Abstract
AbstractThis article explores the interrelationship between global production networks (GPNs) and free trade agreements (FTAs) in the South Korean auto industry and its employment relations. It focuses on the production network of the Hyundai Motor Group (HMG) — the third biggest automobile manufacturer in the world — and the FTA between the EU and South Korea. This was the first of the EU's ‘new generation’ FTAs, which among other things contained provisions designed to protect and promote labour standards. The article's argument is twofold. First, that HMG's production network and Korea's political economy (of which HMG is a crucial part) limited the possibilities for the FTA's labour provisions to take effect. Second, that the commercial provisions in this same FTA simultaneously eroded HMG's domestic market and corporate profitability, leading to adverse consequences for auto workers in the more insecure and low‐paid jobs. In making this argument, the article advances a multi‐scalar conceptualization of the labour regime as an analytical intermediary between GPNs and FTAs. It also provides one of the first empirical studies of the EU–South Korea FTA in terms of employment relations, drawing on 105 interviews with trade unions, employer associations, automobile companies and state officials across both parties.
Highlights
A major driver and outcome of trade-based integration in the global economy has been the enhanced capacity of capital to organize highly calibratedLiam Campling and Adrian Smith are at Queen Mary University of London
It is well established that both the global production networks (GPNs) of transnational capital and the international trade agreements of states matter for employment relations, but there is less research showing how they interrelate
Our contention in this article has been that these two literatures need to be brought into closer conversation, in relation to the labour standards provisions that have proliferated within the free trade agreements (FTAs) constituting the leading edge of trade-based integration
Summary
A major driver and outcome of trade-based integration in the global economy has been the enhanced capacity of capital to organize highly calibrated. The first scale is the workplace, which includes the labour process and its ‘dynamics of control, consent, and resistance’ and at which point the organization of labour in the production process provides the basis for the creation and appropriation of surplus value (Thompson and Smith 2009; see Cumbers et al 2008) This is the scale at which popular campaigns tend to politicize working conditions and scrutinize the effectiveness of trade-related labour provisions, as seen in the response to the Rana Plaza collapse that implicated a number of EU-based clothing companies in the deaths of garment factory workers in Bangladesh. Any significant differences in opinions between key informants are explicitly identified
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