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Multinational corporations (MNCs) are reorganising their production systems. Many MNCs are integrating their production on a continental scale and allocating specific responsibilities and tasks to their research centres on a global scale. Empirical research on the pharmaceutical industry suggests that the spatial reorganisation of the production system can be understood as a process of reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation on different scales. In this paper I outline how MNCs in the pharmaceutical industry are responding to the challenges of the changing economic environment. The ongoing restructuring and rationalisation in the Swiss pharmaceutical giant F Hoffmann–La Roche serves as an example. The recent acquisition of the German pharmaceuticals and diagnostics company Boehringer Mannheim by F Hoffmann – La Roche illustrates how such huge business transactions meet with trade unions which are completely unprepared. I also discuss the responses of trade unions in different affected locations to the ongoing spatial industrial reconfiguration. Whereas the executive committees of MNCs think, develop their strategies, and act on a global scale trade unions, social movements, and local governments are, in contrast, locally and nationally anchored. They have not been able to break out of the cage of localism and the national state with their concepts and activities. This structural inequality is one of the reasons for the loss of importance and credibility of trade unions. Therefore, labour must adopt a new approach to the spatial and social scales of its political practice.
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