The rise of labour geography over the last 20 years has ensured that labour politics, worker rights and employment‐related struggles have remained strong themes in economic geography. This article provides an updated review of labour geography's development, charting its expansion from an early focus on organised spatial ‘resistance’ at a range of scales, to a more varied project incorporating a wider range of analytical and empirical inquiries. Despite this progression the paper suggests that work is still needed to address a gap in moral considerations within labour geography as a whole. Specifically a moral economy approach is offered as a means of explaining the decision‐making processes/rationales behind worker actions in the context of particular struggles. This includes a necessary focus on less celebratory, ethical or successful forms of coping with labour market challenges on the part of workers than have typically been discussed in the case studies of labour geography.

Following recent calls for the development of a more embedded sense of labour agency, this paper focuses on the scale of the workplace which is largely absent from recent labour geography debates. Drawing on studies in the labour process tradition, the paper presents empirical research on call centre work in Glasgow, utilising this to revisit the concept of local Labour Control Regimes. We argue that rather than being simply imposed by capital and the state 'from above', workplace control should be seen as the product of a dialectical process of interaction and negotiation between management and labour. Labour's indeterminacy can influence capital in case specific ways as firms adapt to labour agency and selectively tolerate and collude with certain practices and behaviours. Workers' learned behaviours and identities are shown to affect not only recruitment patterns in unexpected ways, but also modes of accepted conduct in call centres. Accordingly, the case is made for the influence of subtle -yet pervasive -worker agency expressed at the micro-scale of the labour process itself. This, it is argued, exerts a degree of 'bottom-up' pressure on key fractions of capital within the local Labour Control Regime.

For the past decade the European Commission has urged EU member states to pursue ‘flexicurity’ policies aimed at achieving employment growth and social inclusion. However, the economic crisis and turn to austerity across the EU has presented the flexicurity model with a substantial challenge. This article argues that since 2008 labour policies across the EU have exhibited shared tendencies, but support for measures that might contribute to the achievement of the security aspects of flexicurity has been substantially weakened. In developing this argument, the article presents findings from a cluster analysis and detailed investigations of labour policies in EU member countries. The article also discusses the implications of the findings for comparative institutional analysis. It highlights differences in the approaches of countries that are commonly treated as members of the same institutional family, as well as similarities in the policies adopted by countries commonly associated with different ‘varieties’ of capitalism.

There are growing concerns over current and future incarnations of routine work, based on the rise of technology and its perceived impact on skill requirements in the labour market. Drawing on Autonomist Marxist (AM) literature, the following article demonstrates how and why workers are likely to play a role in maintaining meaningful forms of work. Complimenting labour process research, which focuses on the role of worker "resistance" in the workplace, we develop a more nuanced perspective on worker agency and the human potential to create meaning through self-governance in even the most unlikely service work encounters. Taking resilience and reworking agencies as subtle forms of "self-valorisation", we show how different spaces of routine work are mobilised for reproducing human connections and values in ways which act in opposition to management's control and the evolution of unpleasant work environments. Riassunto: La natura, presente e futura, del lavoro routinario costituisce una crescente preoccupazione, dato l'aumentato utilizzo della tecnologia e date le competenze specifiche ora richieste dal mercato del lavoro. Il presente articolo si basa sulla letteratura sull'autonomia operaia e dimostra come e perch e i lavoratori possano influenzare la continuata esistenza di forme di lavoro importanti. Contribuendo alla ricerca sul processo del lavoro, la quale si focalizza sulla "resistenza" del lavoratore nel contesto lavorativo, sviluppiamo una prospettiva pi u approfondita sul ruolo del lavoratore e del potenziale umano nella creazione di scelte importanti e autonome sulle attivit a lavorative da intraprendere. Considerando la resilienza e la rielaborazione dei lavoratori come forma di "auto-valorizzazione", mostriamo come in diversi ambienti di lavoro routinario vengano sviluppati nuovi valori e nuove relazioni umane che agiscono in opposizione al controllo manageriale e all'evoluzione di ambienti lavorativi sgradevoli.

There are established difficulties in upholding private standards within global production networks (GPNs) through the use of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs). Taking the case of wine production in South Africa, the article examines labour’s role in leveraging new approaches to labour regulation in the interests of improved working standards and opportunities for labour organising. To do this, the paper adopts an extended take on the GPN framework which focuses on labour’s own networked capabilities. The role of worker agency in forging international connections and new relational geographies between unions and civil society organisations across wine GPNs (in particular between South Africa and Scandinavia) is explored. By applying pressure within and through these networks, workers are shown to encourage new approaches to private governance in the interests of improved worker rights on the ground.