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A number of service-sector unions in the United States have turned to urban land-use strategies in alliance with community organizations to achieve organizing goals and sustain bargaining regimes in a hostile environment. These union strategies typically entail the formation of project-specific “common cause” coalitions with community organizations in order to leverage local benefits, living wages, and union rights from private developers and growth-oriented local governments.The labor studies literature on community unionism understands these strategies through the analytical frame of social movement theory, and closely associates them with labor movement renewal. In approaching the question from the perspective of critical human geography, this article highlights a contradiction that emerges in labor’s land-use campaigns in cases where redevelopment entails the transformation of working-class neighborhoods into spaces of production and luxury consumption. The article argues that a strategy of negotiating distributional shares out of prospective increases in land values in such cases encourages union-community coalitions to prioritize workplace over residential demands, in turn reproducing structural divisions between labor and community. The argument is sustained through a discussion of the involvement of the New York City hotel workers union, UNITE-HERE Local 6, in a labor-community coalition formed to contest the terms of the redevelopment of Coney Island. The case study casts some doubt on whether labor-community land use strategies of this type are consistent with labor movement renewal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on labor has been variously interpreted in terms of wage and employment levels as well as labor market structures in Canada, the United States and Mexico. NAFTA has brought the issue of continental labor cooperation to the fore of labor union strategy, not as a well-meaning moral duty or empty political slogan, but as a necessary and concrete tactic in the neoliberal era of the regionalized production system. Accordingly, NAFTA has encouraged the founding of tri-national labor alliances to confront common employers as well as less formal linkages around specific problems and broad-based lobbying and mobilization coalitions. Key to the trajectory of this phenomenon has been the ineffectiveness of the labor side agreement in NAFTA, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), in establishing an arena for the exercise of depoliticized, institutionalized governance. Most observers of the impact of free trade on labor agree on the central role of competition in this dynamic: by liberalizing and widening markets, trade agreements such as NAFTA increase competitive pressures in the labor market. Canadian unions found little interest from their American counterparts in opposing the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA), and indeed, the 1980s saw a deepening trend towards the de-affiliation of Canadian unions from their American-dominated international unions.