Al Rainnie

Just-in-Time, Sub-Contracting and the Small Firm

It has been suggested that moves towards Just In Time systems of production bring with them a fundamental change in the nature of the buyer-supplier relationship. New long-term, high-trust relationships are supposed to replace a win:win for the old win:lose equation. Equally, the new flexibility demanded of suppliers is supposed to favour the small firm. Elements of this analysis have been incorporated into variants of the post-Fordist paradigm. Based on research on high technology industries in Hertfordshire, this paper questions both assumptions. It is argued that small firms will be excluded from JIT style buyer-supplier relations. Furthermore, there is little evidence of a new form of cooperation emerging. Uneven and partial introduction of JIT systems is causing problems, the costs of which are being pushed onto suppliers by large firms.

Small firms, big problems: the political economy of small businesses

Al Rainnies paper is an attempt to understand the role and importance of small businesses in advanced capitalism. Arguing against widely held myths about small businesses, he claims they should not be viewed as anachronistic survivors of a bygone age destined for destruction. He suggests rather they are an integral part of Thatchers Britain.

New regionalism in Australia

An October 2002 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conference in Melbourne introduced approaches and policy prescriptions that quickly came to be known as the New Regionalism. A month later, a conference was held at Monash University to investigate whether this New Regionalism was actually a new model of work, organization

The Reorganisation of Large Firm Subcontracting: Myth and Reality

This article brings into sharper focus an aspect of the restructuring debate: namely the post Fordist orthodoxy which seeks to emphasise the centrality of the locality and the role of small and medium sized firms. Drawing on evidence from empirical examples, including the Hertfordshire study, Rainnie demonstrates that whilst the functions of large firms may be decentralised, with units taking on local appearances, control still resides in the hands of a distant and global management, often overiding local concerns.

Regional Trajectories and Uneven Development in the ‘New Europe’: Rethinking Territorial Success and Inequality

At the start of the twenty-first century the ‘new Europe’ is characterized by significant and enduring territorial inequalities. Within Europe, much as in North America, the debate over such disparities revolves around two main issues. First, some researchers envisage the emergence of economies that are at the same time globalized and regionally integrated, and of a world in which sub-national regional economic life assumes increased significance in a global economy (Scott, 1998; Storper, 1998). Second, others offer a more sober analysis of contemporary trends, insisting that development is associated with a continued reproduction of inequality, and stressing the wide variation in the roles of global and local factors in shaping the trajectories of different regional economies (Dunford, 1994; Hudson and Williams, 1999).

Coming to Terms with Quality: UNISON and the Restructuring of Local Government

The authors argument is that current quality initiatives are managerially driven and coincide with the development of so-called ‘new right’ politics in the public sector. They criticize those those who argue that quality is simply imposed on a quiescent workforce and suggest instead that the process is mediated through workers and their representatives. They use case study evidence from a local authority to analyse trade union responses and locate this within a discussion of the ‘union renewal’ thesis.

Industrial relations in the Latrobe Valley: myths and realities

Abstract In this paper we examine attitudes towards work, employment and industrial relations in the Latrobe Valley region of South East Victoria, Australia. The Latrobe Valley is an old industrial area of Victoria, 150 kilometres south east of Melbourne, based on power generation connected to open cast brown coal mining. The formerly stated-owned power generator (SECV) was broken up and privatised in the 1990s with devastating employment and social impacts on the locality. Before privatisation, the area in general, and SECV in particular, had a reputation for militant union organisation, leading to the joke that SECV stood for Slow Easy and Comfortable. Despite a radical restructuring of work and employment in the region, and a flurry of academic studies which suggested that the old image of the region as a hotbed of militancy was unwarranted, it is believed in some quarters that the old image of the region deters inward investment on the one hand and local entrepreneurial activity on the other. This paper draws on two pieces of work; firstly an ongoing study of the impact of locality on workplace organisations (see Rainnie & Paulet 2005), and secondly a project on industrial relations in the region (see Rainnie et al. 2004). The project, commissioned by a Victorian State Government Taskforce on the region, was designed to investigate what employers, trade union representatives and most importantly, inhabitants of the Latrobe Valley thought about the image and reality of work, employment and industrial relations in their region. This was in the context of an attempt (the most recent of many) to construct a new non-conflictual image of the Valley that would aid restructuring. Drawing on the work of people such as Bradon Ellem, Ray Hudson and Doreen Massey, we argue instead that attitudes to work, employment and locality revealed in the study point to a more complex and conflictual construction of place. While not denying the possibility of short term, local boosterist, place marketing strategies that promote a collaborative image of place, uniting unions, local employers and government institutions, we point to conditions which also allow for the (re)emergence of a more conflictual future. Unions have drawn on the history and conception of the locality to organise in new and often hostile environments.

Policy and practice in general print: the workplace reality of national bargaining

This paper investigates the operation of the National Agreement in the general printing industry at a time when the future of such agreements is in doubt. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data from union representatives, the paper provides insights into the workplace practices of pay, technology, flexibility and work intensification in the context of the National Agreement and local labour market factors. Set against a highly competitive, technologically dynamic environment, the paper demonstrates the general resilience of the National Agreement alongside a complex and uneven picture at the level of the workplace.

Globalization and Utopian dreams: Deconstructing the ‘G’ word

Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996), 227 pp., ISBN 0–7456–12458 Winfried Ruigrok and Rob Van Tulder, The Logic of International Restructuring (Routledge, London, 1995), 344 pp., ISBN 0–415–12239–2 Robert Boyer and Daniel Drache (eds), States against Markets (Routledge, London, 1996), 448 pp., ISBN 0–415–13726–8 Dick Bryan, The Chase Across The Globe (Westview Press, Oxford, 1995), 204 pp., ISBN 0–8133–2356–8

Innovation, development and global destruction networks

Contemporary capitalism produces huge quantities of commodities whose use value is frequently short-lived, often because capitalists’ need to secure profits involves the planned obsolescence of their products. Such waste, however, regularly contains valuable materials which can be retrieved and reused as inputs for new commodities. In this chapter, then, we explore the economic paths – what we call Global Destruction Networks (GDNs) – through which some of this waste travels as it is processed and its components recovered. In many ways, these GDNs are Other to the more familiar Global Production Networks (GPNs) in which commodities are first assembled, except that they involve the taking apart of discarded products. The chapter outlines three GDNs – those involving e-waste, shipping and vehicles – to argue that an important mechanism by which to connect the workings of GDNs with those of GPNs is through following the movement of value, conceptualised here in Marxian terms of congealed labour.