Abstract
In 2014, European Urban and Regional Studies (EURS) awarded the first Jim Lewis Prize. The prize was established to mark the contributions of the former Editor, Jim Lewis, and to highlight the most innovative paper published in the previous year in the journal (see editorial announcement in European Urban and Regional Studies 21(1)). Following nominations from the journal’s Editorial Board, a number of papers were considered by the journal’s Editors. We are delighted to announce the prize award to Andrew Herod, Kostas Gourzis and Stelios Gialis for their paper ‘Inter-regional underemployment and the industrial reserve army: Precarity as a contemporary Greek drama’, European Urban and Regional Studies 28(4): 413–430.
Nick Henry and Adrian Smith, Editors-in-Chief You, who shall emerge from the flood, In which we are sinking, Think – When you speak of our weaknesses,
[. . .] For we went, changing our country more often than our shoes.
[. . .] When there was only injustice and no resistance.
[. . .] But you, when at last it comes to pass, [. . .]
Do not judge us, Too harshly.
We are truly honoured to have our paper chosen as the recipient of the 2022 Jim Lewis Prize. We would like to thank the Εditorial Team of European Urban and Regional Studies for this completely unexpected honour. It comes on the heels of a 12-year-long relationship that started with a simple late night email exchange between Andy and Stelios. Andy’s positive response regarding hosting and supervising Stelios’ post-doctoral research proposal marked the beginning of an ongoing academic relationship that soon became a good friendship. Stelios spent almost 2 years (2012–2014) at the University of Georgia before returning to Greece to work at the University of the Aegean. Three years after Stelios’ return Kostas, who was then developing his PhD thesis with Stelios, won his Fulbright scholarship and went to Athens, Georgia, to work with his co-supervisor, Andy. These years of linking Athens, Georgia, and Athens, Greece – what we like to term our ‘Athens to Athens connection’ – have indeed proven fruitful and in many ways; we see this award as marking a waypoint in our research collaboration. On the one hand, it serves as a capstone to one research project that is being finished up but, on the other, it heralds, we hope, the beginning of a new fruitful phase for our collective endeavour. This latter includes producing a monograph on the relationship between gentrification and precarity in the Southern European Union, as well as developing an Observatory (more about which below) that will monitor working conditions across the region and beyond – especially as they relate to the spread of precarious work.
The article for which we receive the Jim Lewis Prize was not the first and is not the only product of our collective efforts aimed at understanding the changing landscapes of precarity and flexible employment at various geographical scales across the Southern EU – several publications preceded it and a number have come afterwards. In that sense, we consider ‘Inter-regional underemployment and the industrial reserve army’ to be a ‘station along the route’, a station that we enjoyed visiting for two reasons. The first (obviously!) is that it has brought us the EURS prize that we currently celebrate. But it also was an important paper in our own intellectual journey to try to reinvigorate the concept of the reserve army of labour in contemporary critical geographical studies of labour. To briefly elaborate, in the paper we used a Marxist geographical political economy framework to document and empirically test assertions often made by Marxist geographical political economists concerning some critical recent trends in labour markets, namely that full-time stable work is being replaced with forms of precarious work (like part-time employment) as many segments of capital seek solutions to the accumulation crises they face. Specifically, through using the concept of the reserve army of labour, we wanted to show how capital seeks to exercise flexibility through relying upon several different types of employment form and how it switches between these various forms over time and across space. In so doing, our purpose was to document how these different forms of work – and the people who do them – do not operate as discrete practices but work together as part of a continuum, with individual workers transitioning into and out of them over the course of their lifetimes. This is a position very much in the tradition of Marx’s own understanding of the reserve army.
Through our research, then, we hope to have provided a more nuanced and empirically grounded examination of the growth of underemployment and of the Greek economic crisis’ impact upon labour markets as a way to unpack the notion of ‘underemployment’ that has sometimes been conceived of as what Marx in Grundrisse called a ‘chaotic conception’. In this regard, we see our work as drawing upon a long intellectual tradition in critical economic geography – sadly, now somewhat neglected – that stretches back to the kinds of approaches developed by Doreen Massey and Richard Meegan in their classic 1982 work The Anatomy of Job Loss: The How, Why and Where of Employment Decline. In this pathbreaking book, they showed that unemployment can be caused by several quite different processes – they list plant rationalization, work intensification and investment and technical change – that sometimes work together and sometimes work at cross purposes, such that just simply collapsing all forms of job loss into a single category (‘unemployment’) misses much of the specificity of what is going on and how capital is reorganizing itself socially and spatially. We have sought to engage in the same kind of interrogation of the concept of underemployment that Massey and Meegan did with unemployment. Through so doing, we have also tried to respond to a reproach regularly directed by some against critical/Marxist geographers, which is that they often neglect to empirically verify the validity of their arguments drawn from historical geographical materialism, as if theoretical assertion were sufficient to win the argument. Finally, we also wanted to challenge what we considered to be lazy universalist proclamations about metropolitan regions’ supposed resilience and ability to better resist employers’ pressures towards imposing underemployment because workers in metropolitan regions have more employment options than workers elsewhere – our research indicates that this is not always the case and that workers in different metropolitan (and non-metropolitan) regions have quite varied abilities to resist underemployment. Geography matters!
If we try to reflect critically upon our work and where ‘Inter-regional underemployment and the industrial reserve army’ fits into it, we can perhaps say three things. First, as already noted, we draw heavily upon Marxist concepts to further geographical political economy analyses of contemporary capitalism. In so doing, we seek to ground theory in the detail and complexity of economic transformation and to use empirics as a way of both testing the explanatory capacity of these same concepts across various geographical scales but also using empirical analysis to expand them – that is, to recognize that theory must be used to understand the world and not be developed simply for its own sake and that it must be reconsidered in light of how the world actually works. Theory must intersect with the material conditions of existence.
Second, we locate our collective research agenda to analyse labour markets in the Southern EU within the framework of Labour Geography, a field which Andy helped develop back in the early 1990s. In doing so, we seek to understand better some of the ways in which labour agency is constrained and/or facilitated in different places at different times. Given our own political inclinations – we take seriously Marx’s admonition that the point of engaging with the world is not just to understand it but to change it – we hope that our documentation and empirical analysis of past and recent struggles in the Southern EU against the spread of precarious work is something that might just make some small amount of difference to the lives of some of those who are presently suffering, as better understanding what is going on can perhaps lead to strategies and policies that relieve the burdens that they face. In this regard, we have been developing what we have named the Labour Geography Research Lab (https://reslab.aegean.gr/). Based at the University of the Aegean and involving several scholars, the Lab’s purpose is to study the spatial dimensions of employment transformation and its causes at various scales. Hence, Lab members explore various emerging labour market phenomena across the Southern EU, comparing and contrasting rural and urban spaces, core and peripheral ones, and evaluating how different nations’ labour market policies stack up against one another. The Lab provides information on such developments to stakeholders, decision makers from the public and private sectors, the media and the general public. For Stelios and Kostas, having Andy as a board member for the Lab has been something special.
Finally, our most recent research, which draws upon a variety of both qualitative and quantitative methods, aims to investigate the relationship between gentrification and labour flexibilization. For instance, in a project upon which we have been working for the past few years, we have explored how gentrification in parts of Athens (Greece!) has been shaped by processes of labour flexibilization as developers and those building owners interested in renovating their properties have increasingly come to rely upon part-time and temporary workers – often immigrants – to actually do the renovation. Through turning to such a precarious labour force, they have attempted to create and/or exacerbate what Neil Smith termed ‘rent gaps’ in various Athenian neighbourhoods. Equally, as gentrification has proceeded in these neighbourhoods, the types of employment opportunities open to residents have changed. Increasingly, the jobs available are those dedicated to serving tourists – a process which we call the ’touristification’ of local labour markets. Indeed, part of the very reason that these neighbourhoods are gentrifying is because building owners and investors are turning them into nexuses of short-term rentals geared towards attracting foreign visitors. Pointedly, however, the types of jobs that are coming to dominate in these neighbourhoods in the wake of this Airbnb-driven gentrification are often low-paid and precarious – coffee shop baristas, bar and restaurant waiters, people contracted to clean rental units after one guest has left and before the next arrives and so forth. In our work, then, we seek to link what we term ‘gentrification-supporting’ labour flexibility (the immiseration of workers in the building trades) with ‘gentrification-fostered’ labour flexibility (the immiseration of workers serving tourists). However, workers’ struggles against precarious working and living conditions – struggles that explicitly address both issues simultaneously, as highly relevant to each other – can reduce the size of these rent gaps. Such recognition that the rent gap’s size can reflect the state of struggle between those pushing various neighbourhoods’ gentrification and those actually doing the work opens the door to developing a less capital-centric understanding of rent gaps and how they come about. In this sense, we aspire to establish an empirically grounded ‘Labour Theory of Gentrification’.
In ending, we would like to once again thank the editors of European Urban and Regional Studies and those who work behind the scenes to produce each issue for providing a welcoming platform for our research and giving us this opportunity to situate within our broader body of research the article for which we are being honoured.