Labor Studies

Pada Hari Buruh 1 Mei lalu, ada satu topik menyempil yang cukup viral, yaitu tentang ‘buruh desain’. Seorang kartunis asal Semarang, melalui akun Instagram Gumpnhell, membagikan ilustrasi kartunnya berjudul “1 Mei, Demo Buruh Desain” yang
menggambarkan suasana ketika ratusan pekerja desain melakukan demo di jalanan. Gambar ini cukup menyentak mereka yang tidak terlibat dalam keseharian serta merasakan asam garam dan drama kehidupan pekerja desain. Pasalnya, melalui media massa di Indonesia yang juga berkisar pada industri kreatif, dengan para pekerja desain tersebut turut terhitung di dalamnya, tampak berkesan “baik-baik saja.”

This article documents how job readiness programs-as anchors of the devolved organizational landscape of neoliberal poverty governance in the United States-endeavor to instill within the poor not simply the virtue of work, but the virtue of thrift, and thus orient them to "both sides of the paycheck." Using a comparative ethnographic study of two community-based, government-funded nonprofit job readiness programs, we show that this pedagogic focus on budgeting is central to the overall goal of conditioning clients to embrace and endure a degraded labor market. Recognizing that most participants will remain poor with or without low-wage employment, these programs suggest that it is as crafty consumers that participants may retake control of their lives. Despite the programs' differing target populations and racialized and gendered logics, both attempt to accommodate participants to the dictates of the neoliberal economic order: jobs are hard to find and, even if you get one, wages will not be enough.

Using a case study of Alberta, Canada, this paper demonstrates how a geographic critique of fossil capitalism helps elucidate the tensions shaping tar sands development. Conflicts over pipelines and Indigenous territorial claims are challenging development trajectories, as tar sands companies need to expand access to markets in order to expand production. While these conflicts are now well recognised, there are also broader dynamics shaping development. States face a rentier's dilemma, relying on capital investments to realise resource value. Political responses to the emerging climate crisis undercut the profitability of hydrocarbon extraction. The automation of production undermines the industrial compromise between hydrocarbon labour and capital. Ultimately, the crises of fossil capitalism require a radical transformation within or beyond capital relations. To mobilise against the tar sands, organisers must recognise the tensions underpinning it, developing strategies that address ecological concerns and the economic plight of those dispossessed and abandoned by carbon extraction.

Clean Clothes Campaign Country Profile on wages and labor conditions in done-for-brands garment sector in Ukraine.

Research findings point that "made in Europe" myth fails. Brand clothes, produced next door to the consumption countries, are not produced in far better conditions or with far bettwer wages.

Since the mid-2000s, India has been beset by widespread farmer protests against land dispossession. Dispossession Without Development demonstrates that beneath these conflicts lay a profound shift in regimes of dispossession. While the postcolonial Indian state dispossessed land mostly for public-sector industry and infrastructure, since the 1990s state governments have become land brokers for private real estate capital. Using the case of a village in Rajasthan that was dispossessed for a private Special Economic Zone, the book ethnographically illustrates the exclusionary trajectory of capitalism driving dispossession in contemporary India. Taking us into the lives of diverse villagers in "Rajpura," the book meticulously documents the destruction of agricultural livelihoods, the marginalization of rural labor, the spatial uneveness of infrastructure provision, and the dramatic consequences of real estate speculation for social inequality and village politics. Illuminating the structural underpinnings of land struggles in contemporary India, this book will resonate in any place where "land grabs" have fueled conflict in recent years.

A body changed by illness demands new narrative modes. In this article, I use auto theory to foreground my experience of struggling with symptoms of endometriosis. I enter into conversation with feminist disability scholars who have theorized chronic illness and endometriosis as a disability, and think through some of the socio-economic
effects of doing so, particularly within academia. I examine how an experimental arts-based practice can be a method of narrating chronic illness. Situated within a disability art aesthetic, I use textiles to represent a chronic pain episode. These images argue for the inherent worthiness of non-normative female embodiment.

America’s Army, the official and free downloadable US Army video game franchise, has been continually updated with new versions for the past twelve years. Formerly managed out of the Office for Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA) at West Point, it has been an immersive, interactive advertisement for the Army, resting its
rationale within in a military desire to recruit in a cost-effective way a new kind of ‘talented’ soldier. This reflects a military desire to, in the words of an OEMA publication, ‘move the Army beyond personnel management to talent management’. Drawing on a 2009 interview with OEMA director Colonel Casey Wardynski (retired), I argue that America’s Army has been primarily oriented towards recruiting the labour of a new kind of post-Fordist soldier – one who is part of the growing mass of immaterial labourers who can be identified as ‘the cognitariat’.

In socialist Yugoslavia work and labor were central to the legitimacy of the state and government, and represented the basis of social and political rights. Such position of labor was underpinned by social and cultural institutions that either disappeared or underwent dramatic transformation with the restoration of capitalism. This chapter traces the emergence of regional class cultures in relation to print and literacy in the 19th century, and offers a look at one subsequent institutional  development under socialism—factory newspapers. The chapter revolves around the weekly paper of one of the biggest industrial systems in Yugoslavia, Borovo. This was the oldest factory newspaper in the country. The aim of the essay is twofold: to show how the social transformation of the time was registered in the newspaper, and to reflect on the ways in which a cultural form participated in the longer process of class formation.

(Capítulo 5. Páginas 100-122) La propuesta teórico-metodológica del configuracionismo es útil para acercarse, comprender y explicar fenómenos complejos empíricos como es el de la gestión ambiental en la industria de autopartes en Querétaro, México. Es coherente con supuestos ontológicos y epistemológicos de una investigación cualitativa con perspectiva multidisciplinaria como la aquí abordada que no menosprecia el dato; permite considerar niveles de análisis macro, meso y micro, que están entrelazados, así como dar cuenta de lo que ocurre en un espacio geográfico concreto (Querétaro) al interior de una industria global como es la automotriz, pero siempre asentada localmente, con gran impacto para la economía local por los flujos de capital y mercancías que pone en circulación y, desde luego, por las fuentes de empleos que genera. También permite considerar la contradicción presente al interior del discurso y práctica de la relación economía-ambiente-sociedad.

On 12-15 April 2023 the 14th European Social Science History Conference will take place in Gothenburg (Sweden) – https://esshc.socialhistory.org/. The ESSHC brings together scholars interested in explaining historical phenomena using the methods of the social sciences. The conference is characterized by a lively exchange in many small groups, rather than by formal plenary sessions. It is organized in a large number of networks that cover specific fields of interest. The conference language is English. See for full details: http://esshc.socialhistory.org/guidelines. The deadline for proposing abstracts is 15 April 2022.

This article reviews conventional theories about various aspects of labor migration: Its origins, stability over time, and patterns of migrant settlement. For each of these aspects, we provide alternative explanatory hypotheses derived from the notions of increasing articulation of the international system and the social embeddedness of its various subprocesses, including labor flows. A typology of sources and outcomes of contemporary immigration is presented as an heuristic device to organize the diversity of such movements as described in the empirical literature.

Звіт дослідження про умови та оплату праці в українській швейній індустрії, яка шиє одяг для західних брендів. Результати дослідження вказують на те, що робота в цьому секторі економіки в Україні мало відрізняється від класичних "потогінних фабрик", де шиють брендовий одяг.
Дослідження проведено в рамках Clean Clothes Campaign, за підтримки Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

This paper examines the transformation collective bargaining institutions and the weakening of labour market protection in Greece under the auspices of austerity since the onset of the Eurozone Crisis. The paper situates the reforms associated with the Troika backed Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) within the broader context of labour market reform in Greece and Europe. It examines the impact of these reforms on the Greek labour market and its system of industrial relations. Neoliberal structural reforms have resulted in the disorganized decentralization of collective bargaining and the weakening of employment protection. Sectoral and occupational collective bargaining has all but collapsed and Greek trade unions significantly weakened. On top of this, new forms of Eurozone governance have been implemented to further entrench neoliberalism and embed austerity in national level institutions. The research contributes to debates on labour market flexibility and the neoliberal transformation of Southern European labour markets in the context of the Eurozone crisis. Using the most recent data, the paper demonstrates how labour market and collective bargaining reforms have little to do with reducing public sector spending and more to do with disciplining Greek labour.

Social insurance and employee benefits are key elements of society's safety net for workers. Social Security, although popular and successful, is under attack by critics who advocate privatization and benefit cuts. In health care, the United States has charted a course unique in the industrial world: 110 years after the debut of national health insurance in Europe, the US still lacks comprehensive coverage, spends a higher proportion of its gross domestic product on medical care than any other nation, and fails to insure 44 million people.

Este texto aborda el debate, teórico-político, entre la visión autonomista
y la visión marxista de la reproducción social. Para hacerlo, nos basamos en el reciente dossier publicado por la revista Radical Philosophy “Social Reproduction Theory”, cuya presentación está escrita por Silvia Federici y su artículo teórico por Alessandra Mezzadri. El núcleo duro del dossier está dirigido a polemizar con las posiciones sostenidas en el libro de Tithi Bhattacharya Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Opression. Presentamos aquí una “crítica
de la crítica” para proponer una lectura de la Teoría de la Reproducción Social en tanto teoría de la relación entre producción y reproducción en la sociedad capitalista.

This course covers labor history, from the Civil War through the 1980s, and current problems having to do with the structure, culture, and organization of working life in the US. We will be paying special attention to ways that work is structured by race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class strata, and region, and the implications this has for workers’ self-organization. The course will also be attentive to the relationship between the ways capitalism organizes workers and work and the way workers organize themselves.

The primary organizational vehicle for workers’ self-organization is the union, and a lot of this course will deal with the history, struggles, and organizing of US unions. We’ll also look at non-traditional workers’ organizations such as workers’ centers, consider relationships between students and workers, and discuss areas of work which are particularly important to contemporary capitalism, several of which pose a challenge for traditional models of worker organization. We’ll think about unfree and domestic labor, which are often accorded a marginal status compared to that of formal, paid labor. The course will examine critiques of unions which have been particularly sharp in the past few years, especially with respect to public sector workers and teachers unions, and how those workers have responded. We will consider the impact of globalization on work and labor movements.

In this article I argue that the Chinese state is responding to tensions wrought by high-speed growth by attempting to develop a form of technocratic biopolitics I refer to as 'just-in-time (JIT) urbanization'. Mirroring techniques of the Toyota Production System (of which JIT is a constituent element), large Chinese cities have sought to avoid the costs associated with the production and warehousing of surplus populations. Under this system, migrants are granted access to local citizenship and public education for their children if they fulfill a specific, state-determined, need in the labor market. The hope is to be able to precisely deploy specific kinds of labor power as needed, at as low a cost as possible, while avoiding waste, overpopulation, and (presumed) attendant political chaos. The social consequence of this approach is that nominally public resources such as education have been funneled to elites in what I term an 'inverted means test'.

This paper tackles the current challenges to private sector unionism in the United States in light of Catholic social teaching (CST). The focus of the study is unionism in the private sector where the fall-off in membership is observed. CST is contained in a wide variety of official documents of the Catholic Church, in particular papal encyclicals, which present ethical norms for economic life in response to the changing realities of the modern world. The study begins with an analysis of the concrete situation: the causes of decline in union membership. It is followed by an ethical reflection on CST’s perspectives and exploration of practices, strategies, and policies that can help reverse the ongoing trend of union decline and revitalize the labor movement in the country. The paper argues that unions are good in themselves as an expression of the workers’ right to associate and instrumentally good as they invoke such values as the dignity of work, solidarity, subsidiarity, common good, and economic equality. While it has been proven that workers and society as a whole gain material benefits from effective unionization, focus on intangible benefits and moral principles offered by CST may give labor organizing a new impetus and inspiration.

"Around thirty thousand employees of state enterprises were relieved of the jobs owing to industrial sickness or privatization in Andhra Pradesh. These units in some locations were hub of the economic activity in the region and consequently with their closure a larger section of the population in the area are adversely affected. Job loss issue is a new social problem in the context of globalization and privatization and needs to be acknowledged as an important area of policy concern and social action. The problem is not confined to mere government enterprises but also the private sector.

The status of post job-loss livelihoods, especially in weak economies like the Antargaon situation, is important to understand how the life world is redefined by the social status of the affected sections. Many have been relocated with the repatriates going to Tamil Nadu and some members of their family still living in Antargaon expecting payment of arrears and reopening of the unit. There is severe immiserisation and casualisation towards downwards mobility including occupational shift towards farm employment. Local workers have attempted find livelihoods in wage labour, farming, caste occupations and petty trade. Incomes have drastically fallen down compared to their earlier earnings.

Job loss is both economic and social problem. Some of the public enterprises have social obligations besides economic functions. The issues of job loss as an emerging social problem is examined in the context of Andhra Pradesh and a detailed assessment of the complexity is presented based on the case study. After a decade the government had paid job severance compensation and offered vocational training measures to the affected workers still living in Antargaon and surrounding area. Capacity building and job loss trauma mitigation measures need to be local and cultural specific in order to be effective. The paper also examines the pattern of changing livelihoods owing to closure of an enterprise and draws conclusions for strengthening the community effort in addressing the new social problem."

In her essay, “People and their Bodies,” Judith Thomson writes an evaluation of several formulations of the psychological criterion for personal identity and attempts a strategy of criticizing each formulation of the psychological theory. This is done in order to conclude that a physical theory must be the only remaining viable sufficient candidate for explaining personal identity that is both necessary and sufficient, despite its theoretical weaknesses. This paper seeks to analyze Thomson's critique and explain why her chosen formulations of psychological criterion are inadequate and easy to refine against some of her rather hasty objections. In addition, counterarguments in favor of an 'impure' psychological criterion for personal identity are presented in the hopes of clarifying the philosophical discourse.

Se presenta un panorama general de los efectos del
covid-19 sobre las actividades laborales, el análisis
establece tres cortes periódicos de la evolución de la
pandemia y del trabajo durante el año 2020. El
punto de partida es lo anecdótico: la sorpresa del
surgimiento y expansión del virus, así como de los
errores en el diagnóstico y pronóstico de la
profundidad e intensidad de la contingencia
sanitaria por parte del gobierno mexicano, que
vulneró la economía mexicana y las condiciones de
vida de los trabajadores. Los principales resultados
apuntan hacia un proceso grave de intensificación
de la precariedad laboral, con crecimiento en el
desempleo abierto y en sus formas disfrazadas
(empleo parcial, paros técnicos, subempleo). El
artículo cierra con algunas ideas en torno a las
perspectivas laborales de mediano y largo plazo,
especialmente en lo que refiere al uso de la
tecnología en las actividades laborales en casa.