Systemic Flexibility,Production Fragmentation and Cluster Governance

The recent process of production fragmentation and the rapid growth of firm clusters have been explained by the increasing need for output flexibility. Although the mainstream literature relates flexibility mostly to labour adjustments, this paper investigates sources of flexibility as being related to forms of inter-firm production. Two extreme cases are compared: industrial districts and monopsonistic clusters. The nature and the implications of production flexibility are discussed in both settings. It is argued that the governance structure of industrial districts affects the dynamics of inter-firm linkages, which in turn enables systemic flexibility to be achieved.     

In Search of Competitive Efficiency: Labour Process Flexibility in Canadian Newsprint Mills

This paper focuses on the strategies for production and work reorganization pursued in the Canadian newsprint industry during the 1990s. Many newsprint mill managers view new pulping technologies and increased labour process flexibility as the important keys to success in their never-ending quest to remain competitive in the U.S. market. These strategies are discussed in the context of two underlying themes: the nature of the particular competitive pressures faced by Canadian newsprint producers in the early 1990s and the specific nature of the labour process in newsprint mills. Evidence points to the central importance of achieving functional labour flexibility in newsprint mills and to the fact that numerical labour flexibility is not a viable strategy, given the continuous-process nature of the industry.
The Economics of Production, Technological Change, and Cost Competitiveness in the Newsprint Industry
Work Practices and Labour Conventions in the Newsprint Industry
Flexibility and the Quest for Competitive Efficiency in Canadian Newsprint Mills     

Reshuffling Paperworkers: Technological Change and Experiences of Reorganization at a Québec Newsprint Mill

This article offers an historical-geographical account of how an aging newsprint mill located in Gatineau, in the Outaouais region of western Québec, with serious obstacles to cost-effective production, came to be chosen for a complete in situ technological reorganization project in the early 1990s. This apparent paradox is explained by locating the mill with respect to the production system and corporate strategy of its parent company, with respect to changing production and demand requirements, and with respect to its particular labour relations history. We focus on the process through which this drastic reorganization was implemented at the mill, showing how logistical considerations particular to this type of continuous-process industry, as well as procedures laid out in the labour contract, influenced the company's timetable and labour deployment strategies during this period. We show how the process of technological reorganization helped create the conditions for the subsequent implementation of functional flexibility. We also refer to the unpredictable contingencies that necessitated building flexibility into the timetable for downsizing the workforce by some 450 jobs. As well as considering the constraints faced by local management, we explore how the reorganization process was experienced by workers, especially those facing prolonged uncertainty as to their future at the mill. We examine the seeming paradox of the prevalence of overtime at the mill even as workers were being laid off. In conclusion, we critically discuss the appropriateness of concepts such as management strategy and numerical flexibility and point to the need for further concept development to facilitate analyses of labour deployment strategies adopted during periods of production reorganization.     

西方现代劳动力地理学研究进展及对中国研究的意义

劳动力地理学研究有助于理解全球化背景下劳动力作为当前国际国内经济转型和产业区位的一个重要因素及其发生作用的内在机制,对指导劳动力市场调节、促进地方劳动力市场发展具有重要意义。本文总结了国外劳动力地理学理论研究的起源,认为其理论演变经历了由新古典经济地理学区位理论,到马克思主义新经济地理理论,到近年来"文化、制度转向"的劳动力市场地理发展历程。介绍了近年来地方化劳动力市场地理理论和实证研究领域,及其对产业空间组织的影响等方面所取得的最新进展。在对当前的研究进行评述的基础上,指出不足和未来方向。与西方学术界相比,我国相关理论研究较为欠缺,尤其是文化、制度等因素对我国劳动力市场影响的研究有待进一步加强。     

“We Simply Have to Do that Stuff for our Survival”: Labour,Firm Innovation and Cluster Governance in the Canadian Automotive Parts Industry

Based on a case study of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union in southern Ontario we argue for a critical reconstruction of both the labour geography and industrial cluster literature. The former stresses the active role of labour in the formation of economic landscapes, but has yet to explore labour's agency in production and how labour institutions shape technological change, firm innovation and industrial policy and strategy. Conversely, much of the industrial cluster and regional innovation systems literature is silent on the role of unions and industrial relations institutions in fostering innovation. We conclude with two main points. First, while some contend that positive union roles in innovation can only stem from partnerships with management and team working, we argue that innovation is more likely to emerge and worker interests are better protected when traditional collective bargaining structures and progressive employment legislation play a central role. Second, positive workplace and cluster level cooperation in the Canadian automotive parts industry are jeopardized by the broader and ongoing macro‐economic restructuring of OEM global production networks due to over‐capacity and intense cost‐cutting pressures reverberating down the supply chain.     

Gender,Contracts and Wage Work: Agricultural Restructuring in Brazil's São Francisco Valley

Brazil?s São Francisco Valley provides an example of the ways in which agro-food firms are attempting to mobilize and control labour as they expand production of fruits and vegetables for domestic and global markets. In crops where cost reduction is a primary concern, firms choose highly ‘flexible’ forms of labour mobilization, drawing on the casual labour of migrants from the Brazilian Northeast. In crops where the quality and timing of produce are of great importance, firms use either subcontracting arrangements that mobilize family labour, or the labour of local women and children. In this way, firms involved in the production of fruits and vegetables show many similarities to their counterparts in certain branches of industry: they are actively experimenting with labour arrangements that tap the most vulnerable segments of the international workforce, and that appropriate unpaid family labour.     

Women Workers and the Promise of Ethical Trade in the Globalised Garment Industry: A Serious Beginning?

The paper gives an overview of the recent development within the Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI), especially the development of corporate codes of conduct, and considers the prospects they offer for improving labour conditions for workers in the international garments industry. It argues that two specific features of the industry—competitive production systems based on international subcontracting and the use of predominantly female production workers—are likely to undermine the effective development of a codes-based strategy. Nevertheless, the labour rights agenda at the centre of ETI does provide a space for labour activists, whether operating in or out of formal union structures, to build campaigns and connections around global production networks.     

In Search of Regional Industrial Culture: The Role of Labour Organisations in Old Industrial Regions

This paper examines the ways in which the institutions of organised labour contribute to the formulation of regional industrial culture. We argue that industrial culture is fundamental to an understanding of uneven regional development. This industrial culture is dynamic, both product and constituent of negotiated social activities that involve the traditions and capacities of labour as an actor in its own right. We address the question of precisely how these connections between economy and culture are made. This is done through a detailed case study of the way in which one labour organisation—the national steel labour union in the UK, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC)—has both shaped and been influenced by the industrial culture of Teesside in northeast England. There, we argue, nationally led centrist labour politics came together with paternalistic capital-labour relations and localistic forms of self-identification to create a distinctive regional industrial culture. We focus in particular upon four processes: the social construction of work in the steel industry; relations with other steel regions within the UK; fragmentation in collective bargaining; and the ISTC's recent reorientation towards community unionism. We conclude that much remains to be done given the powerful legacies from decades of innate conservatism, but that it is now at least possible to begin to address important questions about the future direction of the local economy. Thinking in terms of the contingent interaction between cultural and economic attributes, centrally incorporating labour, is useful because it opens up the concepts of adaptability and institutional blockage to wider interpretations.     

Industrial suburbs and the growth of metropolitan Pittsburgh, 1870–1920

In 1907, the Pittsburgh Survey team recognized that dispersed industrial development had created a metropolitan area stretching 30 to 50 miles from downtown Pittsburgh. Traditional interpretations of metropolitan formation fail to account for the crucial role of industry in this process. Beginning in the 1870s, the transformation from small, craft organized factories to integrated mills, mass production, and modern management organization in steel and other industries led many manufacturers to search for large sites with railroad and river accessibility. They purchased land, designed modern plants, and sometimes built towns for workers. Other firms bought into new communities begun as speculative industrial real estate ventures. Some owners removed their plants from the city's labour politics to exert greater control over workers. The region's rugged topography and dispersed natural resources of coal and gas accentuated this dispersal. The rapid growth of steel, glass, railroad equipment and coke industries resulted in both large mass-production plants and numerous smaller firms. As capital deepened and interdependence grew, participants multiplied, economies accrued, the division of labour increased, and localized production systems formed around these industries. Transportation, capital, labour markets, and the division of labour in production bound the scattered industrial plants and communities into a sprawling metropolitan district. By 1910 the Pittsburgh district was a complex urban landscape with a dominant central city, surrounded by proximate residential communities, mill towns, satellite cities, and hundreds of mining towns.     

Industrial reorganisation and coal production in Australia, 1860–1982: an historical materialist analysis

From an historical materialist perspective, the essential quality of industrial change is that it is the product of conflict resident both in the relationship of struggle between capital and labour over the accumulation of surplus value and in the competitive relations between individual capitals over the appropriation of profits. This article is essentially methodological in that it identifies the specific competitive and conflictual determinants of profitability internal to an industry and the external influences of the wider economy which contribute to that industry's ‘relative’ profitability vis a vis investment capital. It argues that the emerging pattern of economic change is structured by a tendency towards crisis and declining profitability. The history of black coal production in Australia is examined in the light of this method and emerging theory of industrial reorganisation.     

The case of specialized towns in Guangdong,China

The illustration of some preliminary results of an ongoing research on the industry in Guangdong, China, is the core of this article. In particular focus is on the so called ‘specialized towns’ and the industries that characterize them as complex actors of Chinese industrial development. The evidence on these specialized towns is quite interesting as such, being not yet well acknowledged in the international literature. However, it is also believed that an investigation of these realities may contribute to the understanding of new engines of industrial development in the context of contemporary global economic relations—what is called the ‘new industry’. Furthermore, some light is shed on the nature of the competitive challenge that China poses to traditional European industry: it is not only cheap labour, cheap land, dumping, and the like. In the new emerging China government visions, policies and industrial organization architecture seem to play a central role. In this context, the authors conclude proposing a framework of questions relevant to some of the most industrialized areas of Europe, that is the Italian regions characterized by a great diffusion of industrial districts.     

Restructuring the Architecture of State Regulation in the Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand Cleaning Industries and the Growth of Precarious Employment

This paper examines changes in the commercial cleaning industry in Australasia which are occurring against a backdrop of significant transformation in the mode of labour market regulation in both countries. Specifically, whereas for most of the twentieth century both Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia had systems of labour market regulation in which the state provided minimum wage and work protections through the interventions of arbitration courts, in the past few years these courts have either been abolished (in the case of New Zealand) or severely restricted in their ambit (in the case of Australia), all as part of a neoliberal effort to introduce “flexibility” into labour markets. The result has been an erosion of wages and a worsening of conditions of employment for cleaners and many other groups of workers. At the same time, this transformation in the architecture of labour market regulation poses significant challenges to unions seeking to represent cleaners and other low‐paid service sector workers.     

The Urban Emergence of a New Information Industry: Sydney's Multimedia Firms

This paper analyses the multimedia industry in Sydney. It seeks to understand whether the emergence of the industry has involved dense horizontal and vertical inter‐firm linkages characteristic of an industrial cluster, or whether the industry has grown because of general urbanisation economies related to such factors as skilled labour supply and market demand. The industry is highly concentrated in and around central Sydney. This provides the best access to firms’ main clients, notably advertising companies and other multimedia firms. It also reflects the centralised location of skilled labour such as web designers. While there is evidence of an emerging inner Sydney multimedia cluster which includes graphic design and advertising and related media, the main driver of the industry's development appears to have been general demand from advertising and related media companies, in association with the pool of computer graphics talent generated by these companies.     

Linking Gentrification and Labour Market Precarity in the Contemporary City: A Framework for Analysis

The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under‐researched topic in the fields of labour and urban geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour flexibilisation are both socio‐spatial manifestations of capital's efforts to confront crises of accumulation. Distinguishing between what we call “weak” and “strong” links between them, and drawing upon the concepts of “gentrification‐supporting” and “gentrification‐fostered” labour flexibility, we outline a framework for connecting gentrification and precarity. This allows us to make links between the restructuring of the built environment and the reorganisation of work in the post‐industrial city; it also allows us to show how workers, through their agency, can shape rent gaps in the contemporary city.     

Contested Meanings: Protection and Resistance in Labour Inspectors’ Reports in Twentieth-Century Greece

Reports written by Labour Inspectors responsible for the implementation of protective labour legislation in Greek industry during the period 1913–34 are analysed both as discourses that construct new industrial relations and as sources that provide evidence of workers’ resistance. To account for their difficulty in implementing labour laws, Inspectors defined themselves as agents of ‘progress’ struggling against the ‘backwardness’ of the working masses, especially as expressed in gender attitudes. Yet the reports also provide evidence of divergent cultural meanings and unravel the multiple ways in which men and women workers negotiated their identities.     

The Restructuring of Labour in the Automobile Industry in South Korea

Based on a case study of the South Korean automobile industry, this article explores the qualitative shift in employment practices implied by the expansion of contract labour from peripheral services to the main production activities of firms. This new phenomenon involves the greater integration of labour contracting into the production process, together with changes in employment practices and the rights of workers, which poses a challenge to our conventional understanding of labour contracting. The findings of the present study address the importance of investigating the issue of employment relationships and analysing the roles played by workplace actors in order to better understand the process of change in labour contracting and the consequences of increased numbers of non‐standard workers in the workplace. By revealing both the cooperation and the conflicting interests between workplace actors, the study highlights the sources of tension and contradiction associated with changes in labour contracting arrangements and the subsequent restructuring of the workplace.     

‘Classes of Labour’ at the Margins of Global Commodity Chains in India and China

This article deploys the concept of ‘classes of labour’ to map and compare non‐factory labour relations in the garment chain across Delhi and Shanghai metropolitan areas. It contributes to commodity studies by unpacking the great complexity of mechanisms of ‘adverse incorporation’ of informal work in global commodity chains and production circuits. Field findings reveal the great social differentiation at work in informalized settings in the two countries, and suggest that while the margins of garment work are characterized by high levels of vulnerability, they may also open up new possibilities for workers to resist or re‐appropriate some degree of control over their labour and reproductive time. While these possibilities depend on regional trajectories, informal labour arrangements do not only result from capital's quest for flexibility. Workers actively participate in shaping their own labour geography, even when exposed to high employment insecurity. The conclusions more broadly discuss the merits of comparative analysis to study labour in global production circuits.     

Global Value Chain Participation and the Labour Share: Industry-level Evidence from Emerging Economies

Participation in global value chains (GVCs) has been proposed as a central means for emerging economies to develop and technologically upgrade. However, the effects of GVCs on income distribution in the global South remain underexplored. This article presents an econometric analysis of the determinants of the labour share in seven emerging economies for the period 1995–2014. Drawing on industry-level data from global input-output tables, the authors focus on how GVC participation — in particular offshoring of production from advanced to emerging economies — affects the labour share of different skill groups within manufacturing and service industries. They also estimate the effects of GVCs on productivity, real wages and the capital–value added ratio, to shed further light on the channels through which GVCs affect the labour share. In both industry groups, findings show that integration into GVCs with advanced economies has a negative effect on the labour share in emerging economies, particularly for medium-skilled workers. In contrast, higher union density and government consumption spending have positive effects on the labour share. Thus, labour in emerging economies loses out relative to capital as production becomes more integrated across borders.     

The Costs of Exclusion: Gender Job Segregation,Structural Change and the Labour Share of Income

While women's share of employment has risen in many countries over the last two decades, gender job segregation has worsened, with women increasingly excluded from ‘good’ jobs in the industrial sector. In this article, the determinants of gender job segregation are assessed using panel data for a broad set of developing countries covering the period 1991–2015. The effect of gender job segregation on all workers, via the labour share of income, is also analysed. The results identify two major contributors to gender job segregation — the rising capital/labour ratio and the ratio of female/male labour force participation rates — indicative of ‘crowding’ and exclusion as economies move up the industrial ladder. The analysis further indicates that the crowding of women into lower quality jobs has a negative effect on workers as a whole by dampening the labour share of income. Those processes are influenced by global and macroeconomic conditions and policies that have circumscribed the expansion of high‐quality jobs relative to labour supply, intensifying competition for ‘good’ jobs and weakening labour's bargaining power.     

What motivates millennials? How intersectionality shapes the working lives of female entrepreneurs in Canada’s fashion industry

The contemporary fashion industry is based on a set of ‘gendered skills and attributes.’ Women numerically dominate fashion schools and the labour force of fashion firms, and also start and run the majority of independent fashion brands. Angela McRobbie and others have highlighted the importance of considering the gendered dynamics of fashion-related work. Yet, as the industry continues to evolve in the wake of global integration, the digital transition and intensifying competition, there is an ongoing need for research. Using an intersectional approach, this paper provides a novel case study of young ‘Millennial’ female independent fashion designers who operate within the emerging and under-explored Canadian fashion industry. Drawing on 87 interviews and participant observation, the paper demonstrates how entrepreneurial motivations, pathways, practices and experiences are shaped by individual characteristics, such as gender, age, lifecycle and class. Particular attention is paid to the challenges and tensions associated with the D.I.Y. (do it yourself) model and how forms of work, including aesthetic labour, are performed and experienced in virtual spaces such as social media platforms. In so doing, the paper contributes to nascent research on Millennials and nuances our understanding of the gendered nature of creative labour. Crucially, the paper also moves beyond typical masculinist conceptualisations of entrepreneurship, which focus on high-growth and high-technology businesses, to highlight the legitimacy, prevalence and importance of alternative motivations, networks, identities and business practices within contemporary markets and creative industries.