Taking conflicts over new solar energy projects on the agricultural landscape in the global North as its backdrop, the chapter demonstrates how work and labour (including that performed in the North by workers from the global South) are erased both by the opponents and the proponents of such projects. The erasure is consistent with prevailing ways of knowing the human-environment nexus, shaped by an underlying political economy derivative of how international law has constructed and maintained the foundational liberal mythology that separates labour from land. Grounded in our commitment to pursuing a ‘just transition’ to decarbonisation – that is to say, a transition that attends to the distributional effects and disproportionate impacts of decarbonisation on workers and communities – we strive to reconceptualise work and labour as embodied practices of working and living on the land. Everyday socio-spatial practices structured by law implicate ordinary people in the making of landscapes and continuing relations of settler capitalism, shaping how ‘we’ live together on the land, including who belongs and who gets to decide.

Race was never far from conversations about empire. In 1911 an international collection of ethnologists, social scientists, and reformers gathered at the University of London to discuss the problem of the color line. Had the Universal Races Congress functioned as nothing but a “World Grievance Committee” – to borrow a phrase from the sociologist and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) co-founder W. E. B. Du Bois – it would have served a vital role. Yet for all the value of fostering discussion between “so-called white and so-called coloured people,” as conveners labeled them, the Congress’s greatest contribution came in its intellectual interventions. Speakers like Du Bois and Sioux physician Charles Eastman arrived with cornerstone American legacies of dispossession and chattel slavery weighing heavy on their minds. What scholars now might frame as ravening settler colonialism, Du Bois, Eastman, and others discussed in terms of expansion, independence, development, and disfranchisement. Though the organizers called them “inter-racial problems,” Du Bois recognized the very notion of race as the concept that made these problems all of a piece. He welcomed the conference’s rejection of race as a scientific fact, and of racial differences as immutable or tethered to innate capacity. For too long, he noted, scientific racism had provided cover for “widespread and decisive political action” in service to white supremacy – from “the disfranchisement of American negroes” to “the subjugation of India and the partition of Africa.” For too long, racial discourses had reinforced racialized power.1

Introduction

This book has sought to explore and develop the potential of the labour regime concept for understanding the position and latent power of workers within the contemporary global economy. This is an analytical-cum-olitical project that involves placing workers centrally in our analyses of global production, without underestimating the challenges for workers’ prospects in the context of the intersecting dynamics of capital, state and society in which they are embroiled. In Chapter 1, we started our journey through the antecedents and the early and current development of labour regime analysis by asking a series of questions. How can we theorize labour regimes in the context of long-run historical processes of capitalist globalization? To what extent do labour regime concepts enable the development of comparative analyses across industries and places? How do labour regimes develop differentially in relation to contrasting global production systems? How do we make sense of the reproduction and control of specific labour processes in discrete places and industries? And to what extent can labour regime analysis provide a synthetic framework for understanding the political economy of contemporary capitalism?

The chapters in this volume have made considerable headway in tackling these questions. In developing the idea of labour regimes as temporary, place-specific stabilizations of capital– labour relations embedded in wider, multi-scalar dynamics, they have served to sharpen our understanding of what constitutes such regimes, and our knowledge of how and why they vary across industries, space and time. We have also seen how labour regimes both shape and are reshaped by the variegated landscapes of labour agency across the global economy, and how they are constituted beyond the traditional workplace by processes of social reproduction and household economies that are, typically, highly gendered. In turn, the chapters have also offered methodological reflections on how to undertake grounded labour regime analysis.

In this concluding chapter, our goal is not to synthesize and summarize the contributions of all the preceding chapters. Labour regime thinking is clearly a work in progress, and the commonalities across the chapters are also accompanied by important differences – concerning, for instance, which spatial scales and actors to foreground – that will continue to be debated and refined as the agenda develops.

Introduction

Writing in 2021, the relationship between trade and labour has become especially apparent. An immediate example is the post-Brexit EU– UK trade arrangement, which brought this relationship to the fore through concerns to ensure that the United Kingdom did not deviate in ways that might give it a competitive trade advantage over the European Union by not maintaining sufficiently high labour standards. Another example is the claims of the Trump and Biden administrations in the United States to put the American worker at the centre of US trade policy. But these issues have always been present, beyond the headlines, in the deep history of international trade policy (see Smith et al. 2021).

Trade, and the range of multi-, bi-and unilateral agreements between states that aim to deepen economic relationships, can be understood as instruments designed to enlarge spaces for the integration of economic life that fundamentally shape work and employment. Free trade agreements (FTAs) are an integral contemporary mechanism by which deepening trade integration occurs, and, more broadly, reconfigure spaces for the accumulation of capital, including through the production and exchange of goods across jurisdictions. In so doing, they are powerful forces in the reconfiguration of workplace and employment practices, and in reshaping labour regimes.

Conventionally, trade liberalization has been seen as “bad” for labour, a position that has structured leftist politics on FTAs for many years, often leading to oppositional positions. Indeed, one explanation for the rise of labour provisions, such as the European Union's trade and sustainable devel-opment (TSD) chapters in its recent FTAs, is that trade governance was seeking to ameliorate some of the worst consequences of trade integration for workers by requiring trade partners to align with international labour standards (see Smith et al. 2021). Others note the role of trade integration in increasing aggregate demand for labour and the numbers of workers in employment, especially in global value chain trade (e.g. World Bank 2020). But a perspective starting with global production networks would always caution that any such sweeping assessments are nuanced by the sectoral and production network-specific consequences of trade integration, and their differential impacts on various groups of workers – requiring, essentially, that we acknowledge the uneven socio-economic distributional consequences of trade and GPN integration.