Regulating the new urban poor: Local labour market control in an old industrial city

Abstract

There has been considerable debate in recent years about the new forms of labour market policy developing in advanced industrial states, and especially the emergence of neo-liberal workfare regimes in the US and the UK. Conceptually, this has been viewed as part of a new form of employment regulation, based upon compulsion and coercion within a shift towards more flexible labour markets. Whilst in the UK policy might be conceived at the national level, it is at the local scale, within particular contexts, that the new employment initiatives are played out and their impact needs to be assessed. In this paper, attention is drawn to the importance of local labour control regimes, focusing upon how labour market institutions and mechanisms of regulation are developed within particular local historical contexts. In contrast to some accounts, the importance is emphasised of inherited social institutions and practices, both within the workplace and beyond in the sphere of social reproduction, in the development of local labour market regimes. Against more top–down narratives, this leads also to highlighting the importance of local autonomy and action in the emergence of new local labour control regimes as such proposed perspectives rejoin community-based practices with more conventionally perceived work-based struggles. The arguments are illustrated through an examination of a specific set of labour market programmes established to ‘deal’ with the after-effects of deindustrialisation in the city of Glasgow and in particular the need to manage those displaced by the shift from a productivist economy to one increasingly geared towards services and consumption.

Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at a session of the 2004 Work, Employment and Society conference and a seminar in the Department of Geography at the University of Glasgow. The authors wish to thank the discussants at these events as well as Ivan Turok and Nick Bailey for their thoughtful comments.

Notes

1. This argument also serves as a means of emphasising the importance of understanding social agency, as agency becomes more discernible ‘on the ground’. However, such agency does not imply a voluntarism at the expense of neglecting social structures (see for more detail, Thompson, 1978; Herod, 2001). Instead, this intervention is used to refocus labour relations in exactly the way that the term implies, they are relational between capital and labour.

2. Much of the earlier debates around post-Fordism highlighted some of the difficulties of ‘coherence’ and cohesion of regulatory regimes. This is partly accounted for by a perspective which implicitly takes capital and state as key agents, trying to identify a uniform regime to account for capital accumulation. Yet, in the absence of such a coherent regime, people and communities still have to get by, within particular labour market arrangements and institutions; it is such a broader sense of ‘regime’ that we want to employ in the course of this paper.

3. Material for this section in part originates from a PhD thesis (Helms, 2003) which also examined the restructuring of Glasgow's intermediate labour market programmes. For this, a number of officials from respective public-sector agencies were interviewed as well as staff and trainees of one ILM project. Furthermore, the article draws on documentary and secondary analysis.

4. Overall, it is the public sector (with the NHS and Glasgow Housing Association as the biggest investing agencies) that is expected to be responsible for the majority of construction investment in Glasgow between 2002 and 2008 (McGregor et al., 2001).

5. Such understanding of training and the acquisition of new skills is critically discussed by Thompson (2004, p. 30), who in particular emphasises the highly personalised and often generic nature of ‘soft’ social skills seen as increasingly important in recruitment selection over technical skills.

6. The recent wave of national welfare-to-work policies, notably Working Links and Employment Zones, possesses an element of localised variation in order to tailor national policy to local pockets of deprived neighbourhoods (for details, see Department for Work and Pensions, 2004). Nonetheless, the discussed dilemma of innovative local initiatives such as Glasgow Works clearly demonstrates the limitations of local policy initiatives.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gesa Helms

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