This paper investigates how contemporary labour-capital conflicts in the Cerrado and Amazon biomes of Brazil are centred on the expansion of value from land via dispossession and land titling, and the extraction of value through financial mechanisms that enhance the current and future rent from landholdings. Understanding the consequent territorial struggles between traditional collective ownership on the one hand, and private individual and corporate value capture on the other requires a departure from incumbent capital-(salaried) labour analyses in value chain studies. Resistance to further land capture for speculation reveals inter-and intra-class class tensions, and the facilitative role of the state in validating illicitly grabbed resources. Despite the adverse political conditions in Brazil, there are modest, but significant gains by autonomous land occupations and demarcations in confronting capital expansion. In the face of intensified land grabbing, violent threats, and the laundering of illicit resource extraction, the two cases presented open up new dimensions of, and possibilities for, capital-labour struggles linked to commodity expansion and extraction on resource-rich frontiers.

In the context of the working-class backlash against free trade represented by Brexit, the recent surge of right-wing political parties in Europe and the 2016 US presidential election, it is timely to take stock of the threats to jobs and wages posed by recent negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The European Commission selectively relied on econometric analyses, predicting a positive impact of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Its proposed legal text on ‘Trade and sustainable development’ fell short of the European Parliament’s negotiating guidelines, which themselves failed to ensure protection of labour standards. The activities of corporate lobbies threatened the effective protection of workers’ rights. Major risks to workers’ rights are posed by discrepancies between US and European Union labour and social law and labour standards. The most recent legal text lacks compliance monitoring provisions and sanction mechanisms against member states failing to ratify core labour conventions. The investment court system does not resolve the problems of the discredited investor-state dispute settlement mechanism for which it is the proposed replacement. The year 2016 has provided a foretaste of the dislocation likely from trade and investment regulation that sees social and environmental standards and labour rights simply as barriers to corporate profits.

This paper builds an estimation model to test whether improved labour standards necessarily lead firms to send work offshore to countries with lower wages and fewer employment protections; or improved labour standards influence the labour market, where with time, firms attract more skilled workers, which help deter outward foreign direct investment (FDI). When more firms comply with improved labour standards, the industrial relations climate also improves as non-compliance usually causes labour unrest. Using a model built on pooled cross-sectional time-series data from 2008–17, we studied the role of changes in labour unrest and the percentage of skilled workers in the labour force in predicting outward FDI in Taiwan. Per our estimation model, we found the percentage of skilled workers steadily increased as Taiwan maintained improved labour standards. The increase in skilled workers also increased labour costs making it challenging for firms to stay onshore. However, skilled workers helped firms improve productivity, which justified increased labour costs. As a result, firms in Taiwan that complied with labour standards found it less challenging to pay higher wages and stayed onshore.

Irresponsible lending practices on the part of financial institutions and proliferation of tradable derivatives were key causal agents of the 2008 financial crisis. However, it is less clear why, historically, loose credit arrangements were so widespread. Somewhat misleadingly, much conjecture has laid blame at the feet of financial institutions themselves. While it is true that duplicitous and even corrupt lending practices were consequential antecedents of the crisis, a legacy commitment to certain – laudable – elements of New-Dealism created context for these elements to become established. To understand really what went wrong, it is necessary to look back before the 2000s and appreciate the interaction that was occurring between a long-term policy commitment to neoliberalism and piecemeal/fragmented application of approaches that aimed to assist financially disadvantaged people. Using the analogy of heart-attack pathology to guide some of its analysis, this essay argues for better policy-integration.

This article explores the UK vote in 2016 to exit the European Union, colloquially known as ‘Brexit’. Brexit has been portrayed as a British backlash against globalisation and a desire for a reassertion of sovereignty by the UK as a nation-state. In this context, a vote to leave the European Union has been regarded by its protagonists as a vote to ‘take back control’ to ‘make our own laws’ and ‘let in [only] who we want’. We take a particular interest in the stance of key ‘Brexiteers’ in the UK towards regulation, with the example of the labour market. The article commences by assessing the notion of Brexit as a means to secure further market liberalisation. This analysis is then followed by an account of migration as a key issue, the withdrawal process and likely future trajectory of Brexit. We argue that in contrast to the expectations of those who voted Leave in 2016, the UK as a mid-sized open economy will be a rule-taker and will either remain in the European regulatory orbit, or otherwise drift into the American one.

With economic reform, in China, labour turnover of seafarers became more possible. However, little attention has been paid to its consequences. A limited literature indicates that Chinese seafarers may leave state-owned enterprises to become freelance seafarers, working in the global labour market for better wages and employment conditions. There have been predictions of a substantial increase in seafarer export, with China becoming the top labour supplier to the global maritime industry. However, such expectations have been largely unmet. Through 157 qualitative interviews with seafarers and managers in Chinese ship crewing agencies, we explore some reasons why this may be so. The findings suggest that Chinese seafarers are in fact limited in their willingness and ability to leave their companies. This is due to a complex mixture of organisational, regulatory, infrastructural and personal contexts that are their everyday experience of work in China. Analysis further suggests that the underdevelopment of a national regulatory infrastructure and welfare support mechanism for seafarers, along with poor implementation of the Maritime Labour Convention 2006, combine to limit the extent of the reform of the Chinese seafaring labour market. Together, these factors help to explain why China’s seafaring labour export has been far lower than anticipated.

The past 25 years have been characterised by a surge in international trade as economies have become increasingly inter-linked. In many advanced economies this surge has been associated with increased import competition from low-wage economies. This paper explores the effects of such competition on manufacturing jobs in the UK. We consider two developments that influenced the nature of international trade: the ascendency of China as an important player in global markets and the accession to the European Union of a number of Eastern European economies in 2004. Both of these changes were associated with a shift in trade regimes and led to a sharp rise in import competition in particular UK manufacturing sectors. We find that these changes are likely to have hastened the decline of UK manufacturing.