Touching Down: Labour, Globalisation and the Airline Industry

This paper explores the recent history of cabin crew in the airline industry. It argues that as companies have become more complex and interconnected during the process of globalisation in the 1990s, a dialectic has been at work that provides workers with a newfound power. Lessons are drawn from the British Airways cabin crew strike of 1997, in which workers successfully resisted attempts to remove union recognition. These involve questions of action at global and local scale, and new strategies devised by the union concerned. Lastly, the paper discusses the post-September 11, 2001 climate and suggests that cabin crew have an opportunity to reaffirm their indispensability to airline safety.     

Environmental Standards and Industrial Restructuring: the Case of the Australian Paper Industry

Environmental standards imposed on the Australian paper industry have emerged in response to public concern over the logging of native forests and the ‘greening’ of consumer demand. Such standards play an integral part in the paper industry's restructuring. Neo-classical theorists hypothesised environmental standards as encouraging the relocation of polluting industries to countries with lax regulations. An alternative hypothesis is that environmental standards encourage in-situ restructuring that can positively affect a company's competitiveness. In considering this alternative hypothesis the implications for state and federal policy are briefly considered.     

Dimensions of Global Economic Restructuring and the Idea of Decentralisating Labour Relations in Australia

Though always more exposed than many other countries to the vicissitudes of international competition, Australia seems to have become increasingly vulnerable to the pressures accompanying global restructuring. This much is evident in the pattern of foreign debt, the balance of payments and trade, and fluctuations in our exchange rate. Media paranoia over the day-to-day pegormance of macro-indicators obscures, however, the pressures global restructuring has brought against the integrity and efficacy of our major institutions Not only have there been serious questions raised about the usefulness of the centralised arbitration system in the context of global restructuring, the Australian labour movement itself faces an uncertain future. Notwithstanding the claimed virtues of an enterprise-based labour relations system, there are good reasons to suppose that a decentralised system would have its own problems in accommodating rapid economic change. In this respect, the search for an American-style decentralised institutional regime may be ill-advised; more useful may be an enhanced capacity to adjust within the current framework of Australian labour relations.     

Labour in Global Value Chains: Work Conditions in Football Manufacturing in China,India and Pakistan

A critical challenge facing developing country producers is to meet international labour standards and codes of conduct in order to engage in global value chains. Evidence of gains for workers from compliance with such standards and codes remains limited and patchy. This article focuses on the global football industry, a sector dominated by leading global brands that manage dispersed global value chains. It assesses the working conditions for football stitchers engaged in different forms of work organization, factories, stitching centres and home‐based settings in Pakistan, India and China. It draws on detailed qualitative primary field research with football‐stitching workers and producers in these three countries. The article explains how and why work conditions of football stitchers differ across these locations through an analytical framework that interweaves both global and local production contexts that influence work conditions. In doing so, it argues that current debates on the role of labour in global value chains have to go beyond a narrow focus on labour standards and corporate social responsibility compliance and engage with economic, technological and social upgrading as factors that could generate sustained improvements in real wages and workers’ conditions.     

World Making,Critical Pedagogies,and the Geographical Imagination: Where Youth Work Meets Participatory Research

Renewed interest in the critical geographies of education has raised productive yet under‐examined synergies with reflections taking place among radical youth work and participatory research practitioners. In particular, such intersections point to important ways that the geographical imagination might advance a critical yet creative means of learning through the living material forces of everyday worlds. This paper examines this common ground through a collaborative, London‐based case study exploring young people's sense of home and belonging in the inner‐city. It argues that cross‐overs between the praxis of participatory research and youth work offer generative potential to act alongside young people in the production of autonomous geographical knowledges. Specifically, the case is made for prioritising an imaginative, experiential and intersubjective pedagogical process of “world making”, as an alternative to practices that intervene in, act upon and ultimately “other” the everyday lives of young people.     

The Role of Female Labour in Industrial Restructuring: New production processes and labour market relations in the Istanbul clothing industry

For many industries, a new production system characterised principally by flexibility has become one of the key means of achieving competitive advantage in world markets. In traditional industrial sectors flexibility in the organisation of production is based upon subcontracting, within which female labour is of undisputed importance. In this article, research on female labour in the Istanbul clothing industry is used to investigate these processes of industrial restructuring. Particular attention is drawn to changes in women's attitude to work and in their responses to working conditions, which have important consequences for the industry itself.     

Capital,Labour and State Relations in the Analysis of Enterprises and Restructuring: An Australasian Debate

The paper arises out of the debate of a group of Australian and New Zealand geographers who attended a workshop in ‘Enterprises and Restructuring’ held in Canberra in September 1988. The paper outlines a framework for a political economy analysis of processes at the heart of economic restructuring and examines the units of analysis, concepts and approaches used by geographers bringing different philosophic positions to the investigation of economic restructuring. It explores how the three threads of production, accumulation and social relations are intertwined in the study of enterprise and restructuring and how an understanding of these dimensions provides a basis for reinterpreting the utility of many analytical categories. The discussion of the meaning, relevance and content of terms such as enterprise, industry, capital and the state confirms the validity and value of concepts derived from different theoretical positions and goes some way towards demonstrating that researchers from opposing positions can meaningfully communicate and cooperate.     

Globalisation Lived Locally: A Labour Geography Perspective on Control,Conflict and Response among Workers in Kerala

Abstract: Supported by the labour geography framework, I analyse how spatial practices of labour shape the economic geography of capitalism, by looking into a model not at a global but at a very local scale of organisation and showing its effectiveness while confronting social actors organised at global or extra‐local scales. Questioning global stereotypes on economic responses to globalisation, I argue that labour becomes actively involved in the very process of globalisation and the expansion of capital, empirically demonstrating the relevance of this in the globalisation literature. I deal with one region—Kerala—and processes in its labour markets, taking the case of apparel workers in an export‐promoting industrial park.     

Globalisation,Gentrification and Spatial Hierarchies in and beyond New South Wales: the Local/Global Nexus

Popular visions of globalisation envisage the collapse of physical space as a significant determinant in social relations. The rapid speed at which movements of capital and information occur are touted as evidence that the constraints of physical space are eroding. The emergence of a global network of persons referred to as the transnational elite further supports these popular perceptions. Characterised as highly educated professionals employed in globally aligned industries, the transnational elite seemingly construct their individual and group identities beyond the scale of the local. However, research undertaken in Newcastle and Sydney with gentrifiers actively constructing their ‘global personas’ problematise popular discourses of globalisation as contributing to the decline of space as fundamental to identity construction. As an emergent élite global community, the gentrifiers create complex cognitive maps of spatial desirability reinforcing the significance of specific places. Through this process, places are ranked according to their global significance forming complex spatial hierarchies. Consequently, some places are cast as global and hence desirable, while others are stigmatised as undesirable non-global spaces.     

Negotiating Neoliberal Empowerment: Aboriginal People,Educational Restructuring,and Academic Labour in the North of British Columbia,Canada

Aboriginal peoples in Canada are gaining influence in post‐secondary education through Aboriginal‐directed programs and policies in non‐Aboriginal institutions. However, these gains have occurred alongside, and in some cases through, neoliberal reforms to higher education. This article explores the political consequences of the neoliberal institutionalization of First Nations empowerment for public sector unions and workers. We examine a case where the indigenization of a community college in British Columbia was embedded in neoliberal reforms that ran counter to the interests of academic instructors. Although many union members supported indigenization, many also possessed a deep ambivalence about the change. Neoliberal indigenization increased work intensity, decreased worker autonomy and promoted an educational philosophy that prioritized labour market needs over liberal arts. This example demonstrates how the integration of Aboriginal aspirations into neoliberal processes of reform works to rationalize public sector restructuring, constricting labour agency and the possibilities for alliances between labour and Aboriginal peoples.     

Gender and Global Labour Migrations: Incorporating Skilled Workers

Female labour migration has increased in the past two decades, and has become more complex and interconnected, attracting considerable attention from researchers and policy makers. Earlier debates on the relationship between production and reproduction have resurfaced in a period of changing configurations of welfare states; contemporary theorisations of global labour migration are now paying attention to the role of women in the reproductive sector. However, much of the literature has focused on migrants who enter the lesser‐skilled sectors, in particular domestic labour. In this paper we argue that the migration of women into skilled sectors of the labour market, especially in health, alters our understanding of the role of migrant women in social reproduction. Migrant women are present in multiple sites and spheres of reproduction beyond the household and recognising the different ways in which they are incorporated into globalised labour markets challenges simplistic representations of migrant women and draws out a fuller appreciation of their contribution to social reproduction and welfare in the First World.     

Urban Governance Under Neoliberalism: New Labour and the Restructuring of State‐Space

Abstract: In the UK there has been a proliferation of agencies at differing regulatory scales as part of the rescaling and restructuring of the state by New Labour, following the neoliberal policies of previous Conservative governments. This raises questions concerning the extent to which New Labour's urban state restructuring is embedded within neoliberalism, and the local tensions and contradictions arising from emergent New Labour urban state restructuring. This paper examines these questions through the analysis of key policy features of New Labour, and the in‐depth exploration of two programmes that are reshaping urban governance arrangements, namely Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) and New Deal for Communities (NDC) programmes. We conclude that New Labour's restructuring is best understood in terms of the extended reproduction (roll‐out) of neoliberalism. While these “new institutional fixes” are only weakly established and exhibit internal contradictions and tensions, these have not led to a broader contestation of neoliberalism.     

Multiple Trajectories: A Critique of Industrial Restructuring and the New Institutionalism

This article argues that the agrarian studies literature sheds new light on the multiple,nonlinear trajectories of capitalist development occurring in the context of accelerating global integration. Cast in relation to classical political economy, work on agrarian change is centrally concerned with multiple paths of agrarian transformation. It attends both to historically specificforms of social property relations and to the ways that struggles over resources and labor are simultaneously struggles over culturally constructed meanings, definitions, and identities. Accordingly, it goes well beyond the "new institutionalism" that figures prominently in the literature on industrial restructuring. The article draws on recent research in globally linked industrial districts in former bantustan areas of South Africa to illustrate thecontemporary and continuing salience of agrarian histories and concepts. It also suggests how attention to multiple trajectories of sociospatial change can be used to challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy taking hold in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Global Restructuring,the Welfare State and Urban Programmes: Federal Policies and Inequality within Australian Cities

This paper is a prelude to a theme issue in 2003 on Australasian city and regional problems and policies. It considers the impact of economic restructuring on the level of inequality and disadvantage within Australian cities. Evidence is presented that Australian cities have become more unequal over the past two decades and this greater level of inequality has found concrete expression within the built environment. These patterns of inequality are distinct to Australia. It is argued that the Australian Government's reliance on tightly targeted income support policies and market-based solutions to economic disadvantage has contributed greatly to the concentration of low income and vulnerable households within certain sections of Australian cities.