Labor Markets

At its most basic, a labor market is where labor supply (workers) and labor demand (employers) come together. Although this definition is suggestive of a marketplace where workers advertise themselves to potential employers, in reality, workers' ability to sell their labor is linked to the skills and experience that they have (human capital); the awareness that they have about the availability of a particular job, which is largely tied to their social networks; the location of the job in relation to their home or their willingness to undertake a migration to be within commuting distance of the employer; and also their own domestic responsibilities. Likewise, because not all employees are the same, employers must discriminate between those who are selling their labor. One way they do this is by using the social networks of their existing employees to find other potential workers. Employers also make judgments about the employability and skill level of individuals based on sociospatial positionality (e.g., gender, race, class, age). For example, employers may choose locations for factories to capture the labor of Asian women, partly on the belief that Asian women have nimble fingers and are therefore more suitable to sewing tasks or computer chip production than other social groups who are perhaps located in other places or in other social groupings (Pearson 2000). Likewise, as Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt illustrate, employers may shape their employment conditions by offering “mother's hours” that are based on locally understood gendered household divisions of labor, a strategy that also limits the potential for women to earn overtime wages. What this suggests is that the labor market is not a single location but is instead a combination of the spatiality of both workers and employers.

Perhaps most famously, Henry Ford recognized the interlinked nature of labor and consumption. Mass production of his automobiles not only meant significant changes in both the way that workers' jobs were defined in relation to production but also meant that economies of scale could be achieved that would enable those with lower wages to be able to purchase the goods that they were involved in producing. While Ford was not the only manufacturer to understand and capitalize on the consumer potential of his workforce and the benefits of mass production, the way that he organized production around specific tasks in an assembly-line format, such that workers no longer were skilled in producing the whole object but instead were skilled in one aspect of production, is referred to as Fordism (see Gramsci 1971). Many argue that the overall division of labor into separate, repetitive tasks leads ultimately to a de-skilling of labor more generally (e.g., Braverman 1974). Others argue, however, that because production is a dynamic process and because competition relies on innovation in the production process as well as innovation in the goods and services being produced, what results are a re-skilling and a resocializing of labor (see Attwell 1987).

The process of labor-market change has important implications for how workers are able to sell [Page 834]their labor in the labor market. First, employers may seek out labor markets in low-waged regions. A good example of this is textiles production. Historically, the United Kingdom and the New England region of the United States were the center of textiles manufacturing. As recently as 2001, Marks and Spencer, a large high-street retailer in the United Kingdom, purchased all its clothing from producers in the United Kingdom. However, due to competition from other retailers who sourced their goods from producers in Asia and could offer similar products at a lower price, Marks and Spencer among others subsequently dropped U.K. suppliers in favor of offshore producers. Between 1988 and 2001, the United Kingdom lost over 40 percent of its textile jobs (a loss of over 339,000 jobs). Second, those producers remaining in what are locally considered declining industries often restructure their employment by changing the way work is done through the introduction of new technologies or by seeking out a workforce that is socially distinct from that traditionally associated with the industry. For example, shifting employment from a largely white, native workforce to a largely immigrant workforce (as was the case in textiles production in the United Kingdom) or changing the gender of the employment by altering the conditions of work (e.g., by offering mother's hours rather than overtime). The result of this restructuring is often a decline in the number of workers, as is often the case with technological changes to the production process, or a decline in wages or both. For workers, these changes mean that there are new labor markets in those places that are economically less well-off. Likewise, in the labor markets, change in the old location occurs such that a new group of people may be able to sell their labor power, whereas those who had traditionally had a place find themselves redundant in the local labor market. Importantly, goods such as textiles do not disappear from the marketplace when labor market re-skilling occurs. What this means for consumers in places where industry has re-skilled is that there is often a greater geographical and social separation between the consumer and the goods being produced. As a result, consumers have less understanding of the conditions under which those goods are produced than they once did.

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