Capital-labor Relations Research Articles

Analysing transnational labour mobility regimes

Labour regime analysis is enjoying a resurgence as a way of (re-)centring workers at the heart of questions concerning the organisation of production and social reproduction in the global economy (Baglioni et al, 2022). Migrant labour, and specifically the regulation of migrant labour, is part and parcel of these dynamics yet is often left to the sidelines of labour process studies. Bringing together six papers presented at the 2023 International Labour Process Conference at Strathclyde University, this themed issue of Work in the Global Economy considers how our understandings of international labour migration and its regulation can be extended through a transnational labour mobility regime approach. The rationale is to bring together labour process approaches and theoretical insights from migration studies. These six contributions examine how transnational labour mobility within and from the majority world intersects with a variety of specific local labour control regimes (Jonas, 1996), collectively foregrounding how the bordering of capital-labour relations (within/ beyond the worksite/ state) informs workers’ individual and collective struggles for life and livelihoods.

Contesting just transitions: Climate delay and the contradictions of labour environmentalism

The notion of ‘just transition’ (JT) is an attempt to align climate and energy objectives with the material concerns of industrial workers, frontline communities, and marginalised groups. Despite the potential for fusing social and environmental justice, there is growing concern that the concept is being mobilised in practice as a form of ‘climate delayism’: a problem more ambiguous than open forms of denialism as it draws in multiple and conflictual agents, practices, and discourses. Using an historical materialist framework, attentive to both energy-capital and capital-labour relations, we show how JT is vulnerable to forces and relations of climate delay across both fossil capital and climate capital hegemonic projects. We review this through an engagement with the climate obstructionism literature and the theory of labour environmentalism: the political engagement of trade unionists and workers with environmental issues. As tensions within the labour movement surface amidst the unsettling of the carbon capital hegemony, we assess the degree to which (organised) labour—as an internally differentiated, contradictory movement—is participating in climate breakdown through a ‘praxis of delay’. Trade unions and industrial workers are often implicated in resisting or undermining transitions, but this is related significantly to their structural power relations vis a vis the fossil hegemony. Notably, JT negotiations are themselves structurally embedded within the carbon capital economy. The general preferences of trade unions for social over environmental justice might be prevalent but are neither universal nor inevitable; JT is open and contested political terrain, and labour-environmental struggles remain imperative for building just energy futures.

Social grammars and political practices: an analysis of sociopolitical and moral dynamics of the capital-labor relation in Brazilian National Congress

O tema do artigo se dirige à dinâmica sociopolítica e moral da relação capital-trabalho no Congresso Nacional brasileiro. O objetivo é analisar as gramáticas sociais mobilizadas e as práticas políticas perfomatizadas durante as audiências públicas da reforma trabalhista de 2017. Para analisar o objeto de estudo, criou-se o conceito de “gramática social”, junto do empréstimo dos conceitos de “prática social” (SCHATZKI, 2006) e “coalizão de defesa” (SABATIER, 1988). Analisaram-se seis audiências públicas ocorridas no Congresso Nacional com o auxílio teórico-metodológico da análise do discurso e da análise de conteúdo. Identificaram-se duas gramáticas sociais: a gramática da “modernização” e a gramática da “cidadania”. Cada gramática concebe as noções de “Estado”, “mercado”, “trabalho” e “legislação trabalhista” ao seu modo, sendo noções que se constroem histórica e coletivamente nos discursos políticos. Conclusivamente, argumenta-se que as gramáticas sociais e as práticas políticas se constituem através da dinâmica sociopolítica e moral do capitalismo brasileiro contemporâneo.

Advertising – a Necessary “Elixir of Life” for Capitalism: On the Critique of the Political Economy of Advertising

This contribution aims to lift the ideological veil of apologetics and pseudo-criticism on advertising with the help of a reality-based systematic analysis that contributes to a materialistic theory of advertising. The content-related and methodological basis of such a theory is a Critique of the Political Economy of Advertising oriented towards the critique of capitalism and academic knowledge originally presented by Karl Marx and current societal analyses based on it. In this context, the academic objective is to consider the economic, political, and societal functions of (media) advertising. In doing so, the elementary economic and ideological functions of advertising for the existence and further development of the market economy and capitalist economic and societal systems become recognisable. Advertising then no longer appears as a necessary evil but as a necessary "elixir of life” for the media industry, the economy, and capitalism as a whole. Based on the applied critical political-economic analysis, it becomes clear that on the level of capitalism as an economic and societal system, advertising thus contributes economically and ideologically to the stabilisation of the systemic foundations of capitalist societies (the capital-labour relationship, the regime of accumulation; the economic, societal, and political [advertising] functions of the media). It is shown that a Critique of the Political Economy of Advertising – especially from the point of view of the necessarily growing importance of advertising for media production – also contributes to the development of a Critique of the Political Economy of the Media.

The Political Economy of Gig Work in the Pandemic: Social Hierarchies and Labour Control of Indian Platform Workers

This article examines capital–labour relations within location-based gig work in India, with a focus on the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis of the pandemic exacerbated unemployment and created opportunities for platform services to expand, as consumers relied on digital platforms for their needs. This article assesses conditions across three gig services—food delivery, ride hailing and beauty work—based on interviews with 23 gig workers in the Delhi–National Capital Region in India and five organizers of gig worker collectives. The article discusses how workers’ incomes were cut even as they were exposed to higher risks to health and safety, and was accompanied by higher control exerted over their labour ostensibly for the safety of consumers. This control—both algorithmic and bodily—over workers derived its legitimacy from social hierarchies of caste and class between workers and consumers, and between workers and the platform. The article reveals a remarkable similarity in how workers fared across sectors, despite different classifications as essential or non-essential services. It establishes the significance of the pandemic to amplifying processes of labour commodification and labour control in gig work, ultimately contributing to antagonism between platforms and workers and to an emergent class politics of gig workers.

Safeguarding livelihoods against reductions in economic output

Secular stagnation, escalating socio-ecological crises, and the urgent need to scale back resource use in affluent countries make reductions in economic output increasingly likely. In this context, the prevailing vulnerability of livelihoods to a reduction in output poses a fundamental threat, and obstructs stringent environmental policies that reduce production or consumption.This study explores what creates this vulnerability, and how it might be overcome. We introduce a novel analytic framework that describes the relationship between economic output and the adequacy of livelihoods. Using empirical data for the years around the Global Financial Crisis, we illustrate the vulnerability of livelihoods in the UK. Based on our framework, we show that the vulnerability is not inevitable but arises when livelihoods are dependent on wage labour whilst employment and adequate incomes for workers are insecure, or when adequate pensions are insecure. These conditions are pervasive in contemporary capitalist economies, primarily due to profit maximisation and neoliberal welfare and labour policy. Profit maximisation may in fact actively foster the vulnerability of livelihoods, as the vulnerability can be used as a lever for squeezing wages, and as a pretext for pursuing economic growth and blocking environmental policies.Finally, we identify a range of interventions that could overcome the vulnerability, including specific versions of universal basic services, a universal basic income, a minimum income guarantee, a job guarantee, living wages, worktime reduction, and a pension guarantee, alongside changes in capital-labour relations and a shift to not-for-profit provisioning. Such interventions could secure livelihoods in volatile or contracting economies, and make stringent environmental policies socially sustainable and more politically palatable.

Adivasi migrant labour and agrarian capitalism in southern India

AbstractThis paper looks at a case of rural‐to‐rural movement of agrarian capital in southern India and the ways in which capital–labour relations are reworked to maintain oppressive forms of exploitation. Faced with an agrarian crisis, capitalist farmers from affluent communities of Wayanad, Kerala, take large tracts of land for lease in the neighbouring state of Karnataka and grow ginger based on price speculation. Landless Adivasis from Wayanad have served as labourers on these ginger farmlands for the past three decades. Recently, farmers have shifted to employing labourers from a Scheduled Caste (SC) from Karnataka. The change happened not just because of the lower wages the SC labourers were willing to work for but also because of the farmers' inclination to move away from Adivasis who have been resisting the poor working conditions on the farm. The story resonates with the broader dynamics of agrarian–labour relations amidst capitalist expansion and highlights the centrality of socio‐political factors at play.

Agricultural workers and trade unions in the neoliberal food regime: capital–labour relations, conflicts over labour and the agroindustrial transformation of the sugarcane sector in São Paulo

ABSTRACT In the academic and political debate about land grabbing and agroindustrial transformations in the neoliberal food regime effects on labour are neglected. In response to this gap, this paper focuses on labour, unions, their bargaining power and struggles in these transformation processes. Empirically, I analyse the effects of the transformation of the sugarcane sector in the state of São Paulo between 2002 and 2016 by applying the power resource approach. The analysis shows that these processes had mainly negative effects on the rural working class such as increased unemployment, a loss of associational power or less collective struggles; new power resources could not compensate for this.

Introduction to the Special Issue Precarious Labor, Capitalist Transformation, and the State: Insights from Central Asia

The end of the Soviet Union marked a turning point in the radical reconfiguration of labor relations in the post-Soviet world, including in Central Asia. The effects of this “unmaking” of Soviet working life—to paraphrase Humphrey1—were articulated in new capital-labor relations that led to a heightened sense of financial and existential insecurity across large sections of Central Asian societies. Thirty years on, mass labor precarization in the region appears in line with broader trends in the global political economy, where, despite enduring and even significant differences between countries in the Global North and the Global South, “[c]ontingent, precarious, and temporary jobs are becoming the norm.”2

Abolitionist Pedagogies, Pedagogical Labor

Abolitionist Pedagogies, Pedagogical Labor

Exploitation at the frontier of Europe: Workers’ Alienation and Emancipation in Amazon Poland

This paper investigates workers’ exploitation in contemporary global logistics. Relying on Marx’s concept of alienation, we examine the case of an Amazon warehouse in Poland, at the eastern frontier of the European Union. In line with existing studies, our analysis shows how algorithmic Taylorism and casualized employment alienate workers from the work process, social relations with other workers, the commodities they handle, and ultimately themselves as human beings. At the same time, we highlight how these modalities of work and employment integrate workers into the global circuit of capital, reconstituting them as universal, undifferentiated, global waged labour and as consumers. This integration at once emancipates workers located at the eastern frontier of the European market from more ‘locally embedded’ exploitative capital-labour relations prevalent in that context. Our study contributes to the growing literature on global logistics and Amazon by pointing to the key role of the ‘emancipating effects’ of alienation, which Marx theorized. This complements current explanations of labour’s exploitation which focus on workers’ structural vulnerability and coercion. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of our findings for the possibilities of these workers’ mobilization.

Mobility Power, State and the ‘Sponsored Labour Regime’ in Saudi Capitalism

This article draws on the ‘double indeterminacy of labour power’, a key conceptual development in labour process theory, to examine mobility power in Saudi Arabia. State control over the mobility of migrant workers is crucial to the labour process and the wider political-economy of Saudi Arabia. However, little is known about mobility–effort bargaining and the specific forms of mobility power in the Saudi context. This article argues that not only is mobility–effort bargaining at the core of capital–labour relations in Saudi Arabia, but that mobility and effort are variably controlled by different sponsors/agents of control. Importantly, the control exercised by the state, capital and other sponsors over migrants’ mobility is not absolute. Developing mobility power further, the article details the multiplicity of mobilities and labour contracts to delineate a ‘sponsored labour regime’, and highlights the underexplored role of the state, and other agents of control, in conceptualising mobility–effort bargaining.

Surveillance Capital and Post-Fordist Accumulation: Towards a Critical Political Economy of Surveillance-for-Profit

This article presents a critical political economy of contemporary surveillance-for-profit. The article makes the central argument that surveillance capital emerged out of the contradictions of capitalist accumulation and remains subject to the imperative of accumulation for the sake of ever more accumulation. Platforms constitute the infrastructure and surveillance provides the instrument for the expropriation-accumulation-commodification of user-generated data. Firstly, the article maps how surveillance capital valorizes. Surveillance capital derives surplus value from expropriation rather than exploitation in a strict Marxian sense. Secondly, the article shows that surveillance capital is far from unique in its expropriation of both resources and labor. Indeed, capitalist accumulation has always entailed both expropriation and exploitation. Thirdly, the article argues that while surveillance has always been a key tool for shaping capital-labor relations, surveillance capital as such first emerged under Fordism and has now become an integral part of a Post-Fordist mode of flexible accumulation that is based on the expansion and intensification of forms of surveillance that arose in response to the requirements and contradictions of earlier modes of capitalist accumulation. The article concludes that Post-Fordist flexible accumulation in general and surveillance capital’s valorization in particular may end up producing a crisis of effective demand, as workers who are subject to increasing precariousness and disposability may no longer have the income to consume the commodities on whose sale surveillance capital ultimately depends.

Extracting labour from the neighbour: class dynamics of agrarian change in Sumatran oil palm

ABSTRACT Recent global ‘land grabbing’ has evoked concerns about the dispossession of agricultural smallholders. This concern often assumes that the current smallholders are the continuation of the undifferentiated ‘middle peasantry’ (‘peasant family’), only with a new crop. Drawing from Sumatran oil palm farming in Indonesia, this paper shows that the majority of smallholders are petty landowners who must sell their labour to survive and are thus part of the labouring classes. On the other hand, a few smallholders are among the capitalist farmers, those who extract their neighbour’s labour for accumulation. Exposing capital-labour relations between smallholders implies that any resistance to dispossession can no longer take for granted that all smallholders are opponents of corporations and states.

Articulations of workplace precarity: Challenging the politics of segmentation in warehouse logistics

As critical nodes for global commodity flows, warehouses are an important example of segmented labour regimes which partition workers into groups with different conditions of security or its opposite, precarity. An emerging literature on warehouse work has tended to place segmentation in the context of managerial despotism based upon low wages, high labour turnover and job insecurity. However, the literature has, thus far, tended to pay comparatively less attention to workers’ collective resistance and its relationship to intra-labour divisions reproduced through segmentation. In refocusing attention to this problem, this article addresses the theoretical status of intra-labour groups, the nature of horizontal worker-to-worker relations, and their interaction with workers’ social identities and vertical capital–labour relations. It argues that the Gramscian concept of articulation provides the most promising frame for understanding these networked relations and for addressing how the politics of segmentation can be challenged by building common cause among divided workers.

Capitalist agriculture, COVID-19 and agrarian labour relations in Punjab, India.

In the state of Punjab, the heart of the green revolution in India, a large fraction of agricultural labour is expended by migrant workers. The unplanned lockdown imposed by the Indian government affected paddy transplantation, a labour‐intensive activity in Punjab primarily due to interstate restrictions on movement. Drawing on a primary survey in a village from the Malwa region of Punjab, the paper examines the changes in agrarian relations in rural Punjab due to the Covid‐19 pandemic by critically analysing the dynamics of capital labour relations. The restriction on labour movement and unilateral imposition of transplantation wage rates by a few Panchayats in Punjab (dominated by capitalist landlords and rich peasants) has intensified class conflict in the state. The Punjab government's policies, which are driven by the capitalist landlords and rich peasants, have played a significant role in the increased exploitation of workers. The paper concludes with a brief evaluation of the changes induced by Covid‐19 in the agrarian political economy of Punjab.

Florin Georgescu: A New Outlook on Romanian Capitalism

In 2021, the Romanian Sociological Association awarded economist Florin Georgescu its Award for Excellence. This essay covers the author’s magnum opus, titled Capital in Post-communist Romania, and focuses on the content most relevant to sociology. Unique in size and scope, the approximate 1,000 page three-volume book features three books in one: a 30-year economic history of Romania, a critical analysis of the way the Romanian capitalist economy developed in the second half of the 2010s, and a blueprint for structural reforms to foster development and reduce inequality. The essay includes a short author presentation and an overall review of the book’s contents, an appraisal of the work’s style and originality, and a review of the themes and subjects most salient for sociologists: capital ‒ labour relationship and the distribution and redistribution system, income and wealth inequality, precarious work, the transition and privatisation processes, structural problems of capitalism, and development policies.

What tactical repertoire to use in strikes and when to use it? Strategies of workers and their mobilization power in Chile (2010–2018)

AbstractThis research analyses workers’ mobilization power in Chile through the joint‐cost model, suggesting that wider tactical repertoires, and especially transgressive ones, tend to result in shorter strikes, as a proxy of relative success against the employers. Using the Labor Strike Observatory's original dataset, we study this relation in the Chilean case, where neoliberalism has weakened unions and constrained the occurrence of strikes at the workplace level. We advanced two quantitative methods of analysis. First, using latent class analysis, we identify the tactical repertoires used by strikers. Second, following an event history methodology, we estimate the contribution of each repertoire to the risk of ending the strike. This paper analyses the strategies and milestones of strikers’ actions, shows the greater power of violent tactics compared to peaceful ones at the beginning of the conflict and finally discusses some limitations of the joint‐cost model in the capital–labour relation.

Capital Accumulation and Capital-Labor Relations: A Critique of the Social Structure of Accumulation Theory

The social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory seeks to bridge the gap between highly abstract Marxian categories and concrete history in the analysis of institutional structures of capitalist society. More specifically, the theory focuses on the temporal transformation and national specificity of capital–labor relations. However, SSA theory cannot adequately explain why these relations take specific forms in time and space. In general, the theory fails to reconcile the concrete and the abstract, falling back on unmediated historical explanations. These explanatory limitations derive from an empiricist methodology, which can be examined through the lens of Juan Iñigo Carrera's development of Marxian theory. Iñigo Carrera additionally offers an alternative approach to the historical transformation of capital–labor relations and their national specificities. This explanation derives from Marx's analysis of the transformation of the materiality of the capitalist labor process, and explains concrete phenomena through the further development of abstract categories.

Workers’ organizations and the fetishism of the trade union form: toward new pathways for research on the labour movement?

ABSTRACT In the field of labour studies and industrial relations, there's a long-standing tradition, common to both the reformist and Marxist left, of focusing the analysis on the trade unions, the par excellence form of workers' organization. Changes in the global political economy in the past decades have completely altered the productive and social landscape in which trade unions have historically been inserted questioning the extent to which existing trade unions are still representative of broader working-class interests. I argue that despite this adverse context, labour relations research on collective organization and conflict has remained trapped into a logic which I call, paraphrasing Marx, of trade union fetishism. My critique is a methodological call to abandon the comfort zone of the capital labour relation and of its ‘symbiotic relationship’ with trade unions to advance the field of study toward a truly working-class analysis, based on actually existing social processes of struggle.