Fighting for a working future: Emerging models of local union strategy in a new era of global competition

The overarching goal of this dissertation is to examine and discuss emerging models of local union strategy in what has been identified as a new era of global competition. This study addresses two central concerns within economic geography. First and foremost, this research examines the issue of the role of local unions in influencing the economic future of their communities in a period of intense industrial restructuring. By focussing on unions as agents in economic change, it challenges the notion that firm strategy is the sole, or even deciding determinant of the geography of capitalism. Second, it contributes to our understanding of economic change at the local level. In investigating the experience of two industrial communities undergoing substantial change in the face of global pressures, this study recognizes that the unique local social relations evident in each community have had profound influence over the direction of local economic restructuring--particularly when one considers the level and character of interaction among local unions, local business and local government. This dissertation concludes that workers have transformed their institutions from organizations focussed strictly on representing workers rights in the workplace to mechanisms through which workers can enter into the active production (or reproduction) of space at the local level. This transformation is part and parcel of the process by which stakeholders are responding to what some have called the "crisis of Fordism". In so doing, they are active participants in the subsequent rearticulation of local modes of social regulation. The transformation of local social relations produced (in part) by union activity calls into question the applicability of traditional class analysis with its static view of workers and their relationship to the means of production. Furthermore, a comparison of two Ontario communities--Sault Ste. Marie and St. Catharines--illustrates that there is a great deal of local specificity in both the manner in which workers (and their organizations) enter into the production of space and the desired outcome of such transformative activity.