“Cities are at the frontier of development; they are where people go to chase their dreams of a better life for themselves and their families”, said Juergen Voegele, the World Bank's Vice President for Sustainable Development, when presenting the bank's analysis Pancakes to Pyramids: City Form for Sustainable Growth (World Bank 2021; Lall et al. 2021). This is one of many statements that demonstrate how, in the last two decades, the idea that “the city has triumphed” (Glaeser 2011), has become the credo of most of urban studies, the publications of international organizations and business consultancies. Gone are the days of the “ ‘hate literature’ on cities” (Taylor 2004: 3) that produced urban dystopias such as Planet of Slums, in which Mike Davis (2006) portrays the big cities of the Global South as an evil, as an obstacle to rather than as a means of development. Today, the notion that cities, both in the North and South, boost innovation, productivity and efficiency, and that they are therefore engines of economic growth and social development is a given. The acknowledgement of cities’ extraordinariness (cf. Taylor 2013), of urbanization's “efficiency-generating qualities via agglomeration” (Scott & Storper 2015: 4), of cities “as innovation machine[s]” (Florida et al. 2017) and “mothers of economic development” (Jacobs 1997), and of the “urban ability to create collaborative brilliance” (Glaeser 2011: 8) are prevalent. Not even postcolonial scholars, critical of the universalization of ideas originating in the Global North (e.g. Robinson 2006), have challenged the notion of the “almost universal positive association” (Brockerhoff & Brennan 1998: 82) between urbanization and economic development. It is not surprising, then, that Andrew Kirby (2012: 3) concludes from his bibliometric analysis of social science journals that the “study of cities is in many ways a study of human development”. “Development” is one of the words most frequently associated in urban research with the words “urban”, “city” or “cities” (in 2010). Accordingly, the economic power of cities has become something of an idée fixe among development agencies (e.g. World Bank 2009a; World Bank Institute 2010) and consulting firms (e.g. Dobbs et al. 2011).

I have written this book to intervene in current debates on urban theory and on the nature of cities. First and foremost, I wanted to counter the one-sided, developmentalist discourse on cities which prevails today with a more comprehensive analysis of the role of cities in capitalism, one that acknowledges that cities’ genius is Janus-faced. Their extraordinary capacity to produce innovation and efficiency does not only help to create prosperity, but it also constitutes the ground on which the development of the weapons of oppression and exploitation that underlie capitalist accumulation is based. Cities not only make people richer, smarter, greener, healthier and happier (cf. Glaeser 2011), as most of today's research (and related policy advice) suggests; they also work as “suction pumps” (Timberlake 1987: 51) that rob millions of people of the fruits of their labour and plunge them into misery. As part of my rebuttal to the “the city has triumphed” notion, I recalled the work of scholars of earlier decades (and even centuries) that reveals, more or less clearly but always recognizably, how the urban properties of agglomeration, inter-city networks, and the built environment have been pressed into service, in different times and in different regions, for the purposes of enriching the few at the expense of the many. The works of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, of John Merrington and Bryan Roberts, of Fernand Braudel and Alejandro Portes and others show that the city has been a medium for capitalist accumulation since the advent of capitalism. And that in all senses, the city drives growth and creates the means of exploitation that underlies it. Cities have been – and continue to be – proactive nodes in production networks, and, simultaneously and for the same reasons, also proactive nodes in the asymmetric relations of the capitalist division of labour. We are currently running the risk of losing such insights. The book is a warning against this danger. “Harnessing urbanization for growth and poverty alleviation” (World Bank 2009b) is misleading advice, in political terms, resulting from an incorrect, because one-sided, analysis of how cities work. Misery does not come from a lack of cities, so it cannot be overcome by urbanization per se (which is not to say that cities and their economies cannot be important in overcoming poverty).

I begin my project of developing a citified analysis of uneven development by first explaining what I mean by it. Uneven development generally refers to the fact that the economy grows more in some places than in others. Economic performance varies across space, at different levels, from the urban to the global scale, and wealth therefore becomes geographically unequally distributed. Whereas understanding uneven development in terms of economic inequalities across space is likely to be consensual across disciplines and theoretical currents, views as to how this inequality came about differ widely. Roughly speaking, two approaches can be distinguished.

The “differentiated growth model” explains uneven development primarily as a process of spatially bound self-expansion of capital, which is why Costis Hadjimichalis (1984) refers to this view as the “autonomous or semi-autonomous development thesis”. The gist of this argument is that economic growth dynamics are geographically variegated, because they result from endogenous and therefore clearly localizable factors such as natural endowments or agglomeration economies. Because these factors are inherent to certain places but not others, growth “naturally” varies across space and inequality is the unavoidable result. Whereas economic relationships (e.g. investment, trade, migration) between the respective spatial units of analysis – mostly thought of as states, sometimes as regions or cities – are not negated by proponents of the “differentiated growth model”, they do not have a formative role in the emergence of inequality. The core idea of this approach to uneven development is therefore non-relational: states, regions or cities develop differently, but they do so due to endogenous conditions and hence by and large independently and detached from each other. Economic expansion in one place is consequently unrelated to stagnation or even contraction in another. Uneven development occurs because the more productive economies are pulling away, leaving the slower or stagnating nations, regions and cities behind. Because growth tends to beget new growth, uneven development proceeds in a self-reinforcing spiral, and economic and social asymmetries deepen over time. However, in this model, it is also conceivable that the endogenous growth factors lose strength, i.e. that former frontrunners stagnate or fall behind (for different versions of the “differentiated growth” model, see Jacobs 1970 and Storper 2013; for its policy significance, see, e.g., World Bank 2009a).

The central claim presented in this book is that cities are causally linked not only to development, but also to its uneveness. In today's urban studies, however, growth and exploitation are not linked to each other at all, just as if they were not structurally and necessarily connected in a capitalist world. By and large, cities have been divorced from the study of the asymmetrical relationships that constitute the capitalist division of labour at regional or global scales, with the result that their generative power seems to have nothing to do with the “bad” innovation that produces ever new methods and means of exploitation and oppression. The devices that are used for the appropriation of the fruits of other people's labour, for subjugation, warfare and environmental destruction seem to be orphaned; evil seems to come from nowhere. I have already quoted Jane Jacobs’ (1970: 121) dictum that poverty has no causes, only prosperity, and that this comes exclusively from cities. In Jacobs, this coming “from cities” assumes two meanings: while the first is more descriptive topographical (cities as the places where economic development takes place; see Figure 1.1), the second is plainly analytical: cities generate economic development due to their very specific characteristics. Deeply committed to the latter perspective, Jacobs equates poverty with the lack of city-centred benefits, indeed with “citylessness”. Without cities, she claims, “we’d all be poor … All through organized human history, if you wanted prosperity, you’ve had to have cities” (Jacobs 1997). A similar association of poverty with “citylessness” – i.e. with the countryside, rurality and agriculture – can be found in the arguments of Martin Ravallion (2007: 15), former director of the World Bank's research department. Opposing the notion of an “urbanization of poverty”, which contends that poverty is becoming an urban problem rather than a primarily rural one, he rhetorically asked: “Are poor people gravitating to towns and cities?” His provocative-sounding, but serious answer: “Yes, but maybe not quickly enough”.

Cities, writes Storper (2013: 9), have a particular genius, which arises from their specific “behavioral context in which different elements of know-how come together … [creating] many overlapping worlds of face-to-face contact, [and] giving them a ‘buzz’ ”. As explained earlier, Storper's portrayal of cities as engines of economic growth and social advance is developmentalist, praising their efficiency while downplaying their role in uneven development as side effects of overall growth. The aim of this book is to challenge this one-sided enthusiasm for cities’ productivity and to re-establish a critical analysis of their role in capitalism.

Before that, however, we have to ask ourselves where cities’ extraordinariness comes from. If we do not assume that city dwellers are innately smarter and harder working by disposition than people in less populated areas, then what might the secret behind the economic power of cities be? Building on arguments from different currents in urban studies, cities’ exceptionality can be conceptualized through three characteristics, which, in this combination, are unique to cities and which can therefore rightly be described as being “intrinsically urban in character” (Scott & Storper 2015: 9), namely agglomeration economies, being a node in various inter-city networks, and a massive built environment. In this chapter I will assess these elements, in order to lay the urban-theoretical foundations of my argument. The first step, however, must be to address an even more fundamental question, namely: what is a city? Is there such a thing as the “nature” of cities, features that characterize cities across time and space? Are all cities equal?

WHAT IS A CITY?

Any discussion about what a city is needs to start with a clarification of what is meant by “space”, because cities are spatial things. Today, a relational interpretation of space dominates in the social sciences (and especially in the critical ones): space is no longer perceived in the Newtonian sense as an absolute a priori given substance, because such a view reduces space to a mere container of social processes, without any connection to them or meaning for them.

This is a book about the role of cities in the production of uneven development, a topic with which I have been preoccupied since I was an undergraduate, and that I have approached from different angles since then. Interested in understanding the mechanisms and geographies of exploitation of what was then still called the “Third World”, I plunged into world-systems analysis (Wallerstein 1974a, 1983), which we were assigned as course reading. The course lecturer also sparked my interest in cities, especially through Braudel-influenced lectures on the cities of northern Italy. I am grateful to Peter Feldbauer for introducing me to a city-centred view of capitalism and its uneven development, and for making me read the emerging literature on peripheral urbanization. One of these books was Michael Timberlake's (1985) Urbanization in the World Economy, and Bryan Roberts’ sympathetic but critical review became the guide – or mandate – for my own research interests. To most of the contributions to the Timberlake book, Roberts levels the criticism that “[r]elationships of inequality are taken as given, but the mechanisms by which power is exercised and reproduced are not fully examined … There is not enough emphasis … on how cities and the classes within them achieve control over other regions” (1986: 459; emphasis in original). After almost 40 years since Roberts urged a comprehensive treatment of the question of “how cities and the classes within them achieve control over other regions”, our knowledge of this is still rudimentary. But worse still, the question has been relegated to the background in both urban studies and in analyses of uneven development, which is why I was prompted to write this book.

To address the challenge of how “cities” and “classes within them” could be brought together in the analysis of the mechanisms of uneven development, I found current debates about the specialness of cities, conducted in different disciplines (e.g. economic geography, regional economics, urban sociology) and across theoretical positions very instructive. They have a common denominator: cities are extraordinary (Taylor 2013) because they have certain properties that are “intrinsically urban in character” (Scott & Storper 2015: 9) and that enable the actors within cities to be more innovative and productive than people elsewhere.

For the purpose of this chapter, namely to indicate what research on the Janus-facedness of cities might look like, it is once again helpful to consult Braudel. Although he writes about capitalism from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, his work offers more than just insights into history. Braudel provides us with a method for a citified analysis of capitalism, a way of doing research in order to gain new insights into the functioning of uneven development. He draws our attention to the various “weapons of domination” which, in all their diversity, have two things in common: first, they all come from cities, are invented and produced there and orchestrated from there. Second, they all serve the economic interests of the dominant groups there (in the times that Braudel writes about, basically long-distance traders); their goal is to make value or surplus that people have produced wherever to “flow” into their city. Yet, Braudel (1984: 248) also urges us to pay attention not only to the cities themselves, but in particular to their networks: “It is with these connections, meeting-points and multiple links that we shall be particularly concerned, since they reveal the way in which a dominant economy can exploit subordinate economies”. At each node of the inter-city networks, there are different ways in which the appropriation of surplus is organized, according to the requirements of geographic or historical circumstances, and each way requires specific weapons. Braudel accordingly enumerates different types, namely “shipping, trade, industry, credit, and political power or violence”, each of them with its particular value (1984: 35). There is, however, one weapon that Braudel does not mention here, but which, as we have seen, he discusses at length elsewhere, namely the physical infrastructure of cities. Following on from this, in this chapter I use three examples to show how we can locate the production of uneven development in cities, first by looking at particular buildings, and second by scrutinizing particular capitalist practices (namely super-exploitation and monopoly formation) and the actors who exercise them, and what they have to do with the genius of cities.

ABSTRACT

This chapter traces the development of labour unions as a response to liberal capitalist structures between the late eighteenth and the middle of the twentieth century. It starts off by asking how the introduction of the factory system led to the formation of early unions and how these were different from the old guilds that had characterized the social organization of life in pre-industrial times. Thereafter, it traces their long struggle for recognition and the divisions within the union movement. The chapter discusses both the Global North and the Global South by looking at the development of labour unionism in the colonial and semi-colonial periphery before 1945.

Keywords: liberal capitalism; union genesis; union development

INTRODUCTION

There undoubtedly were a “variety of capitalisms” (Hall & Soskice 2001) that shaped industrialization processes in different parts of the world between the eighteenth century and the present day. And for much of the twentieth century, industrialization also occurred in communist regimes that postulated that they marked the transition from capitalism to communism (Stearns 2013). Yet, it still remains the case that labour unionism fundamentally began to emerge under conditions of industrialization in liberal capitalist regimes. This chapter traces their development as a response to liberal capitalist structures between the late eighteenth and the middle of the twentieth century. It starts off by asking how the introduction of the factory system led to the formation of early unions and how these were different from the old guilds that had characterized the social organization of life in pre-industrial times.

In many parts of the world, unions struggled for a long time to gain acceptance by employers and the state, often in the form of legal rights and policy. This chapter traces this struggle among some of these industrializing countries from the nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. The fight of unions for legal recognition and legitimacy was accompanied by debates surrounding the best way to organize that came to focus upon two contrasting principles – organizing by craft or organizing by industry. At the same time, ideological divisions between unions emerged, with socialism, syndicalism, Christianity, liberalism and communism being the main contenders for unionized workers’ loyalty

ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses, first, upon debates around collective bargaining and in relation to union strategy. Second, it examines how collective bargaining structures and practices develop and operate in distinct national and economic contexts. Third, it looks at rethinking the role of joint-regulation in terms of its dynamics, practices, aims and actors whereby a widening of the ways in which we view collective bargaining is required. So, collective bargaining and new variations of it need to be placed within a broader approach to the dynamics and politics of work since it has become an even more contested. Approaches linked to such a broadening allow a better understanding of the contexts that are beyond the “developed” economic ones.

Keywords: Collective bargaining; character and form of collective bargaining; challenges for unions

INTRODUCTION

In an episode of the American cartoon comedy series, The Simpsons, the young Bart Simpson has broken his leg and is resigned to spending summer in his room, unable to engage in fun activities with his friends. He turns to the television set in his room to take his mind off his predicament only to find that very old programmes are being broadcast due to staff summer holidays. To Bart's horror, they are reruns of black-and-white television interviews with union leaders about the crisis of collective bargaining. This clearly exacerbates the situation for Bart, but also serves as a gentle and albeit peculiar example of the way collective bargaining and related union issues are viewed in some popular circles. Even within various academic circles of a more sociological orientation – and even, increasingly, in some high-profile work-related journals – the question of collective bargaining is increasingly seen as a particular and limited feature of work and discussions pertaining to it. Hence, its exclusion as an acceptable theme on which to publish. Collective bargaining is seen as a narrow and minimalist dimension of the regulation and politics of work. Radical academics – a broad term that would include the present author – are also particularly worried about the way collective bargaining can sometimes be seen as being overstated, especially within the mainstream history of industrial relations debates.

ABSTRACT

Workers’ control has been a slogan and an aspiration of many unions and their activists and leaders. If the older craft societies were founded with collective bargaining as the raison d’être of their trade unionism, unionization of the unskilled constituted a challenge to this by straddling the “political” and “economic”, conventionally posed as the division between party and union within the social democratic tradition. But workers’ control was submerged in the integration of organized labour within commodity relations through collective bargaining with grievances converted into cash payments. Yet from its earliest expression, industrial action has also been linked with alternative organization for subsistence and meeting social needs, broadening and deepening the horizons of what labour unionism could be conceived for and, ultimately, raising the prospect of workers’ control defined as a system such as socialism.

Keywords: Workers’ power; managerial prerogative; challenges for unions

INTRODUCTION

Workers’ control has been a slogan and an aspiration of many unions. If the older craft societies had been founded with collective bargaining as their raison d’être, the unionization of the unskilled rallied a challenge to the very system of capitalism. Rather than negotiation and compromise with employers, the “new unionism” posed direct action as a means of overthrowing capitalism. Not only the strike, the withdrawal of labour, but tactics like sabotage and occupation entered workers’ repertoire. The skilled could see workers’ control as a defence of their autonomy over the labour process, a defence of their job control. The unskilled could see the building of their union, or their workplace organization, as mobilizing for the “general strike” and prefigurative of the administration of a socialist society. Workers’ control was the aspiration for revolutionary syndicalism and of other revolutionary and democratic socialists. In a more moderate formulation, workers’ control has been associated with the establishment of cooperatives and other self-managed enterprises in a more gradual transformation of capitalism from within (Ranis 2016). Further, workers’ control has been presented as the shifting frontier of struggle between labour and capital: “Militant trade unions … able to wrest some, or most, of the prerogatives of management from the unilateral disposition of managers” (Coates & Topham 1972: 61).

ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews the different forms unions can take and have taken across time and space as they have adapted to changes in the labour market. When examining union “forms”, we focus upon their internal governance structure, the constituencies they represent, and their repertoires of representation. Specifically, we draw upon examples from Denmark, Italy, Germany and the United States, which reflect traditional union typologies. For each country, we sketch out the union forms as well as how traditional unions have changed over time. We show that some unions have changed their statutes and bargaining strategies, expanded their services or set up new structures. Finally, we compare the trajectories of labour unionism and highlight the commonalities across countries as well as the differences due to the institutional context and the strategies of the main employment relations actors.

Keywords: Union forms; union function; union identity; challenges for unions

INTRODUCTION

Unions can take and have taken on different forms across time and space as they have chosen or been compelled to adapt to a new worlds of work. In this chapter we use the term, “labour union form”, as the defining organizational characteristic to distinguish labour unions analytically from each other and trace their organizational changes over time. In line with others such as Fiorito and Jarley (2008), Givan (2007) and Streeck (2005), we distinguish union forms along three dimensions: internal governance structure, constituency and repertoires of representation. Internal governance structure – also called “internal vertical structure” – refers to the way in which organizational levels are ordered and the degree of articulation or division of power between leaderships and the rank-and-file or grassroots members. Constituency – also called the “external horizontal structure” or the “who” – refers to the groups of workers the union purports to represent. It sets the scope of membership and, thus, delimits the union from other unions (Fiorito & Jarley 2008). Repertoires of representation – also called “the how” – refer to the typical representational practices that unions employ to realize the interests of their constituencies and/ or the interests of the organization.

There is a relatively well-known saying on the left in the Anglophone world: “The cause of labour is the hope of the world.” “Labour” here is not any Labour (political) party but, rather, the largest existing social group of human beings, namely workers whose labour is held to create the wealth of the world but that never receives anything approximating to its “fair” share of that wealth. If labour can achieve economic equality and social justice for itself, then it would achieve economic equality and social justice for the vast majority of human beings.

In 1894, English artist and book illustrator and sometime collaborator with William Morris, Walter Crane, created the illustration of the “The Workers’ Maypole” for the socialist newspaper, Justice, from which the dictum is derived. Among the demands adorning the maypole are “socialization”, “solidarity” and “humanity”. These are expressed in the aforementioned saying along with another one on the maypole being “the hope of labour is the welfare of all”. Only a few years earlier in 1875, Karl Marx (1950:17– 18) in the Critique of the Gotha Programme had boldly stated the notion that workers create the wealth of the world and that exploitation as theft of the fruits of labour creates a separate social class: “Since labour is the source of all wealth, no one in society can appropriate wealth except as the product of labour. Therefore, if he himself does not work, he lives by the labour of others …”

If both assertions are true, and there is much evidence and inclination to support them, some of which can be found in the preceding pages, then it is politically and practically correct that most of the analysis and assessment made in this handbook has concerned itself with not just diagnosis but also prognosis. This is because, in general and notwithstanding certain places in time and space including Russia in October 1917, not only has labour as an organized force through labour unions (and any associated political parties) been historically weaker than capital but in the new millennium labour is weaker than it has been for many decades.