Abstract
Geographers and oral historians continue to have much to learn from each other. The subfield of labour geography in particular can enrich its understanding of workers’ lived experiences, both in employment and beyond the workplace, through greater use of interpretative, collaborative oral history methodologies. Attentive to the temporal specificity and inter-subjectivity of people’s narratives, oral history reveals how workers’ moral geographies emerge and change. This article documents the spatio-temporalities and institutions of food sector employment in Peterborough, England, a city-region from which urban-based workers are bussed out daily to rural jobs. The analysis draws on four extended case studies of people who migrated to the UK and worked in the sector in the 2000s, building on recent research that has highlighted harsh employment conditions in the food production, packing and processing sector. It complements this work by viewing narrative itself as an agentic act and listening to how research participants crafted their life stories. These stories revealed diverse, complex and context-specific moral geographies, with participants variously placing value on small acts of rebellion or refusal, dignity and the time to speak with others at work. The article advocates greater engagement by labour geographers with the subjective experiences of workers, and with individual as well as collective agency.
Highlights
Working conditions in UK food processing, as well as in growing and packing fresh produce, have intensified with the concentration of supermarket buying power since the latter part of last century (Rogaly, 2008)
The article draws on the methodological and theoretical resources of oral history as one means of addressing the need for more attention in labour geography to lived experience and to workers’ moral geographies, with particular focus on the oral histories of international migrant workers who have tended to be portrayed in popular discourse as either villains or voiceless victims of the employment regimes of the UK’s food sector
Oral history fits well with this agenda, we argue, involving as it does the coproduction of extended case studies of ‘people’, with multifaceted lives, identities, geographies and histories that provided a context for the food sector work they did
Summary
Working conditions in UK food processing, as well as in growing and packing fresh produce, have intensified with the concentration of supermarket buying power since the latter part of last century (Rogaly, 2008). The article draws on the methodological and theoretical resources of oral history as one means of addressing the need for more attention in labour geography to lived experience and to workers’ moral geographies, with particular focus on the oral histories of international migrant workers who have tended to be portrayed in popular discourse as either villains (taking jobs from UK nationals) or voiceless victims of the employment regimes of the UK’s food sector. Our study differs from existing work on labour’s geography (Smith, 2014: 6) in the food sector as our use of oral history enables us to explore subjective experiences of this employment, and its location within varied life trajectories, as they are glimpsed in collaborative interviews This reveals complex, varied and context-specific moral geographies of food sector employment, including a valuing of dignity in relation to supervisors and fellow workers, time for workplace interaction, small acts of rebellion and refusal, and longerterm transformations in people’s sense of justice. Section six concludes by returning to the core issues raised in the article concerning the use of oral history in labour geography
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