Toward an Understanding of the Spatiality of Social Movements: Labor Organizing at a Private University in Los Angeles

In this paper, we examine a labor struggle between predominantly Latino service workers and the University of Southern California, the largest private employer in the City of Los Angeles. This struggle is part of a broader revival of the American labor movement, as some unions return to mass action and community-labor alliances. The re-emergence of labor as a social movement allows us to ask new questions about power and resistance. In particular, we maintain that a full understanding of the political potential of social movements requires recognition of their inherently spatial nature. Drawing on the recent spatial turn in social theory, we argue that social movement scholarship can benefit from attention to space as an active dimension of movement organizing. In an ethnography of the USC case, we show how a coalition of workers, students and community members used tactics of spatial transgression on, around, and beyond campus. At the same time, coalition members linked the labor conflict to social and spatial inequalities between the university and surrounding neighborhoods, and to citywide movements for living wages and job security. Through these actions, the coalition undermined a commonsense understanding of USC as a benevolent employer and good neighbor, and challenged the university's move to gain flexibility through sub-contracting. While we are constrained in our ability to generalize from the USC case, our analysis suggests that further attention to the spatiality of such struggles can enrich social movements scholarship.