Abstract
A key feature of today’s global economy is the outsourcing of tasks and services across national boundaries and increasing organization of production and value creation through global value chains (GVCs). Such rapid transformations carry important implications for labour, warranting closer scholarly attention and analysis. This book constitutes a timely and significant contribution to such an agenda, focusing on the dynamic interaction of GVCs with labour in supplier firms based in late industrializing countries in Asia. Such fine-grained analysis of the nature and form of employment generated by GVCs and the agentive impact of labour on GVCs will undoubtedly appeal to readers across the fields of labour studies, GVC and global production network (GPN) research and those interested more broadly in the socio-economic implications of contemporary forces of globalization.
A central contribution of this book is the argument that both vertical and horizontal relationships ultimately produce the significant variation in working conditions and bargaining power observed ‘on the ground’ in firms supplying GVCs. This conceptual framing is outlined at length in chapter 1, where Nathan et al. distinguish between ‘vertical’ relationships between lead-firms and supplier firms characterized by specific types of governance relationship (market, captive, modular, relational, hierarchy) and shaped by dynamics of profits, rents and conditions of value capture in GVCs, and ‘horizontal’ relationships between supplier firms and labour, shaped by the interaction between wages, knowledge, skills and what the authors term ‘governance’ rules (control and flexibility).
Another real strength of this contribution is that this coherent conceptual framing is married with extensive empirical insights taken from several Asian ‘supplier countries’: Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, and covering a range of sectors spanning agro-food, manufacturing (garments, electronics, automobiles) and services (information technology). The authors organize this rich empirical material broadly by GVC governance type, in order to elucidate variation in employment systems in GVCs exhibiting different modes of governance (i.e. the ‘vertical’ dimension). Chapters 2 to 10 relate to suppliers integrated into ‘captive’ value chains, whereby knowledge requirements tend to be low and suppliers deal with relatively fewer buyers, achieving only competitive profits, and workers receive low wages in line with national minimum standards. Whilst these chapters relate to a diversity of cases and country contexts, an interesting commonality is that varying combinations of ‘vertical’ relations (such as price pressures in the context of the garments industry in Cambodia (Rossi, chapter 2) and Bangladesh (Ahmed and Nathan, chapter 3)) and ‘horizontal’ wage-making institutions (such as the Asian Floor Wage Initiative in the Asian garment sector, Bhattacharjee and Roy, chapter 4) simultaneously shape buyer-supplier relations and labour conditions in these value chains.
Chapters 11 to 17 proceed to discuss case studies exemplifying ‘modular’ governance in GVCs, in which knowledge requirements are moderate, complex transaction are relatively simple to codify and suppliers take full responsibility for making products to a customer’s specification. However, linkages between suppliers and buyers remain complex due to the large volume of information being exchanged throughout the chain. The range of sectors and labour related issues explored within this governance type are vast, including gender and social relations relating to women’s work (Goger, chapter 11) and occupational health and safety (OHS) in Sri Lankan garments (Ruwanpura, chapter 12); informal spaces connected to formalized garment chains and implications for governance in Indian garments (Tewari, chapter 13); wages and employment conditions in China and India (Lee et al., chapter 14); worker resistance in Foxconn, China (Chan et al., chapter 15); and varying knowledge and work requirements across different value chain and country contexts (Damodaran, chapter 16 and Jha and Chakraborty, chapter 17). Collectively, case studies presented here demonstrate that whilst profit margins remain low such as in electronics and contract manufacturing, increased skill requirements from workers can in certain contexts contribute to higher wages.
Whilst the book clearly places greater emphasis on captive and modular chains, chapters 18 and 19 refer to cases of labour dynamics in ‘relational’ value chains in the IT software services sector, where knowledge requirements are high and products made through complex interactions between supplier and buyer. However, the case studies here show that knowledge requirements from employees are not uniformly high, and can entail low wage, low value call centres within the IT chain (Noronha and D’Cruz, chapter 18 and Sarkar and Mehta, chapter 19). These insights provide a useful contribution to GVC debates by emphasizing the general trend towards high knowledge and quality jobs within relational value chains, whilst using rich empirical material to elucidate asymmetries in work quality and security within this particular governance mode.
What is especially welcome about this contribution is the conceptual endeavour to link such a vast and diverse array of cases and issues presented, and consider the nature and form of employment systems generated by GVC governance types, along with the agentive impact of labour on GVC (re)formation. Regarding the former, in the penultimate chapter 20, Nathan goes to great lengths in extrapolating commonalities across GVC governance types and employment quality, with low, moderate and high quality jobs largely mapping onto captive, modular and relational governance types. Here, Nathan strikes a delicate balance between identifying employment trends across governance types, whilst emphasizing the on-going diversity and asymmetry of work that can exist on the same farm, factory or office floor. However, based on the initial conceptual framing, it is surprising that ‘horizontal’ factors such as national employment regulatory institutions (such as the state and trade unions) are given relatively little attention. Whilst there is some mention of labour law diversity across production locations impacting employment relations, perhaps more critical unpacking of the state based on recent contributions (Alford, 2016; Alford and Phillips, 2018; Horner, 2017; Mayer and Phillips, 2017; Smith, 2015), could have helped to consider the central role of this highly significant actor, not only in regulating GVCs, but also facilitating ‘vertical’ governance dynamics and commercial GVC functioning. Indeed, recent analysis underlines that states remain central to the governance of GVCs, and the relationship between public and private governance across national and global scales remains critical to achieving more equitable distribution of gains for labour in GVCs (Alford, 2016; Alford and Phillips, 2018).
Regarding the agentive impact of labour on GVCs, in the final chapter 21 the focus shifts to highlight the observable and yet ‘partial, uneven and incomplete’ nature of labour contestation and gains in GVCs in Asia (p. 510). Here, Tewari et al. observe elements of a Polanyian double movement whereby a process of disembedding of lead-firm driven GVCs took place in the late 1970s, followed by a pushback in the mid-1990s which is on-going. This, it is argued, has taken complex and diverse forms, including private governance, cross-border union alliances, individual acts of resistance, and upgrading to higher skilled jobs in particular knowledge-intensive sectors. A key assertion made is that this second movement can not only reform work in GVCs, but also ‘prompt changes in the institutional, technological and geographic constitution of capital in supplier countries’ (p. 526). The authors proceed to paint a hopeful picture of emerging forms of associational power, transnational institutional arrangements and customized efforts, which hold potential for addressing power asymmetries inherent in GVCs and securing increased economic and social gains for labour.
The book closes with a useful and thought-provoking set of observations charting the set of quadripartite actors (employers, workers, the state and lead-firm buyers) required to engage in industry-wide and transnational bargaining structures. Whilst Tewari et al. propose such institutional structures could help re-work (i.e. strategies aimed at materially improving conditions of employment and existence) labour relations in a GVC world, surely such configurations could also help channel labour agency as a more radical form of resistance (i.e. more direct and fundamental challenges to capitalist social relations) to lead-firm purchasing practices and the commercial foundations underpinning GVC functioning (Alford et al., 2017; Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011). Whilst the authors touch upon the potential of quadripartite industrial bargaining structures as challenging the commercial logic of GVCs, this could have been drawn out more explicitly as constituting a more fundamental form of resistance to asymmetrical GVC relations, as identified in the preceding case studies.
As a whole, the book provides a valuable overview of GVCs in Asia, though the theoretical framing can be readily applied to GVCs located in other developing country contexts across the global South. Exploration of the vertical and horizontal relations shaping labour conditions and agency in GVCs is a highly dynamic and constantly evolving topic, requiring further academic and policy attention. As an entry point to such a topic, this book offers an incredibly insightful comparative overview, providing the conceptual and methodological building blocks for future research to expand.