Moral Matters: De-Romanticising Worker Agency and Charting Future Directions for Labour Geography

The rise of labour geography over the last 20 years has ensured that labour politics, worker rights and employment-related struggles have remained strong themes in economic geography. This article provides an updated review of labour geography's development, charting its expansion from an early focus on organised spatial ‘resistance’ at a range of scales, to a more varied project incorporating a wider range of analytical and empirical inquiries. Despite this progression the paper suggests that work is still needed to address a gap in moral considerations within labour geography as a whole. Specifically a moral economy approach is offered as a means of explaining the decision-making processes/rationales behind worker actions in the context of particular struggles. This includes a necessary focus on less celebratory, ethical or successful forms of coping with labour market challenges on the part of workers than have typically been discussed in the case studies of labour geography.