ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has impacted myriad aspects of contemporary life, reshaping from the very local to the truly global the geography of capitalism in important ways. Drawing upon themes from Labor Geography, in this essay I present six vignettes that either reveal something about global capitalism’s spatial organization or that speak to how that spatial organization is being reworked and with what consequences. These six are: 1) what the pandemic tells us about the structure of global supply chains; 2) what the pandemic tells us about the nature of transnational labor migration; 3) what the pandemic means for the future of work and its geographical location; 4) how nation-states have responded to COVID differently and how this has affected the geography of the pandemic and its consequences; 5) how working people have adopted new strategies of self-reproduction, such as growing vegetable gardens reminiscent of the Victory Gardens of WWI and WWII; and 6) how the micro-geographies of many workplaces have been rearranged to encourage social distancing between workers and between workers and customers and what this means for management’s abilities to control labor through how it lays out the workplace. The chapter, then, contributes to a growing anthropology of labor by focusing upon how COVID is impacting work practices and workers, together with how workers are responding to these challenges.
