Labour in Global Production: Reflections on Coxian Insights in a World of Global Value Chains

This essay reflects on Robert W. Cox’s work on global production, labour and labour governance, and considers how his insights might illuminate the present conjuncture for labour in production. I work with an understanding of that conjuncture as involving the rise to pre-eminence of global production networks (GPNs) and global value chains (GVCs) as the contemporary expression of the ongoing globalization of production. The primary tasks of the essay are two-fold: first, to explore the dynamics of labour and power in the GVC-based global economy, with a particular emphasis on labour exploitation; and second, to link these questions to those of the governance of the global economy, focusing on the shift towards transnational private governance as the dominant mode of contemporary governance, and on the evolving strategies of organized labour and the International Labour Organization in that context.