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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Labor is the source of all wealth. Without workers, the world's natural resources cannot be transformed into finished goods and services cannot be delivered. Labor, though, is a uniquely important resource for the very simple reason that working people have sentience. Whilst a business might seek to employ workers in much the same way as it does any other resource, unlike these other resources labor is capable of altering its own conditions of existence and so of challenging how it is used by others. In this book, Andrew Herod offers an original and wide-ranging analysis of labor as a multi-faceted and truly global resource. Opening with a rich overview of the migration streams and demographic trends that have shaped the planetary distribution of labor, he goes on to explore how globalization and the growth of precarious work are impacting working people's lives. A wide range of examples is examined to illustrate the ongoing struggles faced by workers worldwide - from forced labor and child labor in West Africa's cocoa and southeast Asia's shrimping industries to the labor practices affecting so-called 'knowledge workers'. Herod concludes by surveying some of the ways in which working people are taking action to improve their lives, including forming trade unions and other labor organizations, occupying factories in places like Argentina and Greece, and establishing anti-sweatshop campaigns. This book is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the state of labor in today's global economy.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 A Resource Unlike Any Other
Labor as Object
Labor as Subject
Summary
Notes
2 Labor in Global Context
Moving On
Growing in Place
Summary
Notes
3 Globalization and Labor
FDI’s Implications for Labor
GPNs and Labor as Object and Subject
Waste, Global Destruction Networks, and Labor
Summary
Notes
4 Neoliberalism and Working Precariously
Neoliberalism and Precarious Work
Forms of Precarity and Their Present Dynamics
Summary
Notes
5 From Drudge Work to Emancipated Workers?
Laboring in the Old Economy
Summary
Notes
6 Meet the New Economy – Same as the Old Economy?
Laboring in the New Economy
Summary
Notes
7 Workers Fight Back
Workers Coming Together
Organizing in the Age of Precarity
Summary
8 Concluding Thoughts
Selected Readings
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Resources Series
Anthony Burke, Uranium
Peter Dauvergne & Jane Lister, Timber
Michael Nest, Coltan
Elizabeth R. DeSombre & J. Samuel Barkin, Fish
Jennifer Clapp, Food, 2nd edition
David Lewis Feldman, Water
Gavin Fridell, Coffee
Gavin Bridge & Philippe Le Billon, Oil, 2nd edition
Derek Hall, Land
Ben Richardson, Sugar
Ian Smillie, Diamonds
Adam Sneyd, Cotton
Bill Winders, Grains
Labor
ANDREW HEROD
polity
Copyright © Andrew Herod 2018
The right of Andrew Herod to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station Landing, Suite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2412-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Herod, Andrew, 1964- author.Title: Labor / Andrew Herod.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2017. | Series: Resources | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017015282 (print) | LCCN 2017030878 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509524112 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509524129 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745663869 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745663876 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Labor.Classification: LCC HD4901 (ebook) | LCC HD4901 .H435 2017 (print) | DDC 331--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015282
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank several people who have helped me with preparing this book. First, Louise Knight, who approached me several years ago now to contribute to Polity’s Resources series. I would also like to thank Nekane Galdos for helping to shepherd the project along. My friend Bradon Ellem granted permission to use the map in Figure 5.1. Kavita Pandit helped me track down some of the demographic data in Chapter 2. I would like to thank Adam Wrigley for help with some of the data collection. Adam participated in an innovative program at the University of Georgia in which high school seniors are paired with faculty members so that they can learn a little about how research is conducted. Adam did a sterling job locating some of the data used in the book. Thanks, also, to two anonymous reviewers for some helpful comments. Finally, I dedicate this book to my dad, John Clement Herod (1931–2013).
Introduction
Labor is the ultimate source of all wealth. Without the exertion of human labor, the world’s natural resources, like iron ore, oil, lumber, and land, cannot be used and neither can the services that make the modern world run be provided. This capacity to transform the planet around us through work is central to understanding the dynamics shaping contemporary economic, political, social, and biotic life. In thinking about labor as a resource, however, we must ponder not only labor itself but also the labor processes within which individuals are embroiled and which shape how they interact with one another as they refashion the natural world for human use. This is because the way in which working people cooperate (or not) with one another and with their employers changes how they themselves behave as a resource. Because they have the capability to contest and change the conditions under which they are employed, then, it is important to think of workers both as objects of analysis and also as sentient subjects who can alter their own situations through proactively thought-out economic and political actions. This capacity makes labor fundamentally different from any other resource.
In this book I provide a broad-ranging look at labor as a resource. In the first chapter I outline how labor’s sentience makes it a resource unlike others. In so doing, I consider how labor is deeply geographically embedded in particular places but is also distributed unevenly across the economic landscape. This spatial aspect of labor’s nature is more than simply an interesting facet of working people’s existence. Rather, it is a deeply constitutive element of their lives, for much of their behavior is shaped by their need to come to terms with the differentially developed geography of the contemporary world and how they are tied to specific places. This has signal implications for labor’s behavior as a resource. For instance, many workers are trapped in particular communities for a variety of reasons – an inability to sell their homes so that they can move elsewhere, a psychological attachment to particular places that hold important resonances for them, or the fact that they lack the legal status to move elsewhere. This can reduce their ability to negotiate better terms of employment because they have few options but to take whatever wages are being offered locally. On the other hand, for those workers who can overcome this geographical fixity, the ability to migrate elsewhere may provide significant opportunities for bettering their lives. At the same time, though, it may be fraught with challenges – they may not be welcome in the new communities in which they settle, the promises of a better life may not materialize, or they may have to live in the economic shadows because they do not have the correct legal documents to work out in the open. How they negotiate the tensions between staying in one place and seeking to move elsewhere, then, is an important component of their lives.
Having explored several aspects of what it means to think about labor as a resource, how it is different from other resources, and how labor’s geographical constitution affects how it behaves, I look in Chapter 2 at labor as a global resource. In particular, I detail some of the historical migrations which have led to the current distribution of people across the planet, together with how in situ demographic processes like differential rates of population growth in various parts of the globe, have resulted in the present distribution of working people across the planet. For instance, the booming oil economies of the Persian Gulf are reliant upon the labor of millions of migrant workers coming from places like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, while South Africa’s economy sucks in young men from across the continent to work in the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. Likewise, the migration of hundreds of millions of peasants from the countryside to the nation’s industrial zones has helped make China’s economy the world’s second largest. Concurrently, the global population explosion that has occurred since the mid-twentieth century has fundamentally reconfigured labor’s distribution across the planet – since 1950, world population has tripled in size (from about 2.5 billion to nearly 7.5 billion), with the bulk of this growth occurring in the Global South. At the same time, however, regional phenomena like the AIDS crisis in Africa are having tremendous impacts upon labor markets and what this means for economic development.
Chapters 3 and 4 explore two phenomena that are dramatically impacting working people across the planet, albeit in different ways: globalization and the growth of work precarity. In the first of these chapters, I examine globalization’s impact on working people, focusing especially on the geography of foreign direct investment (FDI) and how this both has allowed employers to play workers in different parts of the globe against one another but has also brought these workers into greater contact with one another, thereby creating improved opportunities for them to challenge their employers’ actions. A key feature of such globalization has been the growth of numerous global production networks (GPNs) through which commodities pass as they are manufactured, with these networks tying workers in different parts of the globe together through how the labor process is structured. I also investigate what I term global destruction networks (GDNs) through which discarded commodities like old electronics pass as they are broken up so that their constituent elements can be recovered for reuse as inputs into new products. These GDNs often link people in the Global North, who discard old commodities, with workers in the Global South, who take them apart. For its part, Chapter 4 details some of the ways in which work and life have become more precarious for millions across the planet. Much of this precarity is the result of neoliberal policies which have made labor markets more “flexible.” Hence, many workers who previously enjoyed full-time, long-term employment now find themselves reduced to part-time, short-term arrangements, while millions of others find themselves with few opportunities for generating paid income except to participate in the “gig economy” as they flit from job to job with companies like Uber and Lyft, food delivery services like Bite Squad and Caviar, and many others. At the same time, new technologies threaten to replace workers across the planet with machines. Meanwhile, for millions of farmers in places like Africa’s Sahel, global climate change is threatening harvests and leading many to migrate to Europe to escape their ever more precarious lives.
Much as Chapters 3 and 4 operate as a pair, so do Chapters 5 and 6. Specifically, they investigate the supposed transition from an “Old Economy” dominated by manual labor and “dirty” jobs to a “New Economy” of knowledge work and mental labor. Although US management consultant Peter Drucker first used the term “knowledge worker” in 1969, it became popularized in the 1990s when growing numbers of writers began suggesting that a new way of organizing economies and work was emerging, one that would have tremendous implications for labor. This New Economy, they averred, would be characterized by “a world in which people work with their brains instead of their hands” and would be “at least as different from what came before it as the industrial age was from its agricultural predecessor,” such that “its emergence can only be described as a revolution” (Browning and Reiss 1998: 105). The future of work, then, would be one in which the dreary, labor-intensive toil of the past would be replaced by clean and rewarding technology-aided manufacturing and service work in which workforces would be empowered and liberated from drudgery. In Chapter 5, in light of this assertion, I examine work in three economic sectors – iron ore mining in Australia, cocoa plantation work in West Africa, and labor in the global fishing industry. As I show, there is little in these sectors which looks much like the imagined emancipatory work that is supposed to characterize twenty-first-century economies. This perhaps is understandable, given how these are activities usually associated with Old Economy work. In Chapter 6, on the other hand, I detail work in several sectors that are often viewed as emblematic of the New Economy, including hi-tech manufacturing and various types of service work. Significantly, despite the utopian language with which the work that is imagined to define the New Economy is often portrayed, much of this labor is also little different from the dirty work of the Old Economy. Rather than there being a historical transition from an Old to a New Economy, then, I suggest that the emancipated work enjoyed by many “knowledge workers” is in fact built upon a foundation of drudge work carried out by millions of highly exploited workers.
The final chapter surveys some of the ways in which workers challenge their positions within various labor markets and labor processes and how they seek to self-organize to improve their lots. This includes forming labor unions and other types of organizations, as well as engaging in activities like occupying factories and running them on their own rather than under the direction of various managers. In this regard, the chapter focuses upon how working people act as the subjects of their own histories and geographies and are not merely resources used by others.
