Labour, organisational rescaling and the politics of production: union renewal in the privatised rail industry

In: Work, employment and society: a journal of the British Sociological Association, Volume 24, Issue 1, p. 127-144

Abstract

Researchers are becoming more alert to the importance of geography to union renewal in counteracting the strategies of corporate and state actors. In this article the example of the UK's rail industry is used to show how privatisation created a new geography of employment relations. Unions responded to the destruction of national collective bargaining and a new fragmented geography of employment relations through organisational restructuring, which, in different ways, was marked by a continuing commitment to a politics of production in connecting grassroots workers to national leaderships. Engaging with the new labour geography, however, the article argues that a further critical element in renewal has been the unions' ability to rethink their internal geographies and scalar relations to contest change at the level of the workplace.