The dump begins with setting TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SERIALIZABLE
.
Please read the manual on Transaction Isolation and for example the User List discussion about this.
QouteQuote:
The backup will only see transactions that were commited before the isolation level was set.
Basically everything after pg_dumppg_dump
sets the transaction isolation level is not part of this dump.
The read/write operations are not affected(locked) during that time.