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This chapter examines how unions have joined in cross-class territorial alliances to shape labour markets, employment relations, public services, and housing markets across a variety of sectors. It analyses various campaigns where attempts were made to make labour markets and employment practices conform to a model that is more conducive to union organisation and bargaining. These initiatives occur in a challenging environment, characterised by the loss of ‘good jobs’ with deindustrialisation and the rise of new business models in the service economy. The authors produce a map of the terrain which would permit decision-making in full view of the variety of strategies available to unions. They identify the common ground between unions and other class actors, class fractions, and the local state, to understand how it is possible for trade unions to advance their priorities in urban and regional governance. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the limits of cross-class alliances and the potential for union strategies beyond the reproduction of capitalist social relations.
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The neoliberal regime of production and services has created a rapacious neoliberal regime that has severely eroded established trade unions and expanded informal work in capitalist countries and leading to the vast expansion of precarious labor, which provides low wages and limited job security. To counter these efforts, unions must challenge precarious work arrangements at the policy level to broaden the forms of labor representation into nontraditional jobs. To do so, unions are compelled to take a far broader view of their organizing and representation function through organizing around class and aligning with new social movements around race and gender, housing issues, and public services. Urban space is the staging ground for new social movements which, whether struggling against gentrification, in defense of public services, for living wages or against racist policing, have a working-class character even if they are not rooted in the workplace. Unions must seize on their potential to develop strategies for the mobilization of urban-based class solidarities in commercial and gentrified spaces that are vulnerable to working-class demands and collective action.
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On November 5, 2012, the Executive Committee of Toronto?s city council voted to move ahead with public consultations on the benefits and location of a casino in the city. The marathon session included over fifty-two listed deputations from unions, social service professionals, urban boosters, and anti-casino residents. The meeting unofficially kicked off competitive campaigns among casino and real estate capital, the state, community groups, and organized labor to shape the future of Toronto?s downtown core. On May 21, 2013, following an intense period of media campaigns and public debate, the council overwhelmingly rejected a downtown casino (40?4) and the
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In the postindustrial city, leisure, the representation of place, and the experience of the city may be counted among its leading exports. As the product is, in a real sense, the city itself, urban space is constantly being reworked by urban boosters to capture an increasing share of the world tourism market, renewing the product through investments in cultural, leisure and mobility infrastructure, aggressive place promotion, and careful brand management (Fainstein and Judd 1999; Gotham 2007; Greenberg 2008). The commercial real estate industry has for decades aggressively promoted urban tourism as an economic growth strategy, justifying public supports for hotel
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In April 2013, the New York City Department of City Planning initiated a public review process to rezone a seventy-three-block area of Midtown Manhattan around Grand Central Station, known in planning documents and real estate parlance as East Midtown. The proposal sought to lift existing restrictions on building density in order to spur development of new commercial office space along the iconic avenues of corporate America, thus ?ensur[ing] the area?s future as a world-class business district and major job generator for New York City? (Department of City Planning 2013a). The city argued that this new development was crucial to ensure
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This book is about unions and the city. It was written by a team of researchers who believe that building socially just cities will require the renewal of our labor movements, and that the renewal of labor can be built in the course of the workplace and broader social struggles that are currently taking place in major North American cities. Many in labor studies have come to see our cities and suburbs as great laboratories of labor renewal. The relevance of this perspective can be glimpsed in the importance of resisting the dismantling of public education to the fate of
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There is an optimistic reading to all of this that goes beyond a narrow accounting of what was gained in a specific struggle. The labor strategies discussed in this volume speak to a level of creativity and effectiveness that most would not expect of unions today. We have seen unions take a broad survey of how power is organized in cities and use this practical knowledge to leverage labor?s interests and capacities. In some cases, unions have sought to negotiate the urban planning process and shape policy decisions in ways that address a broader working-class agenda, while in other cases