity it pays to local labor market conditions, the Service Employees’ International Union which developed it has recently called for a concentration of power in a small number of national union bodies. This has raised questions about the geographical scale at which power should rest within the union movement and how to develop organizing strategies which are locally sensitive yet also capable of challenging nationally and/or globally organized firms.     

Labour in 'lean' times: geography, scale and the national trajectories of workplace change

In this paper we argue that far from being surpassed by globalization, the nation-state remains a key space for organized labour. However, labour geographers' focus on patterns of union organization and strategies of 'internationalism' underplays the enduring role of national institutions. Moreover, while labour geographers have recognized the significance of new forms of work organization, such as just in time and lean production, with some exceptions they have not examined how unions both formally and informally determine the trajectory of workplace change. Based on case studies of unions in the Canadian and German auto industries, we stress that the linkage between national and workplace scales remains critical to understanding how unions are responding to the challenges being presented by lean and just in time production. Finally, while there is a re-scaling of bargaining in the automobile industry to the firm or enterprise scale, the outcomes of decentralization depend largely on the national regulatory context.     

Community Unionism in Canada and Labor's (Re)Organization of Space

The extensive restructuring of industrialized economies continues to challenge workers and their unions in the 1990s. Labor unions are trying to remain viable institutions in the face of globalization of economic production, deindustrialization, and technological change. These processes have increasingly challenged workers in traditionally highly unionized sectors of the economy such as manufacturing and resource extraction industries. At the same time, unions have failed to organize large numbers of workers, often young and female, in geographically fragmented workplaces in expanding sectors of the economy such as consumer services and subcontracted goods production. There has been a call for new "spatialized strategies" allowing unions to access these new sectors and spaces and to produce scales of organization compatible with post-industrial capital. One strategy being adopted by the labor movement is coalition building with non-labor community interest groups with common goals in order to shape geographies of production. The experience of two Canadian unions with "community unionism" is discussed as an example of a spatialized strategy still in early development.     

The Geography of Union Organising in Low‐Paid Service Industries in the UK: Lessons from the T&G's Campaign to Unionise the Dorchester Hotel, London

This paper highlights the importance of organising workers in the low‐paid services sector if British trade unions are to secure themselves for the future. After outlining the scale of the challenge and the new efforts being made to promote organising by unions, the paper looks at the hotel industry in more depth. A case study of a union campaign to win union recognition at the Dorchester Hotel in London is used to highlight the limitations of workplace‐focused campaigns in this sector. Drawing on the lessons of experience in North America, the paper then argues that an extra ‐workplace, occupational and/or sectoral approach may well secure better results. In so doing, workplace issues could be recast as matters of economic and social injustice, widening the scale of any campaign.     

Genuine Renewal or Pyrrhic Victory? The Scale Politics of Trade Union Recognition in the UK

There is an ongoing debate within radical geography concerned with the trade union response to the hegemony of business interests apparent under neoliberal capitalism. In this paper, I contribute to this debate by exploring recent attempts to renew trade union organisation in the UK following decades of decline. I argue that, despite recent successes in stemming falling membership numbers and signing new recognition agreements, closer inspection reveals flaws in the renewal process that reflect the underlying nature of scale politics within the union movement itself. In particular, centralised strategies at the national level are failing to re‐energise local‐level union organisation leading to a rather hollow and pyrrhic renewal process. Drawing upon both macro‐level analysis and evidence from a particular industry case study, I suggest that unions rethink their organisational geographies and scalar relations if they wish to re‐connect with the grassroots and at a broader level remain a progressive force in the changing economic landscape.     

Belgian labour in World War II: Strategies of survival,organisations and labour relations

A system of collective bargaining at sector level emerged in Belgium after the First World War. The commissions paritaires, in which unions and employers were equally represented, became the centres of power of the pillarised Belgian trade union movement. This system of industrial relations was challenged during the general strike of 1936. Some employers tried to compete with the unions by creating factory councils, yellow unions and 'mutual societies' at company level. The strategic aim was to remove the centre of labour relations from sector to factory level. This tendency was reinforced during the Second World War. Pre-war trade unions were abolished, employers tried to take over the role of the unions by creating all kinds of social provisions at company level. The factory became a basic element of the survival strategy of the workers. Moreover, from 1941 a clandestine and more radical trade union movement, which opposed the pre-war pillarised trade unionism, emerged. These clandestine unions were organised at factory level. In their view, the factory and not the sector had to become the locus of industrial relations after the war. The organisational framework that was established between 1944 and 1952 was a synthesis of the pre-war model of industrial relations and newly established councils at company level.     

Institutionalising Future Geographies of Financial Inclusion: National Legitimacy Versus Local Autonomy in the British Credit Union Movement

In Great Britain, financial infrastructure withdrawal and community economic decline have focused attention on the capacity of locally "alternative" financial institutions to combat social and financial exclusion. This paper examines one such institution, the residential or "community" credit union, which provides a low-cost source of credit for members drawn from a common bond area usually based upon place of residence and/or work. Although community credit unions have traditionally been seen as providing individuals and communities with the opportunity to access credit and savings facilities in areas where there has been contraction in bank and building society provision (the financial "mainstream"), ongoing attempts exist to move away from the traditional role of community credit unions. This transition has set up three main challenges for the British credit union movement, discussed in this paper as follows: (1) a struggle over the attempt to redefine the "model" credit union within the national credit union movement; (2) the changing regulatory context for credit union development, including attempts to embrace credit unions within New Labour policies on social exclusion; and (3) a "local" challenge, including the incorporation of credit unions into community economic development initiatives. The paper considers how these challenges feed into wider understandings about the social relations, categorisation and autonomy of locally "alternative" financial institutions. We argue that future research on geographies of financial inclusion focusing on "alternative" institutions and their relationship to the financial mainstream needs to pay close critical attention to potential contradictions and tensions operating at different, yet intersecting spatial scales.     

Sympathy for the Devil?: Australian Unionism and Public Opinion

Public opinion on trade unions is influenced by a variety of factors, including direct experiences of industrial conflict, socialisation, the consonance of union behaviour with values and norms, and the general climate of debate, opinion and propaganda. Union sympathy (general support for unions) slowly declined between the 1940s and the 1960s, deteriorated sharply during the early 1970s, and recovered slowly under the Accord. The deterioration after the 1940s may be attributable to anti-communism's association with anti-unionism. The deterioration during the 1970s was associated with a significant rise in industrial conflict and the slow improvement in sympathy during the 1980s and 1990s was probably linked to the Accord-related fall in it. The decline in union density since the early 1980s cannot be directly attributed to a shift in union sympathy. Despite low levels of disputation in the late 1990s, however, union sympathy then appeared weaker than in the 1940s. Its low level in Australia, compared to other countries, may partly reflect the influence of anti-communism, but especially of arbitration, which rendered strikes illegitimate.     

Negotiating Neoliberal Empowerment: Aboriginal People,Educational Restructuring,and Academic Labour in the North of British Columbia,Canada

Aboriginal peoples in Canada are gaining influence in post‐secondary education through Aboriginal‐directed programs and policies in non‐Aboriginal institutions. However, these gains have occurred alongside, and in some cases through, neoliberal reforms to higher education. This article explores the political consequences of the neoliberal institutionalization of First Nations empowerment for public sector unions and workers. We examine a case where the indigenization of a community college in British Columbia was embedded in neoliberal reforms that ran counter to the interests of academic instructors. Although many union members supported indigenization, many also possessed a deep ambivalence about the change. Neoliberal indigenization increased work intensity, decreased worker autonomy and promoted an educational philosophy that prioritized labour market needs over liberal arts. This example demonstrates how the integration of Aboriginal aspirations into neoliberal processes of reform works to rationalize public sector restructuring, constricting labour agency and the possibilities for alliances between labour and Aboriginal peoples.     

Community unionism and trade union renewal in the UK: moving beyond the fragments at last?

This paper explores the theory and practice of community unionism. It is now widely argued that if trade unions are to reach employees in small workplaces, those on part-time or temporary contracts, and women, black and ethnic minority workers, they need to sustain alliances beyond the walls of the workplace. Increasing the scale of political mobilization in this way can help secure trade union organization amongst new groups of workers while giving unions the power to raise questions of economic and social justice at a wider scale. After summarizing current developments in North America, the paper focuses on the situation in the UK in more detail. By highlighting the pioneering community unionism of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC) and Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Union Council (BWTUC), the paper explores the implications of community unionism for the future of trade unionism in the UK.     

From Compounded to Fragmented Labour: Mineworkers and the Demise of Compounds in South Africa

Abstract: At the core of colonial and apartheid social engineering was a spatial strategy based on institutions and infrastructure linking together rural homesteads and villages, and mining centers and towns. In the case of the mining industry, single‐sex compounds were set up as the foundation of the infrastructure of control over black labor. In this paper we examine how various forms of control operated. We locate our contribution within the labor geography literature. We argue that it was not only state institutions and major corporations that shaped landscapes of control. In this regard we highlight the centrality of workers’ agency, specifically the way in which the National Union of Mineworkers captured the compounds and subverted the logic of employer control. However, the union's successes as well as the advent of democracy have resulted in profound changes, thus presenting the union with new challenges.     

Union Responses to Mass Immigration: The Case of Miami, USA

This article places the attitudes of US unions toward immigrants within the context of a "globalized" environment and a contested and problematic history of the US labor movement regarding its conflicting tendencies toward international solidarity and nationalism. Following a review of that history, the article examines the relationships of four unions in the heavily immigrant Miami, Florida area with immigrant workers in the past four decades. The evidence indicates that explanations for differing responses can be found in the union's structure, its external environment, its leadership' vision and ideology, and its internal "cultural" practices.     

Won with Blood: Archaeology and Labor’s Struggle

Traditionally when Americans went to work they expected that they would earn a reasonable wage, work in a safe environment, put in a 40 h week, collect paid vacation days, earn sick leave, have the right to organize and receive health and retirement benefits. Increasingly, however, fewer and fewer workers receive these rights and today only a minority of people in the United States work under these conditions. The decline in real wages, benefits, rights and safety experienced by twenty-first century American workers has correlated with a decline in organized labor. Corporations and the right have assailed unions to erode worker’s rights and “increase competitiveness” in a globalized, neo-liberal, capitalist, world. The attacks on unions spring from a monstrous lie, that politicians and corporations gave labor these benefits and thus workers no longer need unions. On the battlefield of public policy, these assaults on organized labor work in a fundamentally ideological way that calls the continued existence of unions into question. In this paper, I will discuss how archaeological studies of labor’s struggle can reveal that contrary to the monstrous lie, workers and their families won worker’s rights with blood and that solidarity and organization remain essential to maintain these rights. The paper begins with the present state of labor’s struggle and looks to the past to consider its preconditions. Archaeologists have studied strikes, the lived experience of working class life and class war to study history backwards and these studies contribute to the labor’s struggle for the future.     

清末民初广州的行会工会化

“工商合行”是广州传统行会组织结构的主要特色。然而,随着清末民初资本主义生产关系的发展,尤其“劳工神圣”西潮的浸润与激荡及革命政权扶助劳工政策的实施,使得“工商合行”的行会模式开始了以“工商分离”为主题特征的行会工会化的艰难蜕变。不过,这种由行会孕育出来的工会组织的肌体上不可避免地附着“工商合行”的深深烙印,这在一定程度上削弱并阻碍了国民革命时期中国共产党对广州工人的政治与阶级动员。从阶级斗争与“工商合行”两种理念交锋而导致行会工会化“曲折与艰辛”的事实中,可以窥视到传统行会近代转型“变”与“不变”的新旧交合的复杂面相。     

Scales and Skills of Monopoly Power: Labor Geographies of the 1890–1891 Chicago Carpenters’ Strike

Abstract: This paper builds upon labor geography's contributions to our understanding of the role of workers in the production of scale. In addition to examining exactly how a particular group of workers controlled the scale of their labor market, this paper theorizes the connections between that process and struggles over monopoly power. The 1890–1891 Chicago carpenters’ strike, a work stoppage of significance to both the direction of labor politics within Chicago and to the broader 8 h movement in North America at the end of the nineteenth century, serves as a case study.     

阿普尔加斯与19世纪英国工人运动的发展

19世纪中期,随着新模范工会在各行业的发展,英国工人运动进入了一个新的历史阶段,在阿普尔加斯等人为代表的新一代工会领导人的努力下,工会不仅成功地克服了1866年谢菲尔德暴行带来的巨大危机,而且在各阶级进步人士的帮助下,推动议会在19世纪70年代相继通过了有利于工会运动的立法,使工会从此成为英国产业制度中一个不可缺少的组成部分。而新模范工会所倡导的自助自制精神、阶级合作和劳资和解的政策,不仅为工会运动的合法化开辟了道路,同时也为19世纪中期英国社会的和谐稳定,经济的繁荣发展提供了保障。     

“We Simply Have to Do that Stuff for our Survival”: Labour,Firm Innovation and Cluster Governance in the Canadian Automotive Parts Industry

Based on a case study of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union in southern Ontario we argue for a critical reconstruction of both the labour geography and industrial cluster literature. The former stresses the active role of labour in the formation of economic landscapes, but has yet to explore labour's agency in production and how labour institutions shape technological change, firm innovation and industrial policy and strategy. Conversely, much of the industrial cluster and regional innovation systems literature is silent on the role of unions and industrial relations institutions in fostering innovation. We conclude with two main points. First, while some contend that positive union roles in innovation can only stem from partnerships with management and team working, we argue that innovation is more likely to emerge and worker interests are better protected when traditional collective bargaining structures and progressive employment legislation play a central role. Second, positive workplace and cluster level cooperation in the Canadian automotive parts industry are jeopardized by the broader and ongoing macro‐economic restructuring of OEM global production networks due to over‐capacity and intense cost‐cutting pressures reverberating down the supply chain.     

Experiments in Cross‐Scalar Labour Organizing: Reflections on Trade Union‐Building Work in Aceh after the 2004 Tsunami

Abstract: As part of the post‐tsunami reconstruction effort in Aceh, international labour movement organizations “jumped scale” in an attempt to revitalize a moribund local labour movement. This article provides a close analysis of the four internationally sponsored trade union building projects undertaken as part of that process. This unique intervention sheds light on the crucial role of local context and the extent to which the principles of international solidarity and the pragmatics of trade union diplomacy are mediated through money, institutions, individuals and day‐to‐day activities. The Aceh case underscores the importance of contingency and the agency of individuals in shaping an international intervention of this kind. In doing so it demonstrates how circuits of labour activism can be affected by constraints and opportunities unrelated to trade union politics or the relations of production.