Battery Production in Europe – Empirical research and theoretical reflections on labor and center-periphery relations

Résumé:

If we follow Michael Burawoy (1983), capitalist production and working conditions are a priori bound to (state) policy. Hence, to understand the very dynamic field of European battery production (particularly first the emerging labour regimes in the Chinese and Korean production sites, and second the continuing lag of the European battery industry behind Asia), it is necessary to understand the contemporary mode of European political economy.

In the paper, I will follow the approach of Europeanization as a European formation of competition states, as was developed by the Amsterdam School and taken up by critical geography (Apeldoorn 2002; Apeldoorn et al. 2009; Agnew 2001 Peck 2002; Brenner 2004). This approach describes a specific mode of European integration where some economic state functions, in particular freedom of investment, are upscaled (Europeanized), while social and industrial policies remain national and regional matters and are – moreover – downscaled (particularized, flexibilized). Transnational production, hence Global Production Networks like nowadays battery production networks, are crucial in this concept because inner-European sociospatial unevenness is fundamental for their investment strategies and labor governance (Hürtgen 2021).

With regard to battery production, the approach of Europe as a competitive state formation architecture allows a dynamic view on European center-periphery relations that includes regional peripherization and its low wage and exhausting labour regimes.The approach can explain (peripherized) working conditions in European production sites of companies like CATL, Samsung or Tesla beyond a rather cultural or “ethnic” entrepreneurship model (see Ceccagno / Sacchetto 2020). In addition, we can better understand why the continuing lag of the European battery industry capacity behind Asia is a structural feature that takes us back to an integration model based essentially on (state) political unevenness.
In my talk I will outline the theoretical part only very briefly for then presenting empirical research material that was collected in the research project Battery manufacturing in East Asia and Europe: Networks and Regimes of Labor and Production (located at the Institute of Research in Frankfurt and funded by Hans Böckler Foundation). I will give deeper exemplary insights from battery production in Hungary, East Germany and Poland, respectively the labor regimes in battery production sites of CATL, Samsung and Tesla.

I then will empirically turn to the European Battery Booster Strategy that the European Commission will release in March, and where we attended the Consultative Commission on Industrial Change steering group which is part of the European Economic and Social Committee as academic adviser. Insights show that the proclaimed “booster” is a relatively half-hearted one, it is being slowed down by structural competition and inequality within European nation states. In order to actually implement a “booster” as well as fundamentally better working conditions in Europeans battery production, the current competitive architecture of European integration would have to be questioned.

References:

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Apeldoorn, Bastiaan van (2002) Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration. London/New York: Routledge.
Apeldoorn, Bastiaan van, Jan Drahokoupil, and Laura Horn (eds.) 2009. "Contradictions and limits of neoliberal European governance: from Lisbon to Lisbon." Basingstoke [ua]: Palgrave Macmillan (2009).
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Ceccagno, Antonella, and Devi Sacchetto. "A Chinese model for labour in Europe?." International Migration 58.3 (2020): 73-86.
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