Making the Pickets Responsible: Policing Labour at a Distance in Windsor, Ontario.

This paper examines the 1987 introduction of a policy for policing labour disputes in Windsor, Ontario. The policy emphasizes the explicit use of consensus-building tactics over coercion in strike situations. Events leading to this policy are traced to the local politics of policing and to changing economic and industrial conditions representing the general decline in Fordist industrial relations. Changes within the police, such as the adoption of community policing, are also considered as important explanations. Both the labour-dispute policy and the broader police changes are understood as reflecting the decline of the Keynesian state and the movement toward neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]