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The $15 Wage Movement Moves South: Politics of Region in Labor Union Campaigns
Author(s) -
Brown Megan
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/anti.12377
Subject(s) - movement (music) , wage , politics , position (finance) , trace (psycholinguistics) , political science , labor history , circulation (fluid dynamics) , political economy , labor union , sociology , labor relations , gender studies , labour economics , economics , law , philosophy , linguistics , physics , finance , thermodynamics , aesthetics
The North American labor movement continues to wrestle with the challenges of organizing workers in the US South. This article explores the contradictory position of the South in the contemporary labor movement, using the circulation of the $15 minimum wage to ground the analysis. By problematizing the place of the South in US labor, this article contributes to efforts to complicate the geographic imaginaries of the South and to our understanding of the contemporary labor movement's expansionary projects. Drawing on qualitative interviews and participant observation in Greensboro and Durham, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, I trace the abstract circulation of organizational resources, strategies, and tactics of the $15 wage movement into, throughout, and back out of the South.