Labour Geographers Research Articles

Labouring geography: Negotiating scales, strategies and future directions

In our editorial introduction to this themed issue on labour geography, we outline some important on-going debates in the relatively young field of labour geography and suggest future directions for research. First, there is the key question of labour as an active agent in the production of economic landscapes. The agency of labour will likely remain a defining feature of labour geography, but perhaps it is not as important to construct theoretical analytical boundaries as it is to define labour geography as a political project. Second, debates continue surrounding the production of scale and the multiscalarity of organized labour. Third, labour geographers have yet to engage in any sustained fashion with unpacking the complex identities of workers and the way in which those identities simultaneously are shaped by and shape the economic and cultural landscape. Fourth, there is some debate on the costs and benefits of a ‘normative’ labour geography which emphasizes what workers and their organizations ‘could’ or even ‘should’ do. Lastly, we challenge the assumption that labour geographers have not yet asserted themselves as activists in their own right. We conclude the editorial by introducing the articles included in the issue. While these articles may not address every gap in the literature, they do contribute in significant ways to move the labour geography project forward.

Spaces of Work and Everyday Life: Labour Geographies and the Agency of Unorganised Temporary Migrant Workers

AbstractIn this study, I focus on the agency of unorganised temporary migrant workers – people who travel away to work for just a few weeks or months. Such workers have been relatively neglected in labour geography. Perhaps surprisingly, given the focus on the agency of capital in much of his writing, I build on two arguments made by David Harvey. First, workers’ spatial mobility is complex and may involve short as well as longer term migrations, and secondly that this can have significance both materially and in relation to the subjective experience of employment. The spatial embeddedness of temporary migrant workers’ everyday lives can be a resource for shaping landscapes (and ordinary histories) of capitalism, even though any changes may be short‐lived and take place at the micro‐scale. The article is illustrated with case study material from research with workers in the agriculture sector in India and the UK, and concludes with more general implications for labour geographers engaged with other sectors and places.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Places of Work, Scales of Organising: A Review of Labour Geography

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Places of Work, Scales of Organising: A Review of Labour Geography

Labour Geography: A Work in Progress

AbstractThis short essay takes stock of where the field of ‘labour geography’ has got to and where it might productively go. The first part identifies labour geography's signature characteristics as they have emerged over the last 15–20 years. These are its insistence that geography is constitutive of employment issues, its emphasis on worker agency, its analytical promiscuousness, its acute awareness of power and inequality, and its Left sensibility politically speaking. The second part of the essay is programmatic and looks to the future. It is argued that labour geographers ought to more carefully conceptualize and study worker agency; to connect labour migration more organically with existing research on place‐based workers; to develop a more substantive understanding of how states regulate employment and workers’ lives; to look to synthesize different geographical dimensions of worker existence and strategy; to aim to examine working peoples’ lives holistically; and to be more explicit about the normative basis of their ‘pro‐labour’ stance and its implications for worker strategy.Résumé Ce texte court examine ce qui a été réalisé dans le domaine de la ‘géographie du travail’ et les orientations fructueuses qui pourraient être suivies. La première partie détermine les traits identitaires de la géographie du travail qui ont vu le jour au cours des 15 à 20 dernières années: son insistance pour que la géographie soit partie prenante dans les questions d'emploi, son accent sur l'agence des travailleurs, sa promiscuité analytique, sa conscience aiguë du pouvoir et de l'inégalité, et sa sensibilité de gauche au plan politique. La seconde partie, programmatique, s'intéresse à l'avenir et à ce que les géographes du travail devraient faire: conceptualiser et étudier l'agence des travailleurs avec davantage de rigueur; relier de façon plus organique la migration du travail et les recherches existantes sur la main‐d'œuvre locale; offrir une compréhension concrète de la manière dont les Etats régulent l'emploi et la vie des actifs; veiller à synthétiser les différentes dimensions géographiques dans l'existence et la stratégie des salariés; chercher à analyser globalement la vie des populations actives; être plus explicite sur le fond normatif de leur attitude ‘pro‐travail’ et sur ses implications pour la stratégie des salariés.

Building the ‘competitive city’: labour and Toronto’s bid to host the Olympic games

Toronto’s quest to host the Summer Olympic Games has dominated both contemporary planning discourse and practice. For some, the pursuit of the games embodies Toronto’s transformation into a ‘competitive’ global city. Relatively unexplored in this discourse are the contradictory roles that labour plays in contemporary urban development. I argue that the new labour geography can provide some interesting insights into such processes. Specifically, labour geographers have given workers with divergent interests greater agency in shaping economic landscapes and have noted the multi-scalar organisation of labour. The paper looks at the contradictory and conflicting positions held by different labour unions in Toronto toward the city’s bid to host the 2008 Olympics. The case study suggests that labour is an active agent in processes shaping contemporary Toronto and support the bid for complex reasons ranging from the promise of jobs to potential future organising opportunities.

Labour in ‘lean’ times: geography, scale and the national trajectories of workplace change

In this paper we argue that far from being surpassed by globalization, the nation‐state remains a key space for organized labour. However, labour geographers’ focus on patterns of union organization and strategies of ‘internationalism’ underplays the enduring role of national institutions. Moreover, while labour geographers have recognized the significance of new forms of work organization, such as just in time and lean production, with some exceptions they have not examined how unions both formally and informally determine the trajectory of workplace change. Based on case studies of unions in the Canadian and German auto industries, we stress that the linkage between national and workplace scales remains critical to understanding how unions are responding to the challenges being presented by lean and just in time production. Finally, while there is a re‐scaling of bargaining in the automobile industry to the firm or enterprise scale, the outcomes of decentralization depend largely on the national regulatory context.