Working Culture: The Agency and Employment Experiences of Nonunionized Workers in the Surfboard Industry

Abstract

This paper examines the agency o f nonunionized workers employed in the surfboard industry. Inform ing a labor geography approach with cultural economy theory, the paper contributes to the progression o f labor geographies beyond the confines of unionized labor-m anagem ent relations. Using ethnographic m ethods with 135 workers across thirty-five w orkshops and three hubs o f production (O'ahu, H aw ai'i, southern California, and east coast Australia) I reveal how cultural values and logics powerfully shape labor relations in the surfboard industry. U nder labor-intensive systems o f craft-based, customized production, workers handle m ost aspects o f business themselves: taking orders, designing, making, and exchanging finished products. W orkers use deliberate, targeted actions to create agency and achieve stable, well-paid jobs anchored in vibrant surfing locations. Over the last decade, however, standardization, international com petition, and m anagerial am bitions to upscale for export have instigated pervasive shifts to autom ated, capital-intensive production. C om puter autom ation is transform ing the scope, scale, and conditions o f work. H um an skills have been replicated, work hours have declined, and wages have stagnated. Against an increasingly precarious employment backdrop, workers' strategies to achieve positive change remain perceptible. But workers' agency is now being ham pered by the laid-back, subcultural values pertaining to commercial production and workplace relations.

Labour Geographies of Workplace Restructuring: An Intra‐Labour Analysis

“…The aim was to utilise narratives as illustrative cases of the restructuring process, with analysis being sensitive to personal experiences while building general themes across the group (cf. Warren ). Pseudonyms are used throughout the article and some details are discussed in general terms to maintain workers’ privacy…”

Material Inheritances: How Place, Materiality, and Labor Process Underpin the Path-dependent Evolution of Contemporary Craft Production

“…Bristow 2010;Clark 2014). In an era where more and more work tasks are automated, of critical import is the manner in which manual tasks become a site of value (within cultural capitalism), and of new forms of struggle, based on the retention of valued haptic skills (Warren 2014). Arguably nowhere is haptic skill more visible currently than in the rise of craft-based production.…”

“…This necessarily draws analytical attention to labor process -the "immediate site and material medium of the relation between capital and labour" (Gough 2003, 4), which encompasses "the material processes of production, the allocation of workers to production tasks, the control of workers by management within these tasks, and -crucially -the interrelations between these" (Gough 2003, 3). Matters of the changing process and composition of work have featured strongly in labor geography (Coe 2013;Warren 2014), and in creative industries research (Gibson 2003;Banks, 2010), and are mainstays of research on the shifting fortunes of manufacturing in industrial cities and regions (Gough 2003;Rutherford and Holmes 2014). The growing literature on embodied experiences of work is a related point of connection (Watson 2013; Pratchett forthcoming).…”

“…Some aspects of contemporary craft production do indeed map onto "creative" industries discourse, because of the importance of aesthetic content and design flair, and reliance on an artistic mode of labor (Warren and Gibson 2014). In particular, researchers are making the link between craft and creative industries via a focus on precarious work (Banks 2010;Luckman 2013;Barnes 2014;Warren 2014). But craft production also links back to earlier forms of manufacture based on the contiguous production and sale of physical things.…”

“…Via more-than-human ontologies it becomes possible to view input materials, tools and product designs as interactive or constitutive agents in struggles over labor process; as agents catalyzing affordances and constraining opportunities for firms to innovate, and granting workers some capacity to negotiate the terms and techniques of production (cf. Mitchell 2011;Warren 2014). Through such a focus, this paper also seeks to contribute to a growing analysis of the convergence between creative, craft and maker scenes, materiality, skill and work (Jakob 2013;Thomas et al 2013;Warren and Gibson 2013), echoing Andy Pratt's earlier (2004) call for creative industries research to take seriously their material cultural inputs.…”