https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5458-5727
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ABSTRACT
The aim of this study is to advance understanding of the relationships between trade unions and the city by drawing on the burgeoning literature at the intersection of labour and urban politics research. We analysed the attempts of local unions in France to develop urban-based mobilizations, notably through an in-depth qualitative case study of the Bordeaux area, examining different ways union activists frame their relationships to place. Despite an unfavourable institutional legacy, we found the clear emergence of an urban-based union strategy that takes on board the specificities of place while advancing a working-class agenda. However, the case study also showed that urban-based union activism is not universally recognized by trade union activists as a strategy of revitalization, and can raise dilemmas, particularly in terms of the reproduction of class collective identity.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A previous version of this article was presented at the Urban Affairs Association (UAA) annual congress 2019 and discussed during seminars with union activists in France. We would like to thank all the participants of these events, as well as Kevin Cox, for their valuable comments. A special thank you also to Gilles Pinson, Marine Luce and Sofia Tagliani for their help during Bordeaux fieldwork. Finally, we thank the two anonymous reviewers and editors for having pushed us to develop further our ideas.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Two campaigns are worth mentioning: the Fight for $15 campaign, which involved fast-food workers in different cities and ended up with the introduction in many states of a minimum wage above the federal average (Luce & Penny, Citation2017), and the Justice for Janitors campaign (Savage, Citation2006).
2 These organizations can include workers’ centres, a type of organization most common in North America whose aim is to organize the low-wage workforce, notably immigrants (Fine, Citation2005b), but usually also include other community and non-profit organizations advocating for different causes (education, social inclusion, etc.).
3 However, this distinction is empirically blurred. In organizing campaigns, unions have taken up not only workplace issues but also the social needs of low-paid workers (e.g. housing, transport) (Milkman et al., Citation2010).
4 As noted by Gumbrell-McCormick & Hyman (Citation2013, p. 132), ‘unions are not merely economic (or “industrial relations”) actors: they are necessarily protagonists in the political arena. … It is widely accepted that trade unions need a coherent social vision if they are to win members, inspire the activists on whom much of their work depends and sustain their societal legitimacy. They need to be seen as “swords of justice” rather than as “vested interests”'.
5 Community unionism is a multifaceted concept, bringing together different social processes and elements (union strategies, place-based identity, transformation of unionism, etc.), so may suffer from conceptual stretching. Here we build on Holgate’s (Citation2015) distinction between workplace and community. The latter can be conceptualized as ‘spaces (and places) in which people work and live as well as social/spatial networks in which there is a shared interest or sense of common identity or community of interest’ (p. 436).
6 We define these labour mobilization strategies as ‘urban’ insofar as they link together separate spheres of everyday life (workplace, community, public debate, etc.) of people who trade unions strive to represent and organize. Through these strategies, unions ‘extend their representative function to both non-unionized workers and to the many ways in which their members are not just workers but social actors with a plurality of needs and identities’ (McDonald, Citation2017, p. 4).
7 A repertoire can be defined as an institutionalized disposition or, as stated by Ancelovici (Citation2013, p. 353), ‘relatively stable – but not necessarily coherent – cultural materials available to actors to make sense of the world and engage in it. These materials play the role of both the lenses to interpret social reality and the resources to act upon such reality. Thus, repertoires both enable and constrain collective action’.
8 We use place as an analytical category, following the conceptualization of Agnew (Citation1987), to understand how social relations and specific imaginaries develop in order to mediate the influence of macro-processes of economic and political change. We are primarily interested in the process of metropolitanization, as this has been identified by trade unions as a major economic and political process that might alter their space of dependence. Union activists in France use the term ‘territory’ (territoire) to refer to local campaigns as differentiated from national mobilizations.
9 The five case studies involved different processes of economic restructuring (post-industrialism, crisis of manufacturing, etc.), but in all cases local political and socio-economic actors were confronted by a common discourse, driven notably by government authorities, around reinforcing the political and economic power of metropolitan areas (Ghorra-Gobin, Citation2015). We identified a variety of metropolitan political configurations: an entrepreneurially driven government (Lyon); a grant-collation government (Belfort-Montbéliard); metropolitan cooperation (Nantes and Rennes); a nationally imposed administration contested by local elected representatives (Marseille); and a technocratic government (Bordeaux).
10 A total of 19 semi-structured interviews were carried out between November 2017 and June 2018 in Bordeaux with mainly union activists (of local and regional units) as well as local elected officials, experts and community representatives. In total, the research is based on 119 interviews realized by a team of 11 researchers in the five locations (Gourgues et al., Citation2020).
11 We acknowledge that this focus on North American cities might limit the comparative and analytical insights of our analysis. However, this choice reflects the scientific debates about this research topic and the existence of collaboration between labour scholars, urban planners, sociologists, trade unions and community activists, as in the case of Los Angeles and the engagement of academics from UCLA.
12 The disposition of some French union activists is close to orthodox Marxist theory, which considers community experiences as secondary when achieving social change. On this point, see the analysis developed by Katznelson (Citation1981), who critiques these theories by arguing that ‘workplace and residence–community relations are shaped by the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and constitute the lived-experience world of capitalist societies’ (p. 202).
13 This refers to a primary focus of union resources on single company struggles, even if these are in isolation from each other.
14 These mobilizations were launched at the local level, but coordinated nationally, in the framework of a movement advocating public access to key services and goods against a rationale of the hyper-commodification and financialization of public services (see https://www.convergence-sp.fr/).
15 Unions in France are organized nationally as confederations, and fall into two major types in particular areas: cross-sectoral (interprofessionnel) and sectoral (Giraud et al., Citation2018). Workers join first a union in their workplace: these are part of both national sectoral organizations and local cross-sectoral organizations (Unions Départementales – UDs). The sectoral organizations have traditionally played a central role in orienting the union’s political choices both locally and nationally.
16 There are no recent published data on the distribution of CGT members across the different sectoral federations. The only data available concern the union delegates represented in the local general assembly (one delegate per union/company). In this case, the most represented sectors are health (13%), local public services (13%), state social and welfare services (7%), metallurgy (7%), and bank and insurance companies (6%). The proportion of general assembly delegates from public and private industry is balanced, though these data do not reflect CGT-affiliated members who have a higher proportion in public services. Source: developed by the authors from the CGT Gironde Preliminary for the General Assembly 2021 (see https://www.cgt-gironde.org/files/2021-comite_general_ud33_document_preparatoire.pdf).
17 The project is currently managed by a publicly owned company (Etablissement Public d’Aménagement – EPA) in an ownership structure in which the national government, the metropolitan government, the city of Bordeaux and two other small municipalities in the metropolitan area are all participants. The EPA is a very flexible tool for urban planning, put in place for major urban development projects (such as the Paris business district La Défense) in order to organize land planning and allocation: land rights are then mainly sold to developers.
18 About 250 hectares are planned for newly built amenities, 43% for new housing, 20% for parks, 16% for high-value-added tertiary activities (business centres), 6% for public amenities, 2% for hotels and 2% for small businesses.
19 From the trade union perspective, metropolitanization corresponds both to the strengthening of power of the intermunicipal bodies promoted by a national law (2015) and to the broader process of increasing inequality within the metropolitan region with the concentration of high-tech jobs and activities in specific areas at the expense of peripheral metropolitan areas (CGT Gironde, Citation2015).
20 In the case of the small company, the issue was the closure of the production plant due to financial choices, whereas for the state-owned firm, the issue concerned the relocation of production outside the project area.
21 Declaration of the general manager of the EPA Euratlantique in Sud-Ouest (Citation2018).
22 Bottom-up organizing concerning primarily service employees (particularly in retail) has started to spread in France, but these practices have often been adopted by non-union organizations such as ReAct, although they engage in dialogue with US trade unions such as UNITE.
23 See the examples of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) and the Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN).
24 In Archer’s terminology, the French case study would correspond to a case of morphostasis.
25 As stated by Melucci (Citation1988, p. 343), the process of identity construction, adaptation and maintenance involves the building of common cognitive frameworks that enable social actors to assess the environment and calculate the costs and benefits of their actions, even if the final decisions result from interactions as well as emotional recognition.
26 Katznelson (Citation1986) defines class as a ‘way of organizing, thinking about, and acting on society’ (p. 3). The author clearly defines four interconnected analytical layers of this concept (structure, ways of life, disposition and collective action) to distinguish between different historical processes of working-class formation. We refer here to the class disposition of union members and how this is related to their mode of collective action.
27 This is evident, for example, in these extracts of interviews with local union delegates in the United States: ‘Organized labour doesn’t just look out for organized labour. We make much more than the people affected by this; they are not union people, but they still have to make a living’ (interview with Tony Romano, 1999). ‘I’m tired of being called a labour boss, and that we’re only interested in collecting dues. Here was an opportunity for labour to be a community partner’ (interview with Ian Robertson, Southern Arizona Labour Council president, 1999) (Luce, Citation2015, p. 143 digital edn).