Reconfiguring labour regimes in the Eastern industrial peripheries of the EU: a labour perspective on European industrial reorganisation within geoeconomic rivalry

This paper foregrounds the question of labour in European reindustrialisation, asking how cost-cutting requirements that drove neoliberal deindustrialisation combine with current efforts towards industrial onshoring. We propose the EU’s Eastern industrial peripheries as an analytical angle on this question, given the region’s role as a site of automotive outsourcing, undergoing an intense shift towards reindustrialisation driven by interconnected yet competing investments by German and East Asian manufacturers in the EV battery sector. We argue that while the industrial labour regimes emerging under current conditions exhibit long-term trends by absorbing the cost-cutting and flexibilisation needs of their European industrial core, a qualitative shift is also apparent. Surveying regional trends and presenting an original case study from Hungary’s new battery sector, we claim that currently emerging highly flexible, disciplinary regimes of labour arbitrage reliant on private intermediators of global temporary labour signal the localisation of labour regimes characteristic to East Asian flexible production systems – a development coherent with competitiveness pressures from global industries shaped by neoliberal cost-cutting, but contradicting hopes that reindustrialisation can produce economic and social sustainability in Europe.