Abstract
This book is the latest in Palgrave’s ‘Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment’ series: a collection of papers derived from a stream on global value chains and labour at the 2013 International Labour Process Conference. The chapters cover a wide variety of labour processes, ranging from Malaysian e-waste pickers and Apple app designers – both forms of freelancing, albeit with very different working conditions – to textile manufacturers, logistics workers and call centre operatives. For almost all chapters the primary focus is with placing labour process analysis at the centre of global value chains (GVCs). 1 As such, the concern is with what labour process theory can contribute to the study of GVCs, rather than what an analysis of the global circuits of capitalist production can contribute to our understanding of the labour process. The ambition of ‘putting labour in its place’ is thus skewed towards putting labour (and labour process analysis) at the centre of GVCs rather than reframing our understanding of the labour process by locating them within a global political-economic context.
Central to this call to focus GVCs on labour is the claim that they are ‘heavily capital centric’ (p. 141). Despite recognizing that labour is the ultimate source of value creation, these perspectives primarily view labour as a passive factor of production, echoing more conventional international business perspectives that would consider labour primarily as a cost to be minimized, or as a repository of knowledge and skill. Such a perspective fails to consider the active agency of labour in contesting control regimes and actively shaping the structure of GVCs. Instead, GVCs have focused on governance questions of state and supra-national regulation, or occasionally hegemonic blocs. From a GVC perspective, the main concern is with how firms can capture a larger share of the value produced within a chain through ‘economic upgrading’: when a firm moves up a value chain, for example by shifting from a service-production role to branded goods producer, as when Samsung shifted from producing for other brands to establishing their own and thereby capturing a larger share of value. For many of the essays in this collection, GVCs neglect the impact of economic upgrading on labour and need also to consider: whether economic upgrading can also deliver social upgrading, or improvements in the rights and conditions of labour (p. 195); how the organization and agency of labour can work to secure such improvements. The claim that GVCs neglect labour is only occasionally contested, as for example in Andrew Cumbers’ chapter, which reviews the many and varied approaches to labour from within economic geography.
In addition to a concern with agency, the collection has a broad understanding of labour at the point of production or service delivery (p. 14), moving beyond a more conventional labour process concern with the employment relationship to consider freelance production and self-employment (Chapters 6 and 13), as well as family based agricultural production (Chapter 12). What is absent from these accounts, however, is a concern with practices of value production that are not immediately economic. For example, there is nothing to locate labour within wider circuits of social-reproduction, as might be suggested by Glucksmann’s ‘total social organization of labour’ perspective, or in studies of unpaid ‘work’ that contribute to the value of brands and social media. In this regard, a comparison with Fuchs’ (2014) recent attempt to combine a GVC perspective with studies of digital labour is instructive. While Fuchs’ analysis of social media lacks the empirical rigour and depth of the papers gathered together by Newsome and colleagues, and falls short in its theoretical exposition of the functioning of GVCs, it has the advantage of following a commodity from mineral extraction, through production and circulation, into the sphere of consumption, where new forms of unpaid labour, such as creating media content for Facebook and Google, blur the boundaries of work and life as conventionally understood in labour process analysis.
Despite overstating the neglect of labour, and in turn overlooking those forms of work that fall into labour process theory’s own blind-spots, this is a focused and effective collection of essays, making an important attempt to bring together GVCs and labour process analysis, serving to keep labour at the heart of economic geography and studies of international business, while also locating labour process studies within a well theorized global political economic context. The individual chapters also provide us with many well written case studies, so the book will be valuable to teachers, as well as researchers, concerned with locating labour in a global political economic context.