NEW PATRIARCHAL ECONOMIES IN THE AUSTRALIAN TEXTILE INDUSTRY

Analyses seriously considering the importance of gender in the process of restructuring have been scarce, yet altered gender relations have been integral to these changes at all geographical scales. Vital interconnections exist between a restructuring capitalism and a reconstituting patriarchy. Initially, I clarify the concepts and the feminist politics which inform the analysis, and then I situate the Australian textile industry in a global context of new divisions of labour and capital. Connecting these global changes to a particular national economy provides the necessary background to understanding the transformations which have occurred in one textile plant in Geelong, Victoria over the last twenty years. At all scales, patriarchy and capitalism have interconnected in such a way as to ensure that renewed profitability and reasserted male authority are linked during restructuring. Restoration of capital accumulation in the Australian textile industry has thus been built on a redefined but also reaffirmed patriarchal economy.     

Trade and inequality: Australia's textile, clothing, and footwear industries, 1986-1996

Beginning in the mid 1980s, the Australian government cut protectionof the Australian textile, clothing, and footwear sector, whilethe global TCF industry was embracing a new form of organization,the commodity chain. Some Australian TCF producers were forcedout of business, but others followed a variety of strategies,thereby restructuring the TCF labour force. In a process structuredby age, gender, and ethnicity, skilled and semi-skilled productionjobs have been lost, partially replaced by jobs in design, marketing,and management. Factory jobs in Australia have been replacedby outwork in Australia and factory jobs in the Pacific Rim.These restructurings have contributed to increased occupationalinequality within theTCF sector.     

“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.     

Labour Geographies of Workplace Restructuring: An Intra‐Labour Analysis

Informed by labour geography's thrust to situate workers as active subjects of analysis, this article examines lived experiences of restructuring at Australia's single largest industrial workplace. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, the article traverses three restructuring outcomes faced by workers and their families: (1) job retention; (2) redundancy; and (3) re‐employment. Amid the turbulence and uncertainty of a major workplace restructuring episode, workers' different lived experiences illuminate uneven intra‐labour power relations. As capitalist workplaces are re‐organised and labour processes redefined, more conflictual and divisive relationships often develop among groups of workers differentially positioned within the hierarchical labour markets of large firms. Emphasising restructuring episodes as generative contexts for grounded labour geographies research, the article develops intra‐labour agency as a critical analytical frame to explore more deeply the agency implications of workplace structures, co‐worker relationships, and social life matters that shape workers' capacities for action inside and beyond workplaces.     

Going global: the transnationalization of care

This article critically examines the contours of ‘care transnationalization’ as an ongoing social process and a field of enquiry. Care transnationalization scholarship combines structural understandings of global power relations with an emphasis on social interactions between defined actors in ways that keep sight of human agency, material welfare and wider social development. It has, however, tended to privilege particular forms, dynamics and sites of care transnationalization over others. The body of research on care labour migration, which is otherwise the most developed literature on care transnationalization to date, contains a number of biases and omissions in its coverage of border-spanning relations and their mediation across country contexts. At the same time, other significant forms of care transnationalization, such as those involving consumer-based care migration, corporate restructuring and the formation of care policy, have suffered from comparative neglect. Working towards an integrated agenda that addresses these diverse expressions of care transnationalization and how they ‘touch down’ in a range of sectoral, social and country contexts is of prime importance to policy research agendas directed at understanding the wider development impacts of processes of social and economic restructuring.     

Restructuring women’s work; labour market and household gender regimes in the Greater Latrobe Valley,Australia

This article examines the impact of economic restructuring on gender relations. It examines the implications of labour market change for households within a region, in this case the Greater Latrobe Valley, Victoria, Australia. The argument is that the unchanging gender structures of the labour market constrain the intentions and efforts of individuals within households to significantly alter household gender relations. The analysis considers how restructuring has reshaped the regional labour market since 1996, changing opportunities for both men’s and women’s employment. Despite these changes, the regional labour market continues to be underpinned by a ‘male breadwinner’ gender regime and significant occupational and industrial gender segregation. Drawing on four vignettes, the analysis shows that the impetus towards greater gender equality in the household is constrained by a stagnant and stable labour market gender regime.     

Freedom of Information and Democracy in Australia and Beyond

Freedom of Information laws (FOI) throughout Australia have been routinely studied by law and media scholars. These authors have revealed widespread challenges to functioning FOI regimens, which range from government hostility to public sector restructuring to globalisation. Nevertheless, analysts have only begun to fully appreciate and explore the symbolism of FOI. Access laws are situated at the very heart of state and citizen relations, and they are especially sensitive to broader assumptions about citizenship and democracy. This paper aims to explore this sensitivity through a contextual examination that is as much about democratic theory as it is about access law. Many of the deficiencies outlined by various studies, it is argued, can be best viewed as a cluster of concerns that relate to one major problem – a lack of popular sovereignty. Australian and global democracy must be viewed and conducted in a more generally robust manner in order to strengthen FOI.     

Restructuring in the Canadian Newsprint Industry

This special issue of the Canadian Geographer presents five articles examining the wave of restructuring and the associated changes in the labour process that have swept through Canada's pulp and paper industry in recent years. The allocation of an entire issue to this topic is, we believe, justified by the importance of the industry to the Canadian economy, by the dramatic restructuring that has occurred to it since the early 1980s, and by the centrality of geography to an understanding of these events. During the period covered by these articles, there have been major changes in the location of pulp and paper operations, in their inputs to production, in the organization and technology of production within the mills, in the relations between production units, in the nature of work and employment, in the products produced, and in the markets served.     

Subcontracting Academia: Alienation,Exploitation and Disillusionment in the UK Overseas Syrian Refugee Research Industry

As the political economy of social science research has shifted, subcontracted research assistants have taken over an ever growing part of the research process. In this article, we report on a case study of the experiences of local research assistants employed on UK‐directed research projects on Syrian refugees in Lebanon. While refugee research is framed in the UK as a noble project of helping the world's most vulnerable, these assistants speak critically of their sense of alienation, exploitation and disillusionment with the research they work on. Such problems arise, we argue, not just from subcontracted labour relations in the workplace itself, but also the broader political economy of how overseas social science research is currently produced. Addressing these problems requires giving better recognition to the work, interests and concerns of research assistants, but also rethinking and restructuring the global production of social science research more generally.     

Labour Relations and the Transfer of Knowledge in Industrial Clusters: Why do Skilled Workers Share Knowledge with Colleagues in Other Firms?

Industrial clusters are held to offer competitive advantages to firms that accrue from the transfer of tacit knowledge between skilled workers co-located in spatially bound regions. This paper argues that informal knowledge transfers between skilled employees working in spatially bounded industrial clusters might have an association with the labour relationship between employers and employees. In the literature on industrial clusters general knowledge is readily traded through codified texts and collegial networks but high value, tacit knowledge transfers occur less frequently but are critical to the success of firms located in clusters. Tacit knowledge transfers are held to occur when workers move to other firms because of firm death or poaching but less frequently through contacts between colleagues from other firms. Industrial clusters are said to offer labour market advantages for skilled workers in the form of ample job opportunities and rising wages, which engender firm loyalty and discourage the transfer of tacit knowledge of competitive value to other firms. However, the limited empirical evidence available on actual working conditions for skilled workers in regional industrial clusters indicates that this argument is contestable. Some evidence suggests that there are limited wage premiums accruing to the industrial districts, a limited role for geographic proximity, and weak localised returns on seniority and education. We argue that in such circumstances high value knowledge between workers in different firms might be traded as an act of epistemic solidarity or sociability that disregards the interests of employer organisations. Such actions might vary by region and country in relation to the prevailing system of labour relations. Australian labour relations are offered as a case in point.     

Resource Development and Aborigines: The Case of Roebourne 1960–1980

The pervasive and dynamic influence of economic restructuring on political and social relations is highlighted in many aspects of Australian daily life. The effect of economic restructuring on already marginalised and disempowered groups in society is often overlooked Development of iron ore mines and associated new towns, railways and ports transformed the regional economy of Western Australia's Pilbara region in the 1960s and 1970s. For Aborigines in Roebourne, this restructuring represented a new phase in their relations with ‘White Australia’. Interacting historical legacies, corporate strategies, government policies and economic processes further marginalised the region's Aboriginal population and linked the region to the global economy in ways which created significant barriers to the development of Aboriginal self-management strategies. This paper reviews this period with particular emphasis on the social impact of the iron ore ‘boom’ on local Aboriginal people. In the current climate of renewed economic and political crisis in Western Australia, this review provides a timely reminder that such processes occur in a broader context than is often recognised in regional planning processes.     

Women of Steel: Constructing and Contesting New Gendered Geographies of Work in the Australian Steel Industry

The article argues that although structuralist-inspired approaches to steel restructuring have provided significant insights and recognised the role of "labour" in sectoral change, such studies have predominantly equated labour politics with unionism, downplaying the impact of other forms of workers' politics. This has created a problematic disjunction between "real world" events and academic research, with ensuing issues for policy development and delivery. In response to this difficulty, the paper builds on Herod's concept of a labour geography to develop multiple labour geographies of power, an approach that describes different forms of workers' politics. To illustrate this approach, the paper presents female steelworkers' politics of restructuring. It details the Jobs for Women Campaign in Wollongong, Australia, a 1980s place-based initiative that sought to gain blue-collar employment for women in the local steelworks. The study demonstrates how female steelworkers developed restructuring politics addressing gender and employment discrimination, issues not normally associated with labour politics. The paper concludes that such workers' struggles need to be analysed as they affect restructuring impacts and processes.     

Many Chains to Break: The Multi‐dimensional Concept of Slave Labour in Brazil

This article examines the concept of slave labour through two case studies from Brazil. One involves internal migrant workers and the other cross‐border migrant workers. There have been accusations of slave labour in both cases. I argue that slave labour is a multi‐dimensional concept and that cognate notions (eg forced and unfree labour) could also be reconceived as multi‐dimensional. Recent works have proposed that a continuum viewing labour relations as more or less free should replace dichotomies such as free vs unfree. I argue for taking this further to recognise, first, that workers may be more or less free in different ways, and second, that the resulting conditions of employment can be characterised as more or less degrading, also in different ways. This multi‐dimensional approach allows for a better understanding of the heterogeneity of apparently unfree labour relations and for greater recognition of the agency of workers labelled as slaves.     

The changing system of European cities and regions

This paper analyses the current structure of the system of European cities and regions, relations within the system and how it is changing. Cluster analysis distinguished eight regional types: metropolitan, semi‐peripheral and peripheral service regions; central, semi‐peripheral, peripheral and collapsed industrial regions; and agricultural regions. The core of European industrial societies proves to be almost identical with the city belt that dominated economic development in pre‐industrial Europe. Two possible paths of change are discussed: delocalization of simpler, labour cost‐intensive activities towards the periphery (delocalization hypothesis), or structural changes in industrial core regions and persisting marginal status in the periphery (restructuring hypothesis). Neither hypothesis could be confirmed or rejected unequivocally: there were indicators for the continuing importance of urban service centres but no peripheral industrialization for the continuing dominance of industrial core regions while undergoing structural changes. It is concluded that there are hardly any signs of convergence between core and peripheral regions.     

‘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.     

Settlement Dimensions of the Vietnam-Born Population in Metropolitan Sydney

Australia has the largest Indochinese population per capita in the world, and Sydney supported sizeable populations from Vietnam in 1986. These populations became socially visible because of physical characteristics and clustering and have generated the response by some commentators that ghettos are forming. This paper examines the extent of residential concentration of Vietnamese-bom population in Sydney and changes over time in the distribution of settlement with reference to new immigration and internal migration. Gravitation group migration has reinforced concentration, but the result has not been ghettos, although there have been specific local problems of unemployment and housing access which may constrain residential mobility for some time. Manufacturing and residential restructuring have affected unemployment and have constrained dispersion. Institutional factors have reinforced concentration. Some residential mobility will be required for entry into a diversity of labour markets, if unemployment is to be reduced in the context of the restructuring of manufacturing production.     

Geographically uneven development: restructuring of the Australian aluminium industry

The Australian aluminium industry has played a ‘semi-peripheral’ role in world production. The transnational corporations dominating the world industry were supplied with large cuantities of cheap raw materials for smelters overseas. Three of the firms also produced metal, largely for local sale. Recently, however, there has been a dramatic restructuring of this pattern with six proposals for smelters producing metal for export. The explanation lies not simply in Australia's energy advantages, but in interactions between the corporate global strategies and Australian governments. New patterns of regional ‘comparative advantage’ have been created, in part by corporations setting stale governments in competition with one another to provide cheap energy and supportive infrastructure. The impacts of these changes are inherently uneven geographically.     

Attending to grape vines: perceptual practices,planty agencies and multiple temporalities in Australian viticulture

This article considers the agency of crop plants within sociocultural processes by examining how grape vines influence seasonal labour patterns in Australian viticulture and wine production. Drawing on ethnographic research within a large Australian wine company, I examine how vineyard managers and winemakers coordinate the timing of the grape harvest with the ripening of grapes. I argue that by making the harvest's approach perceptible to humans, chemical and sensory tests of grape ripeness precipitate seasonal changes in viticultural work—rendering grape vines active participants in patterning social time. Practices of attention to ripening grapes thus render the social agency of grape vines perceptible. I analyse these time-reckoning practices as a ‘learning to be affected’, in which human viticulturists actively strive through multiple sensory practices to become attuned to plants' activities. However, attending to the multiple practices used to reckon the ‘right’ time to harvest grapes also emphasises that these ways of enacting the times and agencies of crop plants may interfere or conflict with one another. Highlighting the emotional stresses and tensions between viticultural workers that this may generate, I suggest that agricultural time is both more conflicted and more suffused with power relations than theoretical accounts have typically indicated.     

NATO's Triple Challenge

NATO's future is again the subject of speculation and debate despite its having fought a recent and apparently successful war in Kosovo. This article proposes that there are three aspects to this challenge. First, NATO is facing a series of dilemmas in its relations with non‐members: how should it manage relations with Russia, and with the applicants for membership? The authors argue that NATO should seek to develop a consolidationist posture. The second challenge is that of developing an EU–NATO partnership in the light of the Helsinki Headline Goals. This, it is proposed, can be developed through a division of labour. The third task, that of military restructuring, is overshadowed by the complexities of processing a working European military structure. In conclusion, the authors suggest that a strategy for the alliance, a key component of the Cold War, but subsequently lost, can be refashioned from the above elements.     

Class, Agency and Resistance in the Old Industrial City

Abstract:  Recent left academic work on the consequences of economic restructuring and local labour market change in old industrial cities has been important in emphasising the role of local context and contingency in the shaping of labour market outcomes. However, in such accounts agency is often limited to capital and state actors, albeit working across scales from the local upwards. There is little sense of agency for individuals and communities in the midst of economic restructuring. Instead, they are usually treated as passive victims of deeper underlying processes. In this paper, our purpose is to highlight the autonomy and agency of workers, people and communities in old industrial cities. Rather than starting from the perspective of capital, our starting point is to emphasise how those experiencing economic change forge strategies and practices for "getting by". This leads us to call for a re-theorisation of labour agency, drawing upon the Autonomous Marxist tradition and the more recent work of Cindi Katz, in order to offer fresh insight into the agency of labour and the prospect for recovering a class politics based upon lived experience over reified abstractions.