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.

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