Collectivism, individualism and solidarity in global value chain restructuring in the Global North: Workers’ resistance in the Swiss machinery industry

Aris Martinelli

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2022, vol. 43, issue 3, 1391-1419

Abstract: Global value chains (GVCs) have become the dominant form of industrial organization in the global economy. Although the economic outcomes of GVC restructuring have been measured and the determinants theorized, there is a lack of empirical research on the real processes of GVC restructuring and its impact on labour in the Global North. This article helps to address this gap by investigating the effect of the participation in GVCs on the lead firms’ value-capturing strategies and on workers’ ability to defend and improve their working conditions in the Swiss machinery industry. Based on a critical GVC approach and a qualitative study of two work conflicts, the study demonstrates how GVCs shape a variety of new strategies for capital and labour; enhancing forms of management strategies and weakening the possibilities for workers’ counterstrategies by eroding collectivism and solidarity and promoting individualism among workers.

Keywords: Global North; global value chains; industrial conflict; industrial relations; restructuring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X211009958 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:43:y:2022:i:3:p:1391-1419

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X211009958

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().