Spaces of Work

Global Capitalism and Geographies of Labour

Noel Castree, Neil Coe, Kevin Ward, Michael Samers

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761972174, 9780761972167
• eBook ISBN: 9781446224199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Spaces of Work is an accessible examination of the role of labour in the modern world. The authors critically assess the present condition and future prospects for workers through the geographies of place, space and scale, and in conjunction with other more commonly studied components of the globalisation such as production, trade and finance.

Each chapter presents examples of labour practice from around the world, and across multiple sectors of work, not just Western manufacturing. In addition, the book features:

· further reading section with key questions

· glossary of key terms

· short summaries of the main theoretical approaches

· guide to further learning resouces

Spaces of Work is a key book for all social scientists interested in the contemporary state of labour, and the scope for progressive change within the capitalist system. Students of human geography, sociology, international political economy, economics and cultural studies will all find this an invaluable text.

Part One

GEOGRAPHIES OF LABOUR

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two The Social Relations of Labour: Working in a Capitalist World

Defining capitalist labour: workers as pseudo-commodities

Situating labour in the capitalist production process

Capitalist–worker relations: a field of tensions

The social regulation of the employer–worker nexus

Multiplying the actors: the role of ‘internal’ and ‘non-capitalist’ differences

Segmented labour markets, segmented workers

The complex politics of wage workers

Summary and prospect

Wage labour is a profoundly social activity. It is anything but a dry, technical process of assembling materials, making goods or delivering services. Even the most mundane, repetitive act of production implicates wage labourers in a number of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ social relationships with employers and fellow labourers respectively. It also entails links with groups and institutions outside the workplace, not to mention a range of non-capitalist social differences among people relating to gender, ethnicity, age and the like. It is this constellation of social relations, institutions and identities that this chapter explores. We start by identifying a set of commonalities among wage-workers before step-by-step exploring lines of social difference and division. In reality, the social dimensions of wage-work cannot be considered separately from the geographical dimensions. However, for the sake of clarity we defer consideration of the latter until Chapters 3 and 4.

DEFINING CAPITALIST LABOUR: WORKERS AS PSEUDO-COMMODITIES

If we abstract from the evident differences between millions of workplaces and firms worldwide we start to see the underlying logic that governs their activities. This logic is what we routinely call ‘the capitalist system’. This system doesn’t exist outside the myriad industries, workers and state bodies that together constitute it but is, rather, the precondition and result of their activities. It takes the following form:

In this system money (M) is advanced by owners of firms (capitalists) to purchase commodities (C) of two kinds, namely MP (means of production: buildings, machinery, raw materials etc.) and LP (the labour power of workers). This results in a process of production (P) leading to a new commodity or commodities (C*) which are then distributed and sold to consumers for the original sum of money advanced plus a profit (Δ). Part of this profit is then reinvested into further rounds of production and so on in a ceaseless process of accumulation.

There are several key things that distinguish this mode of producing goods and services from others past and present. First, capitalism is fundamentally growth orientated. Its goal is to generate more and more profits; all other ends are subordinate to this overriding one. Second, capitalism is an inherently competitive economic system. Within different economic sectors numerous firms constantly jostle to sell their commodities to consumers. Only in oligopolistic sectors can firms moderate the chill winds of competition. Third, this competitive ethic sets up powerful incentives for businesses to innovate their products and production processes. If these can be made cheaper or better then firms stand to make more profits and beat out their economic rivals.

So growth, competition and innovation are the life-blood of capitalism. It’s a profoundly dynamic, restless way of producing things. What has this got to do with labour? As the diagram above shows, labour is one input into the production process. It’s one means to the end of capital accumulation. More specifically, it takes the form of a commodity. This is what distinguishes labourers within a capitalist system from those in non-capitalist systems. All commodities have a use-value (that is, a practical function) and an exchange-value (that is, a price). The use-value of labourers is their capacity to work – to perform workplace tasks at certain skill levels for certain periods of time – in return for which their employers remunerate them. Unlike, say slavery, a capitalist does not buy rights to the person but to the person’s capacity to work.

This brings us to the difference between capitalist wage labour and ‘true’ commodities. Most commodities are non-sentient. Be they cars, computers or paper clips, they are typically material artefacts that can be made and disposed of as companies see fit. But labour is different: it is really a pseudo-commodity. As Michael Storper and Richard Walker (1989: 155) put it, ‘Labour differs fundamentally from real commodities because it is embodied in living, conscious human beings …’. This has three implications. First, it means that labourers are only temporarily commodities – except in those extreme and disturbing cases of bonded or indentured wage-workers (Bales, 1999). Each working day they assume the form of a commodity, but this does not alter the fact that they were not born and raised to be commodities. Wage-workers, because they are people and not tables or chairs, require happiness, sustenance, shelter, entertainment, good health and all the other ingredients of a life. This means that, unlike most other inputs into capitalist production, they have irreducible needs and a plethora of wants (though these may not always be met in practice). Second, because wage labourers are physiologically and mentally complex beings capable of independent thought and action – again, in contrast to most conventional commodities – they have agency. In the words of Ray Hudson (2001: 220), ‘Workers are active subjects, not passive objects …’. That is, within certain constraints, they can determine how well, for how long and under what conditions they are willing to work for employers (the sociologist Anthony Giddens has famously theorized social agency; we discuss his idea in Chapter 6). Finally, this means that wage workers – yet again, unlike other commodities – necessarily enter into a social relationship with their employers. In Marxian par-lance, this is a class relationship, since workers’ pseudo-commodity status is what distinguishes them as a social group from the relative minority of capitalists who purchase their labour power. It is a relationship that exists in the workplace and outside it, the combination of which defines the labour market: that is, the quantitative and qualitative matching of labour supply with the demand for labour among employers. This matching can occur directly between workers and employers or via so-called ‘labour market intermediaries’ who act to match workers with employers.

SITUATING LABOUR IN THE CAPITALIST PRODUCTION PROCESS

Understanding labour’s distinctiveness as a commodity helps us to understand its special place in the capitalist production process. Labour is the only commodity input to production that employers cannot treat as an object. The employee–employer relation that develops because labour is embodied is simultaneously necessary and problematic, at once a requirement and an obstacle. Another way of saying this is to observe that the relationship between employers and actual or potential employees in capitalist societies is a co-dependent one of cooperation and conflict. The two are indissociable; they are sides of a coin. But why is this?

The reasons have everything to do with how the ‘rules’ of capitalism position employers and employees differently in terms of their aims and objectives. Capitalists aim to make money: this is their raison d’être. From their perspective, workers are both a cost of production and a necessary input to production. Even today, wages are the highest single cost for most businesses worldwide. Meanwhile, it is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate wage-workers from most production processes. Some production tasks – such as designing aircraft or building houses – are either unamenable or only partly amenable to being done by machines, computers and the like. As Storper and Walker (1989: 160) argue, ‘Labor, as the [fundamental] factor in production …, can never be entirely replaced’. In any case, at the aggregrate level, if all capitalists were to significantly reduce their labour forces then they would lose their biggest market: namely, ordinary consumers (since workers not only earn money but spend it too). For these reasons businesses of all stripes require a sufficient number and calibre of workers both to undertake certain production tasks and to purchase commodities as part of their (and their families’) reproduction.

Yet all this said, for individual firms operating in a competitive environment, it is ‘rational’ to pursue some or all of a range of strategies that are not necessarily in the interests of all employees. Some of these will be workplace strategies (see Box 2.1). One is cutting or holding-down wages; another is displacing existing workers with more cost-effective machinery or a more effective division of tasks within the firm; still another is to exercise maximum control and surveillance over the workforce so that it performs at the required standard for as much of each working day as is possible. Some strategies are associated with adjusting the ‘boundaries’ of particular workplaces, either through the shifting of tasks to other workplaces within a firm, or through the outsourcing or subcontracting of tasks to workers in other firms. There are a variety of other strategies available, many of them pursued outside the workplace (such as groups of firms pressuring governments to reform labour laws in their interests). Together they comprise what Piven and Cloward (2000: 149) call the ‘power repertoires’ of capitalists. These vary between firms and economic sectors, as employers seek to get the most out of workers for the least cost (which is not necessarily to say cheaply). They come into play both when business is good (as in the Dyson case) and when it is not so good (as when the telecom giant Motorola suddenly laid off some 3,000 of its Scottish workers in mid-2001 because of oversupply in the European mobile phone market (The Guardian, 25 April 2001)). And they are undertaken by firms individually (as in the Dyson case) or collectively (for example through employer organizations like the UK Confederation of British Industry).

Box 2.1 Employment relations in the workplace

Employment relations in the workplace – and outside it – are two-way or ‘bilateral’. In all workplaces, there are employer–worker tensions between:

Worker autonomy	Management control
Training and skills development	No training, low skill
Good wages	Low wages
Fixed and few work hours	Long and variable hours
Promotion opportunities	No promotion prospects
Job security	Job insecurity
Full-time status	Part-time or temporary status
No Non-wage perks (e.g. a company pension)	non-wage perks
Good workplace facilities	Poor facilities

Employers tend to emphasize the right-hand attributes when they seek to reduce labour costs and those on the left when they wish to increase labour productivity. Additionally, within a single workplace, or among workplaces within a single firm, some workers may be subject to different treatment at the same time depending on their place within the production process. (Adapted from Gough, 2001: 19).

The precise balance of sticks and carrots that firms use to secure the right workers at a suitable price performing at appropriate productivity levels is a contingent matter. It always depends in part on how far workers are willing and able to comply with the demands of employers. On the one hand, workers need employers. In the contemporary world, the opportunities for non-waged employment are relatively few compared with those for paid work. Though we rarely stop to think about it, most people simply have little or no choice beyond their childhood and teenage years but to offer themselves as wage labourers. Indeed, a good deal of most people’s early life is spent doing things – like going to school – that help prepare them for a life of wage-work. The young are, in effect, ‘wage-workers-in-waiting’. But this does not mean that potential and actual workers lack choices or are completely at the beck-and-call of capitalist companies (though, as we’ll see later in the book many of them are in certain times and places). As we’ve already observed, labourers have agency. The fact that employers need workers (as much as the other way around) gives the latter a degree of potential control over the terms and conditions of their labour. Workers too have ‘power repertoires’. These can be utilized inside or outside of the workplace to either pressurize (for example, by going on strike) or support (for example, by being willing to be retrained or relocated) their employers (see Box 2.2). And, mirroring the repertoires of the latter, they can be pursued within or between individual workplaces and firms. Trades unions have, historically, been the major institution through which these worker repertoires have been channelled (Box 2.3).

Box 2.2 Power repertoires

According to Piven and Cloward (2000: 413), ‘power repertoires’ are ‘historically and geographically distinct power strategies employed by capital and labour separately and together’. Putting spatio-temporal specificity aside for one moment, we can distinguish different types of power strategies pursued by employees and their wage-workers. First, we can distinguish physical from non-physical strategies. Examples of the former are new machines that are more productive than workers or strikes against employers. In the latter case, persuasion is involved by one party to gain consent from the other over some new arrangement (for example, a wage freeze or shorter working hours). Second, we can distinguish workplace from non-workplace strategies. Examples of the latter include companies and labour unions pressuring governments for changes in employment law. Third, we can distinguish incremental from non-incremental strategies. In contrast to the former, the latter are strategies that are ‘sprung’ suddenly, such as the earlier mentioned decision by Motorola to lay-off 3,000 Scottish workers. They give the other party little time to think or act. Fourth, we can distinguish official from unofficial strategies. The first of these are well-established and legal strategies, the second more original and/or of dubious legality. Workers sabotaging machinery or employers breaching minimum wage legislation are examples of the latter. Fifth, we can distinguish reactive from proactive strategies. The former are resistance strategies deployed when the other party has the upper hand, the former control strategies when the other party is relatively weak. Finally, and for workers only, we can distinguish accommodatory and transformative strategies. The former are strategies that aim to get workers the best possible deal within the limits of a capitalist world economy. The latter, more radically, attempt to take workers out of capitalism altogether. In theory, this can be done via a revolution (see the comments on this in the Preface) or, less ambitiously, by groups of workers ‘de-linking’ from capitalism and seeking non-waged ways of making a living while capitalism lives on (see Chapter 6). In all cases, the power of employers and employees are able to exert over one another is a relative not absolute affair. As Held et al. (1999: 20) argue, ‘Power has to be understood as a relational phenomena.’ Thus a strategy that worked for employers or workers in one place and time may not achieve the same results elsewhere or later. See the introduction to Sharp et al. (2000) for a survey of theories of power and resistance.

Box 2.3 Employer and worker organizations

In order to formalize the employer-employee relationship within and between workplaces, firms, and industries at a variety of scales, both sides of the relationship have developed their own organizations and institutions. On the employer side, there are two key types of institutions. First, there are those that bring together the common interests of a broad range of businesses in a particular place. These may be locally oriented, such as Chambers of Commerce, or nationally focused as with the UK’s CBI (Confederation of British Industry). Second, there is a broad range of sector-based trade associations such as the UK’s Computing Services and Software Association (CSSA). While typically nationally based, such organizations may also be members of international organizations. For example, the World Information Technology and Services ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms used in book
• Preface: the landscape of labour
• A note on geographical terminology
• one Orientations
• PART 1: GEOGRAPHIES OF LABOUR
• PART 2: LABOUR IN PLACE
• PART 3: RE-SCALING LABOUR
• PART 4: WORKERS, GEOGRAPHICAL SCALE AND IN/JUSTICE
• Glossary
• Appendix
• Further reading and key questions
• List of websites and other learning resources
• Bibliography
• Index