ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION TOWARDS A LABOR GEOGRAPHY: THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE AND THE POLITICS OF SCALE IN THE EAST COAST LONGSHORE INDUSTRY, 1953-1990 BY ANDREW J. HEROD Dissertation Director: Professor Neil Smith Economic geographers have generally ignored the active roles played by working people and their institutions in the production of economic landscapes. Mainstream approaches conceive labor in terms of descriptive factors of location which influence where industry locates. Marxist economic geographers have explained the geography of capitalism largely by examining how capital structures landscapes in the search for profit. Both approaches have principally told the story of capital, and have condemned workers to a marginal footnote in the production of economic geographies. But landscapes are contested social constructions and as such labor*s role in their creation cannot be ignored. This dissertation argues for a Labor Geography which treats working people as sentient social beings who both intentionally and unintentionally produce geographies through their actions. The dissertation examines two geographical strategies adopted by the International Longshoremen's Association to mitigate the impacts of technological innovation in the East Coast longshore industry. First, it shows how the union imposed a new geographical scale of contract bargaining on the industry. Prior to 1956 collective bargaining was conducted between the I LA and the steamship operators on a port-by-port basis. In its effort to equalize conditions between ports and protect dockers from job loss, the union negotiated a regional master contract covering the North Atlantic ports. During the 1960s and 1970s the union secured several work preservation agreements, which further expanded its master contract throughout the East Coast, culminating in 1977 with an agreement on job security which covered the entire industry. Second, the ILA implemented a number of container handling provisions known as the Rules on Containers. These were designed to prevent the growth of off-pier container consolidating terminals and restrict certain types of work to waterfront areas. By expanding the geographical scale of contract bargaining and controlling the location of work, the ILA played a crucial role in the development of the contemporary economic geography of the longshore industry.