Spatial dimensions of strikes

Some of the precursors of labour geography were analyses of the spatial patterns of the British miners’ strike in 1984/1985. While some analyses claimed that the intensity of strike participation could be explained with the economic situation of single mines within the coal industry, other analyses could demonstrate that strike participation went across economic patterns and were rather determined by political traditions. Both positions could come up with valid arguments, opening a wide field interpretation of how economic and properly political factors influence strike participation. Another perspective was added by social historians who were able to show how traditions of struggle circulated with the migration of workers across regions and countries since the early 19th century. Migration and spatial mobility of workers and craftspeople thus is a key influence for the spatial distribution of strikes: the structural issue of concentrations of many workers in one factory, neighbourhood or region is accompanied by narratives, experiences and processes of learning. A third current exploring spatial aspects of strikes has been research that claimed high strike intensity would be anchored in closed communities like mining towns and that the tendency to dissolve these closed communities would also do away with strikes - this argument occurred already in the 1950s. While regional identities and spatial concentrations indeed do have effects on strike intensity, the global dissemination of strikes in the public sector with workers in many dispersed workplaces again demonstrated that there is no spatial determinism. Although highlighted early on by Rosa Luxemburg in her analysis of mass strikes (1906), the spatial patterns of such strikes without central coordination have rarely been explored, and only recently research on strikes in India and Brazil took up this question again. An alternative angle to look at the spatial distribution of strikes is to look at the global patterns of capital investment in specific sectors which Beverly Silver did in her acclaimed book Forces of Labour (2003). She could show how strikes followed investment patterns in the automobile industry, moving from the US to Western Europe, then to Brazil, South Africa and South Korea and finally to China and India. This line of reasoning connects with the analysis of strike waves on a national and global level, a line of research which has seen a very scattered debate during the last decades but keeps on moving nonetheless with new contributions especially in the last few years.