Labor

Andrew Herod

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780745663876, 9780745663869
• eBook ISBN: 9781509524129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Labor is the source of all wealth. Without workers, the world's natural resources cannot be transformed into finished goods and services cannot be delivered. Labor, though, is a uniquely important resource because, unlike others, it is capable of altering its own conditions of existence and of challenging how it is used.

In this book, Andrew Herod offers an original and wide-ranging analysis of labor as a multifaceted and truly global resource. Opening with a rich overview of the migration streams and demographic trends that have shaped the planetary distribution of labor, he goes on to explore how globalization and the growth of precarious work are impacting working people's lives in both "Old Economy" and "New Economy" employment sectors. He concludes by surveying some of the ways in which working people are taking action to improve their lives, including forming trade unions and other labor organizations, occupying factories in places like Argentina and Greece, and establishing anti-sweatshop campaigns.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the state of labor in today's global economy.

CHAPTER ONE
A Resource Unlike Any Other

Labor has long been thought of as a key resource shaping how economies work. Classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo conceived of resources as falling into one of three categories: natural resources (minerals, flora and fauna, water, land, and so forth, which are provided by the Earth but which can be transformed into finished products for use by people); the capital stock, by which they meant humanly produced goods (machinery, tools, buildings, etc.) used to produce other goods; and labor, which they understood to be the human effort (both physical and mental) required to transform the natural world. In such a view, “labor” came to be understood, by implication, as referring also to the people doing this work. For his part, Karl Marx, who was, like Smith and Ricardo, a classical economist, viewed resources pretty much entirely in terms of labor, suggesting that a society’s key resources – what he called the “productive forces” – were labor (workers who controlled their own capacity to labor, or their “labor power”), the subjects of labor (the commodities produced when human labor transforms the natural world), and the instruments of labor (machinery, tools, etc.). Within this framework, Marx viewed capital as simply “congealed labor,” that is to say, the surplus value extracted from workers in the capitalist production process. For their part, the neoclassical economists of the late nineteenth century saw resources in terms of the factors of production (land, labor, and capital) outlined by the classical economists, but they interpreted them in slightly different ways. Whereas for classical economists the worth of a commodity is a reflection of the amount of labor time involved in producing it (an approach known as the “labor theory of value”), for neoclassical economists the “value” of a commodity is not a reflection of the amount of labor incorporated within it but, rather, its price – i.e., what someone is willing to pay for it. Put another way, for classical economists a commodity’s value (the amount of labor time incorporated within it) and its price (the amount of money that someone will pay to purchase it) are different measures of its worth; for neoclassical economists, on the other hand, a commodity’s value is measured in terms of its price and not the labor time incorporated in it. In other words, for neoclassical economists price = value = price, whereas for classical economists price ≠ value ≠ price (for more on these differences, see Wolff and Resnick 1987). More recently, some economists have suggested that, in addition to the three broad sets of resources of land, labor, and capital, there is a fourth: human capital (i.e., skills and education). Some others have argued that energy should be considered a separate resource. Within such discussions, different economists have argued over which of these various resources should be considered the most important.

Below, I am not going to argue for which resource is most important – though my personal feeling is that labor is the primus inter pares resource, for it is the only one capable of proactively transforming its own conditions of use. Rather, what I want to do is to suggest that labor is a resource unlike any other for one specific reason: it is sentient. Without doubt, some might aver that certain other resources also have sentience – I am thinking here of fauna like cattle, which can be used both as implements of labor (drawing plows, for instance) and as inputs into other production processes (their meat can be used for food, their skins for making leather, bones can be used as fertilizer, etc.). However, although both cattle and humans are obviously sentient, there is an important difference in their sentience: while animals clearly have consciousness, what distinguishes them from humans is the latter’s capacity for proactive planning – as Marx (1867[1967]: 174) put it, “what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” This human sentience means that we must view labor in two ways: as an object of analysis (i.e., as a resource that awaits use by a potential employer) and as a subject in analysis (i.e., as a resource capable of altering its own conditions of existence and of challenging how it is used by others).

In considering how labor is a resource unlike others, it is perhaps helpful to turn to the writing of two geographers, Michael Storper and Richard Walker (1983), who sought to theorize how labor markets operate. Although their analysis focuses upon commodities rather than resources, their approach is nonetheless useful for our purposes here. Specifically, in discussing why labor is a commodity unlike others, they argued (1983: 4) that what they called “true commodities” (raw materials and manufactured goods) can generally “be industrially produced, purchased at a consistent price and standard quality, owned outright and employed in a strictly technical manner, however and whenever the owner wishes,” although they recognized that this is “somewhat less true for plants and animals than inanimate objects.” As a result, these types of commodities can be understood largely in terms of performance versus cost – how much must I pay for a good of such-and-such quality? Labor, though, is quite different. Thus, although it takes a commodity form in that it can be bought and sold, labor “is not a true commodity; it is a pseudo-commodity.”¹ This is because its sentience means that it has the capacity to shape any system of production within which it is imbricated and to challenge the conditions under which its use is bought and sold. Labor’s sentience also means that it has the ability to play active roles in reproducing itself biologically and socially and to control, at least in part, the situations in which it does so (unlike resources like cattle and coal). Hence, Storper and Walker asserted, “Labour is fundamentally different from every other production input because people are conscious subjects of production.”

In drawing inspiration from Storper and Walker, we can identify several important dimensions of labor as a resource, all of which relate to labor’s sentience. The first relates to “conditions of purchase.” For sure, like other commodities, labor is purchased on the market. In this regard, it takes on a commodity form and has a price for purchase – the wage rate. However, as Storper and Walker indicated (1983: 5):

[T]he price of labour is normally more complex than just wages [for the] conditions of purchase for labour include such things as safety and health, security and regularity of employment, prospects for advancement and fringe benefits, etc. Such considerations never enter the picture where true commodities, such as forklifts, are concerned. Yet they often matter more than wages to workers, and they certainly invoke real costs for whoever must bear the burden of their presence or absence, workers or capitalists.

The point, then, is that although true commodities like iron ore or oil and the pseudo-commodity of labor both have a price, and that price will vary based upon the quantity and the quality of the resource being purchased, only one of these actually cares about the nature of what is being purchased and how. Coal or gold or a cow do not concern themselves about their purchase price nor their quality as a resource. Labor, on the other hand, usually cares deeply about both its purchase price (i.e., its wage) and how much it is expected to work for that wage (i.e., its quality to its employer).

The second aspect of labor that makes it a different type of commodity/resource from others is its “performance capacity.” By this, Storper and Walker are referring to its cost compared to its productivity, rather than just to its purchase price. Thus, although two workers may be hired for the same wage, one may be of higher quality (i.e., more productive) than the other. Whereas other types of resources may also vary in quality – some sources of gold are purer than others, for instance – in such cases, their performance capacity can more easily be determined ahead of time by scientific or other analysis. The performance capacity of workers, however, is often not known ahead of time because there are many factors shaping their quality, including their level of technical expertise, as well as more nebulous characteristics like their creativity and persistence in the face of new challenges, their patience and emotional stability, their mood on any given day, whether or not they are sick, and so forth, all of which will affect how productive they are. Moreover, this productivity can vary over the course of their work day – they may be more productive in the morning but then start to tire around lunchtime until they have something to eat, at which point they perk up until it is time to end work. It can also vary over the course of their working life. Furthermore, unlike the quality of other resources, many of these characteristics are also under the direct control of workers themselves, who may be upset with their boss or spouse on one day but not another, which can affect how hard and/or carefully they tackle their work.

Third, the issue of labor control is quite different from that of how other resources are controlled and used. Unlike natural resources like oil or iron ore, which do not consciously “resist” being incorporated into the production process and whose “resistance” can usually be determined ahead of time through a knowledge of chemistry and physics, or resources like animals, which may have some capacity to resist how they are used but can simply be slaughtered if they prove too troublesome, workers can dramatically contest the conditions under which they are incorporated into the production process, even after their labor time has been purchased. Thus, even if it were possible to know ahead of time all the potential issues involved in using labor as a resource (a worker’s skill level, emotional stability, degree of patience, etc.), once it is paid for, workers’ actual performance capacity is not the same as their potential performance capacity because they have the ability consciously to defy their employer’s control over them and to limit their work effort. As Storper and Walker (1983: 6) put it:

Workers, unlike machines [and, I would add, other types of resources], must willingly engage their capacity for work and have the power to resist their use by [their employer]. The intensity, continuity and quality of work that can be got out of workers, with what degree of supervision, monitoring and punishment, is of fundamental importance to the employer. The usual term for the problem of eliciting performance is “labour control.”

As they point out, however, such control is a doubleedged sword, for “it is not enough that workers follow the employer’s orders; they must actively participate in production.” Consequently, “capitalist production contains a fundamental contradiction between the need for labour control and the need for thinking, creative working people.”

A fourth way in which labor is unlike other resources relates to its ability to reproduce itself, socially and biologically, on a daily and generational basis, largely beyond the control of whomever might hire it. Certainly, workers who toil for someone else (as opposed to those who are self-employed) spend part of their time during any given work day, and during their working lives, under the watchful eye of their employer or, in the case of peasant farmers, perhaps under the gaze of their feudal lord. In this regard, how they reproduce themselves socially and biologically can be controlled, to a degree, by their employer, who can set rules concerning how they must dress, with whom they can socialize, how they are to behave in the workplace, and even when they may go to the toilet. However, once workers leave the workplace, they are usually beyond their employer’s gaze and so the latter does not have such direct control over them. They are thus much freer to behave as they wish and to shape their own mode of self-reproduction. Consequently, “a substantial part of labour’s reproduction takes place in the home and community, beyond the reach of the employer … In other words, workers cannot be industrially produced as are true commodities” (Storper and Walker 1983: 6).

Although Storper and Walker’s analysis – of how labor is a pseudo-commodity unlike other commodities – is helpful for thinking about how it is a resource unlike others, I would add a fifth consideration: not only is labor involved in the production of goods and services, but it is also an active and self-conscious consumer of them. Other resources do not share this characteristic. This means that labor is an important element not just in the production of profit but also in its realization and thus for the circulation of capital and the continuation of the capitalist system. This provides another way in which we can think of labor as having a dual character unlike other resources – it is involved in both the active production of goods and also their active consumption. In this way, the factors outlined above that play an important role in shaping labor as a resource in production also shape it as consumer. Hence, labor as consumer makes conscious decisions about what to consume in ways similar to how it decides how to behave in the production process. Equally, labor as consumer is distributed in a geographically uneven manner across the economic landscape in much the same way as is labor as a producer, while its consumption patterns are differentially shaped by its geographical location (goods available in some places may not be available elsewhere).

Having outlined why labor is a resource quite unlike others, in the next two sections I turn to the issue of how we might think of labor geographically, for any understanding of a resource must fundamentally be about its distribution across the Earth’s surface. As we shall see in Chapter 2, labor is more available in some places than in others. This is important because, much as the spatial distribution of other resources has had important implications for patterns of local economic and political development, so, too, does the availability of labor shape the possibilities for development in different places. How labor is spatially differentiated and embedded in the economic landscape, then, is an important aspect of understanding it as a resource. This means that we must think both historically (how does labor as a resource develop over time?) and also geographically (how does it develop over and in space?). In thinking about labor geographically, however, it is important to distinguish two important ways of doing so: seeing labor as both an object of analysis and a subject in analysis. The difference between these two relates fundamentally to the matter of labor’s sentience and its capacity to adapt itself to the geographical contexts within which it finds itself.

Labor as Object

One way to think about labor as a resource that is deeply geographically differentiated and unevenly spread across the landscape (i.e., that has both a history and a geography) is to approach the matter from the viewpoint of those who hire workers and/or wish to catalogue their characteristics in some way. In this perspective, labor is an object of analysis. Working people are seen not so much as sentient beings capable of making decisions that can shape how the economic landscape is produced but, rather, either in the abstract terms of how they fit into the locat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Resource Unlike Any Other
• 2 Labor in Global Context
• 3 Globalization and Labor
• 4 Neoliberalism and Working Precariously
• 5 From Drudge Work to Emancipated Workers?
• 6 Meet the New Economy – Same as the Old Economy?
• 7 Workers Fight Back
• 8 Concluding Thoughts
• Selected Readings
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement