Manufacturing informality. Global production networks and the reproduction of informalized labour regimes in Europe’s peripheries

Abstract

This paper investigates the drivers of informal employment persistence in Global Production Networks. Building on a structuralist perspective, it reframes informalization as a tool of labour control and argues that informalization – while influenced by structural economic pressures and local socio-institutional contexts – is ultimately shaped by the employer-employee relations at the workplace. Drawing on Global Production Networks analysis and Labour Process Theory, the paper builds a novel extended structuralist approach to investigate the reproduction of informalization in the garment-footwear production networks in Italy and Albania. Through a multi-sited qualitative fieldwork, the paper shows that informalization dynamics persist as a response to competitive structural pressures only as long as workers are unable or unwilling to resist them. Yet, the situated bargaining power relations at each node of the chain crucially determine the predominant forms of informalization leading to either coercive and despotic, or hegemonic and negotiated, informalized workplace regimes.