continental European state-societies, unfavourably with the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, on the basis of its incremental restructuring programme ‘at the margins’: ‘Instead of relaxing general employment protection provisions, some governments have preferred to introduce short-term contracts and liberalise employment protection for part-time workers in small firms (e.g. Germany, France, Belgium)’ (OECD, 1997: 8). Despite some apparent concessions to the discourse of flexibility, seen for example in greater devolution of bargaining to the workplace and wage
so-called ‘formal’ waste management with livelihoods have resulted in a proliferation of monthly clean-ups, media campaigns, work opportunity initiatives and community procurement schemes. In a context where risks of automation and surplus labour forces are met with challenges of municipal capacity (Palmer et al., 2017 ), community waste management efforts are an important tool within the commodification of waste and the devolution of state service provision, particularly in marginalised communities. Although national clean-up days and
. Neo-liberal discourses of hyperflexibility advocate the individualisation of the firm and the devolution of responsibility and autonomy to the level of immediate managerial production decisions. Indeed, it could be said that such discourses rely upon the abstraction of the firm from its wider relationship with state-society. The restructuring activities and debates within German and British manufacturing firms reflect and inform a web of power that extends seamlessly into banks, education institutions and civil society. The webs of power that pull together the
making skilled workers the actual employers of their unskilled helpers. In the cotton industry, for instance, about twothirds of the boys and one-third of the girls were thus ‘in the direct employ of operatives’ and hence more closely watched. (Hobsbawm, 1962: 66–67) The devolution of responsibility through supply chains and contract labour is evident in this depiction of labour discipline in early British industrialisation. I am not suggesting that contemporary discourse of deregulation and labour flexibility simply follows from historical practices in a linear or