The Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP), formerly the Centre on Labour and Global Production (CLGP), draws upon a critical mass of researchers across different disciplinary areas at Queen Mary University of London who are engaged in research on the intersections between workers, enterprises, regulation and sustainability in the world economy. We understand the world economy as constituted by a set of value-creating and -appropriating activities that are rooted in specific geographical and ecological contexts and connected through global networks of commodity and financial flows. Moreover, we recognize that these production and financial networks, including but not only value chains, traverse national boundaries as well as the gendered and racialised hierarchies of so-called reproductive and productive labour. Together, these structures and flows create a diversity of production-consumption relations that are socially and environmentally unsustainable. In other words, we consider the economy to be constructed through socially, historically, spatially and ecologically embedded relations that are necessarily power-laden. As such, the global challenge of sustainability is one which needs to grapple with these deep, historically complex and contemporaneously fraught relations across multiple scales. Within this, the question of labour in the global economy is one of uneven working conditions, labour standards, precarious work, affective labour, unpaid and invisible work, child labour, forms of representation and worker organisation. The role of the state and regulation is seen as crucial to structuring these relations but also to potentially remedying or mitigating their effects.
Any meaningful attempt to study and reach these issues necessarily requires an interdisciplinary social scientific approach. The Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) brings together such an interdisciplinary group with diverse disciplinary backgrounds including Development Studies, Economic Geography, Critical Management Studies, International Political Economy, History and Anthropology, and with regional specializations across the global South and North. We are committed to the careful study of actually existing social relations. Our work is theoretically informed but uses theory as a guide to interpret contingent historical-geographical worlds around us, not a pre-determined blueprint.
Suyash Barve (PhD student, School of Business and Management, QMUL) research explores the public sphere, political culture, and gendered labour of the working classes in western India. He has worked as a creative professional in the film and media industry in India, and holds a diploma in direction and screenwriting from the Film and Television Institute of India.
Professor Liam Campling (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a political economist working in two connected research areas: (1) global production, natural resource industries and labour regimes; and (2) international trade policy, its negotiation and relationship to global production, including environmental and labour standards. He had recently co-authored two books Capitalism and the Sea (Verso, 2021) and Free Trade Agreements and Global Labour Governance (Routledge, 2021)
Siddharth Chakravarty (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a PhD student whose research examines the firm-nature relationship in India’s seafood industry. In particular, his research is focusing on how the ecology influences business strategies with a comparative study between fishing and fish-farming. He is also affiliated with the National Platform for Small-Scale Fish Workers. He currently researches and works on matters related to migration and working conditions in India’s marine fishing sector, the social relations of shrimp farming in coastal states and the changing policy landscape of inland fisheries.
Dr Isadora Cruxen is a Lecturer in Business and Society. Her research bridges scholarship in development studies, politics, economic geography, and business organization to interrogate how state-market relations shape natural resource governance and urban infrastructure provision in the global South. Her recent research interests span business ownership and politics, financialization, private sector-led development and regulation, with a focus on water governance. Her research experience also includes work on participatory development, collective action, and feminist organizing. Isadora holds a PhD in Political Economy, Development and Planning (2022) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a masters in City Planning (2016) from MIT, and a bachelors degree in Political Science (2011) from the University of Brasília, Brazil.
Dr Giorgos Galanis (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Economics. His current research interests lie at the intersection of Economics with Political Philosophy, (International) Political Economy and Sustainable Development.
His work utilises insights from behavioural science and different schools of thought within political economy and combines analytical and computational tools to answer questions related to sustainability, social justice, health, and income distribution.
Dr Giorgos Gouzoulis (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is an Associate Professor in Human Resource Management. His research focuses on industrial relations and issues around employee compensation, wage inequality, underemployment, union membership, and strike activity. Giorgos’ work has been published in leading academic journals like the British Journal of Industrial Relations, the Industrial Relations Journal, Economic and Industrial Democracy, the Socio-Economic Review, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, and Sociology of Health & Illness, among others. Giorgos is the treasurer of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association, a member of the editorial board of the journal Work, Employment and Society., and the Co-Editor of the Bristol University Press’ research-based magazine Futures of Work. Prior to Queen Mary, he worked at the University of Bristol, UCL, and King’s College London.
Maximilian Hofmann (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a PhD student researching the translocal dimension of agency and governance. He is analysing how translocal migration is affecting, and is regulated by, governance mechanisms in the context of Jordan’s garment industry. He holds a MSc. with Honours in Economic and Social Geography from the University of Salzburg. Prior to his PhD project, he conducted research on glocalisation processes, special economic zones and labour market integration.
Dr Carlo Inverardi-Ferri (School of Geography, QMUL) is a human geographer whose work is situated at the intersection of economic geography and political ecology. His research focuses on the health and environmental aspects of globalised systems of production and has appeared in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Mobilities, Area Development and Policy and the International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography among other publications.
Dr Matan Kaminer (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a Lecturer in Business and Society and joined Queen Mary in 2024. His background is in cultural anthropology, political economy, and political ecology. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and an MA in Sociology and Anthropology from Tel Aviv University. A long-time activist, he has participated in movements against militarism and occupation, in solidarity with migrant workers, and for the democratisation of academic life. His research on agricultural labour migration from South and Southeast Asia to the Middle East encompasses geo-political and geo-economic processes from the perspective of the most marginalised. Matan’s research interests include (but are not limited to!) the political ecology of desert agriculture, the racialisation of agrarian labour, and labour migration in the Indian Ocean world. His most recent interests span the history of proletarianisation in Palestine/Israel and elsewhere and the synergy between exploitation and elimination of the indigenous in colonial contexts. His book, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.
Hyunjung Kim (PhD student, School of Business and Management, QMUL) is researching labour control and labour regulation in the contexts of Korean and Taiwan distant water fisheries. In particular, her research focuses on the political-economic dynamics of multi-scalar engagements by stakeholders in transnational value chain governance.
Dara Leyden (PhD student at the School of Business and Management, QMUL) is researching the role of labour struggles in Thailand’s electronics sector, which largely employs young, female migrant workers. He is analysing how new forms of coalitions and struggles can influence social upgrading in global value chains.
Dr Ulrike Marx (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a Lecturer in Accounting. Ulrike’s research focusses on social studies of accounting, such as the emergence and translation of new (management) accounting phenomena as a response to crisis and political problematizations.
Her research has been published in international journals such as Gender, Work and Organization and she is member and affiliated researcher in a wide range of national and international research networks and communities.
Dr William Monteith (School of Geography, QMUL) is an interdisciplinary social scientist interested in questions of work and energy. My research explores people’s experiences of work, entrepreneurship and informality at the margins of capitalist economies; the relationships and places produced by these experiences, and the possibilities they provide for enacting more just and inclusive economies. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the activities and aspirations of workers in the majority world challenge taken-for-granted ideas about the futures of work and energy.
Sofia Negri (School of Geography, QMUL) is a PhD candidate researching on workers organising on the platform economy from a sociological and geographical perspective. Particularly, her PhD focuses on delivery platforms in Argentina, analysing the forms of sociability and political organisation through spatial lenses. She holds a MSc Social Research methods, LSE and a BSc Sociology, UBA.
Dr Benjamin Neimark (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Business and Management, and a Fellow at the Institute of Social Science and Humanities (IHSS) at Queen Mary University of London.
Benjamin is a human geographer and political ecologist (defined as the intersections of ecology and a broadly defined political economy) whose research focuses on politics of biological conservation and resource extraction, high-value commodity chains, ‘green’ precarious smallholder production, and agrarian change and development. He has a geographic focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar. His current research looks at the US military as a global climate actor and, more broadly, the environment footprints of the world’s militaries.
Zafer Ornek (PhD student, School of Business and Management, QMUL) is researching the relationship between the role of labour in the vehicle manufacturing sector and just transition to a low carbon economy, with a focus on the shift to electric vehicle production in Germany.
Dr Paula Serafini Dr Paula Serafini holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Analysis from King’s College London. Her work is in the field of cultural politics, and her research interests include extractivism, social movements and art activism, cultural labour, and socioecological transitions. Her research has been funded, among others, by the British Academy, and in 2023 her latest book Creating Worlds Otherwise received an honourable mention from the Visual Cultures Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association.
Natasha Sharma (School of Geography, QMUL) ethnographically engages in the work-lives of the labour force within India’s economy of waste in her doctoral research. The major themes of her work are based around the ideas of social reproduction, infrastructural citizenship, and the intersections of work, space, and (il)legality at large. She has previously looked at the labour force participation rates for women in India with the London School of Economics and has been engaged with work around labour and resource politics in her MPhil and beyond.
Dr Shreya Sinha (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is co-Director of the Centre. She is a political economist studying agrarian capital, the politics of agricultural markets and rural labour relations, as well as the environmental dimensions of agrarian change. Her work is focused on India, while being in conversation with other regions of the Global South, and is deeply historically-informed. Shreya has published in journals such as World Development, Journal of Agrarian Change, Geoforum and Third World Quarterly.
Dr Jessica Sklair (School of Business and Management and Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, QMUL) has a background in anthropology and development studies. Her research focuses principally on Brazil and explores three main themes: elite and corporate philanthropy and the changing role of the private sector in international development; wealth elites, inheritance and family business succession processes, and research methodologies for studying elites. Jessica's most recent work looks at processes of financialisation and the emergence of new 'social finance' technologies in the development sector. Her monograph Brazilian Elites and their Philanthropy: Wealth at the Service of Development was published by Routledge in 2022.
Professor Adrian Smith (Department of Management, University of Sussex Business School and Visiting Professor, QMUL) works on global production and the political economy of uneven development. Much of his research has focused on the European Union's integration of neighbouring regions into regionalised production networks, and he is currently working on the role of labour standards in EU free trade agreements. He has recently published Articulations of Capital: Global Production Networks and Regional Transformations (Wiley, 2016, with John Pickles, Robert Begg, Milan Bucek, Poli Roukova and Rudolf Pastor) and is Editor-in-Chief of European Urban and Regional Studies.
Gregory Tsardanidis is a PhD student at the School of Business and Management at QMUL. His PhD research examines labour dynamics in delivery platforms in Greece, with a focus on workers’ struggles and the development of platform cooperative alternatives. He has worked as a researcher for the Open Lab Athens and as an Interaction Designer and Developer for Sociality Cooperative. His interests include co-design and development of civic technologies, social and solidarity economy, commons, and participatory design methods'
Dr Philippa Williams (School of Geography, QMUL) researches around questions of citizenship and marginality within the context of organised and informal economies in India. Her monograph, Everyday peace: politics, citizenship and Muslim lives in India (2015), looks in part, at work and social relations in the silk sari industry in Varanasi north India. She has also published research about Muslim middle class professionals in India’s new Service Economy and along with William Monteith and Dora-Olivia Vicol Philippa is co-editor of Beyond the Wage: Ordinary Work in Diverse Economies (2021).
Gavin Capps (School of Law, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Kingston University London) works in the broad field of natural resource extraction and development, the new political economies of land, labour and finance within the platinum mining industry in post-apartheid South Africa. Approaching these issues from a value-theoretic perspective, his work has variously been published in the Review of African Political Economy, the Journal of Peasant Studies, and the Journal of Agrarian Change for which he was awarded the annual Bernstein and Byres Prize for best article in 2016.
Dr Rowland Curtis (School of Business and Management, QMUL). His research is engaged with questions of power, knowledge and subjectivity at work, while exploring the implications of poststructuralist thought for empirical inquiry in culture and economy, including with particular regard to ethnographic and materialist practice. He is a member of the editorial collective of the open access journal ephemera: theory and politics in organization.
Natalia Delgado (Law School, University of Southampton) obtained her LLB and qualified as a barrister in Argentina and graduated with a Master's in International and European Law from the University of Geneva. She is currently finishing her PhD at Birkbeck Law School, University of London. Her doctoral research specifically deals with the manner in which World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have conceptualized labour and labour law since the 1970s.
Dr Cédric Durand (Associate Professor, Paris 13 University) is an economist. Working within the tradition of Marxist and French regulationist political economy, he is member of the Centre d’économie Paris Nord. He studies globalization, financialization and contemporary mutations of capitalism. He participates to the editorial board of the Revue d’économie industrielle and the online journal ContreTemps.
Dr Katy Fox-Hodess’s (Management School, University of Sheffield) research focuses on labour, globalization and political economy. Her PhD in Sociology from University of California, Berkeley, examined contemporary international solidarity among dockworkers' unions in Europe and Latin America.
Evelina Gambino`s (PhD student, Geography Department, UCL) research focuses on the New Silk Road and the logistics revolution in Georgia which she analyses as a discursive and material formation. She holds a Ba and Ma in Anthropology and Cultural Politics from Goldsmiths College, starting from her ethnographic training, her research is concerned with developing critical and collaborative field methodologies. Her interests include critical logistics and critical geopolitics and the politics of infrastructure.
Dr Elizabeth Havice’s (Department of Geography, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) research draws together development studies, environmental politics, and political economy to explore the multi-scalar intersections among state, firms, non-state organizations and nature in the global economy. Current projects focus on exploring ‘value’ in global value chains, dilemmas over property and sovereignty in marine spaces and marine resource management, and building networks of scholars exploring resource geographies and contemporary and historical ocean frontiers.
Dr Amy Horton’s (Department of Geography, UCL) research focuses on the interactions between finance, labour and care. It investigates the role of finance in the economy and society, and how social and labour movements seek to rework economies. Her doctorate examined financial investment in care homes for older people, as well as efforts by labour and community groups to ensure that care is valued more highly. Other work has explored the implications of living wage campaigns.
Professor Sukhdev Johal's (School of Business and Management, QMUL) most recent research interests include critical research on UK finance, how to adapt social and economic statistics to understand employment and wealth changes in the UK, and how local authorities can adapt local CSR policies to promote economic democracy and local supply chains. He has a long-standing interest in financialisation and how it affects the behaviours and performance of large companies.
Dr Ashok Kumar (Department of Management, Birkbeck, University of London) researches on global value chains, workers’ bargaining power, development, and cities. Kumar is part of the editorial collective of City and Historical Materialism as well as on the editorial board of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
Patrícia Rocha Lemos (PhD student in Social Sciences, University of Campinas, Brazil) examines the working conditions and work management at Walmart in Brazil focusing on how multinational companies adapt or shape their strategies to the national environment in host countries, especially regarding the working conditions. She is also interested in issues like employment and labour movement in the retail sector and the role of Global South in Global Production Networks.
Ku'ulei Lewis's (PhD student, School of Business and Management, QMUL) research investigates the management of global value chains, with a specific interest in the effects of scale on biodiversity sustainability.
Angus McNelly is a lecturer in International Development and Latin American Politics at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. He completed his PhD on the experiences of the Left in Power in Bolivia earlier this year, and has written on Bolivian social theory, social movements and the MAS government, the political economy of Bolivia, and the labor movement.
Dr Giuliano Maielli (School of Business and Management, QMUL) holds a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics. His main body of research revolves around issues of technological and institutional path dependence and path creation, and their impact upon power relations across occupational blocs. His most recent research interest concerns the emergence of dispersed organisations and the redistribution of R&D rights across supply chains.
Aris Martinelli’s (PhD student in Socioeconomics, University of Geneva) current project focuses on the interrelation between global value chains, industrial relations and the labour process in the Swiss machinery industry. His research interests include international political economy, sociology of work and organizations, industrial relations and social policy.
Dr Alessandra Mezzadri (Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London) researches on global industrial circuits, labour informalisation and labour regimes; global labour standards and critical approaches to CSR and ethical consumerism; feminisms in development and social reproduction approaches; and India’s political economy. Her research is published in numerous international journals and media outlets. She is the author of The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments 'Made in India' (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Dr Satoshi Miyamura (Department of Economics, SOAS University of London) currently works on patterns of industrial restructuring, labour market institutions and labour-management relations in a range of manufacturing sectors, including jute and cotton textile, engineering and pharmaceutical industries in various regions of India, including West Bengal, Maharashtra, Gujarat and the Delhi/ National Capital Region. More generally, his research interests are in the political economy of development in India and Japan; economics of labour and institutions; economic history and history of economic thought.
Dr Ioana Jipa-Muşat (School of Business and Management, Royal Holloway University of London) is a political economist working on economic transformation and institutional change in Central Eastern Europe, especially in relation to processes of development, economic geography, business politics, labour regimes and migration. Ioana was awarded a PhD from the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London in 2020. Her research has been published in international journals such as Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space and European Urban and Regional Studies.
Professor Susan Newman’s (Economics, The Open University) research interests include the political economy of industrial development, the relationship between finance and production, and the social relations of production and exchange in agro-food commodity chains. She has conducted research on the restructuring of agrocommodity chains in relation to financialisation as well as the political economy of industrial development in post-apartheid South Africa.
Dr Paolo Novak’s (Department of Development Studies, SOAS) research unfolds at the intersection of critical borders, migration and development studies and is concerned with the study of a) borders, understood as the point of contact and articulation between multi-scalar and multi-directional social processes, as a prism to interrogate migration and development theorisations b) border management, understood as the set of interventions concerned with the opening/closing, location and enforcement of border functions, as a prism to interrogate neoliberal migration and development policies c) the tensions between abstract inclusion/exclusion criteria and their situated and fluid everyday life, as a prism to think about politics and political subjectivities.
Dr Jonathan Jones (School of Business and Management and School of Geography, QMUL) is researching the role of labour in the maritime logistics sector, with a focus on the opportunities and challenges that developments in distribution methods, technology and employment practices bring about for workers' collective organisation
Dr Jonathan Pattenden (University of East Anglia) researches on labour and the political economy and political sociology of class relations and agrarian change. He is the author of Labour, State and Society in Rural India: A Class-Relational Approach (2016), and co-editor of Class Dynamics of Development (2017). He has published in the Journal of Agrarian Change, Journal of Peasant Studies, Development and Change, Global Labour Journal, Economic and Political Weekly, and Third World Quarterly. He is on the editorial board of Journal of Agrarian Change.
Professor Nicola Piper (School of Law, QMUL) researches on the global governance of labour migration and the role of the International Labour Organisation in the promotion of decent work for migrant workers. Nicola is also co-investigator in the UK-RI funded Global Challenge Research Hub on South-South Migration and Inequality and co-lead of the Gender Work Package (2019-2023). She is co-chief editor of the Journal Global Social Policy and editor of two book series with Routledge (“Asian Migration” with A/Profs Chan and Lee; “Labour and Skills Mobility in Asia” with Prof Eric Fong, Chinese University of Hong Kong).
Clair Quentin (Research Associate, Policy Institute, King's College London) works on tax policy. Their research interests include the interrelation of international corporate tax norms and inequality in the global production network.
Dr Gale Raj-Reichert (School of Geography, QMUL) researches on labour governance of global production networks in developing countries. Her current research focuses on how changing relationships and power dynamics between firms in the electronics industry, governments, non-governmental organizations and trade unions affect negotiations, strategies and activities around labour governance in Malaysia and China. Gale’s fieldwork is based in the US, EU, Malaysia, Singapore, China and Hong Kong. Gale’s publications include papers in Regulation and Governance, Geoforum and Competition and Change.
Kyla Sankey’s (School of Business and Management, QMUL) research focuses on the political economy of land and agrarian movements in Latin America.
Dr Hannah Schling (School of Geography, QMUL) holds a PhD in Human Geography from King’s College London. Hannah's research focuses on questions of social reproduction, dormitory labour regimes, labour migration and bordering in Central and Eastern Europe.
Dr Gregory Schwartz (Department of Management, University of Bristol) researches the transformation of work, employment and labour relations in the context of post-socialist Central & Eastern Europe and Russia, looking at the effects of (and conflicts arising from) the nature of integration of CEE into global production and political economy on class relations, on the social organisation of the workplace, and on the workers’ social identities.
Professor Benjamin Selwyn’s (School of Global Studies, University of Sussex) research interests include understanding how class relations evolve within and impact upon the formation and functioning of global value chains, theories of development, and the global food system. He is author of Workers, State and Development in Brazil (2012), The Global Development Crisis (2014), The Struggle for Development (2017) and co-editor of Class Dynamics of Development (2014).
Sara Stevano (Department of Economics, SOAS University of London) is a development and feminist political economist specialising in the study of the political economy of work, well-being (food and nutrition), households and development policy. Working at the intersections between political economy, development economics, feminist economics and anthropology, Sara takes an interdisciplinary approach to theories and methods. Her work focuses on Africa, with primary research experience in Mozambique and Ghana.
Dr Umut Ulukan (Department of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations, Ordu University, Turkey) researches on agrarian change and rural labour relations under the hegemony of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization in Turkey. His recent works are concerned with the dynamics and outcomes of the process of rural transformation in the eastern Black Sea region of Turkey, which is the largest hazelnut producing area in the world and the largest fishing area in Turkey. His current research project focuses on the new patterns of social differentiation among small scale fishers in Turkey.
Dr Min Yan (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a Lecturer in Business Law researching on corporate law and governance. His interests also encompass labour protection and regulatory initiates for employee participation at the board level. His recent research focuses on corporate social responsibility through regulation and global supply chain as well.
Professor Tessa Wright (School of Business and Management, QMUL) has been researching on equality and diversity in the labour market and workplace for many years, initially for the labour movement. She is interested in the intersection of multiple identities, and author of Gender and sexuality in male-dominated occupations: women workers in construction and transport (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She has undertaken research on trade union action to address inequality at work, including the role of union Equality Reps. Her ongoing research focuses on public procurement as a tool for advancing equality, and is the co-author of Fighting Fire: One hundred years of the Fire Brigades Union, 2018, New Internationalist, with Sian Moore and Phil Taylor.
Joanne Zhang’s (School of Business and Management, QMUL) research and teaching interests are strategic entrepreneurship and innovation with a focus on digital and high technology sectors. Joanne was engaged in large-scale research projects including “New Modes of Innovation: Managerial and Strategic Business Practice and Open Innovation” (£5m, ESRC supported, Cambridge and Imperial), “Financial and Organizational innovation in UK Biotechnology sector” (£1.3m, EPSRC supported, City University and SPRU). Previously she held positions at Cambridge University and University of East Anglia.
Thursday 13 June 2024, CLaSP Masterclass with Dario Azzellini (Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico) on ‘"Who are the experts?" Co-Research with workers and communities’.
Tuesday, 11 June 2024, CLaSP Masterclass with Dario Azzellini (Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico) on ‘Sustainable Work and Just Transition’.
Thursday 30 and Friday 31, May 2024, CLaSP Workshop, The geography of pain: an interdisciplinary workshop, with Archie Davis.
Thursday, 23 May 2024, Book launch: Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice, by Joan Martínez-Alier
Working Beyond the Border: Labour Standards and Free Trade Agreements
This research examines the effects of the European Union’s approach to trade and sustainable development in ‘third countries’ and the extent to which this approach provides for meaningful improvement in working conditions in the global economy. It involves collaboration with CLGP members in the Schools of Business and Management (Liam Campling) and of Geography (Adrian Smith, Mirela Barbu) at QMUL, and colleagues at the University of Warwick (James Harrison (Law) and Ben Richardson (Politics and International Studies)). It investigates commitments of the EU to improve labour standards beyond its borders. It focuses on the EU pledge “to put more of its commercial weight behind efforts to promote social standards and decent work in bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations”, which has been trumpeted in the labour standards provisions contained in “new generation” free trade agreements (FTAs) as a key policy mechanism for promoting labour standards in third countries.
Electronics Watch
Adrian Smith and Gale Raj-Reichert are advisory board members of Electronics Watch. Electronics Watch is a non-profit, non-governmental initiative which organises public sector buyers, provides tools to create effective market demand for decent working conditions (e.g. contract clauses), and monitors working conditions to ensure compliance in factories. Adrian Smith and Gale Raj-Reichert in partnership with Electronics Watch begin a PhD project on 'Circuits of Global Labour Governance: Public Procurement and Labour Standards in the Global Electronics Industry' in September 2018. The project examines how the public sector buyers in the United Kingdom, informed by the EU Directive on Public Procurement, attempt to regulate working conditions in global supply chains. More specifically the project focuses on questions surrounding how the governance framework impacts lead firm and supplier relationships in the sector; and the experience of public procurement regulation as an emergent new relationship between the state, public sector governance and labour conditions in globalised production networks.
Global Tuna Production, International Trade and Development
Liam Campling’s (CLGP Director, School of Business and Management, QMUL) research on the global tuna industry, the international trade regime and developing countries, and his ongoing policy collaboration with development agencies, trade unions and NGOs (a combination of commissioned and pro-bono work), has contributed to several impacts. Three sets of impacts were highlighted in his REF2016 Case Study: (1) influencing trade policy, regulation and legislation to support developing countries, including at the WTO; (2) improving labour conditions in tuna processing facilities in Papua New Guinea (PNG); and, (3) influencing public debate and understanding of fisheries industry and policy. Read more on this.
Political economy in the era of climate capitalism: Thoughts on Dieselgate, carbon fetishism and libidinal economy, Written by Steffen Böhm, https://www.claspblog.org/blogposts/political-economy-in-the-era-of-climate-capitalism-thoughts-on-dieselgate-carbon-fetishism-and-libidinal-economynbspnbsp
All presenters at CLGP events are encouraged to submit a working paper in advance. These papers will be made available online or circulated by email among Members and Affiliates.
Working Paper 5/2023 [PDF 436KB]
Harnessing Disarmed Criticism to Reinforce Neoliberal Capitalism: The Case of Justification Work in Social Business
Vivien Blanchet, Claudine Grisard
Abstract
This article analyses how dominant discourse reinforces neoliberal capitalism. While most critical studies focus on manufacturing consent, we show how dominant discourse both harnesses and disarms criticism to establish change as a mode of complex domination. We investigate how the ‘guruesque’ discourse of social business puts capitalism to the test. Our discourse analysis highlights how three Muhammad Yunus’ books align subject positions, problems, objectives, and solutions to make neoliberal programmes the solutions to societal issues. Taking the theoretical turn in pragmatic sociology, we build on late Boltanski’s work to show how this justification work connects world and reality differently in truth, reality, and existential tests. We make three contributions. First, we revisit how justification work disarms criticism, showing that it is less about reaching moral agreement than about depriving criticism of its voices, targets, imagination, and alternatives. Second, we reconsider the notion of tests, showing that truth, reality, and existential tests combine within a single discourse to equally legitimate the neoliberal reality. Third, we advance knowledge on complex domination, a Burgundy School of Business, showing that claims for critical change nurture a process of creative destruction supporting neoliberal capitalism.
Working Paper 4/2023 [PDF 5,072KB]
The Global Political Economy of a Green Transition
Giorgos Galanis, Giorgio Ricchiuti and Ben Tippet
From uneven development to unequal exposure to extreme weather events, the economic geography of climate change implies substantial heterogeneity regarding countries’ preferences for climate action. Yet, how this heterogeneity matters for sustaining high and effective levels of global climate action has not been analysed. This paper develops a novel geographical political economy model of climate action where countries’ choices are influenced by the evolution of greenhouse gas emissions, total participation in climate action and by heterogeneous idiosyncratic economic geography factors. Our results highlight that the unevenness of development can be a barrier to sustained high levels of global action.
Working Paper 3/2023 [PDF 741KB]
Financialisation, Underemployment and Disconnected Greek Capitalism
Giorgos Gouzoulis, Panagiotis (Takis) Iliopoulos and Giorgos Galanis
Recent contributions within the disconnected capitalism literature argue that personal financial insecurity related to household indebtedness and pension fund financialisation is positively associated with underemployment. This is because financially insecure workers are more likely to accept worsening working conditions on the fear of losing their job and defaulting. Using quarterly data from the Eurostat for the period 2008Q3-2020Q4, this paper shows that the persistent rise of underemployment rates in post-crisis Greece is robustly associated with the household debt ratio and pension fund investments in financial derivatives. We also demonstrate that while the effects of financialisation are similar for men and women, the employment-tied and gendered nature of social benefits in the country has disproportionately induced underemployment for women in the context of austerity. The paper concludes that personal financial insecurity is a key missing factor behind rising employment precariousness in Greece since 2008.
Working Paper 2/2023 [PDF 563KB]
Systemic Cycles of Accumulation and Chaos in the World Capitalist System: A Missing Link
Giorgos Galanis , Christian Koutny and Isabella Weber
We re-examine the Systemic Cycles of Accumulation (SCA) of Arrighi (2010) and Arrighi and Silver (1999) which provide a framework for the analysis of the cyclical patterns of geographical expansion of trade and production and the related shifts of hegemonic power within the world capitalist system. Within the SCA framework, the last stage of a hegemonic cycle is characterized by what is called ‘systemic chaos’ the drivers of these chaotic socioeconomic dynamics have not been explicitly analyzed. This article fills this gap by providing a link between the accumulation process, and systemic chaos. Our approach provides the missing detailed understanding of how systemic chaos is an outcome of the contradictory socioeconomic dynamics of capital accumulation itself while being based on the key insights of the SCA framework of hegemonic cycles.
Working Paper 1/2023 [PDF 371KB]
Elements of a Progressive UK Trade Agenda
Upturn Network
This paper addresses a series of topics in relation to the development of UK trade policy: labour rights, climate change, digital trade, gender and scrutiny of trade agreements. It is produced by the Upturn Network which is a group of progressive academics and civil society researchers bringing decades of trade policy expertise to bear on ensuring UK trade policy is democratic and works for people and the environment.
Working Paper 1/2022 [PDF 464KB]
Labour Regimes at Sea: Workshop Report
A Centre on Labour and Global Production workshop ‘Labour Regimes at Sea’ was held at Queen Mary University of London on 26 May 2022. This working paper compiles the original concept note and session design, the list of participants and a report on the discussion. The workshop was organised by Hyunjung Kim and Siddharth Chakravarty, and the workshop report drafted by Jack Sergeant.
WP 1 - 2020 [PDF 1,455KB]
Why workers’ determination is not enough: A case study of workers’ struggles in Swiss machinery GVCs
Aris Martinelli
PhD Student at the Geneva School of Social Science and Visiting PhD Student at the Centre on Labour and Global Production, Queen Mary University of London: aris.martinelli@unige.ch
Global value chains (GVCs) affect the capacity of workers to defend and to improve their working conditions. The Swiss economy is deeply integrated into GVCs, especially export sectors such as the machinery industry. The purpose of this paper is to understand how GVCs shape working conditions in this sector and what possibilities exist for workers to improve them. To address this issue, we focus on two workers’ struggles in two lead firms following GVCs restructuring. Based on a class-relational approach, this paper highlights how : (1) the participation in GVCs further strengthens the labour-capital balance of power in favor of capital; (2) despite workers’ determination, the mismatch of collective structures and unions’ strategies largely explains their powerlessness to resist GVCs restructuring; (3) the collective action and the solidarity emerging during the conflict pave the way for individual resistance and divisions among workers respectively once the conflict ends. Finally, the paper questions current labour strategies and imagines new ones in order to contrast employers’ power in GVCs.
WP 1 - 2018 [PDF 973KB]
Walmart in Brazilian Stores: Part of a global strategy?
Patrícia Rocha Lemos
University of Campinas, Brazil, CESIT - Centro Estudos Sindicais e do Trabalho, Centre on Labour and Global Production QMUL, pat.csrp@gmail.com
The aim of this paper is to understand how working conditions and labour management practices in Brazilian Walmart stores can be understood as part of the company's “global strategy”. On the basis of a relational approach, this paper argues that working conditions and management practices at the point of sales in Brazil result from a complex articulation between global changes and global trends with more local and national arrangements. It also argues that working conditions perpetrated in the United States Walmart Stores cannot be completely replicated in Brazil mainly due to the role played by national institutions. At the same time, new technological developments and management practices, reinforced by Walmart’s corporate ideology at the workplace, has shaped policies followed in Brazilian Stores. In particular, seeking to understand how Walmart can press for the intensification of work effort and for filling the porosities of the work time it is necessary to consider the historically precarious national labour conditions, the workers' point of view and the role played by unions.
WP 2 - 2017 [PDF 495KB]
The Common as a Mode of Production: Towards a critique of the political economy of common goods
Carlo Vercellone
Professor of Economics at the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a member of CEMTI and of the Laboratory of Economics, carlo.vercellone@univ-paris1.fr
What is the common? What are its foundations? Is it a set of well-defined resources – so called common goods – or a generic principle governing the social organisation of production? These questions need to be asked because the debate on the Common is as rich as it is confusing. On the one hand, notions such as Common in the singular, commons, common goods, common property, common-pool resources, etc., are at times used as synonymous and at others as opposite, with no clear-cut definition. On the other hand, debates frequently lose sight of the extent to which these terms are used to cover highly differentiated approaches not only to theory, but also to the political role that the Common might play in projects of social transformation. The purpose of the book is to contribute to clarify these questions through a multidisciplinary approach that combines theory and history. The aim is twofold. The first is to provide the reader with a guide to a critical analysis of the main economic and legal theories of common goods. Particular attention is granted to the benefits and limitations of Elinor Ostrom’s contribution and to the debate on the so-called tragedy of the commons. This survey of the literature serves the purpose of showing what the Common is not, or, at least, what it should not be reduced to. The second aim is to put forward an approach that is alternative to that of political economy. In this framework, the Common is theorised as an actual “mode of production”.
WP 1 - 2017 [PDF 744KB]
Taking Labour Rights Seriously in Post-Brexit UK Trade Agreements: Protect, Promote, Empower
James Harrison, School of Law, University of Warwick, j.harrison.3@warwick.ac.uk
Ben Richardson, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, b.j.richardson@warwick.ac.uk
Liam Campling, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University London, l.campling@qmul.ac.uk
Adrian Smith, School of Geography, Queen Mary University London, a.m.smith@qmul.ac.uk
Mirela Barbu, School of Geography, Queen Mary University London, m.barbu@qmul.ac.uk
This paper explores how labour rights should be addressed within the UK’s post-Brexit trade agreements. It argues that the rhetoric in the UK and key trading partners, most notably the EU and the US, about making ‘trade work for all’ ought to be translated into meaningful commitments in the trade deals that the UK seeks to conclude. However, there are dangers this will not happen, including the possibility of reproducing the weaknesses and limitations of labour provisions found in current EU and US trade agreements. The paper therefore advances three principles of ‘protect, promote and empower’ to guide analysis of how progressive trade-related labour rights could be legally enacted by the UK government and its trading partners.
WP 4 - 2016 [PDF 3,161KB]
Community through Corporatization? The case of Spanish nurses in the German care industry
Mark Bergfeld, Queen Mary University of London, m.d.bergfeld@qmul.ac.uk
Germany’s labor shortage in the care sector has facilitated the commercial recruitment of Spanish nurses affected by the crisis to work in private care companies. This research analyses how nurses are recruited to Germany, and how employers use these to save labor costs up- and downstream in the care chain. I show how these corporate practices in care undermine the possibility of solidarity and community between care-users and care-workers as well as how management manufactures divisions of labor to control the workforce. Inadvertently, this engenders the very conditions for worker organization to emerge among Spanish nurses.
WP 2 - 2016 [PDF 2,146KB]
Uneven development patterns in global value chains: An empirical inquiry based on a conceptualization of GVCs as a specific form of the division of labor
Bruno Carballa Smichowski, CEPN – Université Paris XIII, bcarballa@gmail.com
Cédric Durand, CEPN – Université Paris XIII, cdurand@ehess.fr
Steven Knauss, CEPN – Université Paris XIII, knauss.steve@gmail.com
This paper has three interconnected aims: proposing a novel and rigorous definition of a global value chain (GVC) that more easily permits the delineation of its frontiers; creating new indicators of GVC participation and value capture that can overcome the limitations of the existing ones; and offering empirical evidence demonstrating that participation in global value chains is part of an uneven development process that produces a variety of distinct integration patterns that differ with respect to economic and social outcomes.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 offers a definition of GVCs that conceives the latter as a specific form of the division of labor and therefore facilitates the delineation of the frontiers of a GVC. Building on this definition, Section 2 proposes new indicators to measure GVC participation and value capture. Section 3 provides empirical evidence to argue that, contrary to what mainstream economics and international organizations state, larger participation in GVCs does not necessarily lead to higher levels of value capture. Section 4 offers some theoretical justifications to interpret these findings and adds other measures such as the level of productive investment and dimensions of social outcomes in order to better understand differentiated development patterns in GVCs. Sections 5, 6 and 7 empirically show the heterogeneity of development patterns in GVCs for 51 countries between 1995 and 2008. Using country-level data on GVC participation, value capture, investment rates and social indicators (Gini coefficient, labor’s share of income, median income and employment rate), we perform a principal component analysis and a cluster analysis. We find three distinct development patterns in GVCs: reproduction of the core, immiserizing growth, and a social upgrading mirage. We conclude by underlying the apparent complementarity between these development patterns and by identifying some limitations of the paper that open the way to further research.
WP 1 - 2016 [PDF 1,136KB]
Global Value Chains and Labour Standards in the European Union’s Free Trade Agreements: The Missing Link between International Trade Regulation and Global Production?
Mirela Barbu*, Liam Campling**, Adrian Smith*, James Harrison† and Ben Richardson††
*School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom (corresponding author Adrian Smith: a.m.smith@qmul.ac.uk)
**School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
†School of Law, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
††School of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
This paper investigates the extent to which the labour standards provisions in the European Union’s (EU) recent free trade agreements are capable of having an effect on working conditions in global value chains. The paper argues it is vital to develop an understanding of how legal and institutional mechanisms established by these agreements intersect with global value chain (GVC) governance dynamics in contrasting political economies. An analytical framework is developed for assessing the implementation of labour standards in FTAs that draws upon GVC approaches. The paper then applies this framework to explore how governance arrangements and power relations between lead firms and local producers play out in two contrasting value chains and national contexts. This analysis demonstrates how labour standards provisions in EU trade agreements are faced with a range of differentiated environments, and that there are serious difficulties in creating meaningful change in global value chains given the limitations of the EU’s current model of labour standards provisions. The paper finishes with some ideas for how EU FTAs might better support efforts to enhance labour standards in global value chains in the future.