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Area (1991) 23.1, 82-88
The production of scale in United States
labour relations
Andrew Herod, Department of Geography, Rutgers, The State University of
New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, USA
Summary This paper argues that geographic scale is socially produced as the resolution ofprocesses
of cooperation and competition between and among socialgroups. Using the example of a briefanalysis
of the geographic context of twentieth century US labour relations, I argue that conceptualising a
politics of the production of scale provides the mechanism to map translations between processes
operating at different geographic scales.
Fundamental to the contemporary restructuring of US capitalism has been the
reconstruction of the geographical scales at which it is organised. For example, the
globalisation of production capital has been integral to the processes of deindustrialis
ation which have wracked the economy. Similarly, capital restructuring has frag
mented and recoalesced the traditional regional economic geography of the United
States (Smith and Dennis 1987), while the implementation of' flexible' production
technologies with their assemblages of geographically proximate contracting and sub
contracting relationships have in some instances quite literally created whole new
locales, as in the industrial spaces of Silicon Valley (Scott 1988).
Scale is, arguably, geography's core concept, for only through its resolution can we
negotiate the boundaries between difference and similarity. It is scale which enables us
to differentiate geographical landscapes, to delimit inclusion or exclusion in such social
constructions as home, class, nation, rural, urban, core and periphery. Despite its
importance for the production and differentiation of landscapes, scale remains a
theoretically and empirically problematic concept. This is particularly so with regard to
mapping the translations between processes operating at different geographic scales, a
problem which has been especially evident in the continuing localities debate'.
In this paper I argue that geographic scale is produced as the resolution of processes
of cooperation and competition between and among social groups in building land
scapes. Since scale is socially produced, there is a politics to its production. Using the
example of the geographic focus of twentieth century US labour relations, I propose
that conceptualising a politics of the production of scale provides the necessary
theoretical basis to begin to unravel the relationships between different geographic
scales.
Towards a politics of the production of geographic scale
Human geography has tended to treat geographic scale in one of two manners. First,
the urban, national and global scales have simply been given. By this I mean that these
three scales have been regarded merely as taken-for-granted ' natural ' divisions of
spatial organisation by which to order processes operating at different geographic
resolutions (Taylor 1981, 1982). Secondly, while the urban, national and global scales
appeared fairly easy to differentiate in landscapes, defining the regional scale proved a
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United States labour relations 83
much more elusive task. This problem was usually resolved by conceptualising regions
as intermediary spatial units located somewhere between the urban and the national.
Stemming from the discipline's Kantian idealist roots and reflecting the empirical
difficulties of delimiting regional as opposed to urban, national or global boundaries,
regions were then conceived as essentially arbitrary mental contrivances, 'subjective
artistic devices ... shaped to fit the hand of the individual user ' (Hart 1982, 21; Smith
1989). At best scale was invariant, at worst imaginary.
These conceptualisations of scale, however, are highly problematic, not least
because they are incapable of theoretically accommodating the contemporary restruc
turing of the geographic scales of capitalism. Recent calls for a reconstituted regional
geography have thus focused on getting beyond Kantian-based ontologies which have
proved inadequate to explain the processes of region formation and transformation
(Pudup 1988). Similarly, such ontologies have had little to say theoretically about why
it is that the urban, national and global scales appear so crucial to the workings of
industrial capitalism or how to theorise the connections between these different scales
(Taylor 1982).
Taylor (1981, 1982) was one of the first geographers to examine critically the notion
of geographic scale. In applying an analysis derived from world-systems theory, he
argued that a political economy of geographic scale could be identified. The approach
he outlined attempts to articulate the relationship between global (his 'scale of
reality '), national (his ' scale of ideology '), and urban (his ' scale of experience ') scales
and to derive the importance of these different scales for the political economy of
capitalist accumulation. Whereas Taylor is correct to argue for a political economy of
geographic scale based in material processes, his approach subsequently makes few
connections to such processes as the production of landscapes or even the production of
scale itself. While Taylor reveals the importance of scale for capitalists and the main
tenance of capitalist social relations, there is little sense (except presumably negatively)
that scale is also important for structuring oppositional politics, that its control can be
empowering and emancipatory and that struggles over geographic scale are fundamen
tal to the production of landscapes. In the following section of this paper I hope to flesh
out these points by showing how the control of the geographic scale of labour relations
has been a crucial determinant in shaping the economic geography of the US during the
twentieth century.
Smith's (1984) approach to developing a political economy of scale seeks to examine
more directly the processes whereby scales are actively produced in the uneven devel
opment of the geography of capitalism. He argues that scale is produced as the geo
graphic resolution of processes of cooperation and competition between and among
capitalists, relating this to the contradictory tendencies within capitalism towards both
differentiation and equalisation in the production of space. Using this as a theoretical
base, Smith goes on to define the urban scale in terms of the geographical expression of
the reproduction of labour power through the spatial integration of daily labour mar
kets, and the regional scale as produced by the territorial division of labour2. The
national scale, he argues, results from the need to retain political control of markets vis a
vis other national capitals, while the global scale is produced through the universalis
ation and integration of commodified wage-labour and the law of value. Whereas
Smith's work reveals geographic scales to be materially produced social constructions
differentiating the landscape, three concerns need to be addressed.
First, Smith tends to de-emphasise other social mechanisms upon which capitalism
relies in producing space and geographic scale. Patriarchal social relations, for instance,
are also crucial to the process. The reproduction of labour power at the urban scale
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84 Herod
relies on the asymmetrical gender division of domestic responsibilities which in turn
limits women's mobility and job options (Madden 1981). Regionally, different labour
markets operate for women than for men with women tending to be concentrated in
specific types of jobs. This raises the issue of different gendered regions existing for
men and women based on territorial divisions of labour. Nationally, legislation regard
ing child support, welfare provision, divorce and other mechanisms for regulating
social reproduction are geared towards reinforcing women's traditional social role as
domestic supports for the reproduction of labour power. Globally, women form the
bulk of the most oppressed and exploited section of the international proletariat. The
global expansion of the capitalist wage-labour relation into pre-capitalist societies has
not been gender-neutral. Rather, multinational corporations have generally sought out
women for their factory workforces.
Secondly, while articulating the tendencies toward equalisation and differentiation
within capitalism, Smith's formulation relegated political struggles, whether of a class,
gender, nationalist or other type (although he has subsequently modified this position
somewhat (see Smith forthcoming)). Conceptualising the production of scale as simply
arising out of the internal requirements of capitalist uneven development leaves little
room for political struggle, progressive or reactionary, to shape scale. Instead, by
reinvigorating our understanding both of landscapes and the scales at which they are
produced as contested social constructions, we can retain the notion of capitalism's
inherent tendencies (such as the expansion of the wage-labour relation) yet incorporate
other struggles and experiences which modify the law of value in different geographic
locations. Although capital may have the upper hand, the production of scale and
landscapes is never unproblematic. How, for instance, do national liberation struggles
(frequently organised around defending spaces against the further penetration of
capitalist social relations) create and define regions?
Thirdly, scale needs to be treated dialectically. Whereas political, cultural, gendered
and economic struggles distinctively craft the production of scale, scale in turn defines
and redefines those struggles. Scale is not merely socially produced but is also socially
producing. The recent experience of the Metropolitan councils in Britain illustrates
this point well. Despite the national implementation of Thatcherism, militant local
Labour groups in several cities were able to carve out local spaces of resistance to
central government economic policies. However, by using its control of the national
legislative structure, the Thatcher government was able to abolish these councils and
with them this scale of opposition.
The following section attempts to use a brief history of US labour relations to show
how struggles to create and control the scale of union representation and collective
bargaining have fundamentally shaped unions' abilities to resist contemporary
processes of economic restructuring.
The production of scale in US labour relations
The labour reforms of the New Deal mark the emergence of the modern era in US
labour relations. One of the most distinctive features of these relations is the decen
tralised institutional context within which US labour unions operate compared to those
of other industrial countries and the local focus of much of their activity (Clark
1988; Clark 1989; Clark and Johnston 1987). Such a decentralised and locally-oriented
structure is no mere accident of history. Rather, it was forged in the crucible of struggle
and compromise between and among workers, bosses and the state to define the
geographical scales at which labour relations are conducted.
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United States labour relations 85
Perhaps most significant of the New Deal reforms was the 1935 National Labor
Relations Act (' Wagner Act') which codified into law workers' rights to organise and
be represented by unions of their own choosing, and to bargain collectively (Stone
1981 )3. At least one labour historian has claimed these successes ' represented the
labour movement in its finest hour' (Zieger 1986, 157). The importance of the
Wagner Act lies in the framework for labour relations that its passage subsequently
established.
For Franklin Roosevelt's administration the labour legislation of the New Deal had
two mutually reinforcing purposes. First, to promote industrial peace in the wake of
mounting working class agitation spawned by the ravages of the Depression. Such
unrest had precipitated bitter strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco in
1934, and was later also manifested in a wave of ' sit-downs ' involving more than half a
million workers in 1936 and 1937 (Moody 1988)4. Secondly, New Dealers hoped to
facilitate economic recovery by protecting factory wages and thereby stimulating
aggregate wage levels and demand (Boris 1985; Clark 1989). By shifting the focus of
labour relations away from violent confrontation and placing it in regulated grievance
machinery, the Wagner Act became a cornerstone of administration policy.
The local geographical focus of the institutions set in place by the Act reflects the
resolution of conflicts, compromises and cooperation within which its structure
coalesced. For example, there were tensions between New Deal Democrats' top-down
approach to economic recovery as embodied in the National Recovery Administration
(Zieger 1986), and the ideology of industrial pluralism they espoused which maintained
that government intervention should broadly regulate the most egregious aspects of
workplace conflict yet leave collective bargaining issues to the private realm of the
labour-management relationship (Stone 198 1)5. These tensions were magnified by the
administration's concerns to ensure sufficient labour rights to stimulate economic
recovery without embuing unions with too much power, while all the time striving to
minimise powerful business opposition. There were also tensions within the unions as
rank and filers sought to protect local structures and prerogatives as safeguards to
democracy, while simultaneously ensuring federal regulation of organising and bar
gaining rights. Employers similarly were divided. While some tacitly or actively sup
ported federal intervention because of the prospects it brought for industrial peace,
others formed the Liberty League to oppose the Act's implementation. Indeed, it was
only after the League had obtained hundreds of injunctions to prevent enforcement
that the US Supreme Court finally upheld the Act's constitutionality in 1937.
The structure of labour relations which subsequently emerged sought to negotiate
these tensions by incorporating decentralised mechanisms covering both the rules of
unionisation and the process whereby union ' locals ' could be formed within the
context of federally prescribed fair labour practices (Clark and Johnston 1987). Despite
moves towards federal centralisation of wage settlements under the exigencies of World
War Two, this decentralised representation and bargaining structure was further
entrenched by the passage in 1947 of the Labor-Management Relations Act ('Taft
Hartley Act '), a business-sponsored piece of legislation designed to amend the Wagner
Act and circumscribe labour's power. By prohibiting secondary boycotts business
interests sought to bring about the complete isolation of union locals from one another
as economic or political bodies, so fragmenting any emergent tendencies toward collec
tive action (US Chamber of Commerce 1947). This would prevent members of one
union local taking action to help fellow workers in another local (even of the same
' International' union or in the same plant) or of organising and cooperating jointly
(AFL 1949). Similarly, the National Association of Manufacturers' attempts to
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86 Herod
prohibit industry-wide bargaining were designed to fragment unions by preventing
them from formulating any unified wage policies (CIO 1947).
Furthermore, Taft-Hartley facilitated the creation of a whole new regional geogra
phy of US labour relations by enabling individual states to pass Right-To-Work
(RTW) laws. Such laws allow states to prohibit union shop agreements which mandate
that workers join a particular union as a condition of employment. In effect
Taft-Hartley provided that wherever state laws were more hostile than itself to union
security then those state laws would take precedence, but in cases where state law was
more favourable to union security, then Taft-Hartley would take precedence (CIO
1953). By decentralising the prerogative for RTW laws to the states, Taft-Hartley
allowed for their differential geographic implementation and provided US capital with
a unique internal mobility to escape unionised workforces and to alter work conditions,
wage costs and introduce new technologies (Peet 1983). The patchwork of labour laws
which enactment of RTW legislation brought has been fundamental to the contempor
ary restructuring of the regional economic geography of the US. As Davis (1986, 129)
observes, during the 1960s and 1970s almost 90 per cent of all manufacturing employ
ment growth took place in the largely RTW southern and western states, undermining
traditional spatial bases of union power in the northeast and instituting 'a new
union-resistant geography of American industry'.
Despite the decentralised institutional context of labour relations inscribed by the
Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts countervailing tendencies did emerge, particularly
during the long post-war boom of the ' Pax Americana '. Moody (1988) notes that one
response to Taft-Hartley was the growing practice first adopted by the steelworkers in
1950 of making the International Union the sole contracting agent with employers, a
strategy designed to protect union locals from a host of lawsuits which the Act had now
made possible. Furthermore, buoyed by the profitability which global economic
expansion brought US corporations, unions were increasingly able to extend the prac
tices of pattern bargaining established by the War Labor Board's 1942 'Little Steel
Formula ' under which the steel industry's wage and benefit norms had been applied to
industry as a whole. Although employer opposition meant that by the early 1950s such
pattern bargaining' had become more a matter of emulation than of united action ', the
system did still allow stronger unions to set a general pattern for other unions to follow
throughout basic industry (Moody 1988,25). In addition, a variety of' me-too 'contracts
enabled workers in smaller firms to achieve wage and work condition improvements
similar to those of the larger master contracts.
As the experience of the 1 980s has made clear, however, such successes proved to be
extremely tenuous. Union gains had been premised upon the secure oligopolistic
position of unionised manufacturing industries within the economy and the expansion
of consumer durables consumption which federally subsidised suburbanisation had
helped stimulate (Davis 1986). As the post-war boom ground to a halt, the fragile
nature of the pattern bargaining which had been built out from such a locally-oriented
system of labour relations was revealed. Indeed, the failure of the labour movement to
overcome the decentralised nature of labour relations has been one of the most signifi
cant impediments to working people's abilities to counter the economic predations of
capital restructuring.
A key element to the employers' assault unleashed on the working class beginning
with the PATCO air-traffic controllers' strike in 1981 has been the struggle to control
the geographical scale of bargaining. Capital has increasingly sought to weaken unions'
position with respect to economic restructuring by fragmenting the national bargaining
agreements which they had built up during the post-war period. For example in 1986,
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United States labour relations 87
under pressure from steel operators, the United Steel Workers dissolved their Basic
Steel Agreement master contract and agreed to negotiate separately and on different
terms with each operator. This had impacts not just in steel but also in the steel
fabricating, aluminium, copper and can industries for which the BSA had set the
bargaining pattern (Moody 1988).
In what Davis (1986, 143) with sharp geographical insight has referred to as the
shrinking perimeter of unionism', master contracts have been dismantled or elimi
nated in every major unionised industry during the 1980s, including automobiles,
timber, trucking, groceries and meatpacking. In one industry after another the pressure
has been towards fragmenting wage agreements and desynchronising bargaining cycles
to allow employers to break out of industry patterns and take competitive advantage of
local concessionary bargaining. This trend has been reinforced by increasing compe
tition between states for jobs and investment fostered by Reagan's New Federalism
which has shifted much more of the responsibility for generating economic growth
from the federal government to the states themselves.
Capital's strategy to fragment tendencies towards collective action on the part of
unions has fundamentally been concerned with controlling the geographic scale at
which class struggle becomes manifested. By breaking down master contracts and
pattern bargaining during the 1980s and increasingly imposing a system of highly
individualised plant-level contracts, employers have been able to play off union locals
against each other in a mounting wave of concessionary bargaining. During the first
half of 1982, for example almost 60 per cent of unions engaged in contract negotiations
were forced to accept real wage freezes or reductions (Davis 1986). Such concessions
(widely scorned as Con Sessions) netted Ford and General Motors an estimated $4 bil
lion in their 1982 contract with the United Auto Workers, while the steelworkers' 1983
agreement was worth $3 billion in take-backs for the seven major steel operators.
Moody (1988) estimates that between 1983 and 1985 overall concessions may have
netted US capital anywhere from $76 billion to $152 billion. The significance of strug
gles to produce and control geographic scale quickly becomes apparent when one
realises that this is greater than the average annual profits for all US manufacturing
industry during the same period.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Neil Smith and members of the Contemporary Social Theory in Geography seminar,
Department of Geography, Rutgers for providing a stimulating environment in which to develop the ideas in
this paper. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for comments on a previous draft of this paper.
Notes
1 Initiated by an exchange between Smith (1987) and Cooke (1987) concerning the CURS initiative, this
debate has largely been conducted in Antipode and a special issue of Environment and Planning D, 5, 363
434. The protagonists are now too numerous to mention individually, but interested readers can refer to
these references and to subsequent issues of Antipode.
2 Duncan and Savage (1989) have recently criticised using local labour markets as a theoretical basis for
empirical research because, they claim, such an approach pays too much attention to differences between
rather than within local labour markets. While this may be a valid observation, it would seem to miss the
very point about the politics of scale which permeate the differentiation of landscapes.
3 While it is a commonly held belief that the Wagner Act facilitated union organisation per se, Clark (1989)
and Clark and Johnston (1987) have argued that one of the Act's consequences was its circumscription of
union organisation at the national level. This is a point with which I agree. Furthermore, while the Act
marked the beginning of a new-found power for organised labour, it also set in place institutional
structures which constrained grassroots militancy and increasingly tied the labour movement into the
realm of corporate state politics. In trading militancy for security of representation, organised labour since
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88 Herod
the 1930s has thus increasingly had to rely on the capitalist Democratic Party to back pro-labour legislation
(Herod 1989).
4 Sit-downs were strikes in which workers occupied plants by literally sitting down on the job.
5 The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of June 1933 sought to stimulate economic recovery
through a National Recovery Administration (NRA) by relying on business groups and trade associations
to develop codes of fair employment and competition. It was only after May 1935 when the US Supreme
Court ruled the NIRA unconstitutional that the Roosevelt administration, previously lukewarm to
Senator Wagner's bill, clambered to support it (Zieger 1986).
The basic premise of industrial pluralism is that capital and labour come to the bargaining table as
legally equal entities. This contrasts with more radical concepts of labour relations which recognise the
uneven economic and political power relations inherent in the capital-labour relationship (Stone 1981).
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