Uprooting tradition: Rethinking the place and space of labour organization

Abstract

This paper considers contemporary geographical debate about the position of labour in the global economy. I suggest that interpretations of working class organization have been overly focused upon the decline in trade union membership and influence, neglecting the new opportunities that have arisen for labour to organize, often at different spatial scales and using different methods than was previously the case. For good reason, scholars have concentrated attention upon the black cloud that comprises the bulk of trade union experience, but in so doing they have largely neglected the glimpses of a silver lining which hold new possibilities for the future. One such avenue of possibility, which provides the focus of debate in the second half of this paper, are the European Works Councils, which are facilitating trans‐spatial contact between workers in multinational corporations. I suggest that such developments have profound geographical and political significance and they do much to unstable the contemporary conceptual paradigms through which we view the position of labour.