Bridges and barriers: globalisation and the mobility of work and workers
Globalisation opens up many new choices for employers, both to relocate work and to tap into a flexible labour pool through the use of migrant workers. There is a complex interplay between the movement of jobs to people (offshore outsourcing) and the movement of people to jobs (migration). As well as examining the spatial dynamics of offshore outsourcing, this collection explores some of the ways that both jobs and workers are becoming more mobile, and looks not only at the implications of this for the careers and conditions of workers in footloose employment but also what it means for the workers who are left behind when global forces snatch away their more geographically rooted jobs. Drawing on research carried out in Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America and Asia, this collection brings together a diverse range of studies, in the process providing important new insights into both the barriers to and the enablers of employers’ access to a global reserve army of labour. It also demonstrates that global spatial restructuring is not necessarily a single one-off process but typically involves complex mutual adaptation at a local level.
Contents
Bridges and barriers: globalisation and the mobility of work and workers
Ursula Huws
Consent and Content: effects of value chain restructuring on work and conflict in highly skilled workforces
Pamela Meil
(Im)mobilising transnational labour? patterns of spatial mobility in Indo-German software companies
Nicole Mayer-Ahuja
The emergence of a new medical model: the international division of labour and the formation of an international outsourcing chain in teleradiology
Selma Venco
International sourcing and asymmetry: how Western software entrepreneurs tap and decant Ukrainian engineering skills
Graham Hollinshead and Jane Hardy
The international division of labour, local resources and engineering workers: Eastern Europe in the global networks of the semiconductor Industry
Peter Pawlicki
Exhausted bodies and precious products: women’s work in a Special Economic Zone for the electronics industry in Poland
Malgorzata Maciejewska
Offshoring Danish jobs to Germany: regional effects and challenges to workers’ organisation in the slaughterhouse industry
Bjarke Refslund
Workers, New Orleans, and the global shipbuilding regime
Aaron Schneider
Globalisation as a driver of employment precariousness? the labour market status of UK auto workers four years after plant closure
David Bailey and Alex De Ruyter
Skills that are valued in the knowledge economy: an examination of the experience of French workers in the 2000s
Fabienne Berton
Work organisation, labour & globalisation 