Are Labour Markets Necessarily Local? Spatiality, Segmentation and Scale

This paper draws on recent debates about scale to approach the geography of labour markets from a dynamic perspective sensitive to the spatiality and scale of labour market restructuring. Its exploration of labour market reconfigurations after the collapse of a major firm (Ansett Airlines) raises questions about geography’s faith in the inherently ‘local’ constitution of labour markets. Through an examination of the job reallocation process after redundancy, the paper suggests that multiple labour markets use and articulate scale in different ways. It argues that labour market rescaling processes are enacted at the critical moment of recruitment, where social networks, personal aspirations and employer preferences combine to shape workers’ destinations

Pay progression in routinised service sector work: navigating the internal labour market in a fast food multinational company

The United Kingdom's widespread use of low‐skill, low‐paid employment has been well documented. It has been argued internal labour markets (ILMs) benefit such workers, affording them with opportunities for progression. Relatively little is known, however, about the impact of ILMs on entry level workers undertaking routinised service sector work. Drawing on qualitative data, this article explores the prospects on offer in a market leading, fast food multinational company. Potential enabling features include on‐the‐job training, a transparent and integrated pay structure and a professed culture of progression. Occupational movements to positions above the low‐pay threshold are, however, relatively rare. We conjecture this contradiction is the result of the business context in which the firm operates. The findings suggest that in sectors where price leadership strategies dominate, escape from low pay is likely to be exceptional, even within large organisations featuring some of the classic characteristics of ‘pure’ or strong ILMs

Theorizing transnational labour markets. A research heuristic based on the new economic sociology

Mense-Petermann U. Theorizing transnational labour markets. A research heuristic based on the new economic sociology. Global Networks. 2020;20(3):410-433.In this article, I suggest that transnational labour markets are characterized by their multi‐layered embeddedness, not only in national but also in transnational institutional settings. Hence, the national institutional factors formerly at the centre of sociological labour market theories insufficiently explain the newly emerging transnational labour markets. To account for the full complexity and institutional context of the latter, I propose an inductive theoretical approach to transnational labour markets and develop a research heuristic to instruct empirical studies about particular transnational labour markets and inductive theory building. This heuristic draws on analytical categories as developed by the new economic sociology of markets. The empirical example of the transnational labour market that matches eastern European workers to jobs in the German meat industry serves to illustrate how one can use this heuristic, which reveals some preliminary features of transnational labour markets compared with national ones, as well as some research gaps to be addressed by future studies

Trade unions and precariat in Europe : representative claims

Trade unions have been charged with neglecting labour market ‘outsiders’, while alternative actors have emerged to represent these. In response, unions have stepped up their claim to be representative of all workers, without distinction. We review the theoretical and policy debates on this issue, and argue that representation as such has been under-theorized. We draw on Saward’s concept of ‘representative claims’ to analyse the different grounds for competing assertions of representativeness. We identify four main forms of claims, and illustrate these with empirical examples. We conclude that these different claims are mutually reinforcing in stimulating attention to the outsiders, and in their interaction with institutional settings, they have a performative effect in defining new social actors

Hyper-precarious lives : Migrants, work and forced labour in the Global North

This paper unpacks the contested inter-connections between neoliberal work and welfare regimes, asylum and immigration controls, and the exploitation of migrant workers. The concept of precarity is explored as a way of understanding intensifying and insecure post-Fordist work in late capitalism. Migrants are centrally implicated in highly precarious work experiences at the bottom end of labour markets in Global North countries, including becoming trapped in forced labour. Building on existing research on the working experiences of migrants in the Global North, the main part of the article considers three questions. First, what is precarity and how does the concept relate to working lives? Second, how might we understand the causes of extreme forms of migrant labour exploitation in precarious lifeworlds? Third, how can we adequately theorize these particular experiences using the conceptual tools of forced labour, slavery, unfreedom and precarity? We use the concept of ‘hyper-precarity’ alongside notions of a ‘continuum of unfreedom’ as a way of furthering human geographical inquiry into the intersections between various terrains of social action and conceptual debate concerning migrants’ precarious working experiences

Universities and Pricing on Higher Education Markets

Markets and prices in higher education. When can we speak of markets, and when markets exist, how are prices set

Dualism in the Labor Market: A Perspective on the Lewis Model After Half a Century

This paper asks how the Lewis model might be viewed from the perspective of economic science half a century later. Many of the core propositions remain intact, some might be amplified, and a small number might be revised

Two become one : the integration of male and female labour markets in the English and Welsh coalfields

Two become one: the integration of male and female labour markets in the English and Welsh Coalfields, Regional Studies. This paper explores the extent to which the labour markets for men and women are becoming integrated as a single entity. It does so in the specific context of the English and Welsh coalfields, where major job losses in the coal industry fell almost exclusively on men. Using data from 1981 to 2008, the paper presents ‘labour market accounts’ for the coalfields that reveal changing female labour force participation and employment, and it compares these trends with those among men in the same places. Evidence emerges of two relatively independent labour markets – male and female – operating in the 1980s in the same geographic space. However, over time a degree of integration appears to have occurred. As a result, women increasingly have to compete with men for the same jobs and a greater proportion of new job opportunities in the former coalfields are now going to men