Changing workplace geographies: Restructuring warehouse employment in the Oslo region

Abstract

The article examines changing employment relations in Norwegian warehouses, and conceptualises the increasing use of temporary agency workers as a redrawing of workplace geographies. The empirical basis for the analysis is four qualitative warehouse workplace studies, including focus group and interview data. The theoretical framework of the article combines an adapted version of the territory-place-scale-network (TPSN) framework developed by Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner and Martin Jones with the concepts of labour control and labour agency. The analysis shows how a networked recruitment system based on Swedish labour migrants, mediated via temporary work agencies, encourage workers to work their way through levels of employment insecurity in order to secure permanent employment. The article argues that the blurring and redrawing of legal boundaries through labour hire can be understood as a territorial strategy of control that affects the workplace as a scale of justice for trade unions. Moreover, the analysis shows how managerial control is conditioned by workers’ individual, habitual and collective agency.

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

“…Moving beyond the actions of trade unions, workers’ agency potential is understood to be influenced by ‘horizontal’ factors, including gender, age, caste, migrant status and social network in making and constraining agency (Carswell and De Neve, 2013) and the interaction between workers’ productive and reproductive obligations (Dutta, 2016). There have also been recent calls for understanding the difference between the agency potential of deliberate acts and that of the routine daily activities of workers, as both have the capacity to shape economic geography (Ağar and Böhm, 2018; Jordhus-Lier et al., 2018). Research on labour agency has expanded to consider the geographies of non-unionised workers, the influence of horizontal factors across and within various locations, scales and industries, and the many intersections, contradictions and conflicts which emerge as a result (Dutta, 2016; Hastings, 2016; Pattenden, 2016).…”

Process, mechanism and the project of economic geography

“…At the same time, a broader range of examples of research concerned with mechanisms of regulatory restructuring and individual and collective responses is missing, perhaps because much of this work is less overtly about neoliberalization and is conducted from the edges of EG: for example, research by labour geographers that aims to bring workers and their organizations back into analyses of uneven development at the local and regional scales (Herod, 2001; Jordhus-Lier et al, 2019); work on how immigration and migration policy regulate labour markets (Silvey, 2006; Strauss and McGrath, 2016; Wills et al, 2009); and studies of how the gendering of labour as a process operates through institutional, legal and market mechanisms (McDowell, 2017; Schwiter et al, 2018). Some of this work is less interested in meso-level processes per se than in how they connect inter alia worker agency and collective organization to ways of conceptualizing and theorizing macro-level processes and structures like capitalism.…”

Logistics: Situating flows in a spatial context

“…Related developments accelerated further with the rise of E‐commerce and the related establishment of new fulfilment or distribution centers, often considered a potential for local labour markets (Blix, ; Jordhus‐Lier, Underthun, & Zampoukos, ). Probably the most important case in this respect, and also most extensively discussed, is the online retailer Amazon.com.…”