GGR328H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Wage Labour
11 May 2018
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Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017
GGR328H1
LECTURE 1
The Geography of Labour
THE GEOGRAPHY OF LABOUR
• Focus is on the role of capital in shaping the economic landscape
• This literature did not consider how workers’ lives are structured spatially, and how
workers attempt to shape the landscapes of capitalism to their own advantage
Labour Geography
• Geography of capitalism shaped by workers, as well as capital
• Shape landscape to facilitate reproduction
• “geography plays a role in structuring workers’ lives, and workers play an important role
in molding the landscapes of capitalism” (Andrew Herod, 2001)
Labour
• the activity or effort of producing goods and services
• labour that supports material well-being is performed in many different contexts and is
compensated in many different ways
a) unpaid work performed in the household, the family and the community
(reproduction, preparing meals, cleaning the family home, volunteering, etc.)
- this type of work is compensated for not monetarily but in other ways (such as
gratitude, love, references, etc.)
- slave labour is another type of unpaid work
b) wage labour anything from highly paid salary and professional workers to part-
time/temporary workers and contract workers
c) alternative paid work self-employed, reciprocal labourers, etc.
Labour Under Capitalism
• labour is a commodity in this system
• as a commodity, labour has a use value (a practical function)
• ability to do work at a specific skill level for a period of time
• it also has an exchange value (a price-wage)
• however, unlike other commodities, it is more of a pseudo-commodity or fictive
commodity ***labour is a distinct/different commodity
a) only temporarily a commodity
- it isn’t always a commodity
- it has moments of being a commodity
- it isn’t born and raised to be a commodity but it happens to need to be a
commodity in order to survive
- but it also need emotions, relationships, etc. in order to survive – so it is only a
temporary commodity
b) capable of thought and action
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