Rebel Cities-David Harvey

132 REBEL CITIESUnited Sates, which is an alliance of workers characterized by temporaryand insecure conditions of employment, often, as with domestic workers,spatially scattered throughout a metropolitan region. 16The history of conventional labor struggles-and this is my thirdmajor point-also needs some rewriting. Most struggles waged byfa ctory-based workers turn out, on inspection, to have had a muchbroader base. Margaret Kahn complains, for example, how left historiansof labor laud the Turin Factory Councils of the early twentieth centurywhile totally ignoring the "Houses of the People" in the communitywhere much of the politics was shaped, and from which strong currentsof logistical support flowed. 17 E. P. Thompson depicts how the makingof the English working class depended as much upon what happened inchapels and in neighborhoods as in the workplace. The local city tradescouncils have played a much-underestimated role in British politicalorganization, and often anchored the militant base of a nascent LabourParty and other left organizations in particular towns and cities in waysthat the national union movement often ignored.18 How successful wouldthe Flint sit-down strike of 1937 have been in the United States had it notbeen for the masses of the unemployed and the neighborhood organizationsoutside the gates that unfailingly delivered their support, moral andmaterial?Organizing the neighborhoods has been just as important in prosecutinglabor struggles, as has organizing the workplace. One of the strengthsof the factory occupations in Argentina that followed on the collapse of2001 is that the cooperatively managed factories also turned themselvesinto neighborhood cultural and educational centers. They built bridgesbetween the community and the workplace. When past owners try toevict the workers or seize back the machinery, the whole populace typicallyturns out in solidarity with the workers to prevent such action.19When UNITE HERE sought to mobilize rank-and-file hotel workersaround LAX airport in Los Angeles, they relied heavily "on extensiveoutreach to political, religious and other community allies, building acoalition" that could counter the employers' repressive strategies.20 Butthere is, in this, also a cautionary tale: in the British miners' strikes of the1970s and 1980s, the miners who lived in diffuse urbanized areas such asNottingham were the first to cave in, while those in Northumbria, where