18 - Labour: Reckoning with Inequality through ‘Divisions of Labour’

Summary

Introduction

This chapter examines the economic geographies of labour and highlights how geographers are reckoning with inequality within labour (see also Strauss's excellent series of reports for Progress in Human Geography: Strauss, 2018a, 2018b, 2019; see also Chapter 24 in this volume). There are a myriad number of ways to approach this diverse topic: Herod (2018: 5) calls labour a ‘resource unlike any other’ because it is both object (labour is bought and sold on the market like a commodity) and subject (workers are agential and embodied). In this contribution I use the labour-as-subject lens, considering how workers can actively intervene in the means of production, considering forms of agency and workers’ relationship to structural power. Scaling up from attention on labour, my approach here is also guided by research in the diverse economies framework (Gibson-Graham, 2008), which examines economic difference, considering work beyond wage labour, and challenging us to think beyond the imperatives of capitalism (see Chapter 4 in this volume).

To centre inequality, I use ‘divisions of labour’ as an organizing strategy for the main section of this chapter. Labour can be divided in many ways to show different power structures, relationships and spatiality. Although not my focus here, perhaps the most famous is Marx's (via Adam Smith) ‘technical division of labour’, where workers specialize in different parts of the production process, allowing workers to build up their skills and increase efficiency – consider the many jobs involved in a car assembly line. Instead, I use various spatial and social divisions of labour, understanding why different places and people do different forms of labour (see ‘social division of labour’ in Marx, [1867] 1992). Divisions of labour reveal power and inequality – for example, within the gendered division of labour, women do the majority of unpaid work, are more likely to be in informal or low-wage work and are more likely to be in work that is insecure and hazardous. Moreover, following Dutta (2016), across the chapter I highlight research that listens to workers, prioritizing their narratives within wider descriptions of economic change. The chapter proceeds with two main sections – the first examines five different divisions of wage labour, while the second moves beyond wage labour, gesturing towards the many forms of work beyond formal employment.