The Practice of International Labor Solidarity and the Geography of the Global Economy
研究了美国钢铁工人联合会地方分会如何通过全球团结网络，迫使跨国企业恢复被关停工人的职位并签订新合同，揭示了工人在塑造经济地理中的关键作用。
Economic geographers have neglected the international activities of workers and working class organizations. Worker invisibility has been particularly evident in explanations of the geography of foreign direct investment. Yet for over a century workers have built international labor organizations which have shaped economic and political geographies. This paper examines an international campaign waged on behalf of some 1,700 members of United Steelworkers of America Local 5668 who were locked out of an aluminum smelter in Ravenswood, West Virginia on expiration of their contract in November 1990. The lockout was part of a company plan to break the local union and operate the smelter with a non-union work force. The paper analyzes how Local 5668 and its supporters built a global solidarity network which successfully forced a multibillion-dollar transnational metals trading corporation to reinstate the locked out union workers and sign a new contract. As the paper shows, workers clearly make economic geographies through their actions. Economic geographers should pay greater empirical and theoretical attention to this fact.