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.
I discuss the recent union renewal strategies adopted by UNITE-HERE Local 75, the union representing a majority of Toronto's organized hotel workers—a fragmented and diverse labour force. Local 75's renewal strategies are multiscalar with knowledge and resources flowing through the organization forming a spatial circuit of union renewal. Conceptualizing union renewal as a spatial circuit maps the interdependencies of different scales of labour organization and the tensions that emerge among such scales. The paper focuses on the hotel union's strategic attempts to (re)create pattern bargaining at local and international scales and organize new hotels prior to their construction. I conclude with a brief discussion linking the recent merger of UNITE-HERE and its departure from the AFL-CIO to broader renewal processes.
This article explores the ''cultural project'' of a hotel workers' union in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is an examination of the efforts of HERE (now UNITE-HERE) Local 75 to transform the identity and image of hotel workers through the promotion of cultural activities involving rankand-file members. Part of a larger union renewal project, the cultural project attempts to build solidarity by connecting with members' lives beyond the workplace. Furthermore, the union's cultural strategies are linked to the development of the city's tourism sector, situating the union's efforts in broader processes of place promotion. The investigation seeks to identify how worker engagement with the cultural implicates organized labour in contradictory processes producing both emancipatory and oppressive economic landscapes.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberal governments embarked on austerity programs that include reducing public services, imposing public sector wage restraint, and reorganizing public sector working conditions and labour relations. In this context of economic crisis and austerity, populism has risen across North America and Europe on both the right and left of the political spectrum. The rise of right populism in particular confronts unions with key organizational and strategic challenges as neoliberal governments seek to mobilize right populist discourses in their efforts to restructure work and labour relations. Using a socio‐geographic framework, and based on an examination of post‐2008 legislative and policy measures undertaken at the federal, provincial, municipal levels in Canada, this paper explores the nexus between “uneven austerity”, rising populism, and union strategic capacities. We examine this intersection of austerity and populism at multiple scales to reveal the implications for organized labour.
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