Labour Geography Research Articles

Precarity and agency in youthspaces of work: The case of food delivery platform workers in Athens, Greece

The growth of digital platforms is spawning new, if often precarious, forms of work. One such type of work that has particularly grown in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, is that of digital platform-facilitated on-demand food delivery services. Such deliveries are often undertaken by younger workers. Given this, here we explore the following research questions: (i) what forms of labour precarity are found and reproduced in the physical and digital spaces that young food delivery platform (FDP) workers create and inhabit?; and (ii) what types of agency do FDP workers develop within these spaces in order to navigate – and sometimes resist – precarity? Drawing upon concepts from critical Youth Studies, Geographical Political Economy and Labour Geography, the article develops the concept of precarious youthspaces of work to investigate the connections between youths’ everyday lives and the production of space. To do so we present a qualitative study conducted in Athens, Greece, that sought to capture the multifaceted working arrangements of FDP workers, both offline and online. Our analysis reveals that FDP workers suffer various forms of labour precarity which they must navigate. But such workers are not just accommodating to precarity. They have also generated forms of collective oppositional agency that are reshaping local labour markets. However, whilst their agency has sometimes generated solidarity and robust collective movements it has also led to divisions that have limited cooperation amongst FDP workers.

Green Skills for Sustainability Transitions

ABSTRACTGreen Skills are considered a prerequisite for sustainability transitions. However, existing literature shows heterogenous meanings of Green Skills, which are based on normative assumptions about what is understood as ‘green’ and ‘skill’. Despite the high expectations of Green Skills as a driving force for increasing sustainability of companies and regions, there is a research gap about implementation of Green Skills in vocational education and further training, and their impact on sustainability transitions. This paper is based on a literature review and reveals a fertile field for investigation, creating clarity by systematically analysing the fragmented literature and suggesting a research agenda for economic geography and labour geography.

Storytelling as connectivity: expanding the digital geographies of the gig economy

ABSTRACT The last decade has seen unprecedented changes in working forms, not the least through technological innovation while leisure time is equally reshaped by platforms. Although relatively new, the gig economy – temporary work mediated through platforms – is increasingly an important form of employment globally and consequently, the gig economy is represented in popular culture. Popular culture is part of social-technical-spatial relations making these important spaces in digital geographies. However, digital content, for example from streaming programs, is often not considered in labour geography studies. By conducting ethnographic content analysis and doodling ‘think-with’ work on Beforeigners, a piece of speculative fiction from Norway, I explore how storytelling conjoins parallel digital practices. I show storytelling as a kind of softening of ground narrating technological-spatial relations and demonstrates how, from this Nordic example, storytelling is part of the continuative geographical ordering of work forms in digital spaces and places. Exploring other sites of digital spaces highlights the ways digital geography is multi-layered, inter-relational and gradient, and demonstrates the need to go beyond established sites of inquiry to understand the gig economy as a social-technological-spatial relation.

Infrastructure, time and labour: movement and suspension along the Abidjan-Lagos corridor

ABSTRACT Africa’s renewed push towards infrastructure development brought with it new forms of territorialisation tied to both capital and labour. Infrastructures are expected to connect specific African hubs to global trade flows, promote industrialisation and increase employment rates, yet they often struggle to fulfil said promises. We explore the relationship between Africa’s ‘infrastructure turn’ and changing labour relations through the case of the Abidjan-Lagos Corridor in West Africa. Drawing from critical infrastructure studies and broader work in labour geography, we use the concept of suspension as a lens to illuminate a variety of processes – occurring across varied temporalities and scales – that are imbricated in the construction of different forms of infrastructural labour. We posit that infrastructure development as currently structured simultaneously (i) reinforces geopolitical inequities in the division of labour in the design and implementation of infrastructure projects; (ii) fosters competition amongst states for value and trade capture; and (iii) prompts contestation and disavowal in the context of the construction of specific projects. These three distinct, yet inter-related ways in which infrastructure development entangles with labour dynamics highlight that the work of imagining and crafting infrastructural promise creates pathways for novel, and often contested, configurations of labour relations.

Precarious labour geographies of working holiday makers: querying sustainability

The boundaries between tourism and migration are blurry. This blurring has been beneficial for the governments of wealthy countries enabling them to import a large and flexible temporary workforce that can be directed toward regions and industries where there are labour shortages. Such is the case with the Australian Working Holiday Program (AWHP); a historically tourism-focused cultural exchange program that began in 1975. Since the 1990s, the Australian Government has leveraged the AWHP to support several of Australia’s critical industries. This has been achieved through the tweaking of mobility infrastructures that link Working Holiday Makers’ (WHMs) ability to stay in Australia to employment conditions. Such conditions increase precarity among WHMs, directing them towards remote regions and industries where there are evident labour shortages. While these mobility infrastructures significantly benefit Australia’s economy, they result in WHMs being highly vulnerable to exploitation. Such vulnerability is layered with WHMs from less wealthy, non-English-speaking countries facing the highest levels of vulnerability. This study investigates the way mobility infrastructures in the AWHP influence WHMs’ mobilities, as well as how such mobilities are experienced in uneven and unjust ways. There is urgency to interrogate the role that such programs play in contributing to unjust mobilities, and to query the attendant implications for sustainability.

Braverman and Labor and Monopoly Capital: A Retrospective

Abstract This paper appraises the work of Harry Braverman (1920–76), specifically his classic, Labor and Monopoly Capital, published in 1974 and remaining an influential reference for what has become the labour process approach to the study of work in capitalist societies. Labor and Monopoly Capital (LMC) reshaped what was then known as industrial sociology in the English-speaking world and was impactful across a range of disciplines, including history, organisation and management studies, comparative political economy, and labour geography. It is widely regarded as the foundational text of labour process theory (LPT). Fifty years after the initial publication of LMC, that theoretical approach is not only alive and well, but in the past decade, undergone something of a resurgence, influencing global communities of scholars. The paper takes a close look primarily at the text in its context, examining the genesis of the arguments, the distinctive biography of the author, and the structure of the book drawing out its major and minor themes, including a critical assessment of sources and evidence. We argue that the enormous impact of LMC can be explained by its successful challenge to existing orthodoxies about trajectories in work, technology, and management dominant in the social sciences and orthodox Marxism. This is followed up with a discussion of the reception, diffusion, and development of LMC comparatively and across different geographic domains and academic disciplines. As the debate on LMC eventually became a much broader programme of theory and research on the labour process, we consider some of the key points of differentiation from one of the foundational texts. Whilst acknowledging its enduring legacy, the final section argues that there is only a route forward from, rather than back to Braverman, given the profound changes to global capital and labour in the 50 years since LMC appeared.

Pathway to Power: Shifts in Electoral Support for the Australian Labor Party Between the 1966 and 1969 Federal Elections

The House of Representatives election of 2 December, 1972, was a watershed in Australian political history. That election saw the Australian Labor Party terminate the Liberal–Country Party (LCP) Coalition's twenty‐three‐year hegemony and bring to office not only a different type of Labor government but a different prime ministerial style in leader Gough Whitlam. Yet, just six years before, Labor at the 1966 election had suffered a 4.30 per cent two‐party preferred (2PP) swing and the loss of nine seats following Labor's lowest primary vote since 1934. Labor's dramatic reversal of fortunes in just six years therefore remains of enormous historical interest. But, given the 1972 election saw a modest 2.5 per cent 2PP swing to Labor, with the party seizing twelve seats from the Coalition and losing four back to the LCP, the 1969–72 triennium offers little insight into Labor's recovery. In that context, this article, via analyses of House of Representatives election results and public opinion poll data, explores the chronology, demography, and geography of Labor's electoral recovery to argue the 1966–69 triennium remains of far greater value when identifying exactly when, among whom, and where Labor began its pathway to power.

Working with water: a dialogue on care, infrastructure and labour

ABSTRACT In this contribution, we show the significance of care as a lens for understanding infrastructuring labour that is the work of operating, maintaining and repairing infrastructure. We do this focusing on water infrastructure and drawing from scholarship on feminist Science and Technology Studies, infrastructural labour geography and critical water research. We propose dialoguing among researchers as an experimental practice for fostering situated learning about infrastructuring labour across sites and infrastructure. More specifically, we examine the work of tanker drivers in supplying water in Accra (Ghana) and of workers and engineers in regulating water flows along the transboundary Moselle River (Germany, Luxembourg, France). Looking at care as response-abilities, tinkering and ethico-political commitments, we show infrastructuring labour is about planned and improvised interventions that are carried out involving material work and technical knowledge as well as social and emotional work.

Work, Space, and Law. The Emergence of a Legal Geography of Labour. Overview 2020-2022

Work, Space, and Law. The Emergence of a Legal Geography of Labour. Overview 2020-2022

BLEEDING PURPLE, SEEING PINK: DOMESTIC VISIBILITY, GENDER & SOCIAL REPRODUCTION IN THE HOME STUDIOS OF TWITCH.TV

From greenscreens in the bedroom to webcams on refrigerators, household surfaces underlie the broadcast of personality on Twitch.tv, Amazon’s $15 billion platform for live video entertainment. This paper examines how homemaking and visibility are co-conceptualized in the labour of gendered and racialized game live streamers. Drawing from a virtual ethnography of Twitch creators’ domestic spaces in North America (n=12), I document the staging of household visibility in relation to Twitch’s affordances of on-demand broadcast and play. Extending feminist and social reproduction theorizations of housework, I discuss how this convergence of house- and sight-making reifies the gaming industry’s historic reliance upon unremunerated spousal support. How such marginalised Twitch streamers calibrate opacity between their broadcasts and their homes reveals the affinities between platform aggregation and domestic privatisation on local and global scales. The converging geographies of labour, leisure, and living demanded by Twitch represent more than ancillary sites where gameplay(ers) are visually recomposed as “web-ready” for live platform(ization). Rather, the management of a domestic timespace on Twitch represents a struggle for autonomy over the means of cultural production by workers across social media entertainment. This paper reframes “Bleed Purple” as more than Twitch’s company slogan, branded by emojis. Rather, it proffers Twitch as a vital case study on why social reproduction and feminist theories are integral to deepening our understanding of platform work, in and beyond the home.

Women workers in the garment factories of Cambodia: A feminist labor geography of global (re‐) production networks. By MichaelaDoutch, Edition regio spectra. 8, chapters, 333 pages

Women workers in the garment factories of Cambodia: A feminist labor geography of global (re‐) production networks. By MichaelaDoutch, Edition regio spectra. 8, chapters, 333 pages

Housing markets and geographical labour mobility to high-productivity regions: The case of Stockholm

In many countries, there are signs of declining migration to high-productivity urban areas due to restrictions in the housing market and increasing regional differences in housing prices. Using detailed population-wide register data for Sweden, we estimate how regional variation in housing prices and homeownership is associated with the individual’s decision whether to accept a job offer in the Stockholm metropolitan region and the interrelated choice between migration and commuting as the mobility mode. Our findings indicate that high relative housing prices in the Stockholm area and homeownership are associated with decreasing total geographical labour mobility to the region. This is pronounced among the young and among highly skilled workers. The negative effects of high relative housing prices and homeownership on migration are partially but not fully compensated by positive effects on commuting to Stockholm.

The Roles and Intersections of Constrained Labour Agency

AbstractEver since labour geography first started demonstrating workers’ ability to shape geographies, geographers have problematised the agency of labour. This article responds to a recent intervention by Strauss (2020a; Progress in Human Geography 44[1]:150–159), challenging the sub‐discipline to reflect on who counts as a worker and what counts as work. By combining theories of roles and intersectionality, the article poses a related question: as whom do workers act? Theoretically, a critical realist approach to labour agency forms the basis for an intersectional reading of the active subject. To illustrate our argument, we juxtapose the accounts of three people who speak for groups of workers or are asked to justify the actions of collective actors like unions or social movements. By showing how these actors improvise their own role incumbency while actively negotiating social identities, the article problematises the epistemology of constrained labour agency while responding to Strauss’ call for a rethinking of the ontologies of work.

Shrinking labour geographies: Transport access for paid work in later ages

Background and objectivesIn developing countries, a substantial share of the older population is employed (WHO, 2007), which is anticipated to triple between 2020 and 2050, bolstered by the rise of bridge employment in later life. Bridge jobs are part-time, informal work arrangements that serve as a transitional phase between full-time employment and retirement. While transport access for older adults is a primary policy concern in the age-friendly cities framework, their experiences of encountering and negotiating labour geographies, particularly transport systems to access bridge employment, are understudied. Research design and methodsThis paper used a qualitative and interpretative approach to analyse how older adults engage in nonlinear work patterns and commute to workspaces. We use a combination of visual mapping, observations, and in-depth interviews with older adults in Bengaluru, an urban metropolis in southern India. ResultsOlder workers engage in regular mobility routines to access informal bridge jobs. Our results suggest that the precarity of their bridge jobs permeates into their mobilities. Class, gender, and spatialities create additional layers of barriers to their already constrained transport resources. Economically disadvantaged older individuals encountered shrinking labour geographies due to unaffordable public transportation and first-and-last-mile journeys. For reasons of safety, older women were forced to depend on shared and public transport options, which were often unreliable. Lastly, older workers residing in geographically marginalised areas find more difficulty in organising transport to bridge jobs. Discussion and implicationsBridge jobs in informal arrangements are important means of livelihood for older persons in countries like India. Apart from the already precarious working conditions, the weak systemic transport support induces strain on the working conditions of older workers. From the purview of labour geography, adding to the natural limits of ageing, induced limits such as ageism and precarity at workplaces and non-age-friendly transport infrastructure create situations of vulnerable employment among older adults in the cities of the Global South.

Labor, Democracy, and the Postcolonial State: Spaces of Union Organizing and the Duppy State in Britain and Trinidad

This article examines the democratic political praxes and contestations developed by trade unions in relations with the postcolonial state in both the Global North and South. Our work is informed by the scholarship of Richard Iton on the postcolonial duppy state and notions of the colonial past haunting the postcolonial present through the rearticulation of racialized, imperial labor regimes and relations in a postcolonial context. We engage with Trinidad’s Oilfields Workers Trade Union and the British National Union of Seamen to explore how this “haunting” was both contested and modulated by the labor activism of unions in both the former colony and metropole during the period of mid-twentieth-century decolonization. Empirically, we show how unionized workers sought to expand and entrench democratic cultures in opposition to the continued racialization of labor and the uneven power relations existent between labor, the state, and capital. This article responds to recent calls in labor geography to broaden the sites and subjects of study beyond workers in the Global North and introduces a study of the postcolonial state to claims to democratic politics in labor–state relations.

Beyond engaged pluralism? The question of labor in labor geography

Labor geography is a vibrant, variegated subdiscipline, but there are also concerns over its lack of theoretical coherence. In this paper, I examine Open Marxist approaches that engage with post-structuralism and feminism based on Marx's concepts of abstract and concrete labor to frame a review of recent labor geography and related contributions on (a) social reproduction, difference, and class; (b) work, technology and precarity; and (c) labor's agency. I make three main arguments. First, while many conceptual tools for the analysis of social reproduction and difference exist within Marxism, because of their engagement with feminism and post-structuralism, these are being more fully developed. Second, Open Marxist contributions to this dialogue require greater emphasis upon the dialectical relationship between concrete, non-wage workers struggles against abstract labor and wage worker struggles of abstract labor within the totality of capitalism. Third, while important engagements are ongoing between Marxism, post-structuralism and feminism greater integration is neither needed nor desirable precisely because of Marxism's unique combination of conceptual coherence and open-endedness, which means that this interaction is a source of its theoretical development.

Rethinking labour risk in global production networks: Resilience strategies of cruise ship workers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic

The collapse of the global industry due to the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how precarious the livelihoods of workers embedded in globalised industries are. In the global production network literature, moments of crisis have been addressed in the debate on ‘GPN risk’. While this debate has contributed to our understanding of firms’ risk mitigation strategies, much less attention has been paid to workers’ resilience strategies in the face of risk.To fill this gap, this paper rethinks the concept of ‘labour risk’ by including the perspective of the workers. Drawing on concepts from labour geography, the article sheds light on the resilience strategies of cruise ship workers from Indonesia during the COVID-19 crisis. We interviewed twenty-two cruise ship workers, two non-governmental organisations, and two political authorities to analyse how workers used different resilience strategies (coping, adaptive and transformative) to respond to the risk outsourcing practices of cruise ship companies.Our study shows that workers cope with the crisis by relying on family relations, virtual community networks, and the local labour market. In a few cases, workers followed adaptive strategies of opening their own businesses and leaving the cruise industry. These results emphasise that workers’ resilience strategies play a central role in reproducing exploitative capital accumulation regimes underpinning global production networks.

Does greater access to employees with information technology capability improve financial reporting quality?

AbstractAlthough information technology (IT) plays an essential role in financial reporting, many companies today lack sufficient human capabilities to utilize IT competently. We examine the association between a firm's access to IT‐capable labor and financial reporting quality (FRQ). We proxy for access to IT‐capable labor using workforce measures in the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) where the firm operates, including (1) the number of IT‐related college degrees relative to the total active workforce, (2) the level of education of IT graduates, (3) the income level of IT graduates, and (4) a composite measure. We find that firms in MSAs with a higher IT‐competent labor force are associated with fewer financial reporting misstatements and internal control issues. This study contributes to the emerging literature stream examining the influence of geographic labor characteristics on firm‐level outcomes and the research on the impact of IT capability on financial reporting processes. We also inform the current movement of integrating IT knowledge into the education curriculum.

Labour geography and the state: Exploring labour's role in working against, with and through the state to improve labour standards

State labour inspection has been relatively underresearched in economic and labour geography, despite its prospective role in tackling worker exploitation as part of national state regulatory strategies. This paper seeks to address this gap by critically examining state labour inspection as a government function capable of upholding labour standards within and across economic space. A key contribution of the paper is to make stronger connections between workers’ spatial strategies and their ability to shape how labour inspection and standards enforcement is carried out. Focusing upon the UK and Ireland, we examine different ways in which some labour-friendly groups have sought to contest but also to support state labour inspection efforts with a view to protecting workers.

Disruption and Control: Contesting Mobilities through the Picket Line

By exploring the relationship between picket lines and drivers in 1970s Britain, this article considers how mobility and the spatial practices of trade unionsm shape labor geographies. Focusing on issues raised by work on logistics and blockades, it argues that too much emphasis has been placed on tactics of interruption. Drawing on Toscano's writings, I suggest that paying attention to the complex entanglement of disruption and control enables a more sophisticated account of workers’ agency. The article explores three key moments in the relationship between picketing and mobility: the 1972 miners’ strike, debates over picketing legislation in the mid-1970s, and the road haulage dispute in 1979. In doing so, it makes a number of contributions to labor geography. First, it foregrounds the picket line as a key site for understanding the spatialities of working-class organization. Second, it highlights how struggles for control are shaped by competing conceptions of rights and moral economies. Third, it develops thinking on the relationship between mobility and agency by exploring how workers’ power became entangled with the control of movement.