Labor in Movement: Contradictory Articulations of Union, Community, and State in Neoliberal New York.

Existing literature on the contemporary American labor movement generally portrays the (neoliberal) state and community in diametrically opposed terms, with the state seen as monolithically negative while community figures as unambiguously positive. Drawing upon ethnographic and interview data from three labor struggles in New York's retail sector, this paper challenges this view, arguing that labor's relationship to both the (neoliberal) state and community is contradictory. This paper thus offers a challenge to scholars of "social-movement unionism" regarding the need to pay more attention to the positive and negative features of labor's relationship to 1) the neoliberal, or post-PATCO state, with the NLRB seen as hostile, while the New York State Attorney General serves as a positive resource for labor; and 2) community-based worker centers, which though they may serve, through labor-community alliances, as crucial allies for labor, also involve tensions with labor unions.Through the use of dynamic, process-centered analysis, this paper also entails a methodological challenge to the predominance of more "static" forms of analysis within most sociological literature, including that focused on labor and other social movements. By examing the interactions between the campaigns I analyze, instead of merely focusing on what distinguishes the campaigns, I argue for the need to see labor not (only) as an inert collection of discrete variables but (also) as a set of dynamic, interconnected social processes, in short, as a movement. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]