Making a Living in Europe

Human Geographies of Economic Change

Alan Townsend

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134825547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Will 'making a Living' remain a dream for the deprived and excluded?
Jobs are one of Europe's most important problems. Employment provides the basic means of distributing wealth in society, in providing for families, and ensuring pensions for the elderly. Yet unemployment, and increasingly 'non-employment', continues at near record levels in the European Union.
Making a Living in Europe shows how the culture of work has been transformed in the industrialised nations of the EU. Exploring the relationship between employment change, society and economic restructuring, the shift toward 'flexible' work for women in services, away from traditional industrial jobs for men, is demonstrated within three key sectors: business services, retailing and tourism. The outcome of change is discussed in terms of shifts of people and jobs from urban to rural areas.
Europe must be understood in the context of the new Europe, of change in the USA and of global change. Drawing on examples from UK and European Regions and USA, the author challenges long-standing assumptions about changes in economy and society and highlights the need for stronger local and European policies to reduce inequality at large and contribute positively to local people's struggles to make a living in Europe.

Part I
RESTRUCTURING, FLEXIBILITY AND UNEMPLOYMENT

1
PRINCIPAL THEMES

Making a living is at the centre of our lives. Jobs are one of Europe’s most important topics, with their obverse of unemployment, or increasingly ‘nonemployment’, when people of working age have simply stopped searching for work. Employment provides the basic means of distributing wealth in society, in providing income for young families and ensuring pensions for elderly people. Paid work is the basis of leisure spending or a town’s provision of services of all kinds.

This book explores and challenges some longstanding assumptions made by geographers and others about jobs. At the core of the work are the changes in the economy that most affect employment. Gone are the days when economic geographers could comfortably concentrate on the unionised work of men in manual factory work—that is no longer typical. The book integrates in one text the central issues of change: the loss of factory jobs (‘deindustrialisation’; Chapter 4), the relative growth of service jobs (‘tertiarisation’; Chapter 5) and the growth of women’s jobs (‘feminisation’; Chapter 6). Further chapters explore in more depth the three most relevant sectors, the two that consistently show the strongest growth of jobs (‘producer services’; Chapter 7 and tourism; Chapter 9) and one chosen for massive change in the quality of jobs (retailing; Chapter 8).

These changes, providing the core, Part II, of the volume, shape the overall total of jobs and so both produce and counter the growth of unemployment and low pay in individual types of area. As the European Union is increasingly a single functioning unit for economic purposes, with many increasing similarities between member states, it is chosen to provide the framework in which the study proceeds. The sectoral studies are therefore prefaced by a base-line study of the problems of employment across all sectors in the EU area, Part I, while the outcomes of the sectoral studies across different types of area (urban to rural) are assessed, with overall implications for the EU as a whole, in Part III.

This first chapter will set the context in human geography for the principal themes of the book, ‘sectoral change’ and ‘flexibilisation’. Chapter 2 will introduce the implications of unemployment, and Chapter 3 will undertake a spatial approach to Europe’s position in global economic trends.

The redistribution of work has changed relations between men and women. The culture of work in industrialised countries has been transformed through reduction in the regular demand for men’s manual work and change in women’s time-budgets to include paid work. This is amply recorded in the discourse of the first of several regions that we visit.

A voice from the past

The day after I left school I went straight down the pit, with most of my mates. I had eleven good year down Brancepeth Colliery before it closed in 1964. The Coal Board gave me a job six mile away at Brandon, before it too closed—hitting a fault they said but we all knew this area had had it. I was lucky that I knew Jimmy Knight running wagons for Hunwick Brickworks, and I did all right there for a couple of year before he went bust and I went on the dole. My sister-in-law made enquiries and I got a job with the Council bin-men. That was tough work, but reliable, until these Tories made them put the work out to tender. The union thought it might be all right, but I was one of them made redundant, with only a little compensation. That were five year ago; I’d had some back strain, and I went on the invalidity. Best thing that could have happened really, when I was 53, because there’s no future round here for anyone over 40—if that, and you see all these youngsters roaming round at night with nothing to go to in the morn-ing; should get out like my son who’s a teacher down London.

(Member of Willington Working Men’s Club, Co. Durham, England, 1995)

The speaker is typically silent about his wife, who will probably survive him as a widow. Willington is my home, in one of the longest recognised UK problem areas. I am a District Councillor and Chair of the Planning Committee as well as a geographer, which defines my interests in change both in Willington and Europe. Our old primary industry (in this case mining) has been succeeded not by secondary (manufacturing) industries but by an uncertain mixture of tertiary (service) jobs and underemployment—a familiar tale across Europe. The men’s jobs at the big colliery went when it closed in 1964 and our 5,400 villagers now have only 820 local jobs, occupied mainly by women. Those men in jobs travel to work across much of County Durham. However, paid work for men is increasingly confined to the prime age groups, as nearly a quarter of men are still unemployed between 21 and 24, and half have left the labour market at 55–64. A quarter of the whole population reported a ‘limiting long-term illness’ to the 1991 Census of Population.

At the end of this chapter comes a comparable tale from Southern Italy, another classic problem region, although the details are completely different. Longstanding migration from the land was only partly met by past industrialisation policies, and growth of service jobs has failed to prevent continuing high unemployment, in this case especially among young women. In the 1990s high unemployment has spread to many new areas of the EU, notably in Germany and Scandinavia.

My journeys between North-East England and other areas of the EU such as Denmark or Southern Italy take me into totally different realms of cultural geography. These regions have reached their present human geographies by different routes, and the influence of different inherited social, cultural and political practices on the pattern of jobs is strong. However, two points arise.

First, the reality of the Working Men’s Club is partly captured by the local job statistics. In understanding human experience, statistics of employment can help us compare regions and countries of the European Union (EU), using due care and attention to the dangers of the data.

Second, whatever the cultural and historical contrasts within the EU and whatever the dangers of sweeping social science ‘laws’, different regions are, in their experience of making a living, facing similar constellations of trends — such as redundancy or service employment growth—in their directions of employment change.

MAIN THEMES

My aim in this book is to understand the future of places in industrialised countries, in terms of these directions of employment and economic change at large. These prospects depend on the EU and its members’ national economies as a whole. More tangibly, however, they turn on the particular mix of sectors found in the individual place, perhaps in business services, tourism or manufacturing. The changing division of labour by sector, gender and place is my main theme, with the more flexible uses of labour in a society more oriented to consumption, leisure and services. The context is of unemployment and nonemployment as they exist and as they enter future policies of the EU.

The future of individual places also hinges on regional planning by the EU, national and local governments, and more fashionably on community initiatives in local development and employment (CEC, 1995a). All member states evolved measures by which they attempt to correct unemployment and weakness in the economies of constituent regions and sub-regions. Not only do these schemes make additional finance available to attract companies but they may invest in transport, water supplies, training facilities or telecommunications. All areas will normally make planning provision and forecasts for their future needs, say in terms of the roads or industrial land to be created in a given forward period. A ‘jobs gap’ used to be calculated for this purpose, by assuming that decline in particular sectors would have an effect on unemployment and that nearly all men would continue to seek work. Such assessments must now include the quality of work, threatened as this is by strong tendencies toward ‘flexibilisation’.

Two kinds of restructuring may be seen in Europe.

Sectoral change occurs as service jobs replace factory, mining and farm work. Few areas still have an expanding total of manufacturing jobs. Industrialisation was seen as the ‘solution’ to local and regional problems. Now we experience ‘deindustrialisation’, the net loss of industrial jobs or of export production, and too little thinking about possible futures. I agree with Martin (1994:3): remarkably, even the most fashionable theories have ‘barely recognised the service-based regional economies’ of most European capital regions. I shall not only explore the ‘withering’ of the old conventional jobs, but ask where continuing jobs will be. I shall compare the human effects of change in important sub-sectors of the economy such as financial and producer services, retailing and tourism. Whatever the starting points in different areas, the universal direction of change in the industrialised world is toward services, women’s and less conventional jobs, and often from urban to rural areas,‘counter-urbanisation’ (Champion, 1989).

Flexibilisation comes about in many ways in different sectors as employers seek to remain competitive or efficient through adapting the volume and content of their work to changing demand. Workers in part-time, temporary and self-employed work may take over from those in safe, full-time jobs, which accounts for much of the new levels of fear felt widely by employees in the 1990s. The EU is not uniform. ‘Formal’ work has never been as important in Southern as in northern Europe (Stratigaki and Vaiou, 1994). However, the whole future of the EU is indissolubly bound up with the quality of jobs that are being generated and with the continuing problem of unemployment.

PAST ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY—WAS IT HUMAN?

I have chosen deliberately the sub-title ‘human geographies of economic change’. To pursue the above task we must start by appreciating, even in the 1990s, that economic geographers have tended both to ignore the human aspects of change and to explore theories only for the manufacturing sector.

The principal reason for studying the location and growth of economic activities must be for their effects on daily life, all the more critical in a world of underemployment. In economic geography, human beings have often been silent. Much commercial geography dealt exclusively with world commodity distributions and international trade. Labour market studies were normally only a sub-set of industrial geography. Labour supply achieved merely a recognised deviation from the optimum location of an industry as modelled by Weber (1929), and played no part as such in the work of Loesch (1954). It was only during the ‘long boom’ of expansion after the Second World War, when labour became extremely scarce in an era of full employ ment in much of western Europe, that labour attained a premium as an input to industrial location decisions. Such decisions could, however, be influenced through government regional policies, as in the UK or Southern Italy, to redress regional imbalances,often crudely measured through unemployment rates for the filling of the ‘jobs gap’ by new vacancies of whatever kind.

Massey (1984) deployed Marxist concepts to display a ‘spatial division of labour’ in the exploitation of space by multi-site industrial corporations. A single corporation might rely on established skilled labour at one plant in a northern French industrial town, on routine work from a former agricultural workforce at a plant established for the purpose in Brittany, on available graduate staff in an environmentally attractive area such as the French Alps for research and development and laboratories, and on well-trained administrative staff in Paris for head office functions. Each of these functions would exploit the past role of the area and in turn shape its class and income distribution. Massey showed how certain areas were incorporated only for their semi-skilled labour, including many areas to which industry spread in Southern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these same corporations then made use of labour in low income countries, contributing to a ‘Global Shift’ of industrial output (Dicken, 1986).

The selective ‘downsizing’ of these corporations in more prosperous countries through massive job cuts (Townsend and Peck, 1985) was accompanied by two tendencies in research. Those geographers who turned to the study of small firms focused’…not directly on small firms as people with psychological and social characteristics. Instead the tendency has been to treat employment as net additions or deductions from an abstract entity—the labour force’ (Curran and Stanworth, 1986). Mainstream geographers stressed employers’ use of plant and labour in more flexible ways, a valid approach save that they concentrated almost exclusively on the industrial economy when those jobs were declining and the concept applied to many more people in the service sector.

Labour market questions may be best seen only as a subordinate part, a local end-product, of change. Much analysis of the location of services has always and rightly been focused on market issues rather than any considerations of labour supply. Domination of the la...