Abstract
Labour regime analysis provides an invaluable ‘tool to study the complexity of exploitation under contemporary capitalism and to unravel its unbounded reproduction of difference’ (p. 95). This ambitious and compelling collection sets the theoretical and methodological terms for research on labour regimes and what possible avenues for solidarity that shedding light on these can reveal. The editors identify four themes for future development of the approach: (1) the relations between global production and the places and territories in which it happens, (2) identifying processes of racialisation and the production of difference under capitalism, (3) expanding our understanding of how we map dynamics of social reproduction, and (4) deepening the focus on ecological relations and the environment. A key theme of this volume is the role of labour regime as a conceptual bridge, an intermediary between the scales of production and reproduction that connects global capitalism to specific forms of exploitation in different settings and back again, emphasizing the multi-scalarity of exploitation and the multiplicity of ways it is sustained.
The strengths of this collection come, first, from successfully navigating the difficult task of building a genuine interdisciplinarity through the work, building on and contributing to a variety of disciplinary debates pertinent to a richer understanding of labour. Second, in the carefully curated and theoretically rigorous contributions that draw out the diverse potentialities of labour regime analysis. Finally, from demonstrating the concrete application of the framework, illustrating, in diverse geographical and economic contexts, the complexity and coherence of labour regimes.
In sum, the volume will have a transdisciplinary value for political economists, development scholars, geographers, and other interested in how labour is organized, exploited, and ordered within global capitalism. It is a rich and compelling volume for unpacking the complexity of labour control and diversity of labour regimes, as well as the potential avenues to be explored to confront them.
In the first section, which traces the antecedents to the approach, Bair argues that earlier feminist analyses directly anticipated the contributions of labour regime analysis, showing how global value chains (GVCs) mobilize social difference to facilitate capital accumulation on a global scale. Through feminist GVC literature she articulates the importance of its insights to labour regime analysis and the ‘lived contexts of embodied labour’ (p. 41). Lerche revisits key debates in agrarian political economy, highlighting the value of Burawoy’s analysis of factory regimes to understanding agricultural labour regimes in the global South. Using debates in/on India and Africa and colonial labour regimes, modes and forms of production, and the roles of gender, caste, and race, he shows how they anticipated the important directions being taken by labour regime analysis today. Finally, Peck shows how the ‘intermediate’ path of labour regimes addresses the spatial shortcomings of labour market and labour process approaches. He connects the emergence and development of labour regimes debates to geographical concerns with the spatial dimensions of capitalism, not simply bridging different scales but offering an intermediate reading of labour regimes as conjunctural ‘concrete entanglements and institutionalised forms’ that connect across scales (p. 71).
The second section turns to recent theoretical and methodological developments, beginning with Baglioni et al providing a pivotal chapter aimed at providing the tools and concepts for labour regime analysis. Focused on four terrains of production, circulation, social reproduction, and ecology, they show how these are intertwined and ‘mediated historically and spatially’ to co-constitute specific labour regimes (p. 86). Workers’ struggles are also situated as a key mediator of labour regimes, thereby making the approach a ‘powerful political method for building solidarities’ (p. 88). Their breakdown of the phases of analysis of labour regimes sets the foundations for applying labour regime analysis. Following on, Oya develops a ‘multi-scalar labour regime approach’ (p. 102) to Chinese firms in Africa, reflecting on his use of large-N quantitative surveying in Ethiopia and Angola. He demonstrates how mixed methods can grasp the complexity of labour regimes, avoiding traps of methodological nationalism and reduction of comparison to ‘varieties of capitalism’.
Rioux further refines labour regimes conceptually. He takes us through the different phases through which a labour regime is ‘embodied’ by mobilizing, utilizing, motivating, and reproducing ‘labouring bodies’ (p. 122) to expand our understanding of how geographically specific forms of exploitation are stabilized and maintained using a wider set of tools that help to keep these in place. Chang starts from east Asia to develop the concept of ‘transnational labour regimes’, which focuses on how local regimes are impacted by transnational forces and (re)produce a transnational hierarchy. His demonstration of hierarchical relations between connected labour regimes is important for understanding the different ways in which labour constitutes forms of uneven development globally.
Hürtgen starts from the notion of ‘glocal production’ to demonstrate how the generalization of despotic labour regimes unfolds unevenly in the context of economies in the global North. She uses a spatialisation and feminisation of Burawoy’s despotic and hegemonic labour regimes to begin to reveal the multi-scalar transformations that produce variegated integration of different hegemonic labour regimes through an ‘upscaled capitalist logic of control’ (p. 164). Harris and Hough combine insights from world systems and social reproduction to shed light on how labour regimes are built around global processes of proletarianization and exclusion. World systems theorisations of the nodal points of commodity chains and the relations between waged and non-waged work at these spatially differentiated sites can help contextualize different labour regimes. They draw political implications from this, arguing for the need to extend working-class politics from the politics of production and focus on making visible socially reproductive labour and its uneven distribution.
The third section turns to concrete applications of labour regime analysis. Anner applies the labour regime framework to show how buyer firms make supply chain decisions, preferring those regimes that minimize disruption over cheap wages. He develops a typology of three labour regimes that account for the primary locations of apparel exporters and links them to the effectiveness of different forms of resistance. This chapter shows the value of labour regimes for connecting the global economy to the capacities of workers to mobilize in different ways. Bartley and Coe demonstrate how transnational private regulation becomes integrated in partial and uneven ways into labour regimes. Drawing on case studies of China and Indonesia, they show how this helps specify the limitation of private regulation and ineffectiveness of voluntary practices of employer regulation. They situate work on transnational private regulation in the places of its implementation to specify the ways in which private regulation operates in multi-scalar labour regimes.
Wickramasingha unpacks the temporality of labour regimes through rich analyses of garment manufacturing in Bangladesh, highlighting the role-played by international civil society organizations (ISCO). She illuminates their role, further elaborating on the multi-scalar nature of labour regimes, their formation, and their changing over time. Focusing on the interventions of ISCOs in the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster, she highlights a sensitivity not just to the diversity of labour regimes across space and place, but also over time. Campling, Smith, and Barbu apply labour regimes analysis to the impacts of trade agreements, demonstrating how EU free-trade agreements with South Korea and Moldova intersected with existing labour regimes. They show how competitive pressures are transferred into domestic economies, offering key insights to the interrelationship between these different scales and how they set the changing conditions for labour exploitation.
Alimahomed-Wilson shows how Amazon has developed its logistics networks through devalued, racialized labour, enabling enormous profits and producing a ‘racialized global logistics infrastructure’ (p. 270). Using Cedric Robinson’s racial capitalism as a starting point, he demonstrates the importance of differential value extraction for intensifying the labour process for racialized workers in warehouse and logistics roles and making these workers more disposable. Andrijasevic draws on evidence from Eastern European electronics assembly plants to illustrate how labour regimes operate temporally. She shows how this is inherently gendered to meet the demands of just-in-time production for 24-hour production and circulation. Dormitories provide more than just an extension of managerial control, but also change the temporality of workers’ lives. Schling further demonstrates the significance of expanding the dormitory labour regime concept to unpack hierarchically differentiated labour along racialised and gendered lines. Focusing on Czechia, she shows how the production of labouring subjects meets the temporalities of flexible, just-in-time production. Taken together, these two chapters provide an invaluable insight into the extension of labour regimes beyond the workplace and to the (re)production of workers themselves.