Putting Workers on the Map: Towards a Labour Cartography

Abstract

Labour cartography is a useful frame for cartographic research. The project of labour cartography involves three main areas of study. First, recovery of an archive of maps created by workers and labour unions, a history of cartography from below. Second, mapping and spatial analysis that renders visible historical patterns of work, organizing, and working-class community life. Third, research into applications of GIS by contemporary labour unions and workers’ advocacy organizations, with an eye to developing more widespread, sophisticated, and democratic uses of maps and spatial analysis in organizing work. US labour archives contain many maps collected, repurposed, made, and distributed by workers and their unions. These maps provide the basis for a new recognition of the presence of workers and unions in cartographic history, a recognition analogous to that which guided work in labour geography that emerged in the 1990s. Extant maps illuminate scalar tensions in the production, synthesis, and dissemination of geographic knowledge. They reflect the unions’ challenge of reconciling expertise with participation: steering labour organizing activity by a range of information, from the fine-grained social geographies of the shop floor up through the broad terrain of corporate and sectoral campaign research.