Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP)

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The Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP), formerly the Centre on Labour and Global Production (CLGP), draws upon a critical mass of researchers across different disciplinary areas at Queen Mary University of London who are engaged in research on the intersections between workers, enterprises, regulation and sustainability in the world economy. We understand the world economy as constituted by a set of value-creating and -appropriating activities that are rooted in specific geographical and ecological contexts and connected through global networks of commodity and financial flows. Moreover, we recognize that these production and financial networks, including but not only value chains, traverse national boundaries as well as the gendered and racialised hierarchies of so-called reproductive and productive labour. Together, these structures and flows create a diversity of production-consumption relations that are socially and environmentally unsustainable. In other words, we consider the economy to be constructed through socially, historically, spatially and ecologically embedded relations that are necessarily power-laden. As such, the global challenge of sustainability is one which needs to grapple with these deep, historically complex and contemporaneously fraught relations across multiple scales. Within this, the question of labour in the global economy is one of uneven working conditions, labour standards, precarious work, affective labour, unpaid and invisible work, child labour, forms of representation and worker organisation. The role of the state and regulation is seen as crucial to structuring these relations but also to potentially remedying or mitigating their effects.

Any meaningful attempt to study and reach these issues necessarily requires an interdisciplinary social scientific approach. The Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) brings together such an interdisciplinary group with diverse disciplinary backgrounds including Development Studies, Economic Geography, Critical Management Studies, International Political Economy, History and Anthropology, and with regional specializations across the global South and North. We are committed to the careful study of actually existing social relations. Our work is theoretically informed but uses theory as a guide to interpret contingent historical-geographical worlds around us, not a pre-determined blueprint.

Members

Gloria Appiah (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation.Her research focuses on uncovering the entrepreneurial strategies that resource-constrained enterprises and individuals adopt to thrive. She has a strong passion for the success of startups and micro businesses, recognizing the value of these to impacting the lives of their owners and others who rely on them. She is also co-founder of Ezer Mamapreneurs, a social enterprise that supports Ghanaian women from significantly disadvantaged backgrounds to develop and manage sustainable entrepreneurial ventures. Here, we provide women with 1) direct coaching on business start-up and innovative strategies for expansion, and 2) low-interest loans to support various stages of their businesses, to position them for growth.
Dr Elena Baglioni (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is Reader in Global Supply Chain Management and Sustainability. Her long-standing research interests include global value chains and agrarian political economy. Her most recent interests span the political economy of natural resource industries, labour regime analysis and ecology and social reproduction. Her research has been published in the Journal of Economic Geography, Environment and Planning A, Review of International Political Economy, Journal of Agrarian Change and Work, Employment and Society.
Suyash Barve (PhD student, School of Business and Management, QMUL) research explores the public sphere, political culture, and gendered labour of the working classes in western India. He has worked as a creative professional in the film and media industry in India, and holds a diploma in direction and screenwriting from the Film and Television Institute of India.
Dr Michael Shane Boyle's (School of English and Drama, QMUL) researches primarily on the political economy of performance, with particular interest in the labour processes of theatres and other arts organisations. He is finishing a monograph called The Arts of Logistics, which examines how artists engage with supply chain technologies like shipping containers, oil pipelines, GPS, and drones. He has also written extensively on how to apply Marxist theory to study theatre.
Professor Liam Campling (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a political economist working in two connected research areas: (1) global production, natural resource industries and labour regimes; and (2) international trade policy, its negotiation and relationship to global production, including environmental and labour standards. He had recently co-authored two books Capitalism and the Sea (Verso, 2021) and Free Trade Agreements and Global Labour Governance (Routledge, 2021)
Siddharth Chakravarty (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a PhD student whose research examines the firm-nature relationship in India’s seafood industry. In particular, his research is focusing on how the ecology influences business strategies with a comparative study between fishing and fish-farming. He is also affiliated with the National Platform for Small-Scale Fish Workers. He currently researches and works on matters related to migration and working conditions in India’s marine fishing sector, the social relations of shrimp farming in coastal states and the changing policy landscape of inland fisheries.
Dr Isadora Cruxen is a Lecturer in Business and Society. Her research bridges scholarship in development studies, politics, economic geography, and business organization to interrogate how state-market relations shape natural resource governance and urban infrastructure provision in the global South. Her recent research interests span business ownership and politics, financialization, private sector-led development and regulation, with a focus on water governance. Her research experience also includes work on participatory development, collective action, and feminist organizing. Isadora holds a PhD in Political Economy, Development and Planning (2022) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a masters in City Planning (2016) from MIT, and a bachelors degree in Political Science (2011) from the University of Brasília, Brazil.
Professor Kavita Datta (School of Geography, QMUL) is a development geographer whose research focuses on transnational migration from the global South to the North. This interest has been developed in a series of independent or collaborative projects investigating the changing nature, politics and sensibility of work and transnational migration to global cities like London.
Dr Archie Davies (School of Geography, QMUL) is a Fellow of the QMUL Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is a cultural and historical geographer working across the fields of political ecology and the history and philosophy of geography. His first book is A World Without Hunger: Josué de Castro and the History of Geography (Liverpool 2022). He is also a translator of Brazilian radical thought including Milton Santos' For a New Geography (Minnesota, 2021) and Beatriz Nascimento's collected writings (Princeton, 2023). He is working on a global history of Oxo cubes.
Dr Giorgos Galanis (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Economics. His current research interests lie at the intersection of Economics with Political Philosophy, (International) Political Economy and Sustainable Development. His work utilises insights from behavioural science and different schools of thought within political economy and combines analytical and computational tools to answer questions related to sustainability, social justice, health, and income distribution.
Dr Giorgos Gouzoulis (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is an Associate Professor in Human Resource Management. His research focuses on industrial relations and issues around employee compensation, wage inequality, underemployment, union membership, and strike activity. Giorgos’ work has been published in leading academic journals like the British Journal of Industrial Relations, the Industrial Relations Journal, Economic and Industrial Democracy, the Socio-Economic Review, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, and Sociology of Health & Illness, among others. Giorgos is the treasurer of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association, a member of the editorial board of the journal Work, Employment and Society., and the Co-Editor of the Bristol University Press’ research-based magazine Futures of Work. Prior to Queen Mary, he worked at the University of Bristol, UCL, and King’s College London.
Professor Roxana Gutiérrez-Romero analyses three barriers to development: poor governance, inequality, and conflict. In her recent work, she has examined the impact of criminal groups on economic growth, migration, and poverty, among others. She has also analysed the effects of legislative measures aimed at managing undocumented migration flows and combating gender-based violence, particularly femicides. Roxana holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge. She teaches economic development and applied econometrics at the School of Business and Management, QMUL.
Dr Claudine Grisard (School of Business and Management, QMUL) has a background in politics, development studies and accounting. Her research broadly considers the links between accounting and politics to understand the constitutive role that accounting plays in sustaining current politico-economical systems and networks, and in the struggles engaged by groups resisting these systems. Her research covers a variety of fields such as post-colonial and labour struggles contexts.
Dr Vincent Guermond (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is an economic and development geographer. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of the geographies of digital economies, finance and debt, climate adaptation, migration and development, and social reproduction. He has published in academic journals in geography, development studies, and international political economy, including Antipode, Progress in Human Geography, Geoforum, Environment and Planning A, Review in International Political Economy, World Development, and Development and Change. His new book Remittances and Financial Inclusion: Contested Geographies of Marketisation in Senegal and Ghana was published in 2023 with Routledge.
Helen Gutierrez (School of Business and Management, QMUL) holds a BA in Environmental Health from the University of Costa Rica and an MSc in Environmental Justice from the University of Michigan. Her work for the past 5 years has focused on understanding the myriad ways that individuals and communities are affected by climate change. Since 2021, she has been interested in the role of art as a necessary voice in the climate space, especially in navigating the complicated emotions that arise in relation to climate change and action. He research focuses on the everyday placemaking of Latin American migrants as social reproductive labour and understanding the effect that people’s experiences with climate change and migration have on the ways that they settle in a new place.
Professor Gerard Hanlon (School of Business and Management, QMUL) longstanding research interests concern the interaction between divisions of labour and social re-composition, with particular reference to labour processes, standardisation and the loss of autonomy within work. His most recent examines the foundational role of the military in the origins of capitalist organisation and labour control. He has written three monographs and published in leading journals in accounting, law, management, medicine, sociology and social policy.
Maximilian Hofmann (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a PhD student with a background in economic geography and development studies. He is particularly interested in economic development at the crossroads of global production networks, geopolitical economy and labour migration. He holds an MSc. with distinction in Economic and Social Geography from the University of Salzburg. Prior to his PhD project, he conducted research on glocalisation processes, special economic zones and labour market integration.
Dr Carlo Inverardi-Ferri (School of Geography, QMUL) is a human geographer whose work is situated at the intersection of economic geography and political ecology. His research focuses on the health and environmental aspects of globalised systems of production and has appeared in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Mobilities, Area Development and Policy and the International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography among other publications.
Dr Matan Kaminer (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a Lecturer in Business and Society and joined Queen Mary in 2024. His background is in cultural anthropology, political economy, and political ecology. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and an MA in Sociology and Anthropology from Tel Aviv University. A long-time activist, he has participated in movements against militarism and occupation, in solidarity with migrant workers, and for the democratisation of academic life. His research on agricultural labour migration from South and Southeast Asia to the Middle East encompasses geo-political and geo-economic processes from the perspective of the most marginalised. Matan’s research interests include (but are not limited to!) the political ecology of desert agriculture, the racialisation of agrarian labour, and labour migration in the Indian Ocean world. His most recent interests span the history of proletarianisation in Palestine/Israel and elsewhere and the synergy between exploitation and elimination of the indigenous in colonial contexts. His book, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.
Hyunjung Kim (PhD student, School of Business and Management, QMUL) is researching labour control and labour regulation in the contexts of Korean and Taiwan distant water fisheries. In particular, her research focuses on the political-economic dynamics of multi-scalar engagements by stakeholders in transnational value chain governance.
Dr Ed Legon (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is Co-Director of the Centre and Senior Lecturer in Heritage Management and Business History. He is currently researching a monograph on the political culture and ideas of English makers of cloth in the seventeenth century. Ed's research centres experiences of work and relations of production, transformations in political participation, economy, and regulation, and transnational experiences in an era of emerging English capitalism, imperialism, and domestic conflict and crisis.
Dara Leyden (PhD student at the School of Business and Management, QMUL) is researching the role of labour struggles in Thailand’s electronics sector, which largely employs young, female migrant workers. He is analysing how new forms of coalitions and struggles can influence social upgrading in global value chains.
Laura Maghețiu (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is an interdisciplinary doctoral researcher interested in green finance, supply-chain studies, and global development outcomes. She holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences from the University of Freiburg and Science Po Grenoble. Prior to her PhD research on carbon markets, Laura has worked as a Trainee at the European Parliament and as a research assistant at Oxford’s Latin American Centre, Oxford’s Reuters Institute and Freiburg’s Political Sciences Department.
Dr Matteo Mandarini's (School of Business and Management, QMUL) research concerns the relation of conflict to the transformations of capitalism. Drawing on Italian Operaismo and the broader Marxist tradition, his work is focused on the ways conflict is both theorised and organised. His present research takes the forms of workers’ struggles in Italy from the ‘economic miracle’ of the late 1950s to the ‘strategy of tension’ and the legitimation crises of the 1907s, to try to think conflict as a practice that refuses resolution.
Dr Ulrike Marx (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a Lecturer in Accounting. Ulrike’s research focusses on social studies of accounting, such as the emergence and translation of new (management) accounting phenomena as a response to crisis and political problematizations. Her research has been published in international journals such as Gender, Work and Organization and she is member and affiliated researcher in a wide range of national and international research networks and communities.
Dr Chris McLaughlin (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management. His research explores the consequences of deindustrialization and organizational restructuring for affected workers and communities, along with the associated industrial relations processes. His research has focused on responsible approaches to restructuring in the UK steel industry, examining the different forms of institutional support aimed at ameliorating the negative effects for workers. He is currently part of a comparative international research project comparing the post-redundancy transitions of steelworkers in the UK, Sweden and Australia.
Dr William Monteith (School of Geography, QMUL) is an interdisciplinary social scientist interested in questions of work and energy. My research explores people’s experiences of work, entrepreneurship and informality at the margins of capitalist economies; the relationships and places produced by these experiences, and the possibilities they provide for enacting more just and inclusive economies. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the activities and aspirations of workers in the majority world challenge taken-for-granted ideas about the futures of work and energy.
Sofia Negri (School of Geography, QMUL) is a PhD candidate researching on workers organising on the platform economy from a sociological and geographical perspective. Particularly, her PhD focuses on delivery platforms in Argentina, analysing the forms of sociability and political organisation through spatial lenses. She holds a MSc Social Research methods, LSE and a BSc Sociology, UBA.
Dr Benjamin Neimark (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Business and Management, and a Fellow at the Institute of Social Science and Humanities (IHSS) at Queen Mary University of London. Benjamin is a human geographer and political ecologist (defined as the intersections of ecology and a broadly defined political economy) whose research focuses on politics of biological conservation and resource extraction, high-value commodity chains, ‘green’ precarious smallholder production, and agrarian change and development. He has a geographic focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar. His current research looks at the US military as a global climate actor and, more broadly, the environment footprints of the world’s militaries.
Zafer Ornek (PhD student, School of Business and Management, QMUL) is researching the relationship between the role of labour in the vehicle manufacturing sector and just transition to a low carbon economy, with a focus on the shift to electric vehicle production in Germany.
Professor Martha Prevezer's (School of Business and Management, QMUL) research centres on governance, geographical industrial clustering, institutional economic history and institutional development in the global South as well as global North. She is the author of a number of books, the latest of which is Varieties of Capitalism in History, Transition and Emergence: New Perspectives on Institutional Development (Routledge 2017).
Dr Amit S. Rai (School of Business and Management, QMUL) has written Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India (Duke University Press, 2019). He has also recently coedited with Professors Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar, Diginaka: Digital ecologies in Postcapitalist India (Orient-Blackswan, 2020). He and his collaborators at Something to Aim For have been awarded AHRC emergency covid funding to address structural racism and intersectional class antagonisms in UK's performance and theatre sector.
Dr Rachel Randall (School of the Arts, QMUL) is a Reader in Latin American Studies. Her most recent book, Paid to Care: Domestic Workers in Contemporary Latin American Culture (University of Texas Press, 2024), examines the depiction of paid domestic workers in Latin American cultural production since the 1980s, including in film, documentary, literary testimony (testimonio) and digital texts. Her current research project, Affective and Immaterial Labour in Latin(x) American culture, traces the connections between representations of different forms of affective and reproductive labour, such as wet-nursing, migrant domestic work and sex work. The project encompasses photography, film, literature and digital culture produced from the late nineteenth century until the present day.
Caterina Rossi (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a PhD student with a background in Philosophy and Global Political Economy. Her research broadly focuses on the new financial-political architecture of Blue Economy. By combining different scholarships of international development, political economy, and social reproduction, she is currently looking at the new blue deals in Central America and their political, social and economic consequences.
Dr Jack Sargeant (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is Lecturer in Business History and Heritage. His research explores the long history of capitalist development, including through the business practices of merchants and retailers; the shifting role of state regulation in governing commercial enterprise; and the relationship between economic activity and the environment. He is particularly interested in histories of capitalism ‘from below’, which seek to understand how ordinary people experienced and influenced nascent capitalist social relations.
Dr Paula Serafini Dr Paula Serafini holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Analysis from King’s College London. Her work is in the field of cultural politics, and her research interests include extractivism, social movements and art activism, cultural labour, and socioecological transitions. Her research has been funded, among others, by the British Academy, and in 2023 her latest book Creating Worlds Otherwise received an honourable mention from the Visual Cultures Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association.
Natasha Sharma (School of Geography, QMUL) ethnographically engages in the work-lives of the labour force within India’s economy of waste in her doctoral research. The major themes of her work are based around the ideas of social reproduction, infrastructural citizenship, and the intersections of work, space, and (il)legality at large. She has previously looked at the labour force participation rates for women in India with the London School of Economics and has been engaged with work around labour and resource politics in her MPhil and beyond.
Dr Shreya Sinha (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is co-Director of the Centre. She is a political economist studying agrarian capital, the politics of agricultural markets and rural labour relations, as well as the environmental dimensions of agrarian change. Her work is focused on India, while being in conversation with other regions of the Global South, and is deeply historically-informed. Shreya has published in journals such as World Development, Journal of Agrarian Change, Geoforum and Third World Quarterly.
Dr Jessica Sklair (School of Business and Management and Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, QMUL) has a background in anthropology and development studies. Her research focuses principally on Brazil and explores three main themes: elite and corporate philanthropy and the changing role of the private sector in international development; wealth elites, inheritance and family business succession processes, and research methodologies for studying elites. Jessica's most recent work looks at processes of financialisation and the emergence of new 'social finance' technologies in the development sector. Her monograph Brazilian Elites and their Philanthropy: Wealth at the Service of Development was published by Routledge in 2022.
Professor Adrian Smith (Department of Management, University of Sussex Business School and Visiting Professor, QMUL) works on global production and the political economy of uneven development. Much of his research has focused on the European Union's integration of neighbouring regions into regionalised production networks, and he is currently working on the role of labour standards in EU free trade agreements. He has recently published Articulations of Capital: Global Production Networks and Regional Transformations (Wiley, 2016, with John Pickles, Robert Begg, Milan Bucek, Poli Roukova and Rudolf Pastor) and is Editor-in-Chief of European Urban and Regional Studies.
Gregory Tsardanidis is a PhD student at the School of Business and Management at QMUL. His PhD research examines labour dynamics in delivery platforms in Greece, with a focus on workers’ struggles and the development of platform cooperative alternatives. He has worked as a researcher for the Open Lab Athens and as an Interaction Designer and Developer for Sociality Cooperative. His interests include co-design and development of civic technologies, social and solidarity economy, commons, and participatory design methods'
Dr Philippa Williams (School of Geography, QMUL) researches around questions of citizenship and marginality within the context of organised and informal economies in India. Her monograph, Everyday peace: politics, citizenship and Muslim lives in India (2015), looks in part, at work and social relations in the silk sari industry in Varanasi north India. She has also published research about Muslim middle class professionals in India’s new Service Economy and along with William Monteith and Dora-Olivia Vicol Philippa is co-editor of Beyond the Wage: Ordinary Work in Diverse Economies (2021).

Affiliates

Gavin Capps (School of Law, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Kingston University London) works in the broad field of natural resource extraction and development, the new political economies of land, labour and finance within the platinum mining industry in post-apartheid South Africa. Approaching these issues from a value-theoretic perspective, his work has variously been published in the Review of African Political Economy, the Journal of Peasant Studies, and the Journal of Agrarian Change for which he was awarded the annual Bernstein and Byres Prize for best article in 2016.

Dr Rowland Curtis (School of Business and Management, QMUL). His research is engaged with questions of power, knowledge and subjectivity at work, while exploring the implications of poststructuralist thought for empirical inquiry in culture and economy, including with particular regard to ethnographic and materialist practice. He is a member of the editorial collective of the open access journal ephemera: theory and politics in organization.

Natalia Delgado (Law School, University of Southampton) obtained her LLB and qualified as a barrister in Argentina and graduated with a Master's in International and European Law from the University of Geneva. She is currently finishing her PhD at Birkbeck Law School, University of London. Her doctoral research specifically deals with the manner in which World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have conceptualized labour and labour law since the 1970s.

Dr Cédric Durand (Associate Professor, Paris 13 University) is an economist. Working within the tradition of Marxist and French regulationist political economy, he is member of the Centre d’économie Paris Nord. He studies globalization, financialization and contemporary mutations of capitalism. He participates to the editorial board of the Revue d’économie industrielle and the online journal ContreTemps.

Dr Katy Fox-Hodess’s (Management School, University of Sheffield) research focuses on labour, globalization and political economy. Her PhD in Sociology from University of California, Berkeley, examined contemporary international solidarity among dockworkers' unions in Europe and Latin America.

Evelina Gambino`s (PhD student, Geography Department, UCL) research focuses on the New Silk Road and the logistics revolution in Georgia which she analyses as a discursive and material formation. She holds a Ba and Ma in Anthropology and Cultural Politics from Goldsmiths College, starting from her ethnographic training, her research is concerned with developing critical and collaborative field methodologies. Her interests include critical logistics and critical geopolitics and the politics of infrastructure.

Dr Elizabeth Havice’s (Department of Geography, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) research draws together development studies, environmental politics, and political economy to explore the multi-scalar intersections among state, firms, non-state organizations and nature in the global economy. Current projects focus on exploring ‘value’ in global value chains, dilemmas over property and sovereignty in marine spaces and marine resource management, and building networks of scholars exploring resource geographies and contemporary and historical ocean frontiers.

Dr Amy Horton’s (Department of Geography, UCL) research focuses on the interactions between finance, labour and care. It investigates the role of finance in the economy and society, and how social and labour movements seek to rework economies. Her doctorate examined financial investment in care homes for older people, as well as efforts by labour and community groups to ensure that care is valued more highly. Other work has explored the implications of living wage campaigns.

Professor Sukhdev Johal's (School of Business and Management, QMUL) most recent research interests include critical research on UK finance, how to adapt social and economic statistics to understand employment and wealth changes in the UK, and how local authorities can adapt local CSR policies to promote economic democracy and local supply chains. He has a long-standing interest in financialisation and how it affects the behaviours and performance of large companies.

Dr Ashok Kumar (Department of Management, Birkbeck, University of London) researches on global value chains, workers’ bargaining power, development, and cities. Kumar is part of the editorial collective of City and Historical Materialism as well as on the editorial board of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

Patrícia Rocha Lemos (PhD student in Social Sciences, University of Campinas, Brazil) examines the working conditions and work management at Walmart in Brazil focusing on how multinational companies adapt or shape their strategies to the national environment in host countries, especially regarding the working conditions. She is also interested in issues like employment and labour movement in the retail sector and the role of Global South in Global Production Networks.

Ku'ulei Lewis's (PhD student, School of Business and Management, QMUL) research investigates the management of global value chains, with a specific interest in the effects of scale on biodiversity sustainability.

Angus McNelly is a lecturer in International Development and Latin American Politics at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. He completed his PhD on the experiences of the Left in Power in Bolivia earlier this year, and has written on Bolivian social theory, social movements and the MAS government, the political economy of Bolivia, and the labor movement.

Dr Giuliano Maielli (School of Business and Management, QMUL) holds a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics. His main body of research revolves around issues of technological and institutional path dependence and path creation, and their impact upon power relations across occupational blocs. His most recent research interest concerns the emergence of dispersed organisations and the redistribution of R&D rights across supply chains.

Aris Martinelli’s (PhD student in Socioeconomics, University of Geneva) current project focuses on the interrelation between global value chains, industrial relations and the labour process in the Swiss machinery industry. His research interests include international political economy, sociology of work and organizations, industrial relations and social policy.

Dr Alessandra Mezzadri (Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London) researches on global industrial circuits, labour informalisation and labour regimes; global labour standards and critical approaches to CSR and ethical consumerism; feminisms in development and social reproduction approaches; and India’s political economy. Her research is published in numerous international journals and media outlets. She is the author of The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments 'Made in India' (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Dr Satoshi Miyamura (Department of Economics, SOAS University of London) currently works on patterns of industrial restructuring, labour market institutions and labour-management relations in a range of manufacturing sectors, including jute and cotton textile, engineering and pharmaceutical industries in various regions of India, including West Bengal, Maharashtra, Gujarat and the Delhi/ National Capital Region. More generally, his research interests are in the political economy of development in India and Japan; economics of labour and institutions; economic history and history of economic thought.

Dr Ioana Jipa-Muşat (School of Business and Management, Royal Holloway University of London) is a political economist working on economic transformation and institutional change in Central Eastern Europe, especially in relation to processes of development, economic geography, business politics, labour regimes and migration. Ioana was awarded a PhD from the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London in 2020. Her research has been published in international journals such as Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space and European Urban and Regional Studies.

Professor Susan Newman’s (Economics, The Open University) research interests include the political economy of industrial development, the relationship between finance and production, and the social relations of production and exchange in agro-food commodity chains. She has conducted research on the restructuring of agrocommodity chains in relation to financialisation as well as the political economy of industrial development in post-apartheid South Africa.

Dr Paolo Novak’s (Department of Development Studies, SOAS) research unfolds at the intersection of critical borders, migration and development studies and is concerned with the study of a) borders, understood as the point of contact and articulation between multi-scalar and multi-directional social processes, as a prism to interrogate migration and development theorisations b) border management, understood as the set of interventions concerned with the opening/closing, location and enforcement of border functions, as a prism to interrogate neoliberal migration and development policies c) the tensions between abstract inclusion/exclusion criteria and their situated and fluid everyday life, as a prism to think about politics and political subjectivities.

Dr Jonathan Jones (School of Business and Management and School of Geography, QMUL) is researching the role of labour in the maritime logistics sector, with a focus on the opportunities and challenges that developments in distribution methods, technology and employment practices bring about for workers' collective organisation

Dr Jonathan Pattenden (University of East Anglia) researches on labour and the political economy and political sociology of class relations and agrarian change. He is the author of Labour, State and Society in Rural India: A Class-Relational Approach (2016), and co-editor of Class Dynamics of Development (2017). He has published in the Journal of Agrarian Change, Journal of Peasant Studies, Development and Change, Global Labour Journal, Economic and Political Weekly, and Third World Quarterly. He is on the editorial board of Journal of Agrarian Change.

Professor Nicola Piper (School of Law, QMUL) researches on the global governance of labour migration and the role of the International Labour Organisation in the promotion of decent work for migrant workers. Nicola is also co-investigator in the UK-RI funded Global Challenge Research Hub on South-South Migration and Inequality and co-lead of the Gender Work Package (2019-2023). She is co-chief editor of the Journal Global Social Policy and editor of two book series with Routledge (“Asian Migration” with A/Profs Chan and Lee; “Labour and Skills Mobility in Asia” with Prof Eric Fong, Chinese University of Hong Kong).

Clair Quentin (Research Associate, Policy Institute, King's College London) works on tax policy. Their research interests include the interrelation of international corporate tax norms and inequality in the global production network.

Dr Gale Raj-Reichert (School of Geography, QMUL) researches on labour governance of global production networks in developing countries. Her current research focuses on how changing relationships and power dynamics between firms in the electronics industry, governments, non-governmental organizations and trade unions affect negotiations, strategies and activities around labour governance in Malaysia and China. Gale’s fieldwork is based in the US, EU, Malaysia, Singapore, China and Hong Kong. Gale’s publications include papers in Regulation and Governance, Geoforum and Competition and Change.

Kyla Sankey’s (School of Business and Management, QMUL) research focuses on the political economy of land and agrarian movements in Latin America.

Dr Hannah Schling (School of Geography, QMUL) holds a PhD in Human Geography from King’s College London. Hannah's research focuses on questions of social reproduction, dormitory labour regimes, labour migration and bordering in Central and Eastern Europe.

Dr Gregory Schwartz (Department of Management, University of Bristol) researches the transformation of work, employment and labour relations in the context of post-socialist Central & Eastern Europe and Russia, looking at the effects of (and conflicts arising from) the nature of integration of CEE into global production and political economy on class relations, on the social organisation of the workplace, and on the workers’ social identities.

Professor Benjamin Selwyn’s (School of Global Studies, University of Sussex) research interests include understanding how class relations evolve within and impact upon the formation and functioning of global value chains, theories of development, and the global food system. He is author of Workers, State and Development in Brazil (2012), The Global Development Crisis (2014), The Struggle for Development (2017) and co-editor of Class Dynamics of Development (2014).

Sara Stevano (Department of Economics, SOAS University of London) is a development and feminist political economist specialising in the study of the political economy of work, well-being (food and nutrition), households and development policy. Working at the intersections between political economy, development economics, feminist economics and anthropology, Sara takes an interdisciplinary approach to theories and methods. Her work focuses on Africa, with primary research experience in Mozambique and Ghana.

Dr Umut Ulukan (Department of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations, Ordu University, Turkey) researches on agrarian change and rural labour relations under the hegemony of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization in Turkey. His recent works are concerned with the dynamics and outcomes of the process of rural transformation in the eastern Black Sea region of Turkey, which is the largest hazelnut producing area in the world and the largest fishing area in Turkey. His current research project focuses on the new patterns of social differentiation among small scale fishers in Turkey.

Dr Min Yan (School of Business and Management, QMUL) is a Lecturer in Business Law researching on corporate law and governance. His interests also encompass labour protection and regulatory initiates for employee participation at the board level. His recent research focuses on corporate social responsibility through regulation and global supply chain as well.

Professor Tessa Wright (School of Business and Management, QMUL) has been researching on equality and diversity in the labour market and workplace for many years, initially for the labour movement. She is interested in the intersection of multiple identities, and author of Gender and sexuality in male-dominated occupations: women workers in construction and transport (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She has undertaken research on trade union action to address inequality at work, including the role of union Equality Reps. Her ongoing research focuses on public procurement as a tool for advancing equality, and is the co-author of Fighting Fire: One hundred years of the Fire Brigades Union, 2018, New Internationalist, with Sian Moore and Phil Taylor.

Joanne Zhang’s (School of Business and Management, QMUL) research and teaching interests are strategic entrepreneurship and innovation with a focus on digital and high technology sectors. Joanne was engaged in large-scale research projects including “New Modes of Innovation: Managerial and Strategic Business Practice and Open Innovation” (£5m, ESRC supported, Cambridge and Imperial), “Financial and Organizational innovation in UK Biotechnology sector” (£1.3m, EPSRC supported, City University and SPRU). Previously she held positions at Cambridge University and University of East Anglia.

Upcoming events

Thursday 21 November 2024, 15:00-17:00, CLaSP Seminar, How Global are Global Norms of Business Behavior? Insights from the Diversity of Capitalism Approach

Past Events

Thursday 10 October 2024, CLaSP Seminar, Towards a Capital Theory of Race: A Reconstructed Marxist View

Monday 17 and Tuesday 18 June 2024, CLaSP End-of-Year Workshop, Workers' struggles and capitalist strategies: Perspectives from Africa and South America in an age of 'sustainability'.

Thursday 13 June 2024, CLaSP Masterclass with Dario Azzellini (Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico) on ‘"Who are the experts?" Co-Research with workers and communities’.

Tuesday, 11 June 2024, CLaSP Masterclass with Dario Azzellini (Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico) on ‘Sustainable Work and Just Transition’.

Thursday 30 and Friday 31, May 2024, CLaSP Workshop, The geography of pain: an interdisciplinary workshop, with Archie Davis.

Thursday, 23 May 2024, Book launch: Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice, by Joan Martínez-Alier

Tuesday, 19 Mar 2024 and Wednesday, 20 Mar 2024, Socio-Ecological Infrastructures and Finance Workshop

Thursday, 22 February 2024, Book Launch: ‘Hottest of the Hotspots: The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar’ by Benjamin Neimark (QMUL) with Queen Mary Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) and the POLLEN London-Node

Thursday, 25 January 2024, Sustainability for finance: situating green bonds in the financialization of Brazilian agriculture with Vanessa Perin, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

2023

Thursday 7 December, CLaSP Seminar Seminar Series: Me(a)tabolism and political ecology: labour, land and beef extract with Archie Davies (School of Geography & IHSS, QMUL)

Thursday 16 November, CLaSP & Journal of Agrarian Change Seminar: Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit Life in the Indian Tea Belt, with Jayaseelan Raj (King’s College London)

Monday 13 November, CLaSP Lunch Seminar: Bringing in the capitalist state: critical agrarian studies, crisis tendencies and progressive strategy in the imperial core with Anna Sturman, Postdoctoral Research Fellow (University of Sydney)

Tuesday 7th November, Workers’ Inquiry and Co-Research: History, theory, and practice

Thursday 6 October, Carbon Fetishism: Towards a Critical Theory of Climate Capitalism.

CLaSP Masterclasses on Eco-feminism with Prof Ariel Salleh (Nelson Mandela University, South Africa) SBM Distinguished Visiting Fellow

CLaSP Masterclass on Critical Approaches to Political Ecology with Prof Matthew Huber (Syracuse University, US), IHSS Distinguished Visiting Fellow Uneven geographies of electricity capital

Tuesday 6 June 2023 Labour Regimes and Ecology: A workshop

Thursday 8 June 2023 CLaSP end-of-year event, Labour in the Green transition with Ariel Salleh and Matthew Huber

Tuesday 13 June 2023IHSS and CLaSP Workshop, Development on Credit: Financialisation and its effects across the international development agenda

Thursday 23 March 2023, Regional Value Chains and Governance of Decent Work in Sub Saharan Africa.

Thursday 9 March, Financialised capitalism and the subordination of emerging capitalist economies.

2022

Thursday 12 May, Labour Regimes at Sea Workshop.

Thursday 10 March, Pension Systems and Labour Resistance in China and Vietnam.

Tuesday 22 November, How to survive the (violent) degradation of everyday and future environments

Thursday 8 December, Manufacturing Vulnerability: State-Sponsored Forced Labour and the Crisis in the Uyghur Region

2021

Wednesday 30 June, Ecology, labour and the climate crisis.

Thursday 25 February, Demet Sahende Dinler, University of Sussex, 'Designing Fair Markets: An Ethnography of Cut Flower Auctions in Turkey'.

2020

9 December 2020, 2-4pm: Book launch of Jairus Banaji’s A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (Haymarket, 2020) with Jairus Banaji and discussants Henry Bernstein and Fahad Ahmad Bishara

Watch the video recording of the December 2020 book launch here.

Thursday 25 of June, 3-5pm: Aris Martinelli, Geneva School of Social Sciences, 'Why workers’ determination is not enough, A case study of workers’ struggles in Swiss GVCs'

Thursday 21 May 2020 4-6pm: Social reproduction and race: intersections between capitalism and colonialism - and a rejoinder in light of the current crisis.
Brenna Bhandar, School of Law, SOAS, 'Points of Contact: critical race feminism and social reproduction at the neoliberal conjuncture'
Sara Salem, Department of Sociology, LSE, and Mai Taha, Department of Law, American University in Cairo, 'Vignettes on Social Reproduction: Gender, Empire and Capital in an Egyptian Century'

Thursday 23 January 2020, 3-5pm, Bancroft: 3.36, Labour mobility in the production–social reproduction nexus: Between crisis resolution and (re)constitution of uneven and combined Europe, Gregory Schwartz, University of Bristol

2019

Thursday 3-5pm, 15 November, Susan Newman (University of the West of England)- ‘The making of a global commodity: restructuring of the dairy industry’. Bancroft Building, room: 1.02.3.

Tuesday 6pm, 13 November, Screening of Workers (2018), followed by discussion with Jay Gearing (Red 7 Productions, Director) and Ben Rogaly (University of Sussex, Producer) - in conjunction with the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences theme on "Work". Room G19, Hitchcock Cinema, Arts 1.

Tuesday 4-6pm, 13 November, Workshop on ‘Work at the Margins’ in conjunction with the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences theme on ‘Work’. The City Centre Seminar Room, second floor, Bancroft Building.

Wednesday 3-5pm, 31 October, Gale Raj-Reichert (School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London), Leonhard Plank (Technical University of Vienna), and Cornelia Staritz (University of Vienna). ‘Theorising socially responsible public procurement within global production networks’. The City Centre Seminar Room, second floor, Bancroft Building.

Wednesday 30 October 2019 3-5pm, Hedge Funds, Private Equity and the Shadowy World of Mayfair, a walking tour by Angus McNallly, School of Politics and International Relations Queen Mary University of London.

Thursday 3 October 2019 3-5pm, CLGP research roundtable on ‘what are you up to?’, room 4.27A FB, Mile End

26 June, CLGP annual workshop ‘Social Reproduction Within and Beyond Production: Old and New Challenges for the Analysis of Work and Workers’. Organisers: Elena Baglioni (QMUL), Clair Quentin (QMUL), Hannah Schling (KCL)
Presentations by: Stefania Barca, Senior researcher at the University of Coimbra; Gargi Bhattacharyya, Prof. of Sociology, University of East London; Silvia Federici, Professor Emerita of New College, Hofstra University NY; Alessandra Mezzadri, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies, SOAS; Bridget O'Laughlin, Former researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS, Netherland) and current editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change; Clair Quentin, Research Associate, KCL Policy Institute, and PhD student at Queen Mary University and Research Associate; and Sigrid Vertommen, Research associate at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge.
Watch now.

Thurs 3-5pm, 16 May, Peter Cole, Department of History, Western Illinois University. Book launch: Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (University of Illinois Press).

Thurs 3-5pm, 2 May, James Brown, School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, ‘Labour geographies of development in Laos: Class formation, care and complex livelihoods’.

Thurs 4-6pm, 21 March, Alexis Wearmouth, School of Business & Management, Queen Mary University of London. 'Value, information and resource flows in the Calcutta-Dundee textile value chain, 1870-1919'.

Thurs 4-6pm, 7 March, Nithya Natarajan, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London. ‘Indecent work and economic growth in SDG 8: The perils of financial inclusion and growth among unfree brick workers in Cambodia’.

Thurs 4-6pm, 14 February, Hannah Schling, PhD Candidate, Department of Geography, King's College London. ‘(Re)producing the “disposable” EU worker: Work agencies and worker dormitories in the Czech Republic's export-oriented manufacturing sector’.

Thurs 4-6pm, 10 January, Dae-oup Chang, Department of Global Korean Studies, Sogang University, Seoul, South Korea. ‘Transnational Labour Regimes and the Mutation of Neoliberal Development in Cambodia’.

2018

28-29 June 2018

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

Thursday 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

Monday 14 May 2018, 5-7pm

Development with global value chains: Upgrading and innovation in Asia

Book launch seminar

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

Registration via g.raj-reichert@qmul.ac.uk is recommended.

Thursday 15 February 2018, 4-6pm

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

Book launch seminar

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, 2^nd Floor, Francis Bancroft Building, QMUL Mile End Campus

2017

Thursday 30 December 2017, 4-6pm

Session on finance and global production networks

‘Variegated Firm Finance in Global Production Networks: Car Component Manufacturers in Hungary and Eastern Germany’

Emile Boustani, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University

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

Thursday 14 December 2017, 4-6pm

‘The Common as a Mode of Production’

Carlo Vercellone, Professor of Economics at the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a member of CEMTI and of the Laboratory of Economics.

Carlo Vercellone presents research from the new book The Common as a mode of production. Towards a critique of the political economy of common goods (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2017). What is the common? What are its foundations? Is it a set of well-defined resources – so called common goods – or a generic principle governing the social organisation of production? These questions need to be asked because the debate on the Common is as rich as it is confusing. On the one hand, notions such as Common, in the singular, commons, common goods, common property, common-pool resources, etc., are at times used as synonymous and at others as opposite, with no clear-cut definition. On the other hand, debates frequently lose sight of the extent to which these terms are used to cover highly differentiated approaches not only to theory, but also to the political role that the Common might play in projects of social transformation.

The purpose of the book is to contribute to clarify these questions through a multidisciplinary approach that combines theory and history. The aim is twofold. The first is to provide the reader with a guide to a critical analysis of the main economic and legal theories of common goods. Particular attention is granted to the benefits and limitations of Elinor Ostrom’s contribution and to the debate on the so-called tragedy of the commons. This survey of the literature serves the purpose of showing what the Common is not, or, at least, what it should not be reduced to. The second aim is to put forward an approach that is alternative to that of political economy. In this framework, the Common is theorised as an actual “mode of production”.

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

Thursday 16 November 2017 [PDF 738KB]

‘Uneven development in global value chains’

One-day workshop co-organised by the Centre d’Economies de l’Université Paris Nord (CEPN), and Centre on Labour and Global Production QMUL (CLGP)

‘Producing: A labour regimes perspective’, Elena Baglioni and Liam Campling, CLGP

Discussant, Peter Gibbon, Danish Institute for International Studies

‘Value, tax and global inequality chains’, David Quentin, CLGP

‘The trade-labour nexus’, Adrian Smith, CLGP

‘The financialisation-globalization nexus’, Tristan Auvray, CEPN

‘Standards as power: the case of transatlantic trade negotiations’, Benjamin Burbaumer, CEPN

‘The monopolization of the intellectual forces of production’, Cedric Durand, CEPN

‘Upgrading/ downgrading: An economic perspective’, Steven Knauss, CEPN

‘Governing: A critical management perspective’, Florence Palpacuer, Université de Montpellier

‘The limits of corporate social responsibility’, Corinne Vercher, CEPN

Thursday 2 November 2017, 4-6pm

Book launch seminar

The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left

Jeffery R. Webber, School of Politics and International Relations, QMUL

This talk will explain the political dynamics and conflicts underpinning the contradictory evolution of left-wing governments and social movements in Latin America in the last two decades. Throughout the 2000s, Latin America transformed itself into the leading edge of anti-neoliberal resistance in the world. What is left of the Pink Tide today? What are the governments’ relationships to the explosive social movements that propelled them to power? As China’s demand slackens for Latin American commodities, will they continue to rely on natural resource extraction? This talk is grounded in an analysis of trends in capitalist accumulation from 1990 to 2015, in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Venezuela. It explains inequality there today through a Marxist framework, rooted in a new understanding of class and its complex associations with racial and gender oppression. The talk will also cover indigenous and peasant resistance to the expansion of private mining, agro-industry and natural gas and oil activities. Finally, the presentation will conclude with remarks on “passive revolution” in Bolivia under Evo Morales and debates around dual power and class composition during the era of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

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

Thursday 7 September 2017, 4-6pm

Session on labour in industrial fisheries:

‘Fish, Boats and Crews: Working and Living Conditions in the Fishing Sector of Turkey’

Umut Ulukan, Department of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations, Ordu University, Turkey

‘Labour regimes in the tuna industry in the Western Indian Ocean: Connecting boats, ports and factories’

Liam Campling, Director of CLGP, School of Business and Management, QMUL

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

Thursday 22 June 2017, 2pm – 6pm **open to the public**

'Chinese labour regimes: mutations, expansions, resistance'

A Centre on Labour and Global Production workshop with

Rutvica Andrijasevic (University of Bristol)

Anastasia Frantzeskaki (Port Employees Federation of Greece)

Giorgos Gogos (Head of the Piraeus dockworkers union, Greece)

Gaochao He (Sun Yat-Sen University and Harvard Law School)

Pun Ngai (University of Hong Kong)

Carlos Oya (SOAS) and

Tim Pringle (SOAS)

“The ongoing wave of strikes in China is the latest manifestation of a dynamic that can be summed up in the phrase: where capital goes, labor-capital conflict shortly follows.” --- Beverly Silver

The emergence of China as a global economic power in recent decades has been striking – Its ~10% per annum GDP growth since 1989 is but one indication. This economic boom has been accompanied by enormous changes to the domestic labour market, as hundreds of millions have made the change from rural agricultural to urban industrial workers. At the same time, strikes by workers have been rising since 2004, and have intensified since 2010, when the government stopped releasing official statistics. In 2016, China Labour Bulletin had recorded 2,662 worker collective actions – an increase of 20% from a year before.

Meanwhile, Chinese capital has been flowing overseas in search of new investment opportunities, with over $130 billion invested last year alone, an increase of 55 percent on 2015. Major investments stretch across the globe, from Latin America (the canal in Nicaragua) to Europe (the Port of Piraeus in Greece) and Africa (natural resource extraction throughout the continent), competing increasingly with North America and European capital under greater pressure due to the differential impact of the economic crisis.

At this workshop, we will discuss these developments and attempt to answer a series of questions: What kinds of labour regimes are emerging in China and in Chinese owned firms abroad? What forms of resistance do they engender? And what opportunities and challenges exist for linking the struggles of workers in China with the struggles of workers in Chinese owned firms abroad?

The workshop is free but please register here so we have an idea of numbers attending:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/chinese-labour-regimes-mutations-expansions-resistance-workshop-tickets-34239090040#

Room GC201, Graduate Centre, QMUL Mile End Campus

Thursday 27 April 2017, 4-6pm

‘The Struggle for Development’

Ben Selwyn (University of Sussex),

Room 4.27a (Boardroom), Francis Bancroft, QMUL Mile End Campus

Thursday 9 February 2017, 4-6pm

‘Democracy, Leadership and the foundations of im/migrant worker power: A comparative analysis of im/migrant worker organisations in Berlin, New York and London’

Mark Bergfeld (School of Business and Management, QMUL)