Moral Matters: De‐Romanticising Worker Agency and Charting Future Directions for Labour Geography

Abstract

The rise of labour geography over the last 20 years has ensured that labour politics, worker rights and employment‐related struggles have remained strong themes in economic geography. This article provides an updated review of labour geography's development, charting its expansion from an early focus on organised spatial ‘resistance’ at a range of scales, to a more varied project incorporating a wider range of analytical and empirical inquiries. Despite this progression the paper suggests that work is still needed to address a gap in moral considerations within labour geography as a whole. Specifically a moral economy approach is offered as a means of explaining the decision‐making processes/rationales behind worker actions in the context of particular struggles. This includes a necessary focus on less celebratory, ethical or successful forms of coping with labour market challenges on the part of workers than have typically been discussed in the case studies of labour geography.

Labour Geographies of Workplace Restructuring: An Intra‐Labour Analysis

“…)—the “embodiment of global integrations” (Ellen‐Smith and Winders :60)—and exposed complex relationships of opportunity and exploitation in the Global South (Carswell and De Neve ; Werner ). New spatial divisions of labour and industry dis/investment have inspired scrutiny of moralistic questions around how decisions and actions of workers, firms, and states made in a given time and place can have major consequences for distant communities (Hastings ). In short, global approaches have illustrated the major constraints facing working people, including how local places and labour markets are attached to a world of uneven flows, structures, and power relations (Bair and Werner ).…”

“…However, morale problems were made worse as vestiges of workforce cooperation evaporated and in time placed 25 jobs at risk when senior managers cited the dysfunction as a reason for increasing the use of maintenance subcontractors. Consistent with approaching agency as an analytical, political, and moral issue (Hastings ), an intra‐labour focus helps articulate the different capacities for, and constraints upon, individual workers seeking to navigate overarching workplace structures, power relations, and social life matters to affect positive change. Attention now turns to the lived experiences of redundancy.…”

“…In shaping agreeable outcomes, the actions of VR workers involved a degree of compliance with company plans to shed jobs and re‐orient production around a more flexible workforce (Siemiatycki ). But VR workers also argued their actions had a moral, intra‐labour grounding (Hastings ), supporting continued employment—and agency—of colleagues “more needing of the job” (Harry, interview, 2012). Using the lens of intra‐labour agency, individual capacities to rework redundancy towards a lasting material benefit rested on a direct employment relationship and union bargained rights; residual skills coverage in work crews; acceptance of EOIs from managers; the timing of capital‐initiated restructuring, and social factors such as age, time to planned retirement, financial positions of households, and lifestyle expectations (Gardiner et al.…”

“…Critical reviews urged for a move beyond union–management relations and more robust theorising of labour agency, particularly its geographic biases, social efficacy, and structural constraints (Castree ; Mitchell ). Responding to limitations and a shifting political economy of accumulation, labour geography has since pluralised across a wider range of labouring contexts and conditions (Hastings ; Strauss ). In the last decade, research has sought to ensure theory claims around labour agency are firmly based in the concrete realities of contemporary work and employment (Coe and Jordhus‐Lier ).…”

Corrigendum: Moral matters: De‐romanticizing worker agency and charting future directions for labor geography

“…After online publication of this article (Hastings, ), an error was identified on the last line of the first page (page 307) and in the reference list on page 318. The surname should read “Qureshi” instead of “Quershi”.…”