British Jobs for British Workers? Negotiating Work,Nation, and Globalisation through the Lindsey Oil Refinery Disputes

This paper explores the relationships between labour organising, globalisation and national identity through an engagement with the 2009 Lindsey Oil Refinery strikes. Some strikers adopted the controversial slogan ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ in response to employers' attempts to undercut existing wages and conditions with a new migrant workforce. This led to accusations of xenophobia. We make three inter‐related arguments. First, we contend that it is necessary to interrogate the spatialised power relations generated through particular forms of labour agency enacted in relation to globalising processes. Second, since these responses can be politically ambiguous, success in territorially based disputes does not always equate with broader (transnational) class agency. Third, relevant to the project of labour geography, we propose that labour scholars and activists be more attuned to the mundane ambiguities in labour agency, and the subsequent need to frame local action within a broader relational politics of global labour solidarity.     

Labour Migration and the Swedish Labour Market Model: a case study of recruitment of Yugoslav workers to Svenska Fläktfabriken in Växjö, 1969–1970

This essay deals with active labour recruitment from Yugoslavia to Sweden at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. It is a case study of recruitments of foreign-born workers to one particular manufacturing industry. It focuses primarily on trade-union actions and strategies in connection with the recruitments, analysed in the light of the power relations within the corporatist Swedish labour market model. This approach illuminates how the Swedish labour market model dealt with an issue involving both conflicting and coincident interests between labour and capital, with the state as an intermediary. But the recruitments are also analysed from the recruited workers' points of view. The essay reveals great union influence in the process of labour recruitment, and suggests that the national Swedish labour market authority only approved as many work permits for non-Nordic workers as the trade union concerned accepted. This power, in combination with the shortage of workers, could be used by the unions as a forceful instrument in their struggle to transform working life according to their members' interests. Accordingly, the labour recruitments to Sweden were framed by the power relations and the corporative practices within the Swedish labour market model.     

Outsiders? A sociological study of Norwegian artists with minority background

Why are there relatively few successful artists from a migrant background in Norway? Based on a study of artists of known migrant backgrounds, we explore this question from the artists’ points of view. We analyze both their social and cultural background, and the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion at work in Norway’s art world, and especially the interaction between the two. We have concentrated on the dramatic arts: theater and dance. The article presents a theoretically informed analysis of the qualitative material using the sociology of art on the one hand and the sociology of migration and ethnic relations on the other. Further, the empirical analyses are in constant dialog with other Norwegian studies of the art field and the artists themselves. The article presents original findings on the relationship between barriers in young migrants’ backgrounds and impediments to entering and navigating at the field of dramatic arts.     

Workplace mobility in Canadian urban agglomerations, 1996 to 2016: Have workers really flown the coop?

Whilst workplace mobility (i.e., working from a variety of locations) has become an area of study in its own right, and has increasingly gained media attention, little is known about how prevalent or novel it is. In this paper we use Census place of work data to obtain insights into the prevalence and growth of this phenomenon in Canada's ten largest Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs). These data do not capture all dimensions of workplace mobility, but are the best currently available to assess it population-wide. We show that workplace mobility has increased modestly since 1996, and that it is particularly prevalent in sectors such as construction, and amongst less qualified workers. Knowledge workers, to the extent they are mobile, tend to work from home. These results do not capture fine-grained mobility within the working day (which may indeed be increasing), but demonstrate that these finer grained mobilities have not fundamentally impacted the types of workplace that jobs are attached to.     

What drives the spatial wage premium in formal and informal labor markets? The case of Ecuador

This article investigates the incidence of agglomeration externalities in Ecuador, a small-sized, middle-income developing country. In particular, we analyze the role of the informal sector within these relations, since informal employment accounts for a significant part of total employment in the developing countries. Using individual level data and instrumental variable techniques, we investigate the impact of spatial externalities, in terms of population density, local specialization and urban size, on the wages of workers in Ecuadorian cities. The results show that spatial externalities matter also for a small developing country. Moreover, analysis of the interaction between spatial externalities and informality shows that, on average, workers employed in the informal sector do not enjoy significant benefits from agglomeration externalities. Finally, by investigating the possible channels behind spatial agglomeration gains we show that the advantages from agglomeration for formal sector workers may well be accounted for by better job-quality matches and, to a lesser extent, by learning externalities. For informal sector workers, our findings also suggest possible gains from job changes, which offset a penalty for remaining employed in the same occupation.