Labour and work general Flashcards
(17 cards)
What is Labour Geography?
Labour geography is dedicated to understanding the relations between work, place, space and geographical scale
earliest manifestations driven by effort to highlight agency in labour - seeks to understand a lived experience of place – and the trade union as a method of organisation
Labour geography centres workers as the focus of analysis = diverse interests, identities and needs of workers are included
What is the geography of labor?
The ‘geography of labour’ (‘GOL’) is different. In this approach, workers are examined from the outside with little acknowledgement of their lived experience of employment.
Labour is treated as an abstraction assigned to a specific social class and seen to be largely controlled and exploited by capitalists
How has Labour Geography evolved since its early stages?
primarily driven by the effortto highlight the agency of labour - most specifically through collective trade union organisation
As labour geog has grown now moved away from a sole focus on trade union organisation to speak to most of the significant debates in human geography
now includes research into the dynamics of labour migration, questions of work and identity, and whether labour is able and willing to take its place in multi scalar civil society
It also addresses the ways that class and identity are changing, and their implications for work, wealth and power relations
What are some key areas where Labour Geographies have advanced understanding?
Analysing the geography of employment law and labour regulations, which can have an assisting or constricting role for workers
Enquiring into what local, regional, national, and international scale strategies workers employ to assist in their disputes with employers, recognising that most workers are place-based and most are place-bound, which renders workers vulnerable when employers freeze wages and make compulsory redundancies
Enquiring into new alliances between workers and new social movements, which arise because work is umbilically connected to workers’ social and biological reproduction, and also because NSMs are more politically important than trade unions in many places around the world.
explain the concept of ‘agency of labour’ ?
Agency of labour refers to the workers capacity to configure geography so as to protect and advance their interests
Recent contributors have thus decided to integrate a more embedded notion of worker agency, reconnecting agency to the wider societal structures in which it is embedded
Agency can be determined along 4 dimensions - what are they and explain them?
1) more clarity as to what counts as meaningful labour
includes a useful typology distinguishing labour strategies of Resilience (everyday coping), Reworking (efforts to materially improve conditions), and Resistance (direct challenges to capitalist social relations)
2) more precision abt the geographies of agency under consideration involves examining worker spatial strategies, such as intersecting the scale of worker action (local or translocal) with targets of action (local or translocal) to delimit four different spatial strategies. Agency always has geographical dimensions – it emerges in and from particular places
3) temporalities to labour agency
The timing of agency in relation to political context and to other work actions has a non-trivial influence on the likelihood of success
4) Balance needed between individual vs collective agency by workers
while labour geog focusses on collective action - growing awareness of the power of the individuals agency that can be exercised on a daily basis
what are New migrant divisions of labour (NMDL) in the context of Labour geographies?
captures the intensification of immigration to the UK and the ways that these migrants have been integrated into low paid segments of the workforce.
State migration policies are seen as central drivers of the NMDL
what are labour market intermediaries in the context of Labour geography?
Labour market intermediaries, such as temporary staffing agencies, play a role in producing precarious work and labour market segmentation. Agencies arguably also play an important regulatory role in mediating forces of supply and demand
despite ongoing processes of globalization, the persistence of distinctive national markets for temporary staffing is the hallmark of the global industry. Temporary staffing is heavily shaped by national institutional and regulatory formations.
The role of agencies and other intermediaries in both mediating labour migration itself and shaping processes of segmentation in host economies merits urgent further attention
How is growth of precarity challenging organisation of the labour force?
The growth in precarity challenges organising -
due to the multidimensional fragmentation of workers due to extensive outsourcing and subcontracting practices. Workers are fragmented across space in smaller and isolated units. They are also isolated administratively through complex networks of direct employers and subcontractors, isolated contractually through the individualization of the employment relation, and isolated temporally by the intensification of part-time and shift work. These changes challenge the common modes of practice of workplace unionism
what spatial strategies are being developed to help progress organisation of labour forces ?
stress multi scalar strategies over upscalling - act locally and think globally
Strategic spatial interventions include three proposed tactics:
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Power analysis: Identify strategic targets (e.g., workplaces instead of just employers).
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Zonal focus: Target key geographies (e.g., urban areas and transport hubs).
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Upscaling projection: Leverage strong nodes to support weaker ones
Tufts (2007) - proposes
the ‘spatial circuit of union renewal’ model, where each level of organisation (national to transnational) intersects fluidly and contributes to union effectiveness
what is community unionism?
an emerging approach
It involves forming alliances with broader civil society groups (faith, education, local organisations)
highlights how unions are expanding their role into non-traditional community spaces
example of community unionism?
the London Living Wage campaign, a union-community alliance success where community coalitions helped achieve wins for union and non-union workers alike.
These alliances form a new “geo-political architecture” overcoming urban challenges like social disconnection and high mobility
Tufts (2007) - proposed new form of unionism?
proposed a model of ‘Schumpeterian’ unionism, positioned between the ideas of business and social movement unionism
diagnoses a form of unionism that reflects how the traditional union model has been transformed into a grounded pragmatic approach that sees the union operate as strategically as possible within the realities of contemporary deregulated flexible labour markets
How does place matter to workers and work?
Place can be understood as complex ensembles of workers and their old and young dependents, the unemployed, firms and institutions
The patterning of everyday activity in place has subjective and affirmative dimensions
Places are where people work and live, they give meaning to people, and these ties can unite some or all locals whether they are workers or managers in a joint commitment to the place where they commonly reside.
Places are interconnected but also interdependent
need to understand place as permeable in order look beyond solely the local
Non-local influences and local influences combined create unique outcomes, as different places internalise them in different ways
need to examine the horizontal linkages between places
How does space matter to workers and work?
Conceptualising ‘space’ involves understanding the trans-local ties that help contemporary places become what they are
Due to the local nature of work, reproduction and identity and because capitalism is predicated on economic competition, these generate geographical competition
Workers in different places are competing with distant strangers for jobs despite belonging to a larger labouring class
Competition can occur between established centres of commodity production or between old and new places of economic activity
can also be cooperative production relations -
Workers often have an incentive to cooperate with others elsewhere in order to secure a fair deal for all. These have historically been formalised through national and international trades unions, pursuing issues trans-locally
Consumption relations also exist across space. Workers in one place buying commodities keep other workers in jobs (although this may be an unintended outcome). Much as if workers buy commodities that are made in harsh working conditions they become complicit in these labour mechanisms. The ability to compete, cooperate and consume can be thought of as fundamental to the ways that capitalism establishes the ground rules for everyday life to operate on
How does scale matter to workers and work?
Scale allows economic geographers to understand what is done to workers in particular places and what these workers can do.
Geographical scale is not neutral, rather geographical scale is socially constructed and are the product of social relations, actions and institutions.
Scale does not have to be constraining; it can be used politically not just to confine, it can also empower.
Labour unions have used geographical scale politically.
