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Geographic Scale and Grass-Roots Internationalism: The Liverpool Dock Dispute, 1995–1998

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  • Noel Castree

Abstract

In the context of ongoing debates over the effects of “globalization” on organized labor and, specifically, recent experiments in labor internationalism, this paper examines the geography of the Liverpool dock dispute, 1995–98. The dispute has rarely been subject to a serious analysis of its causes and trajectory. This is surprising since it was not only the most protracted industrial dispute in recent British history but also the hub of a relatively novel form of transnational labor organizing: namely, a form of grass-roots internationalism organized largely outside the formal apparatuses of national and international unionism. In the paper I focus on the nature and dynamics of this “grass-roots internationalis” with a view to making two claims that have a wider thematic and theoretical relevance to the study of labor geographies. First, contrary to an emerging new orthodoxy in labor geography (and labor studies more generally), the Liverpool case in fact suggests that the necessity for labor to “up-scale” solidarity and struggle in the 1990s is much overstated. Second, the Liverpool case suggests that international labor organizing is only efficacious when considered in relation to two scales of struggle often thought increasingly irrelevant or ineffectual in a globalizing world: the local and the national. Thus, while those few analysts who have cited the Liverpool dispute, basing their assessments on secondhand knowledge, have held the dockers up as exemplars of a new form of labor internationalism, in this paper I suggest the need for a more complex and contingent appreciation of the multiscalar dynamics of labor struggles. In short, we have not yet reached the stage, even in a globalizing world, where labor’s “spatial fixes” must be preeminently supranational.

Suggested Citation

  • Noel Castree, 2000. "Geographic Scale and Grass-Roots Internationalism: The Liverpool Dock Dispute, 1995–1998," Economic Geography, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 76(3), pages 272-292, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:recgxx:v:76:y:2000:i:3:p:272-292
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1944-8287.2000.tb00144.x
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    Cited by:

    1. Susan Christopherson & Nathan Lillie, 2005. "Neither Global Nor Standard: Corporate Strategies in the New Era of Labor Standards," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 37(11), pages 1919-1938, November.
    2. Koi Yu Adolf Ng & César Ducruet, 2014. "The changing tides of port geography (1950–2012)," Post-Print halshs-01359160, HAL.
    3. Katy Fox-Hodess, 2017. "(Re-)Locating the Local and National in the Global: Multi-Scalar Political Alignment in Transnational European Dockworker Union Campaigns," British Journal of Industrial Relations, London School of Economics, vol. 55(3), pages 626-647, September.
    4. Keshab Das, 2016. "Situating Labour in the Global Production Network Debate: As if the ‘South’ Mattered," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 59(3), pages 343-362, September.
    5. Peter North, 2017. "Local economies of Brexit," Local Economy, London South Bank University, vol. 32(3), pages 204-218, May.
    6. Danny MacKinnon & Andrew Cumbers & Jon Shaw, 2008. "Rescaling Employment Relations: Key Outcomes of Change in the Privatised Rail Industry," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 40(6), pages 1347-1369, June.

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