The Transformation of Labor Relations in Russian Industry: The Influence of Regional Factors in the Iron and Steel Industry

The author examines the role played by the economic geography of the former Soviet Union in the evolution of labor relations in Russian industry, using the iron and steel industry as a case study. More specifically, three regional factors are analyzed as they affect enterprise economic strategies, organization, and management-labor relations: (1) the inherited industrial structure; (2) the degree of product specialization at the regional level; and (3) the level and sophistication of regional political and labor structures combined with the presence (or lack of same) of a “regional agenda.” These factors are examined within the context of a model predicting several possible variants of post-communist labor relations at the enterprise level. 36 references.     

Do Urban Agglomeration Effects and Household Amenities have a Skill Bias?*

There are several hypotheses why urban scale affects wages. Most focus on agglomeration economies that increase labor demand, especially for high‐skilled workers (e.g., dynamic externalities stress knowledge transfers, and imply the urban wage gap favors skilled workers). Others stress urban amenities that increase labor supply and decrease wages. Amenities should have a stronger influence on affluent households if they are normal goods. By examining whether urban‐scale affects net returns to education, it can be determined whether skilled workers are influenced more by urban productivity or amenities. Empirical results suggest net returns to education decline with urban scale, implying a key role for urban amenities in affecting skilled workers.     

The Linen Industry of Shropshire

Abstract

The discovery in 1975 of part of Charles Bage's iron framed Castlefields flax mill led the author to study Shropshire's other linen factories and the domestic manufacture of linen and ropes during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The manufacture of linen by cottagers and farmers from home grown hemp survived, alongside the factories, into the nineteenth century. The hempen cloth produced in Shropshire was rarely sold at markets or fairs, and was made mainly by country families for their own use. The survival of such a cottage industry into the nineteenth century was rare in England, and the existence of a workforce skilled in the preparation and manufacture of hemp and flax was probably one of the factors which influenced Shropshire entrepreneurs to manufacture linen in their factories, rather than cotton.     

Polarization and the growth of low‐skill service jobs in Spanish local labor markets

This paper analyzes the long‐term transformations of the occupational structure in 50 provinces of Spain with a view to ascertain the existence and assess the extent of employment polarization. The peculiar characteristics of this country, namely rigid labor markets and the relatively recent transition to democracy, make for an interesting addition to existing studies on this topic. In line with previous literature on other countries, we find a strong association between the decline of “routine” mid‐skill jobs and the expansion of low‐skill service employment as well as differential labor market outcomes by levels of formal education. Results are robust to various controls and instrumental variables that account for long‐term industry specialization. We also find a positive local multiplier effect of high‐skilled workers on the demand for nontradable service jobs.     

THE IMPACT OF SKILL‐SPECIFIC MIGRATION ON REGIONAL UNEMPLOYMENT DISPARITIES IN GERMANY

Differences in regional unemployment are still pronounced in Germany, especially between eastern and western Germany. Although the skill level seems important for the relationship between regional disparities and labor migration, corresponding empirical evidence is scarce. Applying dynamic panel models, we investigate the impact of labor mobility differentiated by educational attainment of the workers on regional unemployment disparities between 2000 and 2008. The impact of low‐ and medium‐skilled migration is consistent with traditional neoclassical reasoning, suggesting that labor mobility reduces differences in regional unemployment rates. In contrast, the migration of high‐skilled workers tends to reinforce disparities.     

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY OF FIRMS AND SKILLED LABOR*

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the relationship between firm location and skilled‐labor location. While existing new economic geography (NEG) models could not explicitly analyze the relationship due to their assumptions, I construct a new NEG‐type model allowing for different location dynamics of firms and skilled labor for this objective. The main results are as follows. First, a relatively large pool of skilled labor attracts firms when trade costs are small, while it might repel firms when trade costs are sufficiently large. Second, assuming that skilled workers are mobile between regions, the model shows that skilled workers agglomerate faster than firms with decreasing trade costs. Third, the model supports the hypothesis that firms follow skilled labor rather than the reverse. These results are consistent to Indian and Chinese experiences, and some “creative‐class” or “skilled‐city” stories.     

EMPLOYMENT CYCLES AND PROCESS INNOVATION IN REGIONAL STRUCTURAL CHANGE*

Regional employment cycles, the demand for skilled and unskilled labor, and process innovations are analyzed in the context of an industry product cycle. Employment fluctuations caused by endogenous technological change lead to spatial decentralization of production facilities through capital relocation and spatial divisions of labor. A capital investment profile suggested by the product cycle scenario is related to employment cycles. A price system for output is outlined in terms of wages and profits over the product cycle.     

THE LOCATION OF METAL-INTENSIVE AND LABOR-INTENSIVE INDUSTRIES IN THE EASTERN REGIONS

The author argues against the widespread view (stated in several articles in Soviet Geography) that labor-intensive industries should be kept out of Siberia because of the shortage of labor resources in that region. Taking the specific example of labor-intensive machinery industry such as instrument-making, as opposed to steel-intensive industry, he points out that labor-intensive plants, by virtue of their smaller size, usually have smaller labor requirements than large heavy-machinery manufacturing plants. Moreover, he argues, location must not be based on total population or total labor resources of a region, but on the availability of so-called free (nonemployed) labor resources, which consist largely of women and of young people just entering upon a career. This category of labor resources happens to be greater in the eastern regions than in the western regions of the Soviet Union. In fact, one reason for the net out-migration from Siberia, according to the author, is that second and third members of households find it difficult to obtain jobs in a regional economy that is largely oriented toward male employment (in extractive industry, timber felling, etc.). The introduction of labor-intensive industries into existing Siberian industrial complexes would thus help provide employment to other household members and eliminate one reason for out-migration.     

Melting the Cold War Permafrost: Restructuring Military Industry in Scotland

Military industry stands at the confluence of local, national and global processes. This paper examines the restructuring of this peculiar industry in one region, Scotland, from a perspective that takes the geography of production to be a joint, though contradictory, creation. Following the work of Lovering for the UK as a whole, the case of Scotland—often imagined as "militantly proletarian"—allows a specific study of the accumulation strategies of state and capital and the role of organized labor in mediating the spatial fix. Until the early 1990s accumulation was premised on additive "capital widening" strategies. Since then, both "capital narrowing" rationalization strategies and "capital deepening" intensification strategies have been pursued. Through restructuring, the UK military industry attempts to utilize the abstract spaces of the social economy to expediently and opportunistically reconstitute the concrete spaces of production and renegotiate its dependency on the refractory material of proximate living labor. Yet spatial shifts have not uniformly benefited the southern core of the UK military industry. One reason for thecontinuing salience of military industry in Scotland has been the role of a pan-class alliance, "the Scottish lobby," in campaigning against closures and for the allocation of defense contracts. Trade unions have attempted to mediate the contradictions of restructuring by supporting external strategies to retain firm survival in their present localities, even as internally workforce numbers are cut in half and management regimes become more abrasive.     

‘Making Black More Beautiful’: Black Women and the Cosmetics Industry in the Post-Civil Rights Era

This article explores how the ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement transformed attitudes towards beauty standards within black communities and how the cosmetics industry tried to capitalise on these shifts in their marketing strategies. It charts how redefined beauty standards generated a proliferation of cosmetics companies and products exclusively for black women, and their success attracted widespread attention from across the industry. However, this article demonstrates that while the cosmetics industry removed certain racialised barriers to mainstream American beauty culture, the commodification of the language and imagery of “Black is Beautiful” in cosmetics advertising often reinforced gendered expectations as well as heightening tensions within black communities in regard to colourism and business ownership.     

西方高端人才跨国流动研究述评

基于文献分析法,对西方高端人才跨国流动研究进行述评,探讨其跨国流动的空间特征、动力机制和社会影响。跨国人才主要的流动方向为发展中国家流向发达国家,发达国家之间进行人才交换,以及发达国家向新兴工业化国家回流,在空间上高度集中在发达国家和新兴工业化国家的世界城市。其流动机制包括全球政治经济与文化转型、跨国流动渠道、政府管制以及流动者个体决策。其为流出地带来人才流失的困扰以及人才回流的红利,为流入地带来社会分化、居住隔离和种族排斥等社会问题。最后,就国内学者开展相关研究提出一些建议。     

Industrial District and the Multiplication of Labour: The Chinese Apparel Industry in Prato,Italy

Since the 1990s, the Chinese apparel industry in Prato has developed from a few stitching workshops into full‐fledged production networks. However, persistent disparity between the Chinese and Italian labor has triggered widespread social tensions. Drawing upon the recent literature of critical labor studies, this paper offers a different perspective to see the disparity in terms of the multiplication of labor across scales. The Chinese labor in Prato is made cheap and flexible by the proliferation of institutional and social borders, which were in turn inadvertently produced by Italian immigration policies, Chinese social norms, and local and regional economic conditions. In particular, the Chinese migrant workers have played an active role in producing social borders and in their own exploitation. Therefore, the labor polarization in Prato can hardly be solved by local institutional arrangements, and Italian trade unions have failed to organize the Chinese migrant labor in Prato.     

THE FORMATION OF THE INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX OF THE KURSK MAGNETIC ANOMALY

The industrial complex in the area of the vast iron-ore bearing province known as the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly (Central Russia) has been shaped in the past by an advantageous economic-geographic situation in the heart of the European USSR, by the availability of labor resources and by the presence of a wide range of agricultural raw materials for industry (sugar beets, sunflower, hemp). Further development will hinge on the massive use of mineral resources, both iron ore for the iron and steel industry, and cement materials in the overburden of open-pit iron mines. In 1975 the KMA will supply one-sixth of all the iron ore mined in the Soviet Union. About 60 percent of the ore (direct-shipping ore and concentrates derived from low grade-quartzites) moves to nearby plants at Lipetsk and Tula, and 25 percent moves to the Urals. If plans for a 12-million-ton integrated iron and steel plant for the Comecon countries materialize, 40 percent of the ore will be consumed locally, still leaving 60 percent for shipment to other steel plants. See also Soviet Geography, November 1974, pp. 593–94.     

Laboring at the Margins: Welfare and the Regulation of Mexican Workers in Southern California

Despite sustained disciplinary interest in the social and institutional regulation of labor markets, the relations between welfare provision and work have received scant attention from geographers. This paper charts the functional and spatial interdependence of the urban welfare system and the agricultural industry in Southern California in the 1920s and 1930s. Employer groups actively constructed this interdependence and negotiated its unintended effects with strategies to discursively and physically manage the population of Mexican workers using welfare resources. These strategies, dependent on local grower control of the welfare apparatus, undergirded the racialized division of labor that concentrated Mexicans in casualized farm work.     

Navigating global socialism: Tanzanian students in and beyond East Germany

This article investigates tensions and dynamics in global socialism through a focus on Tanzanian students in East Germany between the late 1950s and 1990. Disciplinary techniques partially known from Tanzania and everyday strategies of survival explain why most students complied with official requirements, but did not necessarily agree with East German ideological tenets. Additionally, throughout the decades, mobility across the Iron Curtain remained an important strategy to further own interests. The article concludes that an analytical framework spanning several decades and paying attention to dynamics in the country of origin sheds new light on agency and mobility among ‘East’, ‘West’, and ‘South’ during the Cold War.     

THE DETERMINANTS OF LOCALIZATION AND URBANIZATION ECONOMIES: EVIDENCE FROM THE LOCATION OF NEW FIRMS IN SPAIN

The objective of this paper is to analyze why firms in some industries locate in specialized economic environments (localization economies) while those in other industries prefer large city locations (urbanization economies). To this end, we examine the location decisions of new manufacturing firms in Spain at the city level and for narrowly defined industries. First, we estimate firm location models to obtain estimates that reflect the importance of localization and urbanization economies in each industry. Then, we regress these estimates on industry characteristics related to the potential importance of labor market pooling, input sharing, and knowledge spillovers. Urbanization effects are high in knowledge‐intensive industries, suggesting that firms locate in large cities to benefit from knowledge spillovers. We also find that localization effects are high in industries that employ workers whose skills are more industry‐specific, suggesting that industries locate in specialized economic environments to share a common pool of specialized workers.     

The Crofter and the Iron Works: The Material Culture of Structural Crisis, Identity and Making a Living on the Edge

The iron and steel industry has been of the greatest importance to the Swedish economy since medieval times. During the seventeenth century a large number of new iron works were erected in the Värmland region of western Sweden. The iron works brought an urban and industrial culture into an otherwise rural area. They were also of great importance to the local economies, as a number of people could earn their living, or part of their living, by working at the iron works or in other forms of associated employment. In the late nineteenth century a serious structural crisis hit the Swedish iron industry, causing many iron works to close. However, the actual effects, in the form of unemployment and increased poverty, appear, for hitherto unknown reasons, to have been minimal. In this article the household of a crofter family with close links with an iron works at the time of the structural crisis is investigated. Aspects of the crofter’s material culture, identity and consumption pattern are studied, and it is found that although the household shared in an urban and industrial identity, its economic basis was in the rural tradition of a mixed economy, combining wage employment and land-based elements. The mixed economy stands out as one reason why the structural crisis did not have as dramatic an effect as might have been expected.     

A Study of the Functional Structure of Urban Places of the USSR (in connection with the tasks of an economic-geographic typology)

The author, following previous work by himself and A.A. Mints, offers a functional typology and classification of Soviet cities based on the percentage of the urban labor force employed in industry and transportation combined and in industry alone. The classification is apparently based on unpublished employment data supplied to the author by the Central Statistical Administration USSR. The classification distinguishes major capital cities, diversified industrial, transport, local organizing, recreation, and other types of cities.     

Adaptation in cultural industry under conservation pressure: case study of two Chinese embroidery clusters

Abstract

In this study, we explore how tension between ‘culture’ and ‘industry’ can be effectively dealt with in promoting cultural industry, taking the Chinese embroidery sector as an example. The diverging performance of two leading centers of Chinese embroidery production suggests that local adaptive and networking capabilities are essential in creating a new path out of the tension, and these capabilities are largely determined by local openness/flexibility, entrepreneurship, and linkage capacity. In Changsha, cultural conservatism prevails, and the local embroidery sector largely maintains traditional product styles and target customers, sticking to the historic path. It is in question, however, whether such a strong bias toward the high-culture segment of the industry is good for cultural heritage protection in the long run, given that the industry at standstill has faced increasing challenges in sustaining a solid local pool of skilled labor. In contrast, Suzhou’s local embroidery sector has actively responded to the changing market environment, through increased product segmentation and customization as well as intra/cross-industry collaboration. Such a flexible, scale-up strategy has helped the industry attract local talent and meet the market demand, while maintaining space for high-end artistic products.     

Civil War Iron and the H.L. Hunley Iron Ballast

At the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861, the Union greatly outpaced the Confederacy in industrial manufacturing capabilities. The Confederacy's economy prior to the conflict was largely based on agriculture, and the Southern states lacked the facilities and skilled labourers to produce iron on the scale necessary to compete with the Union. The possibility of importing products was greatly diminished when President Lincoln instituted a naval blockade around major Southern ports, limiting the amount of cargo that could be imported from Europe. Consequently, the Confederacy was forced to adapt ironworks to wartime purposes. Despite these adaptations, the Confederacy suffered from iron shortages throughout the war. This paper uses the iron ballast found on the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley as a case study for the manufacturing processes, labour relationships and social significance of iron production and usage in the Confederacy.