Organising at the Margins: Spaces of Worker Resistance in Late Twentieth Century Britain

Drawing from past examples of marginal worker organising, this paper engages with the diverse spatial politics of labour to reflect on questions of worker resistance within and beyond the workplace. This contribution connects with challenges faced by the trade union movement and ongoing academic commentary across labour geography and industrial relations more broadly. In doing so, we combine literature around worker organising margins and trade union orientations to shape our approach. Empirically, the paper draws upon two examples of worker organising at the margins; the Indian Workers Association Great Britain and Unemployed Workers’ Centres, arguing that their emergence in the 1970s and 1980s reflected an intersectional and dynamic spatial politics of labour organising. Through this analysis, and our use of collaborative historical geography methods, the paper argues that such organising at the margins illustrates how trade unions historically engaged beyond the workplace through matters of race, migration and unemployment. We illustrate how such an extension of trade union organising, beyond the workplace, shaped and contested more established trade union principles and grammars through a variety of uneven spaces, relations and practices. In doing so, we contribute to the theorising of spatial politics and resistance within and beyond the sub-discipline of labour geography.