Contrast the role of labour as a major factor influencing the nature and location of industrial activities in the core and peripheral EU regions within a Fordist and Neo-Fordist regime of capital accumulation.
Labour has been a critical, defining influence on the development and spatial geography of Europe in the modern age. I will demonstrate this by defining and giving a brief history of Fordism and exploring the impact of labour on its nature, paying particular attention the development of the new industrial division of labour (NIDL) and the feminisation of the labour force.
Secondly, I will discuss industrial restructuring and the move from Fordism to Post-Fordism. I will then explore the nature of labour under Post-Fordist, the importance of flexibility, and the emergence of the highly skilled urban elites and cluster economies and their impact on the new geography of the EU.
Fordism (1900-1975) is an organisation of production, characteristic of multi-national corporations, which requires a vast number of de-skilled or semi-skilled workers to run mass production lines and operates on a ‘just-in-case’ principal of stock accumulation in relatively closed economies.
Fordist spatial divisions of labour emerged due to locational and functional separation of mental and manual labour (Perrons 1981) , The national spatial hierarchy was re-organised whereby a small pool of highly skilled, non-manual labour organised management and R&D from the core, basic manufacturing operations were carried out in the semi-periphery by skilled and semi skilled workers and mass production was moved to the periphery to be completed by large supplies of de-skilled, automatic assembly lines workers.
As a result of the spectacular rise in the demand for du ...