Problematizing Labour's Agency: Rescaling Collective Bargaining in British Columbia Pulp and Paper Mills

Abstract

This paper focuses on the contradictory nature and sometimes unintended consequences of workers’ efforts to defend particular communities against the ravages of capital restructuring. In the past decade, pattern collective bargaining in the highly unionized British Columbia pulp and paper industry has faced enormous strains due to intense industry restructuring. Our analysis focuses on the repercussions of actions taken by union locals in two British Columbia towns—Port Alice and Port Alberni—to try to secure the survival of their pulp and paper mills and, even in the case of Port Alice, the continued existence of the community. Our analysis resonates with recent debates surrounding worker agency as well as writing in the 1980s which addressed the often contradictory and problematic nature of workers’ struggles to “defend place”; writing largely neglected in more recent work in labour geography.

Labour Geographies of Workplace Restructuring: An Intra‐Labour Analysis

“…Between these hopes and concerns, scholars are re‐engaging with present cases of restructuring (Ince et al. ; Siemiatycki ; Sweeney and Holmes ; Werner ). As capitalist restructuring is reframed as a generative context for labour geographies, a dominant tendency to examine contestation and outcomes through the lens of labour unions is also shifting.…”

“…Joined to formative research from the 1980s, contemporary studies also re‐affirm the contentious, often exclusionary politics, bound up in defending jobs in local places gripped by structural change (Cumbers et al. ; Gialis and Herod ; Sweeney and Holmes ). Parochial campaigns to protect jobs—often fed by populist politics—have involved mobilising ugly discourses that hamper development of transnational solidarities (Ince et al.…”

Labor geographies of socially embedded work: The multi scalar resistance of Mexican teachers

“…Centralization of education governance and constraints on the embedded agency of teachers: The need for a multi scalar strategy Labor geography emerged in the 1990s as a corrective to a tendency within economic geography and the social sciences to neglect the agency of workers while analyzing economic and political structures and contexts. The first wave of labor geography (see Herod, 1997Herod, , 2001 was critiqued for its over-emphasis on workers' agency through its selection of successful cases that are arguably not representative of organized labor, let alone workers generally (Castree, 2007;Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011;Sweeney and Holmes, 2012;Tufts and Savage, 2009). The debates on structure and agency and its application to labor geography will not be explored deeply here, but the categories developed by Katz (2004: 246-247) are useful for defining what is meant by "workers" agency.…”

Labour geography II: Being, knowledge and agency

“…Labour geography, I would argue, can learn something from this approach. While labour geography research has paid explicit attention to praxis (Herod, 2003, 2017), left political commitments (Featherstone and Griffin, 2016), and the specific issue of how we understand worker agency (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011; Cumbers et al, 2008; Hastings and MacKinnon, 2017; Kiil and Knutsen, 2016; Ramamurthy, 2000; Rogaly, 2009; Sportel, 2013; Sweeney and Holmes, 2013; Warren, 2014), the time has come to also examine the ontological and epistemological foundations of theorizing and some of the exclusions or path-dependencies they engender. This process can help solidify new directions and clarify labour geography’s distinctive contributions (see, for example, Crossan et al, 2016, on material practices of community building; Dutta, 2016, on complexities of social being of workers; Hurl, 2016, on state formation and organized labour; Nowak, 2016, on mass strikes; Prentice et al, 2018, on everyday health and well-being of workers in global supply chains; and Stenning, 2003, 2008, on post-socialist working-class politics).…”