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The development of Global Value Chains (GVCs) led by companies in core countries and branched out into peripheral countries through supply relations with local companies or subsidiaries, while responding to a profit maximizing strategy of the former, generates strong competition between the latter. In order to remain competitive and maintain these supply relationships, these must find a way to reduce costs while maintaining profit margins.
New technologies and models of labour organization provide an extremely effective tool to achieve the goal, through a greater extraction of relative surplus value and thus an increase in the rate of exploitation.
The aim of the present paper is twofold. First of all, it aims at investigating what happened to productivity, both in Italy and Germany, over the last two decades. The analysis is carried out in terms of vertically integrated sectors—see (Pasinetti, 1973, 1981, 1988; Sraffa, 1960).
The second purpose of this article is to investigate the above mentioned issues by means of workers’ enquiry, a methodology widely developed in the Italian tradition, in particular from the experience of Quaderni Rossi.