Understanding the global political economy of work: insights from labor geography

Labor Geography focuses upon how workers are embedded in landscapes and how this affects how they engage with the unevenly developed geography of capitalism. It is largely a project of the political left within critical economic geography, most specifically Marxism. At its heart, it seeks to treat working people not as mere pawns of capital and/or simply factors of production but, rather, as sentient geographical agents who have vested interests in ensuring that the geography of capitalism is made in some ways and not in others. With this in mind, the chapter first outlines the historical development of the field of Labor Geography and then explores four aspects of workers’ spatial praxis: 1) how they engage with place; 2) how geography complicates class analysis; 3) how landscapes’ path dependence shapes the possibilities of worker activities; and 4) how workers make new geographical scales of their own political existence and how this can be a central element in their praxis.