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Trade unions are facing a series of challenges around place-based forms of work in industries such as construction, transport and public services. New spatial strategies by employers involving corporate reorganization, increased outsourcing and the use of migrant labour, allied to a deepening of neoliberal governance processes are accelerating a race to the bottom in wages and conditions. Drawing upon the experience of two recent labour disputes in the UK—at Heathrow Airport and Lindsey Oil Refinery—we explore the potential for workers to intervene in such globalizing processes. We highlight both the ability of grassroots workers to mobilize their own spatial networks but also their limitations in an increasingly hostile neoliberal landscape.

This paper explores the relationships between labour organising, globalisation and national identity through an engagement with the 2009 Lindsey Oil Refinery strikes. Some strikers adopted the controversial slogan ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ in response to employers’ attempts to undercut existing wages and conditions with a new migrant workforce. This led to accusations of xenophobia. We make three inter-related arguments. First, we contend that it is necessary to interrogate the spatialised power relations generated through particular forms of labour agency enacted in relation to globalising processes. Second, since these responses can be politically ambiguous, success in territorially based disputes does not always equate with broader (transnational) class agency. Third, relevant to the project of labour geography, we propose that labour scholars and activists be more attuned to the mundane ambiguities in labour agency, and the subsequent need to frame local action within a broader relational politics of global labour solidarity.

Recent academic and policy discourses on regional development in Europe promote the expansion of 'knowledge-based' economies and learning regions. The assumptions underpinning the new regional policy are cast into sharp focus by the experiences of old industrial regions (OIRs). We engage with these issues through empirical research into the recent fortunes of OIRs in Western Europe, drawing upon material from the Eurostat database. Our findings highlight distinctive and diverse experiences among OIRs in different countries with the UK OIRs performing better in terms of GDP growth and service employment, while their continental counterparts do better in retaining manufacturing employment. This raise questions about the role of different national varieties of capitalism in shaping regional trajectories and the different mechanisms of regional adaptation promoted in the different countries.

Since the 1970s, many different governments around the world have sought to transfer power to sub-state governments, meaning that devolution has become a key ‘global trend’ of recent decades (Rodriguez-Pose and Gill, 2003). The term devolution can be defined as a form of political decentralisation, involving a “transfer of power downwards to political authorities at immediate or local levels” (Agranoff, 2004, p.26). Devolution has introduced in response to pressures exerted on established states from both ‘below’ and ‘above’, referring to demands from regions within the state for more say over their own affairs and the effects of processes of globalisation and supra-national integration respectively (Keating, 1997; Tomaney, 2000). Arguments for devolution have variously stressed questions of identity in relation to the recognition of minority groups, governance in terms of creating more effective political institutions, and the economy by allowing regions to adapt to changes in the economic environment and to fulfil their economic potential (Rodriguez-Pose and Sandall, 2008).