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COVID-19 is a global pandemic but has a particular geography to it, differentially affecting people and places. Here we explore its impact upon labour markets in the Mediterranean European Union (EU) countries. Our analysis is part of a collective work-in-progress monitoring the pandemic’s effects upon workers since early March 2020. First we note that there is a geographical political economy to pandemics. We then scrutinise the current pandemic’s spatiality and impact upon Mediterranean EU workers. Following this, we discuss how workers are responding to the pandemic and how this is remaking the geography of employment. As such, our paper represents a contribution to the ongoing development of the Labour Geography literature. Overall, we stress that workers face a variety of choices in responding to the pandemic, choices which are, of course, shaped by the geographical contexts within which workers find themselves. In deciding whether and how to act, they are playing proactive roles in shaping COVID-19’s impact upon the geography of employment and emerging labour landscapes.

An account of my journey from an English schoolboy interested in landscapes to academic geographer, and the role that my engagement with Marx has played in that intellectual odyssey.

Gentrification and labour precarisation constitute prominent responses to urban capitalist crises. They have typically been addressed in the literature as distinct processes. Even though they can indeed occur independently of one another, here we argue that they are also often deeply interconnected. To do so, we utilise a mix of fieldwork and secondary data to investigate how gentrification has both fostered labour precarisation but also how it has been supported by it, within a context of economic recession yet growing tourist inflows into two neighbourhoods (Koukaki and Kerameikos) in central Athens, Greece. Our findings show that the growth of precarious labour in construction has facilitated the development of several gentrification loci whilst, in turn, gentrification’s consolidation has encouraged the growth of poor working conditions in local lodging, hospitality/catering, and creative activities. Ultimately, in highlighting the role of labour precarisation in gentrification, the paper argues that these processes are more than mere parts of an opportunistic conjuncture. Instead, their interconnectedness constitutes an integral part of the city’s contemporary urbanisation, being a continuation of the crisis-struck, construction-driven economic models that have historically characterised much of the Mediterranean European Union.

We explore the 2008/2009 economic crisis in Greece and its impact upon employment precarity. Specifically, we focus upon changing regional patterns of waged part-timerism during three periods: the 2005–2008 pre-crisis period; the 2009–12 deep recession; and the 2013–2016 period of mild stabilization. Our analysis reveals important geographical and sectoral variations in the growth of this type of underemployment. In particular, we find that metropolitan regions have experienced the heaviest losses in full-time waged employment and a significant expansion of underemployment. Moreover, they have struggled to bounce back effectively during the period of stabilization. By way of contrast, island regions orientated towards tourism weathered the crisis to a much better degree, with many avoiding the acute flexibilization felt in more urbanized regions. Our study observes a “downwards convergence” of regional employment figures that is caused by Attica’s disproportionate crisis. This contrasts popular accounts that focus upon productive output. Moreover, by documenting distinct sectoral trajectories, such as the substantial flexibilization of tourism-related activities, we shed light upon the specifics of an industry often praised for its adaptiveness. Ultimately, through exploring the changing spatialities and sectoral specificities of growing flexibility during a period of recession and recovery, our study provides a geographically sensitive perspective on the emerging dynamics of the Greek reserve army of labour. In so doing, we further historical geographical materialist understandings of the capitalist crisis in Southern Europe.

Resumen: Los debates sobre la escala geográfica han cambiado radicalmente la forma de la geografía humana anglófona en las tres últimas décadas. A la cabeza de la discusión hay dos grupos de preguntas de mayor importancia: ¿cuál es el estado ontológico de la escala?, y ¿cómo las maneras como imaginamos que el mundo está escalado afectan nuestro comportamiento en él? Estas preguntas revisten especial importancia en el contexto de los argumentos sobre el carácter de la globalización, en las que ocupa un lugar central la consideración sobre la relación cambiante entre distintas escalas; por ejemplo, la globalización se ha considerado de manera variable la representación de un debilitamiento de la soberanía nacional, la deslocalización de la vida social, entre otros. En este artículo, esbozo algunos de los principales elementos de estos debates. Abstract: Debates about geographical scale have dramatically shaped anglophonic human geography in the past three decades. Two principal sets of questions have been at the forefront of discussion: what is the ontological status of scale?; and how do the ways in which we imagine that the world is scaled geographically affect how we behave in it? These questions have been especially significant in the context of arguments over the nature of globalization, where the changing relationship between different scales is a central consideration - for instance, globalization has variously been viewed as representing an undermining of national sovereignty, the delocalization of social life, and so forth. In this paper, then, I outline some of the main elements of these debates. Resumo: Os debates sobre a escala geográfica têm modelado dramaticamente a geografia humana anglófona nas ultimas três décadas. Dois conjuntos principais de questões têm estado na vanguarda da discussão: qual é o status ontológico da escala? E como as maneiras como imaginamos o mundo é escalado determinam nosso comportamento nele? Essas questões têm sido especialmente significativas no contexto dos argumentos sobre a natureza da globalização, onde a relação mutante entre as diferentes escalas é uma reflexão central. Por exemplo, a globalização tem sido amplamente vista como representando uma diminuição da soberania nacional, da deslocalização da vida social, e assim por diante. Nesse artigo, então, esboço alguns dos principais elementos desses debates.

Refereed/Peer-reviewed In this article we look at waste and working on waste. In particular, we set out a case against analyses that see working on waste as somehow outside of capitalism, an informal system quite separate from, and other to, formal work. To do so, we first outline the nature of contemporary waste production. We then put forward three caveats to the emerging orthodoxy on waste and waste work, doing so through presenting a brief history of waste work in Victorian Britain, through an exploration of how tracing the movement of value (in the Marxian sense of congealed labour) from waste to new commodities (and, often, back again) problematises views that see waste work as detached from capitalist labour processes, and through a questioning of what waste work means for the oft-made ‘formal/informal’ division of work. Specifically, we argue that working on waste is complex and even at its most basic it remains part of a continuum of working practices, regulations, and relations, rather than being hermetically sealed off from ‘formal’ employment.

David Harvey. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016. viii and 376 pp., photos, diagrams, bibliography, index. $27.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-19-046944-3).David Harvey. New York, NY: Oxford Universi...

The term division of labor refers to how the tasks associated with completing an economic activity — manufacturing a car, selling stocks, growing corn — are organized. Perhaps one of the most famous historical examples of this was outlined in Adam Smith's 1776 Wealth of Nations, in which he detailed how pin manufacturing was broken into 18 different operations, including drawing out the wire, straightening it, cutting it, pointing it, making the pin's head, and even putting the pin in its paper holder. Each of these operations was conducted as a separate, though interlinked, part of the larger process of turning rough metal into a finished product. For Smith, breaking the operation down into such specialized activities allowed a more efficient production system than if the process were organized so that each individual worker conducted all 18 activities. Such increased efficiency, Smith argued, resulted from three factors: (i) breaking up the production process allowed workers to specialize in particular activities and so become more effective in conducting them; (ii) workers could avoid wasting the time typically lost by having to switch from using tools appropriate for one part of the operation to tools more appropriate for a different part; and (iii) such specialization allowed for and encouraged the invention and deploying of a large number of machines which could make each individual worker more productive (Smith 1961/1776). Keywords: capitalism; marxist theory

Matthew Sparke. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. xvi and 491 pp., maps, photos, diagrams, glossary, bibliography, index. $102.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-631-23128-8); $46.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-631-2...

Contemporary capitalism produces huge quantities of commodities whose use value is frequently short-lived, often because capitalists’ need to secure profits involves the planned obsolescence of their products. Such waste, however, regularly contains valuable materials which can be retrieved and reused as inputs for new commodities. In this chapter, then, we explore the economic paths – what we call Global Destruction Networks (GDNs) – through which some of this waste travels as it is processed and its components recovered. In many ways, these GDNs are Other to the more familiar Global Production Networks (GPNs) in which commodities are first assembled, except that they involve the taking apart of discarded products. The chapter outlines three GDNs – those involving e-waste, shipping and vehicles – to argue that an important mechanism by which to connect the workings of GDNs with those of GPNs is through following the movement of value, conceptualised here in Marxian terms of congealed labour.

This paper studies workers’ resistance to the spread of informal and flexible employment patterns in Greece during the ongoing economic crisis. It focuses upon the spatial aspects of two strikes, the first by immigrant agricultural workers employed in the strawberry fields of Nea Manolada, in the Peloponnesus region, and the second by steelworkers employed at the Hellenic Steelworks SA in Aspropyrgos, in the Attica region. The paper analyses workers’ agency in both these cases, viewing it as a relational phenomenon strongly determined by the economic specificities of the sector to which workers’ employers belonged, by the workers’ ability (or not) to develop trans-local networks of solidarity and by the timing of the two struggles. We view the paper as a contribution to the growing body of Labour Geography research in two ways: (i) it speaks to how to theorise worker agency in a more nuanced manner; and (ii) it argues that, rather than viewing workers as simply social actors who are caught up in labour markets that are assumed to be structured by the actions of capital and the state (as per much economic theory), workers can actually play important roles in shaping how labour markets function and in resisting the tendency for precarious employment relations to spread across them.

The concept of “flexicurity” (encouraging flexible work arrangements while also ensuring various social protections for workers) has been much lauded in recent years within the European Union. This paper examines how practices of flexicurity are working for immigrant workers living in Preveza, a prefecture located within the Greek region of Epirus on the border with Albania. In doing so, it highlights possible interconnections between immigrants, whether documented or not, and atypical and informal employment in peripheral urban and rural localities. The paper draws upon data collected during 2008 as part of research conducted for Preveza’s local government as well as a follow-up study on flexicurity and immigrants conducted in 2011. Other data sources, such as the list of migrants holding official residence and work permits and the national census, are also used. All of these sources offer valuable insights into the precarious employment status of immigrants in contemporary Greece, highlighting the extensive presence of flexible employment with few security provisions and informal employment. Finally, the paper concludes with some remarks on policy relating to the European Union’s flexicurity agenda and migration in Southern Europe.

I initially pondered whether there was anything to say about Labour Geography, for in the view of some commentators both labour and geography seem to have become irrelevant of late. On the one hand, we have heard in recent years that the organized labour movement is dying, if not dead, and that workers, at least within neoliberal eyes, should not be seen as labourers (far too much of an antediluvian identity for such times of alleged market triumph!) but, instead, as consumers and/ or members of employment teams, teamwork being the leitmotif of contemporary discourses about work. On the other hand, in the age of globalization, geography, it has been argued by some, has been annihilated; hence the litany of books heralding the ‘death of distance’ and the emergence of a ‘flat and borderless’ world (Cairncross 2001, Friedman 2005, Ohmae 1990). Thus, it is contended, the revolutions in transportation and telecommunications technology that are transforming the spatial and temporal organization of capitalism mean that ‘[i]n the age of the global economy, physical location is much less important [than previously and it] no longer matters where a company is based’ (Ohmae 2005: 13, 94). Within this situation, few places are now more than 24 or 48 hours apart, such that Sao Paulo or Guangzhou can be considered manufacturing suburbs of Los Angeles, London, Sydney, or Paris. In such a world, neoliberal globalization discourse suggests, capital is active and can overcome space, the erasure of geographical boundaries is automatically leading to greater competition for many workers, who are passive and confined to place, and the best thing that workers can do is to get on the neoliberal train or be left at the station.

This paper studies workers’ agency in the context of government austerity measures in contemporary, crisis-hit Greece. It focuses upon the spatial aspects of two cases of worker mobilisation. The first of these involves powerworkers who supported widespread popular protests against a new property tax designed to raise government revenues. Importantly, the government had sought to collect this tax by adding it to people's electricity bills, a novel method which generated massive opposition. The second concerns strike activity engaged in by steelworkers employed at the Greek Steelworks SA in Aspropyrgos, in the capital region of Attica. These workers were responding to the company's taking advantage of new laws designed to increase flexibility in labour markets by allowing employers to fire more people than they otherwise would have been allowed to do. The paper analyses the different tactics employed in both of these quite different efforts to challenge Greek austerity measures. In analysing these different tactics we explore the role of in-place and trans-local networks of solidarity in response to government policy. A deeper understanding of such factors, we would suggest, may contribute to strengthening the prospects of workers’ struggle in places and spaces where painful capital devaluation diminishes workers’ rights and dismantles social and employment protections.

Analysis of waste has largely focused on the physical transformation of commodities atthe ends of their lives. This has led to a discourse of ongoingness in which the re-useof commodities’ parts is often seen to be almost endless. Such a focus on form,though, fails to adequately account for the movement of value—used here in theMarxist sense of ‘congealed labour’—or to recognize the centrality of the labourprocess in shaping how previously used parts are prepared for inclusion in newcommodities. As a way to correct such failings, here we present the concept of GlobalDestruction Networks (GDNs). In so doing we make two key arguments: (i) there areindeed limits to commodities’ ongoingness when viewed from the perspective of theproduction, transfer and realization of value and (ii) workers play key roles in shapinghow GDNs are structured.Keywords: Ongoingness, value, labour process, wasteJEL classifications: B510, J210, L230, P120, P160Date submitted: 13 November 2012 Date accepted: 9 May 2013‘Waste’ is the political other of capitalist ‘value’, repeated with difference as part of capital’sspatial histories of accumulation.Gidwani and Reddy (2011: 1625)

Waste in general, and e-waste in particular, has become a topic of interest in recent years. One focus of attention has been on how commodities are broken up after the putative end of their lives, with such commodities' constituent elements then being used as inputs into other products. The fact that much waste is recycled in this manner has led several scholars to emphasise the ‘ongoingness’ of economic life. In this context, Lepawsky and Mather have recently drawn on actor network theory to make a case in this journal that analytical attention should be placed on processes of wasting and valuing as a way to look beyond the end of commodities' initial lives. This can be done, they contend, by exploring how commodities are physically transformed into new objects to the point where their constituent elements are no longer recognisable as what they once were and through how waste is ‘performed’ in different ways in different times and places. Although their paper rightly emphasises economic continuity, we suggest that their approach nevertheless ultimately fetishises commodities' form and that their claim that ‘[i]n following ‘e-waste’ qua waste, we were bringing its reality as waste into existence’ represents an idealist approach to waste. By way of contrast, we seek to retain their nuanced conception of ongoingness but without abandoning analysis of the movement of value – conceived of here in the Marxist sense of congealed labour – through the chain of product destruction, the processing of products' constituent parts, and their reuse through incorporation into new products. In order to do so we distinguish between two ways in which value can be used up: devalorisation and devaluation. Such an approach allows us to retain insights into the specifically capitalist nature of waste recycling and to engage with the materiality of Nature.

Since the renaissance of market politics on a global scale, precarious work has become pervasive. Divided into two parts, the first section of this cross-disciplinary book analyses the different forms of precarious work that have arisen over the past thirty years. These transformations are captured in ethnographically orientated chapters on sweatshops; day labour; homework; unpaid contract work of Chinese construction workers; the introduction of insecure contracting in the Korean automotive industry; and the insecurity of Brazilian cane cutters. The editors and contributors then collectively explore trade union initiatives in the face of precarious work and stimulate debate on the issue.

Since the renaissance of market politics on a global scale, precarious work has become pervasive. Divided into two parts, the first section of this cross-disciplinary book analyses the different forms of precarious work that have arisen over the past thirty years. These transformations are captured in ethnographically orientated chapters on sweatshops; day labour; homework; unpaid contract work of Chinese construction workers; the introduction of insecure contracting in the Korean automotive industry; and the insecurity of Brazilian cane cutters. The editors and contributors then collectively explore trade union initiatives in the face of precarious work and stimulate debate on the issue.

In this paper I first detail some of the geographical concepts that help us make sense of capitalism’s spatiality. I then provide several brief vignettes which illustrate how conflicts over how capitalism’s geography is made can be central to disputes both between and within groups of workers and capitalists. The paper’s purpose is to argue that understanding how social life is geographically structured can add important insights to explaining economic and political praxis.

Both workers and employers must come to grips with capitalism’s spatial organization, and how they do so shapes the kinds of political behaviors in which they engage. In this article the authors explore how two different groups of European workers—dockers and seafarers—have responded to liberalization efforts and suggest that their differential success in resisting labor market deregulation can be explained, at least in part, by how they are spatially embedded in particular places and what this means for their abilities to make common cause with others across space.