No worker’s Land. The Decline of Labour Embeddedness in Resource Peripheries

Abstract

Local development literature has generally assumed that labour force is a crucial and territorially embedded asset, the origin of social and political demands to improve the quality of life and one of the main driving forces of local change and economic development. Nowadays, this assumption is far from true, particularly in the case of resource peripheries. As it has happened with the increasing externalization of tasks to service firms located in the main urban agglomerations, a growing proportion of workers—especially those in primary industries—live far away from the resource peripheries where they produce, fostered by the increasing use of Fly-in/fly-out (FIFO) and other systems and technologies facilitating long-distance work. Furthermore, the increasing use of robotics and remote work in primary activities can turn resource peripheries into places for production, but not for social reproduction. By using some of the main elements of GPN framework, this chapter proposes an extension of resource periphery research agenda, considering this trend of declining labour territorial and social embeddedness; analyses how this trend has become a distinctive characteristic of resource peripheries; and what the consequences are for economic development in these territories.