[...] the windfall profits that ac­cru ed to U.S. automakers helped them underwrite a stable lab or-capital accord and mass consumption social contract that lasted for more than four decades after the CIO struggles of the 1930s. In contrast, the lower profit levels associated with the intense competitive pressures toward the end of the life cycle (and the relative national poverty of the favored new sites of production) make such social contracts increasingly difficult to sustain eco­nomically. In other words, late-developers of mass production automobile industries have experienced the social contradictions of capitalist develop­ment (including strong working classes) without the benefits that might allow them to deal with those social contradictions successfully. Elsewhere, we have labeled this phenomenon "the contradictions of semiperipheral success" (Silver 1990; see also Arrighi 1990b).

The combination of these strategies - the spatial fix and the tech­nological/organizational fix - may be leading to the re-consolidation of a spatially bifurcated process. On the one hand, new innovations in or­ganization and technology, to the extent they can be monopolized by the innovators, provide the basis for more consensual labor-capital-state social contracts, allowing legitimacy to be combined with profitability, albeit for a shrinking labor force. On the other hand, in poorer countries, where com­petitive advantage is based on a continuous drive to lower costs, profitability requirements lead to continuous crises of legitimacy. [...]

The ability of both textile and auto workers to make substantial and durable gains at the end of the innovation phase suggests that the monop­olistic windfall profits reaped by the innovator in any given product cycle also creates favorable conditions (at least the material resources) for stable labor-capital compromises. Yet, as in the automobile industry, so in tex­tiles, once the labor movement made a show of force, capitalists responded with a spatial-fix strategy that accelerated the diffusion of production to new sites, initiating the mature phase of the industry. [...]

It is indeed reasonable to assume that, ceteris paribus, the greater capital's vulnerability to workers' direct action and the more limited the options of capital for pursuing a spatial-fix solution

Moreover, in transportation industries, it is not easy to devise (much less practically carry out) spatial fixes as counterweights to labor's strong work­place bargaining power. Particularly troublesome nodes might be elimi­nated entirely fr om the distribution network - that is, unruly or otherwise unprofitable nodes can be cut off from networks of trade and production. But the upstream and downstream ramifications for all other industries of such a spatial fix in transportation makes it a heavy-handed solution at best (especially if the region as a whole to be cut off is not plagued by generalized problems of profitability and control). Moreover, "roads, rail­ways, canals, airports, etc., cannot be moved without the value embodied in them being lost," creating the paradoxical situation whereby the mobility of capital requires relatively immobile investments in the transportation industries (Harvey 1999: 380). Thus, the disincentives to geographical re­location facing the transportation industries are on average significantly higher than the deterrents facing even the most capital-intensive manufac­turing industries. Indeed, the fact that the reports of transportation workers' unrest in the WLG database are consistently spread widely across the globe throughout the 1870-1996 period suggests that spatial fixes have not been the main response to transport worker unrest.

Technological fixes have, on the other hand, been far more significant in the arsenal of employer responses to transportation worker labor un­rest. The most widely studied case is that of containerization and dock automation in the shipping industry. These process innovations dramati­cally downsized the historically militant dock labor force in the second half of the twentieth century and in large part account for the dramatic decline in labor unrest mentions discussed earlier. Where substantial transformations in the transport labor process have been less forthcoming, product fixes have been the more prominent response. Thus, for example, railroads and railroad workers have come under increasing competitive pressure from new alternatives: trucking and aviation for cargo and the automobile and aviation for passengers.