Andrew Herod

Reflections on interviewing foreign elites: praxis, positionality, validity, and the cult of the insider

Abstract Using open-ended interviews to conduct research on foreign elites raises methodological questions which conducting research on non-foreign elites and foreign non-elites does not. In this paper I first reflect upon some of the practical issues I have encountered when conducting interviews with members of foreign elites. I then examine the issue of positionality to suggest that the dualism of “insider” knowledge and status versus “outsider” knowledge and status is not as stable as it is often assumed to be, and that it should not be presumed that an “insider” will necessarily produce “better” knowledge than will an “outsider” simply by dint of their positionality. Indeed, given that the interview process is about constructing social meaning – a process that involves both the researcher and the source – in many ways such a dualism is meaningless.

Labor Internationalism and the Contradictions of Globalization: Or, Why the Local is Sometimes Still Important in a Global Economy

In this paper I examine two case studies of workers fighting against transnationally organized corporations. In the first case, a 1990–1992 dispute between the United Steelworkers of America and the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation, union workers developed an international campaign to pressure the corporation to rehire them after they had been locked out in a dispute over health and safety issues. In the second case, a 1998 dispute between the United Auto Workers and General Motors, strikes by workers at just two plants in Flint, Michigan over the corporations plans to introduce new work rules resulted in the virtual shutdown of GM for several weeks. Drawing on these two cases, I suggest that, in challenging transnationally organized employers, workers may on some occasions best achieve their goals through engaging in practices of transnational solidarity aimed at matching the global organization of their employer (“organizing globally”), whereas on other occasions they may be able to do so through highly focused local actions (“organizing locally”) against strategic parts of a corporation. Of course, which of these two strategies is most likely to succeed in particular cases will depend on a coterie of contingencies, such as how interconnected the corporations component parts are. However, the fact that different geographical strategies may be open to workers challenging globally organized capital means at least two things. First, some workers may not have to organize at the same geographical scale (ie globally) as corporations in order to challenge them. Second, through their choices of which strategy to pursue, workers are clearly shaping the very process of globalization itself and the new global geographies which globalization is auguring.

The Practice of International Labor Solidarity and the Geography of the Global Economy

Economic geographers have neglected the international activities of workers and working class organizations. Worker invisibility has been particularly evident in explanations of the geography of foreign direct investment. Yet for over a century workers have built international labor organizations which have shaped economic and political geographies. This paper examines an international campaign waged on behalf of some 1,700 members of United Steelworkers of America Local 5668 who were locked out of an aluminum smelter in Ravenswood, West Virginia on expiration of their contract in November 1990. The lockout was part of a company plan to break the local union and operate the smelter with a non-union work force. The paper analyzes how Local 5668 and its supporters built a global solidarity network which successfully forced a multibillion-dollar transnational metals trading corporation to reinstate the locked out union workers and sign a new contract. As the paper shows, workers clearly make economic geographies through their actions. Economic geographers should pay greater empirical and theoretical attention to this fact.

Implications of Just-in-Time Production for Union Strategy: Lessons from the 1998 General Motors-United Auto Workers Dispute

This paper analyzes the spatial and temporal dynamics of the 1998 General Motors-United Auto Workers dispute to examine what implications ‘lean’ production methods may have for organized labor. Whereas much writing on new forms of production organization has tended to see such developments in ‘either/ or’ terms — either as an attack on unions in the workplace, or as offering workers an opportunity for empowerment through teamwork and greater control over job content — in this paper, I argue that, under lean production, the power relations between workers and employers are being refashioned in contradictory ways at different geographic scales. Specifically, while lean production may indeed represent an attack on workers’ traditional ways of doing things at the scale of the shopfloor, the introduction of Just-in-Time production methods as part of the ‘leaning’ of capitalism may present new possibilities at the scale of interplant relations for unions to exploit in their relationship with employers. In this ...

Spatialising Industrial Relations

In this article, we argue for a deeper and more theoretically informed engagement between the fields of industrial relations and geography. We lay out a number of concepts developed more fully by geographers and show, through four vignettes, how such concepts can add to our understanding of industrial relations practices.

Union Retreat and the Regions: The Shrinking Landscape of Organised Labour

1. The Disorgnaised of organised Labour. 2. Situating Trade Unionism: Spaces of Regulation and Representation. 3. The Contours of Decline: Union Retreat and Resilience in the Regions. 4. Labour Market Restructuring and Regional Unionism. 5. Striking Out the Past? Geographies of Industrial Action. 6. Decentralization and Local Industrial Politics. 7. Mapping Union Futures: Representation and Organisation in a Detraditionalized Economy.

Workers and Workplaces in a Neoliberal Global Economy

In this commentary I suggest that three sets of processes—a dramatic shrinking of distance between places, a growing global interconnection of economies, and the increasing importance for many corporations of an ‘international strategy’—are having fundamental impacts on workers and workplaces. Although these processes are playing out in geographically uneven ways, differentially affecting various parts of the globe, there are three sets of general implications associated with them. First, the speed with which the consequences of economic and political events are transmitted through markets has increased dramatically during the past decades. Second, the rhetoric of neoliberal globalization is being used in an attempt to shift the balance of power to global capital. Third, the international migration of both work and people is likely to increase, the former fueled by Internet technologies effectively allowing global telecommuting, the latter fueled by falling birth rates in the industrial economies of the global North. I conclude with some observations about how workers and their organizations may respond to these developments.

Global production networks, labour and small firms

The literature on global production networks (GPNs) and global commodity/value chains has generally conceptualised small firms as being at the bottom of the commodity chain hierarchy, and thus subordinate to larger firms. As a consequence, small firms and their employees are typically imagined to be fairly powerless to shape the structure of GPNs. By way of contrast, in this paper we argue that small firms and their employees are not lacking in the capacity to affect the way GPNs and commodity chains develop, but can in fact shape them in potentially significant ways. This recognition becomes evident if, instead of starting any analysis of small firms in GPNs with the governance structures of production networks or managerial strategies, we instead start the analysis with the organisation and control of the labour process in concrete settings, and tie this to broader understandings of uneven and combined development under capitalism.

Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscape of Capitalism

Preface. Introduction: Labor and Landscapes. Toward a Labor Geography. Challenging the Global Locally: Labor in a Postindustrial Global City. Spatial Sabotage: Containerization, Union Work Rules, and the Geography of Waterfront Work. Scales of Struggle: Labors Rescaling of Contract Bargaining in the U.S. East Coast Longshoring Industry, 1953-1989. Labor as an Agent of Globalization and as a Global Agent. Engineering Spaces of Anti-Communism: Connecting Cold War Global Strategy to Local Everyday Life. Thinking Locally, Acting Globally? The Practice of International Labor Solidarity and the Geography of the Global Economy. International Labor Union Activity and the Landscapes of Transition in Central and Eastern Europe.

Homework and the fragmentation of space: Challenges for the labor movement

Abstract The Reagan Administration, as part of a broad strategy to provide greater flexibility of investment opportunities for capital and to undermine organized labor, lifted the bans on homework in six of the seven industries in which it was originally regulated in 1942. The Administration argued that deregulation would give women greater freedom to combine domestic responsibilities with wage-earning work. Trade union leaders opposed deregulation on the grounds that it would allow manufacturers to use homeworkers to cut production costs and would ultimately lead to the erosion of protective labor legislation for both factory workers and homeworkers. However, the labor movements failure to locate the issue of homework within the broader context of the gendered nature of economic restructuring has led it to adopt a political strategy which, ironically, will merely encourage homeworks further growth.