From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor's Spatial Fix and theGeography of Capitalism

Abstract

Mainstream neoclassical economic geography and its Marxist critique have largely failed to incorporate active conceptions of working class people in their explanations of the location of economic activities. Neoclassical approaches tend to conceive of workers simply as factors of location, whereas Marxist approaches primarily focus on how capital structures the economic landscape in its search for profit and frequently relegate labor to the status of “variable capital.” Both approaches present Geographies of Labor. They have not really examined how workers try to make industrial landscapes. In contrast, I argue that workers have an interest in how the economic geography of capitalism is made; consequently, they seek to impose what we might call “labor's spatial fix” and so play an active role in the unevenly developed geography of capitalism. Examining how workers try to develop their own spatial fixes allows us to incorporate a more active sense of workers as geographical agents into understandings of the production of space under capitalism. Recognizing that workers' efforts to create “labor's spatial fix” are significant allows us to theorize how workers attempt to make space as an integral part of their social existence (a Labor Geography) and so to write less capital‐oriented economic geographies.

The Old and the Stubborn? Firm Characteristics and Relocation in the Netherlands

“…The longer the firm has been in this particular place, the harder it is to relocate out of this place without experiencing negative effects (e.g. Kessides, 1990;Cox and Mair, 1989;Herod, 1997). This 'spatial fix' strengthens forces of inertia.…”

“…Therefore, it is expected that the spatial environment (or surroundings) of the firm partly determines the survival (getting older) of firms. As firms are located on the same spot longer, they create close ties with local suppliers, capital suppliers and customers (Hoogstra and van Dijk, 2004), also seen as spatial fix (Herod, 1997) and lock-in effects (Gulati et al, 2000). Creating these ties takes time and to break down these ties can be disastrous for the effectiveness of firms (Brouwer, 2005).…”

The Ties of Place

“…This same study (1999: 239) also concluded that, despite trade liberalization, the United States-Canadian border "imposes barriers to arbitrage comparable to 1,700 miles of physical space." Such observations reinforce the theoretical contributions made by radical economic geographers since the 1980s (Herod 1991(Herod , 1994(Herod , 1997(Herod , 1998(Herod , 2001Massey 1994;Harvey 1982Harvey , 1989Harvey , 2001Peck 1996;Smith 1984). Although these theorists are divided over the relative contributions of capital and labour to the construction of what Harvey (1982: 421) calls the "historical geography of capitalism," they are broadly united in conceiving the latter as "a social process" whereby "productive forces and social relations .…”

Detailing spaces and processes of resistance: Working women in Dundee’s jute industry

“…I look not only at trade union sanctioned protest but also at non-union forms of resistance. As Herod (1997) has stated, whilst trade unions are certainly powerful workers' institutions, they do not hold a monopoly as instruments of the expression of workers' interests.…”

“…The geographically situated and embedded nature of workers' lives and the spatiality of trade unionism is now clearly recognised and, amongst others, Andrew Herod's writings on the geographies of the labour process have demonstrated the shift to understanding the spatial strategies used by workers and trade unions and the ways in which they use and create space, actively shaping economic landscapes (Herod 1994(Herod , 1997(Herod , 1998(Herod and 2001. Indeed, a far greater engagement between geographers and industrial relations scholars has been called for (Herod 2002).…”