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Space, Opportunities and Labor Protest Across Political Regimes: Chilean Metalworkers’ Mobilization, 1945-2011

Mon, August 18, 8:30 to 10:10am, TBA

Abstract

Students of contentious politics have recently focused how opportunity and threat shape social protest in the Global South. Additionally, researchers have considered how space, place, and scale shape collective action. This paper integrates these two approaches to understand four strikes among metalworkers in Chile. I first consider the conditions under which opportunity and threat can facilitate or constrain labor protest. Using Lefebvre’s conception of the production of space (1991), and Brenner’s (2004) notion of state spaces, I examine how changes in the spatial structure of capital and government in Chile affected labor mobilization. I integrate these concepts with the ideas of spatial routines, time-distance costs, safe spaces, and sense of place (Tilly 2000). Drawing on 100 oral histories, participant observation, and documentary evidence, I argue that under Chile’s democratic-Keynesian state space (1939-1973), the concentration of factories, housing, and union infrastructure in Santiago, the country’s capital, facilitated the creation of a sense of place among workers and provided political allies, facilitating successful labor mobilization. Under authoritarian-neoliberal state space (1973-1990), political repression as well as industrial, state, and housing decentralization and fragmentation eroded the sense of place, eliminated labor’s political allies, and decreased labor’s mobilization capacity. Under democratic-neoliberal state space, the legacies of fragmentation continued though a political opening led workers to “jump scale” (Miller 2000). The political conjunctures for each strike shaped labor’s and capital’s spatial strategies. These findings have broad implications for the evolution of social protest over short- and long-term changes in the spatial configuration of economy and state.

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