Disruption and Control: Contesting Mobilities through the Picket Line

Abstract

By exploring the relationship between picket lines and drivers in 1970s Britain, this article considers how mobility and the spatial practices of trade unionsm shape labor geographies. Focusing on issues raised by work on logistics and blockades, it argues that too much emphasis has been placed on tactics of interruption. Drawing on Toscano's writings, I suggest that paying attention to the complex entanglement of disruption and control enables a more sophisticated account of workers’ agency. The article explores three key moments in the relationship between picketing and mobility: the 1972 miners’ strike, debates over picketing legislation in the mid-1970s, and the road haulage dispute in 1979. In doing so, it makes a number of contributions to labor geography. First, it foregrounds the picket line as a key site for understanding the spatialities of working-class organization. Second, it highlights how struggles for control are shaped by competing conceptions of rights and moral economies. Third, it develops thinking on the relationship between mobility and agency by exploring how workers’ power became entangled with the control of movement.