Labour geography II: Being, knowledge and agency

Abstract

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.

‘I’m my own boss…’: Active intermediation and ‘entrepreneurial’ worker agency in the Australian gig-economy

“…Within labour geography, labour agency is fundamental to the active role labour plays in reshaping the landscapes of capitalism (Herod, 1997). Individual and collective expressions of labour agency shape the geography of capitalism through the actions and interactions of workers, households, segments of capital, other workers, civil society and governments (Coe, 2013;Strauss, 2020). This occurs because particular workers, or groups of workers, pursue their own spatial visions that can intersect, sometimes for sustained periods, with the interests of capital and to the detriment of other workers (A gar and B€ ohm, 2018; Harvey and Williams, 1995).…”

NotJustParticipation: The Rise of the Eco‐Precariat in the Green Economy

“…Ecosystem service markets are often sustained by an eco‐precariat whose labour, or human input, is central to securing the ecosystem “goods” or service benefits that are the focus of green economy interventions. Building on critical work in “labour geographies” (Castree ; Herod ; Strauss , ; Yeoh and Huang ), we seek to examine how the “labour‐turn” can deepen our understanding of the ways in which diverse green economy interventions unfold. We take a feminist political ecology lens emphasising a renewed focus on unaccounted for, and more often than not, gendered and at times racialised labour, exposing wider issues of intersectionality, justice and precarity in green economy platforms and the uneven spatiality of labour resource access.…”

“…We contribute to a deeper understanding of the unequal benefits and burdens of labouring in the green economy, moving beyond “participation” rhetoric and into more integrated discussions of labour rights and organisation (see Cooke and Kothari ; Pasgaard and Nielsen ). We purposefully look to engage with the field of labour geography (Castree ; Coe ), “green” organised labour (Räthzel and Uzzell ) and the heterogeneity of precarity (Siegmann and Schiphorst ; Strauss ). This emphasis is vitally relevant now with the adoption of eerily similar participation rhetoric by leaders of far‐right populist movements raising a set of new challenging questions around labour, and the role of the state and non‐state in a period of “post‐truth” environmentalism (Asher and Wainwright ; Mouffe ; Neimark et al ).…”

“…This has forced many to rethink different categories of labourers and how wage relations can be restructured through new transnational and virtual networks (World Bank ). The beneficiaries and those bearing the burdens of this new division of labour in the global North have been discussed at length (Castree et al ; Urry ), and more recently taken up by those concerned specifically with precarity (Strauss , ). A useful thread of literature makes an important analytical and empirical distinction between “work as the labour processes” and “labour power or the capacity to work” (Thompson ).…”

“…Herod ). New divisions of labour and problems of fragmentation and heterogeneity of precarious workers may correlate with the difficulties of organising resistance (Räthzel and Uzzell ; Siegmann and Schiphorst ; Strauss ). Yet, some of the blame has been attributed to new extractive and remedial technologies that depend more on algorithms and less on human labour.…”