Updated: 12 September 2006

Abstracts

Conceptualising globalisation

Elmar Altvater

Karl Polanyi in his famous ‘great transformation’ once wrote that markets for commodified labour-power function as a ‘satanic mill’. In order to counteract destructive forces on labour (as well as on nature) the regulative power of the state is required. The most important aspect of globalisation, however, is the erosion of state sovereignty and thus the undermining of the institutional structure of the welfare state without creating comparably efficient institutions on the supranational level. In the contrary, global markets are unleashed and political rules and limits to a great extent deregulated. This occurs on all kinds of markets: on markets for finance, for commodities and for labour. The resulting informalisation, i.e. the ‘démontage’ of forms and norms, which stabilise the social formation, affects labour as well as finance. Financial places are competing on liquid funds worldwide and thus pushing (real) interest rates and returns on investment upwards. Expected yields of 20% and more on capital exert an enormous pressure on labour, on working conditions as well as on remuneration. This is a major reason why the state comes back in and why ‘geo-economic’ globalisation with its characteristics of unleashed competition on global markets and the ‘transformation of enemies into competitors’, is complemented by a ‘geo-political’ globalisation of competing trading blocks (e.g. Lisbon-strategy). The strategic options now aim simultaneously at improved competitiveness of places in the global space of a knowledge-based world economy by increasing labour productivity and at the same time on new forms of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. This is the background why neo-liberal and neo-conservative discourses today are merging.

Overview on recent Morocco outsourcing experience: taylorism or innovative global activities

Saâd Belghazi

Illiteracy is the first economic and social problem for Morocco. Illiteracy affects mainly women and young girls in rural areas. It is one of the main causes of the poverty and the exclusion in rural areas and urban peripherals. It is responsible for the productivity divide between what can be designed by the modern/formal sector and the traditional/informal sector.
The labour market in Morocco is relatively segmented. The more advantaged employees are those working in any of the public sector, the formal private sector related to import substitution sector, and the export sector related to Public Enterprises or MNC. The employees in the competitive private firms are less advantaged. The average skill level of workers in this sector is relatively weak. But, the lowest education level is to be found in the urban informal sector and rural agricultural activities.
The Structural Adjustment program in the beginning of the 80s induced a new incentives system which afforded, through a 50% devaluation of the Dirham, a sound competitiveness to low wages industries and allowed the development of the subcontracting export garment sector, which relies on low skilled female labour force.
Two major facts accounted in the Moroccan labour market dynamic during the 80s and 90s: the massive entry of the female active population drawn by the rise in export oriented manufacturing activities and the high unemployment rate of the young skilled one, along with long unemployment period.
Recent social security statistics array that the employment share of the informal sector and of the poorly educated labour force is in regression. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate of the young skilled (under 35 years old and with university diploma) is higher than 30%. The Moroccan economy is still not able to absorb all the available skilled labour force.
Today, the Moroccan market is connected to the global market through WTO and several bilateral free-trade agreements. Its main FTA are with the EU, USA, Turkey and the Arabic quad (Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco).
After the MFA alleviation, the development pace of the garment export sector reduced. Morocco lost significant market shares. Low wages can no longer work as main competitiveness factor of the Moroccan garment industry as it did during the 80s and 90s. The workers became more unionised and asked for the adjustment of their condition in this sector in compliance with the labour legislation. Compliance to social norms emerged as an important reference for the participation of the local subcontractors to the global value chains in garment industries. Even if the export potential remains high, new export activities are necessary for labour force excess supply absorption.
Today, Morocco tries to diversify and to enhance its exports .The bulk of exports is still mineral and agricultural products. Morocco adopted, in 2005, a new industrial program called "Emergence Program". This program has two main objectives: upgrading the traditional pillars of the Moroccan industry (fishing industries, garment and leather) and enhance emergent activities in outsourced offshore services and in automotive and aeronautic global chains.
This program adopted a volunteer approach for the industrial development. The main tool of this approach is to prepare new attractive zones for FDI, not only with relevant infrastructures, but also with a large offer of skilled and low cost labour force. This program did not bother directly the labour market issues. A comprehensive planning of the skilled labour force supply is currently at stake.
The paper presents the cases of garment industries and aeronautic industries. It exposes the investors profile and focus on labour issues, education, industrial relations and gender issues. It points out that Morocco is going to upgrade from a low skilled taylorian industries (mainly garment) to more innovative activities using more local skill and targeting future industries. The employment provided by the participation to the global value chains will be probably insufficient regarding the unemployment pressures: a synergy must be built between the sector participating to the global economy and the local economy activities, which seams to be the only solution for providing decent jobs for low skilled female workers leaving the garment sector. The key success factor of this strategy is the labour force profile. Providing relevant competencies, on the quantitative and qualitative levels relies on the supply capacity of the education and vocational training institutions, the efficiency of the labour market, the industrial relations model and the social dialogue. The competitiveness challenge, as attractiveness for MNC and foreign SMEs, depends on the social capital building process involving Government, Professional Associations and Trade Unions.

Globalisation and national institutions: a shifting relationship

David Coates

Conventional wisdom, at least in many influential neo-liberal circles these days, is that the policy space available to the state in the managing of economic affairs is now heavily circumscribed, to the point indeed that only the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model of capitalism has any future. That argument rests on a series of misunderstandings about the role and range of state policy in the past, and on a set of premises on the determinants of economic competitiveness that remain highly problematic. The talk will explore those misunderstandings and premises, and offer an alternative specification of the determinants of state policy - one more sensitive to the impact of labour on the parameters of the possible in an age of global capital.

The need for European company surveys

Peter Ester (in collaboration with Lutz Bellmann, Markus Promberger &
Henk Vinken)

In order to really know how European business copes with flexibility needs
- both from the employer and employee perspective - and how it responds to broader economic and societal trends (such as globalisation, increased com-petition, technological innovation, ageing) we need comparative European company surveys. It is remarkable that our European data infrastructure is much better equipped with respect to tapping trends among employees, consumers, and citizens than among companies. It is important both for research and policy needs to readdress this imbalance. Based on company panels from OSA (Netherlands) and IAB (Germany) the advantages and possibilities of company surveys are outlined. An exploration of a recent
EU-wide company survey on working times (ESWT) has generated a typology of flexibility strategies by European firms that further shows the research and policy potential of company surveys.

Relocation – challenges for European trade unions

Béla Galgóczi

Throughout Europe increasing fears have been raised about companies relocating jobs to low-wage countries. Sluggish economic growth and continued high unemployment in much of the EU15, and low employment and income levels in the new member states (NMS) exacerbate these fears, and this has made relocation a hot topic in the media. Relocation (often referred to by the term delocalisation) has both an intra-European dimension and, against the background of the rapid growth of, in particular, China and India, a global dimension.

With the integration of new countries into world trade, new markets have emerged, but also a huge, relatively cheap and in some cases skilled labour force has joined the world economy. With rapid technological change more and more activities have become tradeable and thus subject to potential relocation. This has tended to intensify competition between production locations for available investment and to weaken the relative position of labour. Multinational companies are reorganising their global operations and use new branch specific business models in managing their values chains.

Relocation takes place on various channels often in a hidden latent way.

Companies seek to take advantage of newly emerged opportunities to exploit large differentials in wages and working conditions. Workers and unions fear that this will lead to a massive exodus of well-paid jobs in high-wage countries, to a weakening of labour’s bargaining position and thus to a downward spiral of wages and conditions. Meanwhile the new member states, which suffered huge job losses when they opened up their markets at the beginning of the transformation, see foreign investment as the key modernisation lever and as a job creation factor (although the employment effects of FDI are sometimes ambiguous).

In response to such fears, it is often claimed that the overall impact of such processes will be to permit specialisation, promote trade, thus increasing productivity and raising living standards, in both low-wage and high-wage regions.

In order to address these questions, we make an attempt to gain some clearsight about relocation in its full complexity. What forms, patterns and company strategies appear in practice; what are the ways multinational companies reorganise their production chains; what branch specifics can be identified?

What is the real extent of production relocation and what is driving it? What are the labour market impacts of increased cross border investments and the internationalisation of production for source and target countries? What are the potential threats to trade unions and workers? What strategies should trade unions adopt to confront the challenges of relocation in an increasingly globalised economy and to address the accompanying phenomenon of restructuring in an advance looking and offensive manner?

The paper represents an interim stage of the research project being conducted at the European Trade Union Institute.

Content of and access to knowledge in the knowledge based society:
a view from the South

Sujata Gothoskar

The current dominant phase of the economy has been characterised as knowledge-based. In fact society in its current phase has been called Knowledge based society or knowledge society. However, one needs to map out the knowledge elements in work today.

Formal knowledge has always been polarised and has been the monopoly of dominant sections of society for centuries. This monopoly is also based on denial of status of knowledge that people/women carry forward through generations. Women in health sector were forcibly expelled from their knowledge-based activity. In India caste system punished lower castes if they tried to acquire formal knowledge. Whether it was the white male in the North or the Brahmin male in the context of India, large sections of people, the majority in most societies, have been deprived of access to certain types of knowledge.

With increasing democratisation of society and struggles of large sections of people against this monopoly, access to knowledge has been less restricted.
However, one needs to attempt a critique of the knowledge base in the current context of work, especially in the light of elaborate chains of sub-contracting and outsourcing arrangements.

Secondly, the context of work is at one level global. However, the labour market and the actual labour performed are also local. Thus access to particular kinds of work in a society where this access is generally limited and has been constrained is an important aspect of perceptions of work by the young women in such labour markets.

Thirdly, in the context of countries like India, with at one level a legacy of colonialism and at another level, a particular historic response to this colonialism, the labour market for knowledge-based work is even further restricted to a certain section, gender, caste and class of people. This caste, class and gender grid has very different implications for different sections of women. I will explore these with a few case studies.

Some issues the case studies indicate are:

		that there are increasingly large sections of knowledge workers who are completely deprived of and alienated from the `knowledge’ they work with;
		that there is an increasing gap between people from urban and from rural areas where knowledge work is concerned;
		that this gap seems to be larger where women are concerned. While men from rural areas only more recently, do have some access to, for example, software training, women in the hinterlands are even in the 21st century deprived of this. So one sees the picture that while most women in the knowledge sector are from upper caste and from urban areas, there are few but increasing numbers of men who are from the more historically deprived castes and geographic areas.

Operationalising gender theory in research design

Ewa Gunnarsson

Concepts that incorporate a more holistic view in incorporating the relation between the productive and reproductive sphere i.e. incorporating the work-life relation will be presented as ‘reflexive gender reminders´ in general and as methodological tools in a reflexive research process to increase gender robustness in research. One of these concepts is the Gender Contract that has been coined to describe the sex-segregated division of labour (paid as well as unpaid). Gender contracts are expressed on different levels; an overall structural level in society, as well as regional gender contracts, at the specific workplace and within the family. This presentation will discuss the ways in which gender has been operationalised in the WORKS project in relation to the organisational case studies and the professional studies. A particular focus will be on gender in relation to flexibility, time and space issues.
The presentation will also offer practical examples. In the instance of a local or regional gender contract where the norm is that women or close relatives take care of children and are not expected to work more than part time, particularly when the children are small, this is reflected on the degree and space of action women have in the job situation and particularly for the their degree of mobility if a company is outsourcing the job.
On the other hand, if there is a regional gender contract (like the one for example in Stockholm) including the norm that both women and men are expected to take part in spending time with the children and family, the mobility for both women and men at that age and situation restrain their space of action.
This can be seen as aspects of dominant local or regional gender contracts not meaning that there are on individual levels a variation on gender contracts in the region.

Contextualising workers’ lives in the global supply chain: case studies to and from Canada

Penny Gurstein

When work is ‘boundless’ and ‘seamless’ where and how do workers’ lives intersect with the space-time continuum of place-based communities? Who and what are they accountable to? Tele-mediation is fragmenting and modularising the notion of work across increasingly complex, transnational networks. Workers in these networks must negotiate through a multitude of temporal, contractual and trans-cultural milieus. This paper will trace the trajectory of the work experience using case studies of tele-mediated work relationships in various points in the global supply chain and theorise about the implications of tele-mediated spaces on the quality of workers’ lives. The case studies derive from research being conducted by EMERGENCE Canada that is investigating a range of employment relocation practices including: data processing; systems and software development and maintenance; accounting and financial management; telesales; customer services; training and staff development; and editorial and design functions. They reflects a range of work relationships from outsourcing where a firm or individual provides services to another firm in a separate location, governed by some form of contractual agreement to geographically distant intra-corporate transactions where services are provided to one branch of a firm by another branch of the same firm. The paper argues tele-mediated work represents a shift in the scale at which many aspects of daily life unfolds, and that the assumptions upon which workers’ lives are governed must be reconsidered.

Call centres: a global or embedded production model? The ‘Global call centre industry’ project

Ursula Holtgrewe and Ole H. Sørensen

Call centres are often cited as prime examples for the global outsourcing and standardising of service work. However, most of them still are in-house, cater too a national market, and there is considerable variation in terms of the composition of call centre labour forces and working conditions.

The paper is going to present some preliminary findings of the ‘Global call centre industry’ project, which has surveyed call centres in currently 17 countries, and an analytical model trying to account for both ‘global’ tendencies and the embeddedness of the call centre production model in its national institutional context.

Dynamics of national employment models in the era of globalisation: policy still matters

Steffen Lehndorff

Contrary to the concept of ‘one best way’ of responding to ‘globalisation’, i.e. the alleged need to converge with the so-called Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism in order to maintain international competitiveness and to foster employment, there has been a growing body of literature over recent years on the persistence of distinctive ‘varieties of capitalism’. A wide range of typologies of models has been developed dependent on the focus of analysis. We find typologies of business systems and corporate governance in conjunction with systems of industrial relations and employment regulation, of welfare regimes and gender contracts, of production models, education and training systems and innovation systems. A potential shortcoming of these specific typologies, however, may be that they do not sufficiently take into account the interaction between different institutions and between these institutions and major actors, including governments. This shortcoming may become particularly relevant in a context of change. There can be turning points in national models where the changes are so marked that more attention must be focused on discontinuity than continuity. The talk will illustrate this consideration by the examples of two or three flagships within the typologies of national models of capitalism, based on the ongoing EU 6th Framework Programme research project ‘Dynamics of national employment models’ (DYNAMO).

Productive restructuring and labour in Brazil

Marcia de Paula Leite

The Brazilian industry grew at high rates in the 25 year period between 1955 and 1980, going through a fast process of technological innovation, which took place under the protection of the import substitution model. Early 1980’s marked, however, a crisis of this accumulation model and the beginning of a period in which the country lost international competitiveness, growing away from the countries which were becoming more competitive world-wide. The last four years have not differed much from this pattern, even though some of industrial policies have been undertaken in order to spur technological innovation.
This text discusses those issues, seeking to underline the limits and the potentialities of such policies, as well as the difficulties and contradictions inherent to the Brazilian restructuring process. For that purpose, it analyses the strategies of the innovative process of the manufacturing sector as a whole, and specially, of the automotive sector and its implications on labour.
Those strategies have not lived up to the original expectations of the economic actors, neither they have made possible higher growth rates to take advantage of the extremely favourable conditions of the international economy. On the other hand, with regards to labour conditions regulatory context, governmental officials have insisted on deepening labour flexibility. In this sense, even if the current industrial polices may result in more competitive firms and better labour and salary conditions for the manufacturing sector, the maintenance of current macroeconomic policies and attempts to make work relations even more flexible, might lead to a significant deterioration in global labour conditions.

Trade unions and worker movements in the North American communication industries

Vincent Mosco

This paper reports on a project that examines trends in North American labour movements and specifically on the workforce in the converging communication, culture and information technology sectors. The paper concentrates on two important developments: efforts to unify workers across the communication industries and the rise of worker movements that operate in conjunction with but outside the formal trade union structure. The paper begins by situating these developments within debates about labour in a post-industrial, information, or network society. It describes the challenges facing workers in the knowledge sector, especially rapid technological change, massive corporate consolidation, the rise of the neo-liberal state and divisions between cultural and technical workers in the knowledge sector. The paper proceeds to describe how workers are responding within the traditional trade union system, primarily through forms of consolidation or trade union convergence (e.g. the Communication Workers of America), and also through worker movements operating outside the traditional trade union system in the information technology and cultural sectors (e.g., WashTech, the National Writers Union). The paper concludes by addressing the significance of these developments. Do they portend a rebirth of North American labour activism or do they represent its last gasps?

The recoil of globalisation: flexibility and social inequality within metropolitan societies

Markus Promberger

From its beginning in the 15th century, globalisation showed a set of strange dialectics. One of it could be addressed as a ‘recoil effect’. Transforming outside economies most of the times had put an impact on the inside of the metropoles as well. Intended as a simple enlargement of business and profit by ‘integrating’ outside economies, in the long run it often turned out to introduce fundamental changes also in the metropolitan economy itself, sometimes even leading to crises in their markets and institutions. What the contribution deals with is the present recoil effect being put on labour, employment and social security institutions of metropolitan economies, especially the German one.
First: It was not only rationalisation and microelectronic revolution which made simple labour more and more obsolete in the mid 1970s, it was also the move of simple labour to other places on the globe, starting maybe with the textile industry. Not only the crisis of the fordist standard-mass-good-consumer-model led to the growing demand for flexibility, it was also stimulated by new competitors ‘outside’, doing successfully now what they had been forced to do earlier. And today it is fully accepted, that if enterprises or their labourers are not showing enough flexibility, work is going to be moved elsewhere – be it by decisions of global players or by the silent mechanisms of competition. Organisations therefore live in an age of ‘permanent revolution’ concerning space and time structures, control and decision structures and their inside/outside relations.
Second: Capitalism in metropolitan countries in the short post-war period could be somewhat convenient for labourers only by externalising many inconveniences to labour outside, a pattern which was – at least in Europe - also motivated by the threat of real socialism, which today no longer exists. Now those inconveniences – precarious employment, high unemployment, declining wages, rising biographical and professional uncertainties – come back on metropolitan labour. And a lot of them appear now under the label of flexibility. It is a kind of dependant flexibility, being set by market and organisational development: Flexibility for workers is under optimum conditions a way to a better realisation of one’s own plans, but in many respects just an euphemism for uncertainty and instability – but this is maybe just a return of the ambiguous character of labourers’ freedom as it was in the springtime of industrialisation.
Third: Flexibility for enterprises and for workers, rising uncertainties for both within permanently changing environments can be regarded as characteristics of post-industrial (or post-fordist) societies. It depends on the reaction and action of institutions, whether it comes to an increase of social inequality or not. And this is still an open question.

Call centres: a global or embedded production model? The 'Global call centre industry' project

Ole H. Sørensen

The use of Call centres as an organisational production model for service work is increasing in most industrialised countries. The ‘Global Call Centre Survey’ indicates that the organisational models for call centres are fairly similar across countries. Furthermore, call centres use the same types of technologies to support the organisational model. However, in spite of the fairly uniform global forces, case studies indicate that call centres develop differently in different institutional contexts.
The paper presents finding from case research that demonstrate different development patters for in-house call centres in two Danish industry sectors: finance and utilities. In the finance sector, labour unions have been able to influence pay, job quality and work time to a much larger degree than in the utility sector. This has had positive impacts for professional workers in finance. In some cases, the ‘losers’ are the student workers. In the utility sector, employees have some influence, but labour unions have weak influence. The worst working conditions in this sector are found in subcontractors. The background and consequences of these differences is discussed in the paper and related to the situation in Germany and the US, where outsourcing takes different shapes depending on the respective industry.

The governance of global value chains. Implications for industrial upgrading

Timothy J. Sturgeon

The world economy has changed in very significant ways during the past several decades, especially in the areas of international trade and industrial organisation. Two of the most important new features of the contemporary economy are the globalisation of production and trade, which have fueled the growth of industrial capabilities in a wide range of developing countries, and the vertical disintegration of multinational corporations, which are redefining their core competencies around innovation and design, marketing, services, and the highest value-added segments of manufacturing. Together, these two shifts have laid the groundwork for a variety of network forms of governance in modern industries, which are situated between arm’s length markets, on the one hand, and large vertically integrated corporations on the other. These transformations affect not only the strategies of firms and the structure of industries, but also how and why countries advance - or fail to advance - in the global economy. The purpose of this presentation is to characterise the main patterns of global value chain governance and discuss the implications of various governance forms for the development and implementation of state policies aimed at industrial upgrading and economic development.

Work organisation restructuring and gender

Patricia Vendramin

The paper examines the impact on gender of new trends in work organisation and human resources management. It focuses on two dimensions: time issues and career trajectories. Work organisation restructuring supports new approaches of working time through new work rhythms, project work, autonomy and distance working. New organisational models also favour new forms of professional trajectories characterised by an increased mobility and boundaryless careers. New organisational models create both opportunities and challenges for women, however it is not sure at this stage that the opportunities are more numerous than the challenges. Women and men do not only have differentiated social role, they are also working predominantly in different sectors and they are unequally distributed in hierarchical positions so, from a gender perspective, work organisation restructuring raises many questions.

Similarities and differences of call centres in particular contexts

Anita Weiss

Even when the question about which are the particularities of call centres in different contexts, can only be answered through systematic comparative studies, we want to ask where this particularities of our research subjects, in this case call centres, lie, in order to refer to results of research carried out in different countries.

Some factors that can explain similarities of call centres situated in different countries are:

		technical and organisational infrastructure of call centres make them similar everywhere provided that they offer similar services;
		the hiring of students as typical call centre workers: this implies an ‘uprooted’ workforce as generally students are not interested in being long term call centre agents. Employers very often are not interested in having a stable, long term workforce either;
		different type of services and the level of qualification of the workers have an implication on differences in the working conditions and the employment relations;
		working conditions that some authors define as neo-tayloristic. The technical premises allow a strict control of the agents performance and results.

Conclusions of the EMERGENCE projects define some variables regarding national differences related to differing paths of development, as well as the characterisation of national institutions. In this sense and considering also our research results, we can mention some factors that could explain differences:

		economic structure of countries or regions;
		diffusion of information and communication technologies and their impact over the economic and social structures. There are questions about the meaning and scope of the supposition about that Latin American countries are in a ‘transition towards an Information or knowledge society’;
		characteristics of the local labour market structure. Unemployment rates. Employment opportunities. Size of the ‘informal’ sector. Population ‘excluded’ from capitalist relations. Inequality rates;
		supply of qualified workforce. Employment opportunities for students and graduates. Mobility expectations through education and opportunities to find a ‘good job’;
		strength of the State’s power. Power to ensure that the law is upheld; to prevent that illegal employment relations are established like for example the use of workers co-operatives that act as intermediaries between call centres and the agents in Colombia;
		coverage of the welfare system;
		individual and collective negotiating power to demand better working and employment conditions. Possibility of bringing up collective problems in enterprises. Strength of collective representation and trade union organisations;
		possibility to challenge employers expectations and demands for work performance and results;
		trust as a cultural particularity that has an effect on employment relations and working control methods. For example, there is ample evidence that Colombia does not have a culture of trust. In the call centres we studied, a lack of trust is expressed in the way technology is used to supervise and control work performance.

In our paper we will illustrate these and other aspects with data taken from empirical research about call centres.

Improving working conditions in call centres - Experiences from Denmark

Inger-Marie Wiegman

In call centres employees often find themselves watched and checked up on due to monitoring, they have very little influence in their job, very few possibilities of developing their competences and they often experience conflicting demands on quantity and quality. That was indeed the case at the outset of an intervention project in three large Danish call centres. Through the research project ‘Developing of Competences and Work Organization in Call Centres’ or ‘Call Centres - Development of Work’ carried out in 2003-2006, the working conditions has been improved for the employees in these call centres. The improvement has been obtained through changing the work organisation towards more autonomy to the teams and through developing the competences of the employees. A comprehensive training of the management - in particular the first line leaders - was necessary to make the changes possibly.