Labour Regimes and Global Production

Elena Baglioni, Liam Campling, Neil M. Coe, Adrian Smith, Elena Baglioni, Liam Campling, Neil M. Coe, Adrian Smith

• Editorial: Agenda Publishing
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781788213639
• Categoría: Economics
• Categoría: Labour Economics

There has been a recent resurgence in interest in the theorization of labour regimes in various disciplines. This has taken the form of a concern to understand the role that labour regimes play in the structuring, organization and dynamics of global systems of production and reproduction. The concept has a long heritage that can be traced back to the 1970s and the contributions to this book seek to develop further this emerging field.

The book traces the intellectual development of labour regime concepts across various disciplines, notably political economy, development studies, sociology and geography. Building on these foundations it considers conceptual debates around labour regimes and global production relating to issues of scale, informality, gender, race, social reproduction, ecology and migration, and offers new insights into the work conditions of global production chains from Amazon's warehouses in the United States, to industrial production networks in the Global South, and to the dormitory towns of migrant workers in Czechia. It also explores recent mobilizations of labour regime analysis in relation to methods, theory and research practice.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: LABOUR REGIMES AND GLOBAL PRODUCTION

Elena Baglioni, Liam Campling, Neil M. Coe and Adrian Smith

LABOUR REGIMES AND GLOBAL PRODUCTION: INTELLECTUAL CONTEXTS

Huge strides have been made in recent decades in our understanding of the networked and dynamic forms of capital accumulation in the world economy. Ranging across foundational work on the new international division of labour (NIDL) to more recent global production network (GPN) and global value chain (GVC) analyses, such work has enabled an enhanced understanding of the ways in which more globally integrated economies have developed and become consolidated. Until recently, however, this work has been more silent in terms of understanding both the employment and the labour consequences of these changes, and also the role that labour plays in the structuring and formulation of landscapes of accumulation. Although it is possible to diagnose a growing “awareness of the different forms of labour” enrolled into global production structures (Taylor et al. 2015: 9), alongside growing attention to social upgrading, the rights and voice of labour, and labour agency (Ramamurthy 2000; Barrientos, Gereffi & Rossi 2011; Coe 2015), we still see a tendency towards a capital-centric narrative focused on firms as the key agents and actors in global production systems.

Our approach in this collection is to recentre the analysis of global capitalism on the labour regime as the core of networked, scalar systems of economic integration and production. At its core, a labour regime signals the combination of social relations and institutions that bind capital and labour in a form of antagonistic relative stability in particular times and places. This recentring is important both analytically and politically. Analytically, it refuses to privilege any single site in a global production system but, rather, sees the labour regime as the societal framework through which capitalist accumulation at a world scale becomes possible. Politically, it positions labour at the heart of questions about how we understand and approach the global economy. By understanding and locating different forms and modes of work, labour regime analysis seeks to defetishize exploitation as a first step for building relationships of commonality between workers who are, seemingly, often disparate, including those whose labour is frequently “hidden” in informal or household economies. Labour regimes analysis exposes the multiple threads linking different workers both within systems of global production and also across workplaces, regions and countries, thereby indicating avenues for building new solidarities.

The literature on the impacts of global production on labour is several decades old and spans many disciplines, notably development studies, economic anthropology, human geography, labour studies/industrial relations, political science and sociology. This literature is replete with time- and place-specific case studies of the differentiated outcomes of enrolling in global production for workers of different types. More recently it has emphasized the potential for workers to improve their conditions of existence through exerting different forms of individual and collective agency, as well as advancing deep historical accounts studying processes of change in capitalist production, such as in the field of global labour history. In parallel, since the mid-1990s, analysis of the underlying production structures in terms of new international divisions of labour has given way to work on global value chains/production networks that captures the spatially and organizationally fragmented nature of much contemporary commodity production. Connections started to be forged between these two strands in the 2000s (e.g. Smith et al. 2002; Bair & Ramsay 2003; Palpacuer & Parisotto 2003; Selwyn 2007; Cumbers, Nativel & Routledge 2008), and the conversation has broadened and deepened subsequently (e.g. Pickles & Smith 2016; Mezzadri 2017; Werner 2016). This work has revealed the interdependences between worker positionality in global production networks and the particular social and institutional milieux in which they live and work. Newsome et al. (2015), in turn, use labour process theory as a window onto these interactions in and through the coordinated but geographically distributed functions of global production networks.

What these works lack, however, is a systematic theorization of the intersections between the workplace and wider social institutions and processes, and they have not tapped the potential of labour regime analysis for advancing this agenda. In our diagnosis, such analysis has the potential to make a unique contribution through effectively bridging the dynamics of territorialized labour systems and global production structures. This impulse builds upon a significant resurgence of interest in the theorization of labour regimes in a range of interdisciplinary areas, including critical development studies, economic geography and employment relations, among others. This has partly taken the form of a concern to understand the role that labour regimes play in the structuring, organization and dynamics of global systems of production and reproduction. Labour regimes are seen as historically formed, multi-scalar phenomena resulting from the articulation of struggles over local social relations, and their direct or indirect intersections with the commercial demands of lead firms in global production networks and with the gendered and racialized politics of social reproduction. As the following section elaborates, however, the notion of a labour regime has a long heritage that can be traced to debates in the 1970s and 1980s in development studies, feminist political economy, industrial relations and political sociology, and in labour geography in the 1990s. This book, therefore, seeks to develop this emerging field of intellectual enquiry by examining the nature, role, constitution and dynamics of labour regimes in globalizing capitalism.

But why labour regimes? In taking seriously Thompson and Smith’s (2009) call for labour process theory to incorporate but simultaneously move beyond distinct workplaces, a labour regimes approach introduces the variegated scales of political-economic and socio-cultural relations, processes and contexts that produce and reproduce networks of workers dispersed across spaces and places from the local to the global (Bernstein 2007; Taylor & Rioux 2018). As Pattenden (2016) argues, in a development of Banaji (2010), the labour regime is a useful mediating category between the day-to-day labour processes of a particular workplace with its diverse “forms of exploitation” and the more abstract “general forms of domination” under capitalism. It also offers the potential for significant analytical purchase on how labour control and governance mechanisms, promulgated “vertically” through inter-firm interactions within global production networks, interact with more territorial or “horizontal” systems of labour regulation to ultimately shape labour conditions and potentialities (e.g. Locke 2013).

But, if a labour regime can only ever be understood through its particular historical-geographical configurations and, as such, has to be analysed empirically, to what extent can we theorize the category further than what is currently in place? Is it the case that the thorny methodological issue of any particular labour regime’s analytical bordering (where it stops and starts) can be defined only in relation to the types of questions being asked? This book engages with a range of questions at the heart of labour regime analysis, which include: how can we theorize labour regimes in the context of long-run historical processes of colonization and the spatially uneven deepening of global capitalist relations of production; to what extent do labour regime concepts enable the development of comparative analysis of different but interconnected political-economic formations; how do labour regimes develop in distinct and similar ways in relation to contrasting global production systems; how do we make sense of the reproduction and control of specific labour processes in discrete places and industries; and to what extent does labour regime analysis provide a synthetic framework for understanding the political economy of contemporary capitalism? In short, the book contributes politically to putting workers – their organizations, regulation and (re)production – at the centre of global production.

LABOUR REGIMES: HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF A CONCEPT

The notion of the “labour regime” – alongside associated terms such as “workplace regimes” and “production regimes” – crops up repeatedly in contemporary social science. In many cases, however, it is used in somewhat broad and descriptive terms, to simply capture the varied experiences of labouring in the global economy, or as a synonym for national-level systems of industrial relations and employment regulation. The result of this multiplication of uses of the concept is that it can lead to quite general and often elusive definitions of labour regimes. Bair (2019: 488), for instance, defines a labour regime as “the dominant way in which labour is recruited, compensated, and disciplined”, while Li (2017: 247) describes how the term refers to “the assemblage of elements that set the conditions under which people work”. In this section, we introduce a series of studies that have sought to use, or “put into practice”, the labour regime in more conceptually precise terms. To do so, we delimit three phases of work dating back to the 1980s, using the varied geographical scales through which the concept is deployed as a loose organizing device. It is important to recognize that all labour regime analysis is multi-scalar to a certain extent, so here we are primarily focused on identifying different emphases and analytical priorities. Many of the themes we sketch out in this introduction are more fully developed through the richness and conceptual development of the chapters that follow.

Phase 1: the workplace in national context

The work of Michael Burawoy (1979, 1983, 1985) is foundational to the labour regimes approach. As such, his ideas are engaged with frequently in the chapters that follow (see especially Peck in Chapter 4), meaning that only a brief introduction is required here. In his critiques of Braverman’s (1974) germinal work on deskilling and capitalist labour processes, Burawoy (1985) sought to extend consideration of labour control beyond the workplace to include the wider “politics of production”. What he termed “factory regimes” were therefore forged at the intersection of the politics associated with the labour process – i.e. the workplace struggles between employers and workers – and the wider “political apparatus” of the state in terms of its labour market interventions and regulations. Of particular importance here were the efforts of the state to provide basic welfare and social safety nets, and to mitigate the effects of harsh labour control strategies through establishing and upholding employment regulations and collective bargaining rights. At the heart of Burawoy’s (1979) concern was the question of how forms of consent in the labour process were “manufactured” via the development and deployment of different regimes.

Burawoy thus conceptualized differences in factory regimes as being shaped by four intersecting dynamics, namely the labour process, the nature of market competition, the reproduction of labour power and state intervention – with the latter two being of particular importance (McKay 2006). Drawing on detailed empirical work at the factory level, he distilled five different types of factory regimes. In addition to company-state regimes, in which workers are entirely reliant on the employer for their social reproduction, and the regimes of bureaucratic despotism, associated with state socialism, Burawoy famously distinguished between despotic regimes, in which there is little or no state support to workers beyond that provided by employers; hegemonic regimes, in which welfare states provide assistance in the domain of social reproduction, and workers also benefit from a strong union movement; and the early contours of a regime of hegemonic despotism – which we would now associate with neoliberal globalization – in which labour becomes subordinated to the interests of expansive capital accumulation in a process of competitive undermining of labour standards and salaries (see, in particular, Chang, Hürtgen and Anner in Chapters 8, 9 and 11, respectively).

Burawoy’s work has been especially influential because of the way it allows analysis to bridge the scale of the workplace – the traditional locus of labour process approaches – and the national political-economic contexts in which they are embedded. Put another way, the factory regime connects “the micro-politics of the workplace and the macro-politics of the state” (Knutsen & Hansson 2010: 159). It has inspired a range of studies of workplace labour regimes that continue to this day, ranging across, for instance, the workplace regimes associated with the logistics industry in northwest Europe (Dörflinger, Pulignano & Vallas 2020) to the construction industry in China and India (Suresh 2010) and Africa (Wethal 2017). In this latter...