A freshly published open access paper in New Political Economy, co-authored by CELSI researcher Tibor T. Meszmann, foregrounds the question of labour in European reindustrialisation.

A freshly published open access paper in New Political Economy, co-authored by CELSI researcher Tibor T. Meszmann, foregrounds the question of labour in European reindustrialisation. It asks how the cost-cutting requirements that drove neoliberal deindustrialisation combine with current efforts towards industrial onshoring.

The paper uses the EU’s Eastern industrial peripheries as an analytical angle on this question, taking into account the region’s role as a site of automotive outsourcing. The region is now undergoing an intense shift towards reindustrialisation. This shift is driven by interconnected yet competing investments by German and East Asian manufacturers in the EV battery sector.

The paper’s central argument is that the industrial labour regimes emerging under current conditions follow long-term trends: they absorb the cost-cutting and flexibilisation needs of their European industrial core.

Yet a qualitative shift is also apparent. Highly flexible, disciplinary regimes of labour arbitrage are emerging, reliant on private intermediators of global temporary labour. According to the authors, they signal the localisation of labour regimes characteristic of East Asian flexible production systems.

This development is coherent with competitiveness pressures from global industries shaped by neoliberal cost-cutting. However, it contradicts hopes that reindustrialisation can produce economic and social sustainability in Europe.

The paper “Reconfiguring labour regimes in the Eastern industrial peripheries of the EU: a labour perspective on European industrial reorganisation within geoeconomic rivalry”, by Agnes Gagyi, Tamas Gerocs, Tibor T. Meszmann and Linda Szabó, was published online on 28 October 2026.

🔗 Read the full open access paper in New Political Economy at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2026.2751108

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