Paper short abstract:

Focusing on an automotive factory in Romania, the paper suggests labour fragmentation has been driven by an increasingly feeble and asymmetrical supply network, which failed to absorb local labour and allowed the emergence of regional employers that are too big to fail.

Paper long abstract:

While taking a stroll in the streets of the Southern Romanian city of Craiova, it is impossible to miss the graffiti stating: "The new Labour Code = the reinvention of slavery". Conspicuously displayed in some of the most important intersections, the dark green letters stand witness for a historical turn in the Romanian tripartite relation between labour, capital, and the state: the 2011 modification of the country's Labour Law. Hailed by local and foreign capital as evidence for the Romanian government's commitment to flexibility, it was denounced by the trade unions as "a return to the dark 19th century". Despite the unions' unequivocal stance, their actual opposition to the newly introduced changes was minimal, confirming the erosion in Romanian labour's capacity to defend its interests.

My paper analyses the dialectical relationship between the fragmentation of labour's interests and the weakening of the local and national supplier network in car industry since the mid-2000s. Focusing on an automotive factory in Romania and on the expansion/contraction moments of its horizontal relations in the territory, I suggest that on the ground, labour decline has been driven by an increasingly feeble and asymmetrical supply network, which failed to absorb local labour and allowed the emergence of regional employers that are too big to fail. Following Marx, these entanglements can be seen as antinomic processes within which the elusive home market has been articulated, disarticulated, and rearticulated around contradictory structural necessities of capitalist production relations, as well as around conflicting rights, belongings, and solidarities.