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How does collective action shape economic landscapes? This book examines the transformation of the workers' movement in Spain’s metal sector, one of the country’s most unionised industries. Having faced restructuring, delocalization, subcontracting and increasing precarity, metalworkers in Cádiz have used radical methods to challenge measures that threaten their income and industry.
Adopting a spatial approach to labour and social movements, Beltrán Roca investigates the spatial strategies employed by unions to navigate these challenges, debating whether to focus on factory-bound action or engage the broader community. In doing so, the book highlights labour militancy as a social process deeply rooted in specific cities and places, and of workers as producers of space through conflict.
“An excellent book that help us reflect on how labour and social struggle are connected through the living fabric of the Bay of Cádiz.” Maurizio Atzeni, CEIL-CONICET and Universidad Alberto Hurtado
“A bold theoretical perspective on the spatial politics of labour that beautifully animates the history of Andalusian shipyard workers in the post-Franco, post-Fordist era.” Ruth Milkman, City University of New York Graduate Center
“Through a close reading of the history of industrial workers’ struggles in Cádiz, Beltrán Roca wonderfully demonstrates how the places within which workers live shape their political behaviour and how, in turn, workers remake those places through their activities.” Andy Herod, University of Georgia
Introduction
1. City, Place and Space in Social and Labour Movements
2. The Terrain of the Struggle: Work, Labour and Society in the Bay of Cádiz, 1958-2008
3. Changes in the Economic Landscape: The Restructuring of the Cádiz Shipbuilding Industry
4. Place and the Making of the Working Class: Labour Identities, Collective Memory, Carnival and Union Struggle
5. Exploring New Spaces: Trade Union Conflict and Renewal From the 2008 Crisis to the Pandemic
6. Unravelling Workers’ Spatial Agency and the Future of Trade Unionism