| Coalitions of labor, community, and environmental groups have emerged in the last decade in response to environmental crisis and to rapidly deteriorating conditions for organized labor, working people and the poor. This dissertation studies the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' (OCAW) 10-year collaboration with community, which grew out of a 5-year lockout of the union by the BASF Corporation near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It examines the social and geographic conditions under which the coalition, now called the Louisiana Labor/Neighbor Project, developed; the obstacles it faced; the degree to which it broadened its agenda; and the impacts it had on environmental health and economic development. This dissertation is based on participant observation with the Labor/Neighbor Project and on additional qualitative research. Using a Gramscian-regulationist framework, it examines how interacting material and political/ideological relations gave rise to OCAW's politics of collective identity and explores how the latter is part of the process of resolving capitalist crisis. The study found that the OCAWs local politics of community collaboration were structured by the place-boundedness of the petrochemical industry's politics, which provided labor with opportunities to experiment with the inclusion of community. Labor/community's new spatial politics, encompassing production and reproduction, is entirely distinct from the discrete politics of labor and community. It has succeeded in exerting some control over local space because of the dynamic interaction of two factors: the transformation of consciousness through discursive struggle; and labor's constant intellectual leadership, owing to its initial shaping of the politics of collective identity and to its provision of significant multi-scale financial and skill resources. The complex relation of collective transformation and class-based leadership has militated against a potential turn to parochial politics and withstood challenges by the petrochemical industry to interfere with the coalition process. A Gramscian analysis--focusing on intellectual leadership as embedded in class relations, yet sensitive to the contingent, conflictual and transformational character of collective politics--is particularly useful in understanding labor/community coalitions, and may help illuminate the complex dynamics of labor/community politics elsewhere. |
