On August 31st, 2025, the Global Sumund Flotilla departed from Genoa, accompanied by 40,000 people. That same evening, one of the leaders of CALP (Autonomous Port Workers' Collective - Collettivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali) announced a port blockade should Israel dare to interfere with the boats. Following an assembly attended by students, workers, and solidarity groups from across the country, the grassroots union USB (Unione Sindacale di Base) proclaimed a general strike for September 22nd. After months of inertia, even the national leadership of the confederal union CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro) announced a national state of agitation for port workers in support of the Flotilla’s humanitarian mission, calling for hours of strike action and demonstrations on September 19th.
For some time now, the European Union (EU) has been facing an interlocking set of challenges aptly described as a “polycrisis,” which has only deepened in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election to the White House. Economic stagnation, deindustrialisation, chronically high energy prices, war in Ukraine and the threat of US abandonment, ageing populations and underfunded healthcare systems, unaffordable housing, right-wing populist surges, and escalating climate breakdown are some of the key dimensions of this polycrisis. Scholarly output understandably struggles to keep pace with Europe’s rapidly unfolding predicament. Much has been written, but very little of it from a critical political economy (CPE) perspective informed by Marxism and Neo- Gramscian theory.
As Israel’s military assault on Gaza escalated in late 2023, with mounting evidence of genocidal intention, Palestinian trade unions and professional associations issued an urgent appeal to workers around the world. They called on international trade unions and workers to “Stop Arming Israel,” urging them to refuse participation in the manufacture, transport, and handling of weapons destined for the Israeli military (Workers in Palestine 2023). Although addressed globally, the call placed particular emphasis on labour movements in states supplying Israel with military and diplomatic support, including the United States, United Kingdom and countries across the European Union.
Existing research on global apparel production networks (GPNs) has focused almost exclusively on the formal sectors of such networks when discussing labour conditions and workers’ agency. Despite being part of the same network, informal post-production apparel waste-handling sectors and their workers remain largely invisible in academic discussions. Drawing on insights from the literature on GPNs and global recycling networks (GRNs), this article develops an analytical approach that connects informal apparel waste work and workers to the formal apparel industry. Using qualitative data, it explores the implications of interconnections between the two segments of an apparel GPN, showing how they relate to ‘forms of harm’ and ‘forms of living’ for workers in Bangladesh’s apparel waste-handling sector. In doing so, the article broadens the labour perspective within the GPN literature and demonstrates that such analysis is essential for any substantial understanding of sustainability in GPNs.
This article develops a theoretical framework for analysing time autonomy among marginalised workers by extending Jean-Daniel Reynaud's social regulation theory in dialogue with Southern theory, epistemologies of the South and critical border studies. It argues that time autonomy is the temporal dimension of regulatory pluralism: when workers exercise autonomous regulation over working time, they pluralise the temporal order. Drawing on 140 interviews with Portuguese posted workers, Chinese factory workers, Malaysian office workers and French teleworkers (2011-2024), the analysis shows how marginalised groups create autonomous regulatory systems that operate alongside, against or outside institutional frameworks. Three concepts emerge: the subsistence- continuity-projection complex, which integrates survival imperatives, intergenerational continuity and future aspirations; regulatory microenvironments, where multiple normative orders coexist without any single order achieving dominance; and adaptive hybridisation, through which imported workplace models are transformed rather than simply implemented. Together, these concepts extend labour sociology by surfacing collective and relational dimensions of time autonomy that Northern frameworks tend to obscure.
