Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscape of Capitalism. (Reviews/Comptes Rendus).(Book Review)

Andrew Herod, Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscape of Capitalism (New York: Guilford Press, 2001)

AT THE CONCLUSION of his book, Andrew Herod states "that social praxis cannot be understood without an appreciation of the spatial context within which it takes place. Put more bluntly, the triumvirate of 'race, class, and gender' should really be a quadrumvirate of 'space, race, class, and gender.'" (269) Herod's study is a thoughtful scholarly effort to prod geographers to look closely at those four factors, and especially to consider workers seriously as conscious actors in the production of physical landscape within the system of global capitalism. His work is also an appeal to labour historians to see space as a source of power and an object of social struggle, not merely a flat stage for historical actors to play out the drama of class conflict.

Drawing on the seminal work of Marxist geographer David Harvey, Herod argues that workers and labour organizations need their "spatial fix" - "certain configurations of the landscape... in order for them to reproduce themselves (socially and biologically) from day to day and …