Abstract

Cities are being reorganized around the promise of near-instant fulfillment. With a click, meals, groceries, health-care workers, and cleaners show up at your door within the day, often within the hour. Just as fast a car pulls up to whisk you to a date, meeting, or the airport. In order for this to happen, a highly mobile, flexible, just-in-time, just-in-place workforce has to be there, waiting. As is well-known, the platform companies that organize and deploy the gig labor that makes the fulfillment city tick rely on what is called “employee misclassification,” treating their employees by contract, and now in some places like California, by law, as “independent contractors” with few if any of the normal labor and welfare protections offered to regular employees.

Such “misclassification” is hardly new, but instead has antecedents not in the city, but in the countryside, and, I will argue in this talk, for surprisingly similar reasons. The discontinuous work that marks the urban gig economy echoes the discontinuous work that marks agricultural production, even if the time scales sometimes differ. Focusing on California, in this talk, I will show how the resolution of series of labor struggles in the Central Coast fields in the 1980s created a legal landscape that first logistics and then gig companies had to confront and vanquish in order to vouchsafe their “independent contractor” model of labor relations. In doing so I will offer a political-economic explanation, rooted in theories of the discontinuities between labor, production, and circulation time, for why “independent contractor” status seems so indispensable both on the farm and in the fulfillment city.

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Don Mitchell is professor of human geography at Uppsala University, Sweden. His research focuses on labor-capital struggles in the making of agribusiness (and now urban) landscapes; the politics of public space and homelessness; the spatiality of law; and spatial theories of justice. He is currently drowning in a deep sea of documents related to the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers and the remaking of California agribusiness between 1960-2000; involved in an international network called “Keep the City Ticking” which examines the shifting labor and migration infrastructures that shape contemporary urban space; completing a book (with Johan Pries and Erik Jönsson) on Sweden’s People’s Parks; and just launching a new research project (led by Marlene Spanger at Aalborg University) on labor relations along the whole “natural wine” supply chain from growing in Sicily, across the logistical networks in Europe, to final consumption in the trendy bars and restaurants of Copenhagen. His most recent books are Landscape, Law, and Justice – 20 Years (edited with Michael Jones, Gunhild Setten, and Amy Strecker); Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits to Capital; and Revolting New York: How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising and Revolution Shaped a City (edited, with the late Neil Smith).