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This article explores disparities emerging under localized collective ('enterprise') bargaining in Australia, and relates these to regional economic prospects. The purpose is to highlight how, driven by a rhetoric of globalization and international competitiveness, the 'rescaling' of wage regulation is recasting workers' well-being and shifting the politics of regional development. This is situated in the context of growing cross-disciplinary dialogue concerning the spatiality of labour (industrial) relations. With the effects of the first decade of enterprise bargaining becoming discernible, the article considers the longer-term influence of increasing wage disparity produced by spatially disaggregated wage setting. The article backgrounds regional economic development in Australia, noting the heritage of a near-century of centralized wage institutions as a possible contributor to the very pronounced metropolitan primacy that has been established in this country. It questions whether increasing geographical wage disparity in Australia will act as a catalyst to rural and regional viability. The challenge for labour is to anticipate, find and create appropriate scales of action that can counter these outcomes.

The literature on global production networks (GPNs) and global commodity/value chains has generally conceptualised small firms as being at the bottom of the commodity chain hierarchy, and thus subordinate to larger firms. As a consequence, small firms and their employees are typically imagined to be fairly powerless to shape the structure of GPNs. By way of contrast, in this paper we argue that small firms and their employees are not lacking in the capacity to affect the way GPNs and commodity chains develop, but can in fact shape them in potentially significant ways. This recognition becomes evident if, instead of starting any analysis of small firms in GPNs with the governance structures of production networks or managerial strategies, we instead start the analysis with the organisation and control of the labour process in concrete settings, and tie this to broader understandings of uneven and combined development under capitalism.

Theorists of work and employment (W&E) practices should more seriously engage with literatures concerning how space is constitutive of social praxis. Rather than simply serving as a stage upon which social life is played out or being merely a reflection of social relations, the construction of the economic landscape in particular ways is fundamental to how social systems function. Struggles over space are a central dynamic in W&E practices as different actors engage with the economic landscape to ensure their 'geographical vision' is emplaced in that landscape. Furthermore, conflicts over W&E practices frequently revolve around the spatial (re)scaling of such practices (as when collective bargaining is 'decentralized'). Consequently, an important key to better theorizing W&E practices is understanding how the various spatial scales at which these operate are socially constructed and discursively represented.