Of Catharsis and Community: Bicycle Messengers and Organizational mise en scène.

This paper primarily examines the historical background of a recent attempt by the New York Bicycle Messenger Association (NYBMA) to organize messengers along nontraditional lines. This attempt faltered after approximately a year (it took place between March 2004 and March 2005). To contextualize this organizational endeavor, I explore the more general dynamics at work in the messenger industry, as well as those forces' relations to messenger culture more generally. After laying out those aspects of messenger labor that create desires for organization, I offer an overview of both the factors within the messenger world that contribute to organizing, as well as those that detract from it. Towards the end of that overview, I present a brief history of two other (also failed) attempts to organize within the industry in New York City since the mid-90s, looking at those cases primarily in terms of the ways that their failures inflect the present. Having collected all those contexts together as the general setting (or mise en scène) that frames messenger organizing, the paper delves into the problems that the NYBMA encountered as well as its successes; finally, I consider the implications for future organizing attempts within the messenger community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]