CLaSP Past Events 2018

15 February, Book launch seminar

On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War

by Kim Moody, Visiting Scholar at Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment, University of Westminster, Labor Notes founder and activist.

The Centre on Labour and Global Production hosts a book launch for Kim Moody's eagerly awaited On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket Books, 2017). While many accounts claim that the working class can no longer exercise power as it once could, Moody traces developments in the global economy to locate new concentrations of capital potentially vulnerable to collective action, with particular focus on the logistics and services sectors. If workers can organise effectively, Moody argues, then capital remains vulnerable to class struggle in the twenty-first century. This talk will therefore be of interest not only to those specifically studying logistics or other important sectors in today’s economy, but anyone grappling with questions of how workers can still win.

City Centre Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Francis Bancroft Building, QMUL Mile End Campus

14 May, Book launch seminar

Development with global value chains: Upgrading and innovation in Asia 

by Dev Nathan, Meenu Tewari, and Sandip Sarkar, Cambridge University Press (Series on Development Trajectories in Global Value Chains)

Speakers: 

Dev Nathan, Institute for Human Development, India, and Duke Global Value Chain Center, USA 

Gale Raj-Reichert, School of Geography, QMUL

Can firms and economies utilize GVCs for development? How can they move from low-income to middle-income and even high-income status? This book addresses these questions through a series of case studies examining upgradation and innovation by firms operating in GVCs in Asia. The countries studied are China, India, South Korea, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, with studies of firms operating in varied sectors aerospace components, apparel, automotive, consumer electronics including mobile phones, telecom equipment, IT software and services, and pharmaceuticals. In the movement from low-income to middle-income status, the key industrial and firm policies are those of catching-up and learning through reverse engineering, sometimes as part of and sometimes outside GVCs. However, what suppliers actually do to internalize and build upon what they learn through ties with buyers is the crucial factor in effecting upgradation. In moving beyond catch-up, however, securing rents is important. This can be done through securing process rents. However, higher rents are earned through product innovation, which enable firms and economies to develop as headquarters of value chains and overcome the middle-income trap. The acquisition and development of knowledge and capabilities drive the processes of upgrading and innovation.

Location: Geography Room 220

14 June 2018, The Labour of Logistics: Workers and resistance across global supply chains’

One-day workshop organised by the Centre on Labour and Global Production

Victor Figueroa, Lead researcher on new technology and the future of work, International Transport Workers Federation

Katy Fox-Hodess, Lecturer in work, employment, people and organizations at the University of Sheffield

Andy Green, Dock worker and UNITE workplace representative

Patricia Rocha Lemos, PhD Researcher, University of Campinas, Centre for Labour Economics and Trade Unionism

Kim Moody, Author, On New Terrain: How capital is reshaping the battleground of class struggle

Sian Moore, Professor in Employment Relations and Human Resource Management, University of Greenwich

Kirsty Newsome, Professor in Employment Relations, University of Sheffield

The ‘logistics revolution’ has been a central element in a global reorganisation of capitalist production. Container shipping has experienced astronomical growth in recent decades: from 102 million tons in 1980 to 1.631 billion tons in 2014; a sixteen-fold increase. The expansion of intermodal transportation has accompanied the development of tightly managed global supply chains, as commodities are shipped across the world, moved through ports and distribution centres and delivered to retailers or the customer’s doorstep. From the shipping container to the Amazon package, the ubiquity of logistics is an increasingly prominent factor in everyday life.

Behind these processes lies a story of increasing intensification of the labour process for millions of workers. So called “just-in-time” delivery methods that demand regularity and predictability, and ever-increasing levels of standardisation and automation to guarantee that reliability, have reshaped logistics work. Ports, which have been bastions of trade union strength, have seen precipitous declines in their workforces – between 1961 and 2001 over 90 percent of dock work was lost in the UK. Increasing numbers of logistics workers find themselves employed in high pressure and low wage work in distribution centres and courier services. These workers are typically unorganised, with managements that fiercely resist attempts at unionisation. Yet in in the context of tightly integrated networks of production, logistics workers have tremendous potential disruptive power.

In this workshop, we will discuss these developments and attempt to answer a series of questions: How is logistics work changing around the world? What forms of resistance do these transformations engender? And what opportunities and challenges exist for organising workers across the sector?

Room GC 201, Graduate Centre, QMUL Mile End Campus, London

28-29 June, The Post-Wage Economy: Re-theorising ‘work’ across the global North-South divide

An interdisciplinary workshop hosted by the School of Geography, and the Centre on Labour and Global Production, QMUL.

What are the emerging drivers and conditions of the post-wage economy across the world? How are these features experienced locally (e.g. through workers’ relationship with the state, the market and the household)? What are the key geographies of difference? To what extent are these conditions captured by dominant concepts of work, such as those of precarity and informality? What is the genealogy of these concepts? To what extent do they enable or restrict South-North comparison? What alternative theories are emerging based on the experiences of people provisioning outside of waged labour? What possibilities do these theories provide for reconceptualising the social, political and spatio-temporal boundaries of ‘work’?

Graduate Centre, QMUL Mile End Campus, London

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