ABSTRACT
Although they are not often recognized as such by many, labour relations are explicitly geographical in nature. Not only are industries, trade unions and labour markets organized spatially, but the question of where the locus of decision-making capabilities within them should lie (nationally or locally, for instance) is fundamentally one of the geographic scale at which power is located and exercised. A number of commentators have suggested that the recent trend in many advanced industrial economies, together with those economies in transition in Eastern Europe, has been one of labour relations’ decentralization, with the focus of activity being shifted away from central or national employer, trade union and government bodies to regional or local institutions (see Martin et al., 1994, for a good review of these arguments). Such decentralization is evidenced in the break-up of national agreements, efforts to outlaw secondary boycotts (so hindering national solidarity actions by workers), the passing to state and local governments of responsibility for regulating workplaces (see Herod, 1997a for more on this in the US context), and the development of collective bargaining agreements tailored to specific plant conditions. This process has led some to assume that employers prefer decentralized systems of labour relations because they allow management greater flexibility to develop individualized systems of local-level bargaining and contracts, and thus more easily to play workers off against each other. The corollary of this assumption is that workers logically should prefer to negotiate at regional or national levels as a means of preventing employers from whipsawing plants in a never-ending spiral of concessions. Other observers, in contrast, while arguing that employers prefer decentralized systems of labour relations, have assumed that rather than fighting to maintain a national organization and structure, logic instead demands that workers’ organization follow that of their employers. Consequently, they suggest, trade unions would do best to decentralize their own organization to match that of their employers and the transfer of central state power to the local state.
