Introduction: what are labour markets, and why are they in crisis?

The commonly used term ‘labour market’ is an example of what Gibson-Graham (1996, 2006) and Pettinger (2019) describe as a ‘capitalocentric’ concept, meaning one that implies the ubiquity, universalism and inevitability of capitalist economic systems. A labour ‘market’ is one in which an individual's capacity to work (labour power, as mentioned in Chapter 2) is bought and sold as a commodity, and the term connotes physical sites of hiring and firing, or even slave ‘markets’. In the current context, labour markets are not physical but abstract: they are the patterns of employment opportunities through which individuals find jobs or occupations.

We speak of labour markets in the plural because these arrangements are geographically specific and diverse. In the UK, the local labour market in largely rural Cornwall is vastly more limited than that in London. In general, working- class people, especially youths, tend to seek employment in local labour markets, while middle- class people may access local, national or, more recently, as part of the mechanics of globalization, international labour markets. Ironically, the most underprivileged and desperate jobseekers, migrants and refugees, are also likely to seek work internationally, often ending in informal roles and treated as ‘illegal’ by the authorities.

This is the first of the chapters in which we explore in more detail how the crises of work and of neoliberal capitalism, discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, are playing out in various aspects of working life. We assert that labour markets are in crisis due to the disruptions and changes inherent in the dynamics of capitalism, especially in the current neoliberal phase. While in the UK in the post- war decades, centred on industrial forms of production, labour markets remained relatively stable, as the economy shifted to its post-industrial service- based forms in the late 1970s and 1980s, the occupational structures and the supply of labour fell out of kilter, causing unemployment to rise in former industrial areas such as South Wales and North East England.