‘The union hall was the center of the worker's life’: Spaces of class formation in the United Auto Workers, 1937–1970

Abstract

Recent scholarship in labor geography has established the spatial agency of workers and labor organizations in a variety of settings; however, it has largely focused on expressions of this agency in public, exterior spaces. This article examines union halls and other interior spaces created by the United Auto Workers (UAW) in and around Detroit in the mid twentieth century. Drawing on union archives and historical GIS techniques, it reconstructs the locations and functions of these interior spaces in the period of mass industrial labor organizing. In so doing, it illuminates the spatial dimensions of processes of working class formation, emphasizing the role that union halls and other interior spaces created by UAW organizers played, in intent and in effect, in advancing class formation at the levels of collective dispositions and collective action. The analysis foregrounds labor's spatial agency at multiple scales, revealing the way that interior spaces such as union halls anchored multiscalar projects of class formation linking the bodily scale to the neighborhood and urban scales. These findings suggest further study of the role of interior spaces in social movements and contentious politics more broadly.