Open Access
Abstract
Geographers
and oral historians continue to have much to learn from each other. The
subfield of labour geography in particular can enrich its understanding
of workers’ lived experiences, both in employment and beyond the
workplace, through greater use of interpretative, collaborative oral
history methodologies. Attentive to the temporal specificity and
inter-subjectivity of people’s narratives, oral history reveals how
workers’ moral geographies emerge and change. This article documents the
spatio-temporalities and institutions of food sector employment in
Peterborough, England, a city-region from which urban-based workers are
bussed out daily to rural jobs. The analysis draws on four extended case
studies of people who migrated to the UK and worked in the sector in
the 2000s, building on recent research that has highlighted harsh
employment conditions in the food production, packing and processing
sector. It complements this work by viewing narrative itself as an
agentic act and listening to how research participants crafted their
life stories. These stories revealed diverse, complex and
context-specific moral geographies, with participants variously placing
value on small acts of rebellion or refusal, dignity and the time to
speak with others at work. The article advocates greater engagement by
labour geographers with the subjective experiences of workers, and with
individual as well as collective agency.
Capitalists… want labour power: they want a factor of production. What they get are people (Mitchell, 2012: 73)
Oral history is a history built around people (Thompson, 1988: 28)
1. Introduction
Working
conditions in UK food processing, as well as in growing and packing
fresh produce, have intensified with the concentration of supermarket
buying power since the latter part of last century (Rogaly, 2008).
People working in the food sector have long been employed on a
contingent, informal basis across the diverse geographies of agrarian
capitalism (Reid-Musson, 2014: 164).
However, the recent intensification of workplace regimes in the food
sector coincides with ascendant neoliberalism and ‘worsening conditions…
for the majority of workers worldwide’ (Coe, 2013: 279).
This is, at first glance, a surprising context for labour geography,
premised – as its canonical texts were – on critiquing approaches to
economic geography that made little or no allowance for workers’ power
to influence the spaces in which they lived and worked (Herod, 1997 and Herod, 2001).
Early
works in labour geography have rightly been criticized for being
overoptimistic regarding the potential for workers to shape landscapes
of capitalism (Lier, 2007 and Peck, 2013).
More recently the sub-field expanded its focus to include the
diminishing power of labour in relation to capital across several
sectoral and geographical contexts (see, for example, Bergene et al., 2010, Smith, 2014, Warren, 2014 and Waite et al., 2015).
Agency remained relevant to these new accounts, but, in terms of Cindi
Katz’s typology, more in terms of ‘resilience’ than the stronger
‘reworking’ or the more transformative ‘resistance’ varieties (Katz, 2004).
Importantly workers’ agency has been shown to take diverse forms, not
necessarily involving the workplace, and including reactionary as well
as progressive politics (Ince et al., 2015 and Featherstone and Griffin, 2015).
With important exceptions such as the work of Warren, 2014 and Ince et al., 2015 and McDowell, 2005 and McDowell, 2013,
this expanded labour geography contains very little of the voices of
workers themselves. It seems ironic that in a subfield that originated
as a committed project of the Left, more attention is given to fellow
scholars’ academic productions, organizational perspectives, and
governmental, employers’ and union archives than to the experiences of
workers as they themselves saw them.1 Notwithstanding important work by feminist geographers emphasizing the ‘complexity of workers as social beings’ (Warren, 2014: 2300; and see McDowell, 2008, Pratt, 2012 and Buckley, 2014), this absence contributes to a more general lack of grounded engagement with workers’ lived experiences in labour geography (Kelly, 2012: 431–2), which remains evident in a recent restatement of the ‘central tenets’ of the subfield (Herod, 2014).
It also exacerbates what Castree has portrayed as an insufficient focus
by labour geographers on workers’ moral geographies – ‘sets of values
relating to modes of conduct – potential and actual – towards other
people, near and far’ (2010: 468–9; see also Philo, 1991).
Prompted by Castree, this article moves away from the wider focus of
geographers writing on professional and academic moralities,
geographical sensitivity to ethical practices (O Tuathail, 1996 and Smith, 2000) or human–environment relations (Matless, 1994).
Instead, like Gough, whose subject is also workers’ agency, we are more
interested in ‘the moralities of the majority’ than in those of ‘an
enlightened social-democratic elite’ (2010: 132).2
The
article draws on the methodological and theoretical resources of oral
history as one means of addressing the need for more attention in labour
geography to lived experience and to workers’ moral geographies, with
particular focus on the oral histories of international migrant workers
who have tended to be portrayed in popular discourse as either villains
(taking jobs from UK nationals) or voiceless victims of the employment
regimes of the UK’s food sector. This is part of a move away from a
labour geography that is confined to seeking out all-too-rare examples
of workers’ victorious actions in relation to capital. Contra some critiques of a focus on workers’ agency per se ( Scott, 2013b: 709),
we do not seek to celebrate that agency and thereby somehow obscure the
depradations of contemporary food sector capitalism. Indeed, attending
to workers’ moral geographies enables us to avoid romanticizing or
conceptually homogenizing workers’ agency in the food sector. As with
workers in other sectors (see, e.g. Ince et al., 2015),
UK food sector workers have sometimes excluded or discriminated against
others in the workplace ‘through (often unspoken) employment cultures’ (Gough, 2010: 133).
We
use four extended case studies developed from repeated oral history
interviews and interactions about a specific sector, place and time: the
industrialized food and agriculture sector in the Peterborough city
region of the UK in the 2000s. International migrant workers have come
to have a central role in the sector (Rogaly, 2008 and Scott, 2013a). As with the work of Mitchell, 1996 and Mitchell, 2012 and McDowell, 2008 and McDowell, 2013,
therefore, the article speaks to another of Castree’s critiques of
labour geography, that ‘the study of labour migrants… has tended to be
undertaken by others… If one looks at existing exemplar texts in labour
geography… migration barely warrants a mention’ (2007: 858–9).
Our
study complements the growing body of research on the impact of
structural changes in the food supply chain on contemporary employment
regimes in the UK (Rogaly, 2008, Strauss, 2012, Scott, 2013a, Scott, 2013b and Findlay and McCollum, 2013).
Demographic changes in Britain’s food sector workforce during the
2000s, the growing importance of packing and distribution work servicing
supermarket requirements, and the ways in which capital continues to
accumulate surplus in the sector in particular regional and national
contexts (Thomas, 1985 and Guthman, 2004),
are abundantly evidenced by the narratives of workers and former
workers in the food sector in the Peterborough city-region. However, our
study differs from existing work on labour’s geography (Smith, 2014: 6) in the food sector as our use of oral history enables us to explore subjective
experiences of this employment, and its location within varied life
trajectories, as they are glimpsed in collaborative interviews. This
reveals complex, varied and context-specific moral geographies of food
sector employment, including a valuing of dignity in relation to
supervisors and fellow workers, time for workplace interaction, small
acts of rebellion and refusal, and longer-term transformations in
people’s sense of justice.
We
thus respond to the tendency of labour geography, as a self-defined
field, to ‘[fail] to put ‘working people’ at the center of the analysis’
(Mitchell, 2005: 96).
The word ‘people’ is important here, as it avoids reducing the subjects
of such research to the occupation they may have had at a particular
point in time. Indeed, we seek to respond to Castree’s call for a labour
geography that analyzes the geographies of employment and labour
struggle ‘not in themselves but as windows onto the wider question of how people live and seek to live’ ( 2007: 860,
author’s emphasis). Oral history fits well with this agenda, we argue,
involving as it does the co-production of extended case studies of
‘people’, with multifaceted lives, identities, geographies and histories
that provided a context for the food sector work they did.
The
rest of the article proceeds as follows. In the next section we
introduce the spatial, temporal and sectoral context of our study,
noting the importance of international migrant workers in food
production, processing and packing in the Peterborough city region. The
third section explains the oral history methods we used, before we go on
in section four to elaborate the four extended case studies. In section
five we discuss what the four cases taken together reveal about current
and former food sector workers’ subjectivities and moral geographies.
Section six concludes by returning to the core issues raised in the
article concerning the use of oral history in labour geography.
2. A labour hub in the English Fens
The
eastern edge of Peterborough abuts the westernmost portion of the Fens,
an industrialized rural region for which food processing has been
identified as ‘fundamental’ (Green et al., 2009: 1271).
In the mid-2000s, the Fens were the site of a major concentration of
national agricultural and horticultural production with 4000 farms
accounting for 24 per cent of all potatoes, 37 per cent of the field
vegetables and 28 per cent of the bulbs grown in England, and employing
17,500 people (National Farmers Union, 2008: 1, 3, 5 and 9).
Since
the 1990s, there has been an increasing reliance of farms and food
packing and processing companies in the Fens, and also nationally, on
international migrant workers. One estimate based on analysis of
official data on the registration of EU accession country nationals
between 2004 and 2010 found that they accounted for 40 per cent of the
agricultural workforce – a far higher ratio than in any other sector (McCollum, 2013: 36).3
Evidence showed that moves made by international migrant workers
complemented, rather than substituted for, British workers, who, even in
the years following the post-2008 recession, had shown themselves to be
reluctant to take up work under the conditions required (Findlay and McCollum, 2013: 12).4
Peterborough
has long been a labour hub for the food sector in surrounding rural
areas, including the Fens. Crucially it is the headquarters of a large
number of employment agencies, whose businesses revolve around
physically transporting people to different worksites depending on the
demand for workers on the day. Stenning et al. (2006)
use the term ‘city region’ for Peterborough, a term no longer commonly
used in geography but one that makes sense, certainly in East Anglia,
‘as an organizing concept for spatial development policy’ (Healey, 2009: 832 and 837).
This might well include policy responses to the arrival of large
numbers of international migrants in cities such as Peterborough in the
2000s.
The population
of Peterborough increased dramatically between 2001 (157,439) and 2011
(183,631). Much of this growth came from migration to the city by
nationals of eight of the countries that acceded to the European Union
(EU) in 2004, whilst there was also a significant rise in Portuguese
nationals.5
Earlier, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the city had seen the arrival of
thousands of migrants from other countries, including Italy, Pakistan
and Uganda. A survey of 278 more recently arrived international migrant
workers undertaken in early 2008 found that over 30% gave their
workplace as outside the city, in surrounding counties,
revealing the very particular geography of this Peterborough-based food
sector labour force. The report drew direct links between the growth in
the number of migrant workers living in Peterborough and working
conditions in agriculture and food processing, referring to ‘the
segregation of new migrant workers into agriculture and food processing
plants through poor pay, long hours and shift-pattern working’ ( Scullion and Morris, 2009: 32).
Similar
conditions were reported by two national studies of food sector
employment in the early 2010s, also based on interviews with workers.
Part of a wider contemporary concern with unfree labour (McGrath and Strauss, 2015),
one study used community interviewers to gather testimony from 62
people across England and Scotland. The labour practices they identified
bring out important aspects of recent employment experiences in the
sector, including humiliating treatment by supervisors, being used ‘more
as machines’ than people, and being tied-in by work permits. The
material is hard-hitting, revealing the ‘psychological harm’ that
workers in the sector can experience (Scott et al., 2012: 41, 42 and 65).
The second national study was commissioned by the UK Equalities and
Human Rights Commission (EHRC) into employment conditions in meat and
poultry processing (EHRC, 2010 and EHRC, 2012).
The study found that supermarkets operated downward pressure on meat
and poultry prices, leading to reductions in labour costs. These
national reports based on interviews with workers are of vital
importance as sources of evidence in struggles for workplace justice.
Indeed, as we describe our methodology in the next section, we explain
how our own study also aimed at doing more than merely researching,
especially at the urban scale.
3. Oral histories/working class geographies
If experience of workplace inequality and exploitation shapes people’s moral outlook (Gough, 2010: 132),
reflective oral history interviews can be opportunities for such moral
positions to be articulated to a wider audience, including fellow
workers. We brought different Peterborough residents’ oral histories of
the workplace into conversation with each other using theatre,
photography, exhibitions and other events.6
These conversations included residents who were apparently unfamiliar
with each other because of their differing ethnicities, countries of
origin and migration histories. We expected that oral history interviews
would be transformative for the individual interviewers and narrators.
We also hoped that they would enable greater understanding among
working-class residents in the city of challenges they faced in common
across ethnic and national boundaries and thus build opposition to
racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Among the important commonalities
we believed might emerge were workplace experiences in the food sector.
Oral
history is diverse and encompasses distinctive regional and national
traditions. Nonetheless, some ‘shared social and intellectual forces’
can be identified, showing oral history’s move from a positivist
approach that used ‘memory as a source for “people’s history”’ (Perks and Thomson, 2016: 1)
to an interpretivist one attentive to the relation between interviewer
and narrator, shared authority, co-production, and the use of oral
history to achieve social change. Oral history can also contribute to
more ‘temporally integrated geographies’ (Kwan, 2013)
through explicit consideration of the ‘timeframe’ of research, both in
terms of historical time, and time as subjectively experienced and
narrated (Rogaly and Thieme, 2012).
In contrast to the under-contextualised eternal present sometimes found
in social science writing, an oral history narrator is understood as
speaking ‘of a particular history at a particular moment to a particular
person, who himself is situated in a particular history’ (Shopes, 2011: 479).
Andrews et al. argue that oral history has been relatively neglected by human geography as a whole (2006: 158), while Jackson and Russell refer to geography’s ‘relatively modest contribution to oral history research’ (2010: 188).7 This is also true of the sub-field of labour geography. Major exceptions here include Gray’s (2014) collaboratively-produced oral history portrait of a non-unionised female domestic cleaner, and especially the work of Linda McDowell, 2005 and McDowell, 2013,
whose studies of international migrant women in the UK over six decades
show these workers to have been active, knowing subjects both in
contesting conditions of injustice and exploitation in the workplace and
in challenging representations that stereotyped them.
Our
approach to oral history leans towards the interpretivist – exploring
the significance of how oral histories are told – and the collaborative.
How and what people remember, how they talk about it, what they choose
to tell and why, are key areas of analysis. At one level, there is no
single objective truth but rather a bundle of renditions of past
experience, recorded in particular circumstances (see Abrams, 2010).
Yet we also treat oral history interviews as sources of information,
believing that multiple and repeated oral history interviews yield a
broad picture of how food sector jobs and their associated
spatio-temporalities were experienced by workers in the city region (Rogaly and Qureshi, 2012).
In this article we attempt to hold in tension these different registers
of analysis that (i) provide insights into the four individuals whose
stories are explored in depth, including how they wanted their story to
come across, and the moral geographies associated with this, and (ii)
enable us to comment on food sector work in a specific city region at a
particular time.
Alessandro
Portelli argues that ‘the researcher’s path crosses the narrator’s at
erratic times, and the collected life history is the result of this
chance occurrence’ (1991: 61). The temporal location of these four narrators as former
insiders to some of the toughest food sector workplace regimes enables
them to reflect from a distance of sorts. These are people who tell
their stories looking back over time having subsequently experienced
greater comfort and security than the most intensive work in the food
supply chain allows. Trajectories are not linear, and seemingly more
comfortable workplaces contain their own conflicts and struggles; the
search for economic security and life fulfillment continues. These are
unique testimonies. Moreover, food sector workers’ narratives are rarely
found in local or national archives.
While inter-subjectivity lies at the heart of much contemporary oral history analysis (James, 2000, Herbert, 2007 and Abrams, 2010),
it is relatively rarely explored by labour geographers. Yet, as other
geographers of working lives operating outside the self-defined subfield
of labour geography (Miles and Crush, 1993 and Gray, 2014)
have drawn on oral history literature to show, oral history narratives
are co-created through relationships between at least two subjects –
researcher and narrator – and, further, they are told in relation to
contemporary cultural norms and the specific location and atmosphere of
the interview. This contains its own paradox. A sense of political
closeness to a narrator does not turn the researcher into an insider.
There remains an inequality to the relationship (Portelli, 1991: 38).
In spite of this, Portelli himself is optimistic about building
equality in oral history fieldwork, which needs to be seen as based on
‘encounter[s] between two subjects who recognize each other as subjects’
(1991: 43).
The oral history fieldwork that we have drawn on in this article brings
us as researchers into the discussion through the multiple encounters
we had with each of the narrators of the stories. These stories were
told to us as subjects and emerge out of our own interventions
as well as narrators’ reflections on the person they were talking to and
the utility or otherwise of the research. This can contribute to a
denaturalizing of research processes and a problematizing of academic
subject positions in the study of labour’s geography.
We
conducted 76 oral history interviews in Peterborough in 2011 and 2012,
64 of which were life history interviews, 35 with women and 29 with men.
Rogaly stayed in the city three days a week from March to December
2011. Qureshi lived there for three months during June to September. We
undertook that participants would be sent the transcript of their
interview for review and be able to make amendments to it before we
sought permission to quote from it in our writings, playscript and
website, and asked whether they would prefer the material anonymized for
this purpose. Participants were also made aware that, if they were
willing when consulted later in the process, the amended transcript
would be deposited with the local library archives. 54 transcripts were
deposited with Peterborough archives in 2014.
