Part of the Comparative Work and Employment Relations series, Putting Labour in its Place is an edited collection, containing cutting-edge research and theoretical innovation on global value chains, the nature of work and labour process theory. It addresses the different processes around the world that each add value to the goods or services being produced; whilst also analysing the idea of labour itself and the exploitation surrounding it. Key benefits: - Written by leading international academics. - A landmark text combining the growing interest in global value chains with labour process theory. - Provides up-to-date critical analysis of global developments.

This edited volume provides a collection of historical and contemporary commodity chain studies placing labor at the centre of their analysis. It represents an important contribution to commodity chain research, but also to the fields of social-economic and global labour history.

This comprehensive Handbook explores the complex and volatile debate over globalisation and labour standards. It offers key insights into the impact of globalisation on workers, the obligations of corporations and international legal bodies in protecting workers’ rights and maximising the opportunities offered by international trade and investment.

This book puts Indian garment workers and their organisations at the centre of the analysis. Taking the Bangalore export-garment cluster as a case study, the book explores the conditions that enable but also constrain the capacities of garment workers’ unions to build collective power vis-à-vis employers and thereby improve their conditions. Drawing on theoretical concepts from labour geography, relational economic geography, and Global Production Network (GPN) analysis, the book highlights, on the one hand, how the complex labour control regime in the Bangalore export-garment cluster poses manifold challenges and constraints for workers’ and unions’ collective agency. On the other hand, the book illustrates the various networked agency strategies that local garment unions in Bangalore have developed over the years to overcome these constraints by tapping into coalitional power resources from worker, consumer and labour rights organisations in the Global North. This book is therefore highly relevant for economic geographers and other scholars interested in dynamics of labour and development in GPNs as well as for unionists and labour rights activists committed to improving working conditions in the global garment industry. This is an open access book.

Part of the Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment series, this edited collection brings together contributions from leading international scholars to initiate an important dialogue between labour process analysis and scholarship on work in the Global South. This book characterises the forms of work and labour process that characterise globalising capitalism today and addresses core analytical concerns within Labour Process Theory and research on work in the South. It explores how a wide range of production relations in the Global South, ranging from formal to informal employment and self-employment, are embedded in wider social relations of gender, caste, religion and ethnicity, and are related to wider patterns of commodification and resistance. Drawing on cutting-edge research, the book's chapters consider a diverse range of working situations, covering migrant workers in the Middle East, commercial surrogacy work in India and cooperative garment workers in Argentina. In offering a novel reading of the political economy of work in the Global South and shedding light on lesser-considered fields of work and worker organization, this volume will provide new insights for making sense of the changing world of work for students, scholars, labour activists and practitioners alike.

As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world faces extraordinary system-level challenges—from deep inequality and xenophobic nationalism to militarism and neofascism, from the refugee crisis and environmental degradation to upsurges of social unrest and escalating rivalries among powerful states. This book begins from the premise that world-systems analysis can be a powerful tool for the study of these problems, with the potential to overcome the methodological and theoretical limitations of other social science perspectives. The editors argue, moreover, that world-systems analysis can be strengthened by drawing on its holistic methodologies, returning to its Third World roots, and learning from other critical approaches. The authors in this volume not only make important contributions to comparative and historical social science, they also bring a new vigor to the world-systems perspective. Facing critical junctures in both the "state of knowledge" and the "state of the world," this book demonstrates the continued utility of, and future possibilities for, world-systems analysis.

Exploring the contentious relationship between trade and labour, this book looks at the impact of the EU’s ‘new generation’ free trade agreements on workers. Drawing upon extensive original research, including over 200 interviews with key actors across the EU and its trading partners, it considers the effectiveness of the trade-labour linkage in an era of global value chains. The EU believes trade can work for all, claiming that labour provisions in its free trade agreements ensure that economic growth and high labour standards go hand-in-hand. Yet whether these actually make a difference to workers is strongly contested. This book explains why labour provisions have been profoundly limited in the EU’s agreements with the CARIFORUM group, South Korea and Moldova. It also shows how the provisions were mismatched with the most pressing workplace concerns in the key export industries of sugar, automobiles and clothing, and how these concerns were exacerbated by the agreements’ commercial provisions. This pioneering approach to studying the trade-labour linkage provides insights into key debates on the role of civil society in trade governance, the relationship between public and private labour regulation, and the progressive possibilities for trade policy in the twenty-first century. This book will appeal to research scholars, post-graduate students, trade policy practitioners, policy researchers allied to labour movements, and informed activists.