Recentralizing Industrial Relations? Local Unions and the Politics of Insourcing in Three North American Automakers

Since the auto industry’s 2008 crisis, the decades-long trend toward outsourcing by the Detroit Three automakers has stalled. During and after the crisis, original equipment manufacturers moved work inside their corporate boundaries, including the purchase of eight previously spun-off parts plants. Why has this happened? Drawing on 77 interviews in the United States and Canada and 27 insourcing cases, the authors explore how and why insourcing has taken place. Past literature has considered the costs and benefits of creating the vertically integrated corporation, the managerial politics behind vertical disintegration, and the labor–management relations that shape both. While much industrial relations scholarship points to decentralized plant-level partnerships as a union strategy to win investment, the authors find that local unionists are intervening in the politics of the corporation above the plant level to influence the purchasing, manufacturing, and engineering functions that determine the sourcing decision.

‘Airport People’ in Transformation: Vertical Disintegration and the Reconfiguration of Occupational Belonging in Terminal Work at Helsinki-Vantaa International Airport

This article examines the effects of the vertical disintegration of production on airport terminal workers through the theoretical lens of occupational belonging, highlighting themes of sensory and embodied experience, changing dynamics of employment relationships, and new patterns of inclusion and exclusion. The article contributes to efforts to produce nuanced empirical accounts of the dynamics of post-Fordist work, showing how restructuring had the effect of disrupting employment relations and activity rhythms, while nevertheless preserving ‘the airport’ as a symbolic and relational setting in relation to which occupational belonging could be constructed. The article examines how the work of binding people and jobs, previously undertaken by integrated organisations, was taken up by workers themselves through their personal relationships and will to belong. The article highlights the capacity to undertake this work of belonging as a central dynamic of occupational inclusion and exclusion, a capacity which in this empirical context was experienced as being shaped by age and the ability to make use of personal relationships in navigating precarious employment relations. Based on this empirical analysis, the article argues for belonging as a valuable perspective for studies of materiality, symbolic identification and relationality in post-Fordist work.

Intellectual property, technorents and the labour share of production

How does the capture of explicit monopoly rent via intellectual property rights interact with the capture of additional profit via monopsonistic labour markets, and with what consequences? Most analyses of changes in the labour market focus on the distributional struggle between capital and labour over the wage share. This paper examines how the distributional struggle among firms over shares of aggregate profit has affected the labour market, generating rising income inequality. Over the past 40 years, struggles over shares of the value generated in a given commodity chain have driven de jure but not de facto vertical disintegration of those value chains. Firms vertically disintegrated by outsourcing non-core production and support activities, by in-sourcing contingent labour, and, where possible, by adopting a franchise model of corporate organization. The franchise model enables core firms to exert near total control over firms that are technically separate legal entities, while avoiding legal and social responsibility for the workers (and owners) of those subordinate firms. Vertical disintegration has produced three ideal typical kinds of firms whose differing ability to capture value and thus profit stems from their different forms of control over other firms in the value chain. Vertical disintegration generated labour shedding and employment contingency. Differential value capture has concentrated profit into firms with relatively small headcounts, reducing the degree to which profits are (partially) redistributed among workers.

Adapting Labour Law to Complex Organisational Settings of the Enterprise: Why Rethinking the Concept of the Employer is Not Enough

Labour law struggles to deal with the vertical disintegration of the enterprise, a phenomenon that questions the traditional bilateral and contractual analysis of the employment relationship and the unitary concept of the employer. Multiple employer patterns have been proposed by the Italian and English scholarship to try to sidestep the current impasse. However, these seem to be inconsistent with the existing legal framework and, in addition, it is debatable that they can be always instrumental in addressing the issues arising from the vertical disintegration of the enterprise. Nevertheless, an alternative and more nuanced analytical path can be followed. Labour law mostly takes the view that the employer is the contractual counterparty to the employee. Yet it also recognises that other entities can assume certain responsibilities of the employer in certain specific regulatory domains, where legislators recur to particular regulatory strategies often independent of a contractual analysis of the employment relationship. This article argues that the law takes this step not because these other legal entities are functionally akin to employers, but precisely in spite of the differences between them and the employer form. Rather than seeking to redefine the concept of employer, a better understanding of the subject must recognise that employment law consists of a kaleidoscopic blend of different regulatory domains, characterised by a range of different purposes, the achievement of which requires the adoption of different and even non-contractual normative tools. Adopting a variable geometry approach to frame the scope of labour laws would constitute a better analytical response to potentially restore the coherence and completeness of the scope of employment protective norms.

Integration in Manufacturing Trade in Asia: A Cross-country Scenario with Special Reference to India

The fragmentation of production due to vertical disintegration has profusely impacted growth in world trade via vertical specialisation in production and trade. This article is purported to examine domestic and import contents in exports in the manufacturing sector of India, and a few select countries in Asia. We have used the World Input–Output Database (WIOD) to estimate the domestic and foreign value-added shares of export. The period of our study is from 2000 to 2014. Our results pertaining to the aggregate manufacturing industry of India reveal that while, on the one hand, the domestic value-added contents of export have fallen significantly, the foreign value-added contents of export, on the other hand, have increased significantly over time. We have also conducted disaggregated industry-level analyses, which show that there is a wide variation in the degree of vertical integration in trade. The cross-country analysis reveals that the foreign value-added shares in total manufacturing export increased for developed Asia in 2014 over 2000. In emerging and developing Asia, it either has increased or remained stagnant. This scenario indicates a larger backward linkage of the manufacturing sector in the global value chain (GVC) across countries. Here, we have primarily focussed on the six key manufacturing industries viz. Food, Textiles, Chemicals, Basic Metals, Fabricated Metals and Motor Vehicles for cross-country industry-level analysis. Industry-level heterogeneity is highly prevalent in Asia in terms of their participation in GVC.

Conclusions

This book has compared advances in the regulation of work, asking what can be learned for purposeful institutional change elsewhere in the world. Chapter 10 concludes by recapping the overlapping dynamics of informalization that reoccurred in the case study chapters. These include: mass migration and circulation of labour within countries and between countries; large scale macro-economic and institutional liberalization; integration of previously separate economic systems as socialist and capitalist systems were combined following the fall of the Eastern bloc and the opening to global trade; new ways of organizing production resulting in the vertical disintegration of productive units (firms) and the expansion of supply chains; the explosion of new, non-employment forms of work; the complexity and scale of production outstripping national labour regulation systems; and lack of transnational orchestration in labour regulation resulting in gaps in the scale of labour regulation. The book concludes by imagining a future in which action is not taken to promote a global living wage.

Standardization of Information and Financial Innovation

Mortgage securitization markets emerged as an extension of the primary mortgage lending markets. This created the need for standardization of information across these two contexts that would enable a collective and universal understanding of credit risk and its management. The securitization industry, however, instead of developing standardization management strategies that would support this vision, it rather chose to implement an organizing vision that was centered around operational efficiency and profit-making supported by a focus on functional specialization. The outcome was the fragmentation of the securitization supply chain via vertical disintegration, which undermined the unity of the risk analysis process. This chapter argues that the effects of technological standardization on innovation in the mortgage industry should be explored beyond a narrow focus on efficiency and profit in relation to an individual organization's business strategy; but rather within an extended scope that includes broader social and policy contexts that guide innovation.