Labour Geographers Research Articles

Labour geography is tedious: Of contracts, grievances and the nitty-gritty of worker agency in United Farm Workers-era California

Responding to the oft-asked question, ‘what counts as labour’s agency?’ this paper engages with recent developments in labour geography to argue that labour geographers would benefit from paying close attention to the nitty-gritty struggles over – and not only for – the contract. Taking the case of the United Farm Workers’ efforts to administer its newly-won contracts in the agribusiness fields of California in the 1970s, it suggests that labour’s agency is often not just expressed, but made to count, in the midst of the most mundane – and often tedious – of circumstances, like late night-grievance procedure meetings. The paper argues that not just labour’s agency, but its class power, is often formed and deployed – and sometimes countered – in the details of how the collective interests of workers, on the farm or across a region, and handled.

Cultures of labour: aspiration, developmental futures and the materiality of memory after Chinese economic reform

ABSTRACT This article argues for attention to the affective investments that motivate working people’s life choices in contemporary China by tracing the materiality of the development of aspirations in a rapidly developing context. Turning to the work of Bernard Stiegler, the article contends that for working people, the demand to labour is based not just on the alienation of the means of production (savoir-faire), but also the means of living a good life (savoir-vivre), which is displaced into a future made knowable within the material world in the present. The article shows how the developmental standard-making that produces senses of progress and legitimizes aspiration, thus compelling economic action, is alienated within the materiality of working people’s rapidly changing worlds. By referencing these temporal displacements, developmental subjects assess their own presents by comparison, justifying difficult circumstances by making progress tangible. Understanding the mechanics of aspiration and cultures of labour is vital in light of critiques by labour geographers of the equation of labour agency with traditional, formalized labour politics, as there remains much work to be done to understand how and why people become workers in the first place.

Labour geography I: Labour agency, informal work, global south perspectives and the ontology of futures

This review builds on Strauss’s (2020) discussion of how labour geographers conceptualise worker agency ontologically and epistemologically. Research on labour agency has been dominated by a narrow and limited lens based on a materialist ontology of capitalistic production which tends to depict labour agency as a ‘spatial fix’. Considering this critique, I review three themes of research on labour agency that push the boundaries of such dominant conceptualisations: understanding labour agency in informal work and by workers on the fringes of formalised economic spaces; from perspectives in the Global South; and via an ontology of the future.

Any Labour Geographies in Urban Theory? Workers Meet Lefebvre and Harvey (Yet Again)

AbstractThis paper examines the urban theory of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey to construct anurbanperspective on labour geographies. Lefebvre understood work in a work–nonwork continuum beyond binarism, and Lefebvre and Harvey hailed the outpouring of working‐class agency from cities. However, they may have obscured the role of labour movements in urbanisation when identifying the living‐place (such as streets, neighbourhoods, or housing) as the primary seat of urban agency. Learning from labour geographers in the 1990s, I query this ambiguity to enhance the urban theory of Lefebvre and Harvey, conceive of the urban scale as the site ofunfinishedindustrial/urban dialectics, and conceptualise labour agency as a producer of transformative continua in urbanisation. Interpreting Toyota’s factories as rescaled pivots of industrial urbanisation, I explore how Japanese labour movements challenged just‐in‐time production, its union form, and its work/nonwork divides, producing new urbanising continua—even planetary ones—between different transformative agencies.

Kitchen, Farm, Room – Spaces of Transnational Feminist Theorising by Working Class Women in India

The term “labour geography”, first coined by Andrew Herod (1997), sought to shift the capital-centric focus of economic geography to a more labour-centric focus. Feminist scholars have long argued for paying attention to the ways that labour’s social relations and lived experiences shape the politics of labour beyond wages or formal employment. However, labour geographers problematically continue to separate the larger questions of existence, analytically and ontologically, from the questions of work and everyday labour struggles. This article draws attention to the significance of quotidian processes of theorising by working class women in India as they labour and mobilise across disparate social, economic and cultural locations. The spaces of work discussed in this article are transnational, because, as spaces of knowledge production they are shaped by, and in turn shape, transnational narratives and strategies around global labour struggle. The article offers two key insights regarding a) the everyday kno ledge production of working-class women, forged through work and struggle; and b) the significance of paying attention to the political thoughts and acts of working-class women, which holds possibilities for new solidarities and political alliances. These points are made through three illustrations – women farmers at the farmers’ protest in the outskirts of Delhi, women singing ovi in rural Maharashtra, and women factory workers creating radio podcasts in Tamil Nadu.

Labour, Efficiency, Critique: writing the plantation into the technological present-future

In this commentary, we call upon critical labour scholars, including labour geographers, to feature what sociologist Palmer called the ‘thrust of efficiency’ more centrally in their work. We put forth that the push for efficiency, as made possible by digital technology, needs to be analysed in terms of its historical lineage as well as in terms of its geographical scope. Centreing efficiency in critical labour studies, necessitates three scholarly moves. These are particularly relevant for labour geography, a field that has so far tended to circumvent questions of coloniality/labour, digital Taylorism, and the politics of (re-)writing economic geographies, in by-passing the literatures that deal with them. The plantation, an analytical category and ontic reality that stretches across several yet often unconnected bodies of literature – literary studies, Black Geographies, Caribbean studies, and the Black Radical Tradition, as well as in Global History – is central to our effort. Eventually, writing the plantation into the technological present-future can be the starting point for a larger and historico-geographically informed critique, in economic geography and beyond, of efficiency, a mode of thinking-cum-praxis based on input–output calculations, objectifying practices, violent value extraction and the removal of undesired ‘social frictions’ for the sake of capital accumulation.

Logistical geographies

AbstractAlthough logistics are fundamentally geographical and of critical importance to contemporary society, it is only relatively recently that human geographers and cognate social scientists have started to meaningfully engage with the topic. This paper explores this recent growth of interest, which encompasses the work of transport geographers, economic geographers, labour geographers, mobilities scholars and critical logistics scholars. It synthesises, reviews and evaluates this research around four themes: logistics, cities and regional development; logistics and global production networks; logistics labour; and infrastructure, power and violence. These themes are presented in the loose order in which they have emerged in the literature; while these topics have originated in particular sub‐disciplines, important conversations are now starting to emerge between different kinds of scholars both within and across these themes. These conversations have also increasingly connected geographers into vibrant interdisciplinary debates involving researchers from political science, sociology, anthropology, labour studies, and architecture and planning, among others.

Labour geography III: Precarity, racial capitalisms and infrastructure

This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity, within geography. After briefly discussing the implications for approaches to agency, I argue for attention to debates about racialized and racial capitalism from labour geographers. I suggest that theorizations of racial capitalism emerge from particular standpoints, and that geographers are well placed to explore racial capitalisms in a plural sense if we are willing to grapple with the standpoints from which we theorize in labour geography itself. I draw on the ‘infrastructural turn’ to illustrate how labour geographers can start to think with relational approaches to racial capitalism.

From ‘spaces of work’ to ‘spaces of struggle’

Abstract This paper examines the historical relationship between state, labour and capital through analysing the process of production of urban space. Cities in global South are the domain for constant contestation which emerges as a result of conflict between the spatial actors. These actors deploy space to engage with the urban processes of growth, development or work and employment. This contributes to two most important point in the debate relating to classical economic geographers and labour geographers: firstly, labour does not plays a passive role in production of space, rather actively produces space through its activities which are spatially embedded and secondly, to analyse the ways in which labour engages with the production of space, it is important to study their everyday lived experiences and the manners in which it encounters representational space. The ways of conceptualising/theorising labour's agency vary with the scale, spatial embeddedness and the historicity, hence making it crucial for geographers to understand the nuances of labouring practices in cities of global South.

Labour, carcerality and punishment: ‘Less-than-human’ labour landscapes

This paper brings together carceral and labour geographies to highlight new research avenues and empirical gaps. Despite valuable engagements with unfree and precarious work by labour geographers and substantial developments within carceral geography around carceral circuitry and intimate economies of detention, punitive aspects of work remain largely under-theorised within labour geography, while the political economy of carceral labour is relatively side-lined within carceral geography. The paper calls for two interrelated research agendas – the first a punitive labour geographies agenda, and the second a more sustained political economy lens applied to carceral geography in the context of labour and work.

Labour geography II: Being, knowledge and agency

This report builds on an examination of different approaches to labour precarity and precarious employment to argue for the need for labour geographers to examine the foundations of our approaches to agency. The debate about agency has become the terrain on which many labour geographers meet, but the dominant epistemology of agency has an (implicit or explicit) grounding in debates about labour’s spatial fix. This grounding rests on assumptions about the activities and sites that ‘count’ in analyses of labour, with implications for theory-building and the politics of knowledge production in labour geography.

Mobile with an agency: Negotiating the spatiotemporalities of the temp migrant worker

Several calls have been made by labour geographers in support for a more thorough investigation and theorization of labour as an active agent in the production of economic geographies. The present paper responds to this challenge by examining how Swedish agency warehouse workers and temp nurses working in Norway act and think in relation to mobility and how certain spatiotemporalities come into play in the mobility agency of individual workers. Though we are particularly concerned with the ambiguities involved in the relationship between mobility, agency and power, a second objective is to contribute to the theorization of how space and time matters to mobile workers. Drawing on data from twenty interviews with Swedish temp nurses and six focus group interviews with Swedish agency warehouse workers, and by combining several strands of literature ranging from current research on mobilities and migration to the work of classical scholars in geography and sociology, we propose that a ‘trialectics of spatiotemporalities' is part and parcel of workers' mobility agency. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the purposive agency as emphasized for instance by the notion of ‘mobility strategy' needs to be complemented by a conceptualization of agency that includes what we term (erratic) probing. We conclude that labour mobility may be strategic and a sign of power, but not always and everywhere, and not in any pure sense.

Tourism's labour geographies: Bringing tourism into work and work into tourism

ABSTRACTGeographers have certainly contributed actively to the extant scholarly literature relating to tourism work and workers. Nevertheless, with few notable exceptions, most of this research has been piecemeal and case-based demonstrating unawareness of broader theoretical discussions and debates within the emerging sub-field of labour geography. For this special issue, a total of eight papers have been selected, most of which deal to varying degrees with labour mobilities, a theme that mainstream labour geographers themselves have largely avoided in the past. Additionally, the thorny issue of setting the intellectual boundaries between what constitutes work and leisure in contexts such as volunteer tourism is taken up in some of the discussions. Our aim with this special issue is to encourage the development of closer intellectual connections between labour geography and the study of tourism work and workers and their everyday mobilities.

Searching for the Material in Peter K. Andersson’s ‘How Civilized Were the Victorians?’

This article is a response to Peter K. Andersson’s arguments about the ‘civilizing thesis’ in Victorian Studies. It examines his approach in relation to class, discourse, and structure, particularly in relation to the working classes and future directions in approaches to nineteenth-century sources. It suggests that Victorian scholars can learn from labour geographers, who offer new models that highlight structural inequalities while maintaining a sensitivity to post-structural cultural understandings of gender, race, and class.

Seeking security: Gay labour migration and uneven landscapes of work

Previous research has understood the migrations of gay men and other queer people through a lens of identity development, whereby relocation is driven by processes of coming out and consuming particular urban amenities. Meanwhile, labour geographers have largely overlooked sexuality, seeking to understand work-related migration in relation to gender, race, citizenship and the collective organization of workers. Drawing on the migration narratives of gay-identified men living in Ottawa, Canada, and Washington, DC, USA, we argue that the norms governing gender and sexuality within various workplaces, economic sectors and locales continuously influence migration related to work and inextricably linked processes of social reproduction. In particular, we explain how the affective needs of gay workers both deflect them from and attract them to particular locales and workplaces. In their migration destinations, gay workers tend to also transform the norms of social reproduction within workplaces and sectors. While gay workers may use migration to successfully negotiate the uneven landscapes of inclusion and visibility in North America, their agency is also constrained by the ongoing of regulation of sexuality in both workplaces and social and community environments.

‘That’s where my perception of it all was shattered’: Oral histories and moral geographies of food sector workers in an English city region

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.

Migrant Workers in Ontario's Tobacco Belt: An Examination of Workplace Dynamics

Recent critiques by scholars conducting research on the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program and labour geographers assert that there has been a lack of emphasis in the academic literature on the relevance of the formal workplace for developing an understanding of the social relations between capital and labour. In this article, I address these critiques through an empirical examination of workplace dynamics on two small-scale tobacco farms in Delhi, Ontario, Canada. My analysis draws upon original empirical evidence from interviews with three Mexican and nine Jamaican workers, two union representatives, and two farm owners. I argue that the farm is not simply a site for producing tobacco with economic efficiency, but an arena of struggle in which workers confront their employers, and a place of critical contests in the politics of production.

Garments without guilt? Uneven labour geographies and ethical trading—Sri Lankan labour perspectives

Economic geographers tout social upgrading via economic upgrading as a path that engenders labour conditions, while labour geographers underscore the inherent contradictions of corporate governance initiatives. They point to the conceptual flaws of firm-level analysis, given the limited attentiveness to worker actions and labour voice. Others point to the inherent tensions in global governance initiatives as they traverse along global supply chains, and the absence of labour voice within corporate codes. This neglect underpins my article, which uses Sri Lanka as a litmus case to critically engage with labour voice around ethical codes and analyse its efficacy as a form of social upgrading.

Practising workplace geographies: embodied labour as method in human geography

Embodied experience, situated corporeal knowledge(s), and bodily mobility lie at the forefront of many research agendas within geography. However, the body has been largely ignored in workplace studies. That is, the context‐specific, embodied daily practices of work remain overlooked within workplace geographies. In this paper, I reiterate a call made nearly two decades ago for more analyses of ‘bodies at work’ in geography, and I suggest a way of studying bodies at work that integrates the context‐specific concerns of labour geographers with the theoretical interest on the body found elsewhere in geography: working participant observation. I claim working participant observation provides an opportunity to analyse how generic ideas about flexible labour are put into practice and creatively adapted by bodies in the workplace, especially in service industries. Through a description of working participant observation carried out in a handful of inns in Japan, I discuss how this method allows one to conduct research through the body and enables geographers to take seriously the spatiality and creativeness of embodied work practices.

Forced to Concede: Permanent Restructuring and Labour's Place in the North American Auto Industry

Abstract: The stunning decline of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler over the past decade has rendered the once “Big Three” US automakers a vulnerable “Detroit Three”. In their attempts to return to profitability, the Detroit Three have undertaken a series of “turnarounds” aimed at renewing their competitive edge. Through this corporate restructuring agenda, 250,000 assembly jobs in North America have been lost, upwards of 50 auto plants have been closed, wages and benefits for new hires have been cut substantially and once strong, independent auto unions have been thoroughly overwhelmed. Permanent restructuring, then, represents a crisis strategy on the part of the corporate elite to continually intensify the demands placed on labour in the hopes of creating new conditions for capital accumulation. Working within labour geography, this paper documents the “regional race to the bottom” in the North American auto industry while reminding labour geographers that capitalist restructuring is a powerful constraint on labour agency.