Labor, Geography of

Historically, issues of workers and labor have been the domain of economic geographers and addressed largely by industrial location theory. Arguably, the most significant work in this subfield was based on the models of Alfred Weber, a German economist and sociologist and the brother of famous sociologist Max Weber. Principally, Weber tried to show how spatial variations in labor costs shape where industries locate. However, during the early 1970s, Weberian locational analysis was criticized by a new generation of geographers influenced by political economy, particularly Marxism. These geographers argued that Weber's approach did not account for the complexity of labor as a category; for instance, it ignored issues such as the gender makeup of the labor force and whether workers were unionized or not. Furthermore, it implicitly examined the making of economic landscapes from the perspective of industrialists/capitalists, who were seeking to locate new industrial facilities, rather than from the perspective of workers themselves.

Consequently, economic geographers began to examine the category of labor in different ways and in greater depth. Some, such as David Harvey, showed how under capitalism the need to extract surplus labor from workers shaped how economic landscapes are made. Thus, Harvey argued, if capitalists were to be profitable, they needed to arrange their operations in particular geographic ways, perhaps by relocating labor-intensive operations to developing countries overseas while keeping capital-intensive operations in economically core countries such as the United States and Britain. Others contended that although labor power was a commodity that needed to be purchased by capitalists—that is, that workers needed to be paid for their time spent working—it was a commodity unlike other elements of production such as iron ore and electricity. Instead, they maintained, labor is a pseudocommodity given that worker behavior can drastically affect the labor process, unlike in the case of other commodities. Furthermore, a number of researchers showed how labor can be an important locational factor even in highly capital-intensive industries; for example, many companies choose to locate their research and development operations close to major universities, hoping to make use of the intellectual resources available in the labor pools located around such institutions.

By the 1990s, however, a new set of issues was being addressed with regard to labor. A number of authors argued that whereas these earlier critiques of Weberian locational theory were important elements in further deconstructing the category of labor, they nevertheless still viewed labor from the perspective of how industrialists make investment decisions—an approach termed the geography of labor by Andrew Herod. In contrast, Herod argued for what he called a labor geography, meaning an approach to theorizing labor that centered on how workers are embedded within particular geographic structures, how geographic considerations affect workers' political and economic decision-making processes, and how workers directly and indirectly shape the making of capitalism's geography. Rather than viewing labor from the perspective of how capitalists make locational decisions, this approach focused on workers as spatial actors. In this vein, a broad-ranging body of work developed showing how labor markets operate as spatial structures and how these serve to embed workers in particular[Page 268] locations geographically, how workers and employers struggle over the geographic scale at which things such as union contracts will operate, how traditions of labor militancy or quiescence may be diffused across space, and how practices of trade unionism are influenced by spatial considerations.

...