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With the onset of decolonisation, the newly independent and non-aligned countries forged transnational alliances within the United Nations that have represented the collective interests of the developing world in the realm of economic cooperation and development for more than fifty years. This paper situates Yugoslavia’s global role and its labour force mobility in the South within a broader story about economic and technical cooperation in the non-aligned world, the project of ‘collective self-reliance’, and the endeavour to ‘democratise’ international economic relations. These occurred within a framework of nesting hierarchies, both at the global and at domestic level and were not directed at a radical transformation of the existing ‘transnationalised economy’, but rather at the redefinition of the nature of the economic relations/hierarchies in place and reflected an aspiration to partake in the international division of labour and economic exchange as equal partners. The paper also addresses t...

In this paper I first detail some of the geographical concepts that help us make sense of capitalism’s spatiality. I then provide several brief vignettes which illustrate how conflicts over how capitalism’s geography is made can be central to disputes both between and within groups of workers and capitalists. The paper’s purpose is to argue that understanding how social life is geographically structured can add important insights to explaining economic and political praxis.

Purpose: The flexibility inherent in temporary agency work allows employers to cut labour cost in a variety of ways. Recurring themes in the employment literature draw attention to the duality of the labour market rooted in type-of-contract segmentation. This duality in the labour market carries with it a number of undesirable consequences. Design: Drawing on qualitative data from six case studies in Pakistan, this paper reports on an in-depth study of deceitful labour market intermediaries, through which employers attempt to bypass statutory obligations concerning workers’ constitutional rights. Findings: A case study inquiry, based on qualitative interviews, suggested that the agencies were ‘created’ or ‘arranged’ to illustrate indirectness of employment relationship by misclassifying effectively permanent employees as ‘agency workers’. The evidence points towards a growing trend for agencies to be simply a sham arrangement.Originality: This study broadened our comprehension about the nature of temporary agency employment and subsequent labour market duality in Pakistan, beyond the traditional functional model of legitimate labor market intermediaries. A picture of precarious work from Pakistan being a large and growing economy shares many features in common with the rest of the world. These findings offer useful policy and social implications for national and multinational companies.

Edward Blissett, 'Fatally Divided: An analysis of the role micro-political divisions played in the unions’ loss of the 1986-87 News International dispute', paper presented at the British Universities Industrial Relations Conference, Leeds, UK, 29 June - 1 July, 2016.

The Whitley Reports, 1917–1918 were seen by contemporaries as conservative: they reflected pre-existing voluntaristic approaches to the labour problem rather than a radical departure. Largely neglected by the well-established private sector, for whom they were intended, Whitley Councils were taken up by the newly emerging public service unions. The interwar years demonstrated Whitleyism’s lack of clout. But, endorsed by governments during and after the Second World War, public sector Whitleyism came to embody the tenets of progressive public administration by providing nationally determined pay, career progression and a public service ethos. These hard-won union gains are under attack from neoliberal reforms that attempt to model public service labour relations on the private sector. The paper examines the major weaknesses and strengths of the Whitley model for managing public service industrial relations through an analysis of a century of Whitleyism.

This paper seeks to explain the development of capitalism in Eritrea and Kenya from a labour history perspective. Indeed, the assumption in this research is that capitalism can only be explained by taking into consideration free wage labour as one of the sine qua non conditions for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, the article looks at the paradigmatic socio-economic shifts: from unfree to free labour, from free to precarious labour and from unfree to precarious labour. These are the result of the complicated relationship that exists between capital and labour. The point of departure of the analysis is the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis on the structural origins of slavery, which despite severe criticism, it has been largely remained unchallenged until the present. In Eritrea, colonised by Italy, and Kenya, colonised by England, free wage labour fully developed between the nineteenth and twentieth century. This could be considered the era of the advent of capitalism, with th...

Until very recently, European employers and political leaders denied the need for any coordination in industrial relations at EU level. In 2011 however, the European Parliament and the Council adopted a new European economic governance regime that makes EU member states labor policies subject to multilateral surveillance procedures. This paper analyzes this 'silent revolution' from above and assesses organized labor's responses to this challenge. It shows that the EU's new governance regime does not follow the classical model of a federal state, but rather the governance structures of multinational corporations that control their local subsidiaries through the use of whipsawing tactics and coercive comparisons. European trade unions and social movements difficulties in politicizing European economic governance are thus best explained by the ability of the new supranational EU regime to nationalize social conflicts.

The North American Free Trade Agreement's side accord – the 1994 North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation – has been portrayed as providing an ineffective, bureaucratic procedure for dealing with labor complaints about infringements of national labor legislation. This paper reviews two decades of experience. It argues that after an initial period of formal activity, which did indeed expose the accord's severe limitations, a new era of intensified international links at grassroots level commenced. Despite its limitations, the accord initiated positive learning processes and intensified exchanges between the trade union movements in the USA, Canada and Mexico.

The common image of a female wage earner in the U.S. in the decades around the turn of the 20th century is that of a young, single woman: the daughter of her family. However, the wives and mothers of these families also made important economic contributions to their families' economies. This paper argues that we need to rethink our evaluation of the economic roles played by ever-married women in working-class families. Using a range of government reports as well as IPUMS, I document three ways in which working-class wives and mothers strove to bring cash into their family units: through formal workforce participation; through home work of various sorts; and through selling subsistence, providing in-home services to nonfamily members in exchange for cash. Unlike earlier works which focused on single locations or ethnic or racial groups or female occupations, I tell a national story of ever-married women's cash-producing work. Working-class wives and mothers filled in the economic gaps existing in the inter...

This article concerns social relations in the estate villages of northern Germany between 1890 and 1923. It focuses primarily on the strategies adopted by seasonal labourers from Russian Poland in their relations with estate managements. Using police and union reports, and the letters and accounts of the migrants themselves, it argues that seasonal workers cannot simply be viewed as exploited, passive victims of this phase of agricultural modernization. This is evident, above all, in the practice of job-switching, which, although criminalized, was a widespread phenomenon both before 1914 and during the war, when the Poles were kept back as forced labour. Escaping estates to which they had been contracted, many workers outsmarted the system of registration by carrying multiple sets of identity papers. But such ‘contract breaking’ was also greatly facilitated by the endemic shortage of labour in the countryside; there were always some owners prepared to hire illegal fugitives. Examining the post-war years, ...

The paper sets out to pinpoint and explain the position of building labour in Britain today through a historical and comparative approach. Wage relations and the division of labour in the building industry are traced through different stages of development, from the crafts and statutory trades of feudalism to the collectively bargained skills and the social-partner-negotiated qualifications of capitalism. It is shown how, since the 1970s, the progressive development of building labour has been stalled with the continued adherence to traditional trade divisions, the reassertion of managerial prerogative and the decline in direct employment, collective bargaining and training. This stagnation in development is especially apparent from comparison with the situation in Germany and The Netherlands, where qualification-based rather than output-based wage relations and industry-wide rather than trade-based skill structures are prevalent. The construction labour process today in Britain remains strongly craft bas...

Employing two widely used approaches to identify the effects of monetary policy, this paper explores the differential impact of policy on the labor market outcomes of teenagers, minorities, out-of-school youth, and less-skilled individuals. Evidence from recursive vector autoregressions and autoregressive distributed lag models that use information on the Federal Reserve's contractionary initiatives indicate that the employment–population ratio of minorities is more sensitive to contractionary monetary policy than that of whites; the ratio falls primarily because of an increase in unemployment and not because of a decline in labor force participation. Monetary policy appears to have a disproportionate effect on the unemployment rate of teenagers, particularly African American teenagers. Their employment–population ratio falls because of increased difficulty in obtaining employment. The larger responses are not caused by their higher likelihood of having been employed in industries and occupations that are...

This paper examines discourses on citizenship and nation at shop floor level through Bakirkoy Cloth Factory – a state-owned factory in Istanbul, Turkey. Founded as a private enterprise in 1...