Workers on the move: can unions keep up to changes in community?

Abstract

The radical restructuring of contemporary labor markets, combined with the weakening of welfare states, has extended and deepened the commodification of labor and the experience of risk and insecurity at work. In the face of increasingly uncertain hours of work, or confronted with layoff or unemployment, people become more mobile. This can take the form of searching for work further afield, or moving house to reduce costs. Mobility therefore becomes a strategy for mitigating risk, albeit shaped by class, race, and gender. We argue that such mobility shifts how workers imagine and live in their communities, stressing and stretching their key social relationships across space, while at the same time diminishing peoples' capacity for solidarity. We go on to argue that as workers respond to labor market pressures with increased mobility, the correspondence between community and workplace, workplace and residence is further eroded. This poses new challenges for the constitution of community, and solidarity, amongst workers, and ultimately for the capacity of unions to represent workers. Based on interviews with workers, we develop three themes from these interviews: the strains introduced to workers' sense of place and community by different forms of mobility; the gendered nature of mobility; and race, immigrant status, and mobility. In the final section of the essay, we discuss how some workers resist the isolating and demobilizing effects of workplace and work reorganization by constituting or reconstituting a sense of community. We then conclude with some reflections on how increased mobility and declining community cohesion impact union strategic capacities.

To move or not to move: mobility decision-making in the context of welfare conditionality and paid employment

“…Little research has been done into the mobilities of non-elite workers (Cresswell, Dorow, andRoseman 2016, 1790), but the scholarship that does exist paints a bleak picture of contemporary labour markets. As Leach and Yates (2015) explain, The radical restructuring of contemporary labor markets, combined with the weakening of welfare states, has extended and deepened the commodification of labor and the experience of risk and insecurity at work. In the face of increasingly uncertain hours of work, or confronted with layoff or unemployment, people become more mobile.…”

“…A major distinction in such motive force is thus between being compelled to move or choosing to move. (Cresswell 2010, 22) This emphasis on what Cresswell (2010) terms the 'politics of mobility' is further evident in recent work on state promoted mobility in national and international employment markets (Roseman, Barber, and Neis 2015;Leach and Yates 2015). Oliver (2012) observes that, in the European context, mobile and flexible STEM workers are celebrated as model citizens despite the inherent lack of job security associated with this work; this framing serves the European Union's strategic objectives of fostering a knowledge-based economy, even as the industry withholds stability from those employed in these roles.…”

“…Ultramobility is not a stable long-term option for real people' (Favell 2008, 113). As individuals respond to precarious work conditions by adopting highly mobile careers, their vulnerability increases as their connection to local community, solidarity, and union ties is eroded (Leach and Yates 2015).…”

“…Working mothers, for example, are significantly less likely to be mobile than working fathers, whose partners typically take responsibility for care and household duties (Schneider and Limmer 2008). Economic hardship also drives much mobility (Leach and Yates 2015), and there are complex connections between poverty and race.…”

“…These findings also show that other resourcesincluding social networks and the material support they providetake on added value in situations of financial precarity. Interviewees did not make decisions about whether to move lightly, but demonstrated a sophisticated awareness of what mobility scholars have shown to be the pitfalls and vulnerabilities that mobility can bring, including previously discussed risks of social isolation (Favell 2008, Leach andYates 2015) and prolonged economic disadvantage (Fackler and Rippe 2017).…”