The Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP), formerly the Centre on Labour and Global Production (CLGP), draws upon a critical mass of researchers across different disciplinary areas at Queen Mary University of London who are engaged in research on the intersections between workers, enterprises, regulation and sustainability in the world economy. We understand the world economy as constituted by a set of value-creating and -appropriating activities that are rooted in specific geographical and ecological contexts and connected through global networks of commodity and financial flows. Moreover, we recognize that these production and financial networks, including but not only value chains, traverse national boundaries as well as the gendered and racialised hierarchies of so-called reproductive and productive labour. Together, these structures and flows create a diversity of production-consumption relations that are socially and environmentally unsustainable. In other words, we consider the economy to be constructed through socially, historically, spatially and ecologically embedded relations that are necessarily power-laden. As such, the global challenge of sustainability is one which needs to grapple with these deep, historically complex and contemporaneously fraught relations across multiple scales. Within this, the question of labour in the global economy is one of uneven working conditions, labour standards, precarious work, affective labour, unpaid and invisible work, child labour, forms of representation and worker organisation. The role of the state and regulation is seen as crucial to structuring these relations but also to potentially remedying or mitigating their effects.

Any meaningful attempt to study and reach these issues necessarily requires an interdisciplinary social scientific approach. The Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP)  brings together such an interdisciplinary group with diverse disciplinary backgrounds including Development Studies, Economic Geography, Critical Management Studies, International Political Economy, History and Anthropology, and with regional specializations across the global South and North. We are committed to the careful study of actually existing social relations. Our work is theoretically informed but uses theory as a guide to interpret contingent historical-geographical worlds around us, not a pre-determined blueprint.