Temporary Work, Agencies and Unfree Labour

Temporary Work, Agencies and Unfree Labour
Author: Judy Fudge
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2013-08-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1136278486

Unfree labor has not disappeared from advanced capitalist economies. In this sense the debates among and between Marxist and orthodox economic historians about the incompatibility of capitalism and unfree labor are moot: the International Labour Organisation has identified forced, coerced, and unfree labor as a contemporary issue of global concern. Previously hidden forms of unfree labor have emerged in parallel with several other well-documented trends affecting labor conditions, rights, and modes of regulation. These evolving types of unfree labor include the increasing normalization of contingent work (and, by extension, the undermining of the standard contract of employment), and an increase in labor intermediation. The normative, political, and numerical rise of temporary employment agencies in many countries in the last three decades is indicative of these trends. It is in the context of this rapidly changing landscape that this book consolidates and expands on research designed to understand new institutions for work in the global era. This edited collection provides a theoretical and empirical exploration of the links between unfree labor, intermediation, and modes of regulation, with particular focus on the evolving institutional forms and political-economic contexts that have been implicated in, and shaped by, the ascendency of temp agencies. What is distinctive about this collection is this bi-focal lens: it makes a substantial theoretical contribution by linking disparate literatures on, and debates about, the co-evolution of contingent work and unfree labor, new forms of labor intermediation, and different regulatory approaches; but it further lays the foundation for this theory in a series of empirically rich and geographically diverse case studies. This integrative approach is grounded in a cross-national comparative framework, using this approach as the basis for assessing how, and to what extent, temporary agency work can be considered unfree wage labor

Bondage

Bondage
Author: Alessandro Stanziani
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2014-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782382518

For the first time, this book provides the global history of labor in Central Eurasia, Russia, Europe, and the Indian Ocean between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. It contests common views on free and unfree labor, and compares the latter to many Western countries where wage conditions resembled those of domestic servants. This gave rise to extreme forms of dependency in the colonies, not only under slavery, but also afterwards in form of indentured labor in the Indian Ocean and obligatory labor in Africa. Stanziani shows that unfree labor and forms of economic coercion were perfectly compatible with market development and capitalism, proven by the consistent economic growth that took place all over Eurasia between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. This growth was labor intensive: commercial expansion, transformations in agriculture, and the first industrial revolution required more labor, not less. Finally, Stanziani demonstrates that this world did not collapse after the French Revolution or the British industrial revolution, as is commonly assumed, but instead between 1870 and 1914, with the second industrial revolution and the rise of the welfare state.

Unfree

Unfree
Author: Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-10-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 150362966X

A stirring account of the experiences of migrant domestic workers, and what freedom, abuse, and power mean within a vast contract labor system. In the United Arab Emirates, there is an employment sponsorship system known as the kafala. Migrant domestic workers within it must solely work for their employer, secure their approval to leave the country, and obtain their consent to terminate a job. In Unfree, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas examines the labor of women from the Philippines, who represent the largest domestic workforce in the country. She challenges presiding ideas about the kafala, arguing that its reduction to human trafficking is, at best, unproductive, and at worst damaging to genuine efforts to regulate this system that impacts tens of millions of domestic workers across the globe. The kafala system technically renders migrant workers unfree as they are made subject to the arbitrary authority of their employer. Not surprisingly, it has been the focus of intense scrutiny and criticism from human rights advocates and scholars. Yet, contrary to their claims, Parreñas argues that most employers do not abuse domestic workers or maximize the extraction of their labor. Still, the outrage elicited by this possibility dominates much of public discourse and overshadows the more mundane reality of domestic work in the region. Drawing on unparalleled data collected over 4 years,this book diverges from previous studies as it establishes that the kafala system does not necessarily result in abuse, but instead leads to the absence of labor standards. This absence is reflected in the diversity of work conditions across households, ranging from dehumanizing treatment, infantilization, to respect and recognition of domestic workers. Unfree shows how various stakeholders, including sending and receiving states, NGOs, inter-governmental organizations, employers and domestic workers, project moral standards to guide the unregulated labor of domestic work. They can mitigate or aggravate the arbitrary authority of employers. Parreñas offers a deft and rich portrait of how morals mediate work on the ground, warning against the dangers of reducing unfreedom to structural violence.

Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914

Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914
Author: Gershon Shafir
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1996-08-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520917415

Gershon Shafir challenges the heroic myths about the foundation of the State of Israel by investigating the struggle to control land and labor during the early Zionist enterprise. He argues that it was not the imported Zionist ideas that were responsible for the character of the Israeli state, but the particular conditions of the local conflict between the European "settlers" and the Palestinian Arab population.

Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire

Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire
Author: Donald Quataert
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781845451349

Table of Contents 1 Introduction and historiographical essay 1 2 The Ottoman coal coast 20 3 Coal miners at work : jobs, recruitment, and wages 52 4 "Like slaves in colonial countries" : working conditions in the coalfield 80 5 Ties that bind : village-mine relations 95 6 Military duty and mine work : the blurred vocations of Ottoman soldier-workers 129 7 Methane, rockfalls, and other disasters : accidents at the mines 150 8 Victims and agents : confronting death and safety in the mines 184 9 Wartime in the coalfield 206 10 Conclusion 227 Appendix on the reporting of accidents 235.

Getting the Goods

Getting the Goods
Author: Edna Bonacich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2011-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0801459478

In Getting the Goods, Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson focus on the Southern California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach—which together receive 40 percent of the nearly $2 trillion worth of goods imported annually to the United States—to examine the impact of the logistics revolution on workers in transportation and distribution. Built around the invention of shipping containers and communications technology, the logistics revolution has enabled giant retailers like Wal-Mart and Target to sell cheap consumer products made using low-wage labor in developing countries. The goods are shipped through an efficient, low-cost, intermodal freight system, in which containers are moved from factories in Asia to distribution centers across the United States without ever being opened. Bonacich and Wilson follow the flow of imports from Asian factories, exploring the roles of importers, container shipping companies, the ports, railroad and trucking companies, and warehouses. At each stage, Getting the Goods raises important questions about how the logistics revolution affects logistics workers. Drawing extensively on interviews with workers and managers at all levels of the supply chain, on industry reports, and on economic data, Bonacich and Wilson find that, in general, conditions have deteriorated for workers. But they also discover that changes in the system of production and distribution provide new strategic opportunities for labor to gain power. A much-needed corrective to both uncritical celebrations of containerization and the global economy and pessimistic predictions about the future of the U.S. labor movement, Getting the Goods will become required reading for scholars and students in sociology, political economy, and labor studies.

Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Slavery

Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Slavery
Author: Prabha Kotiswaran
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-12-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781316613610

In the decades following the globalization of the world economy, trafficking, forced labor and modern slavery have emerged as significant global problems. States negotiated the Palermo Protocol in 2000 under which they agreed to criminalize trafficking, primarily understood as an issue of serious organized crime. Sixteen years later, leading academics, activists and policy makers from international organizations come together in this edited volume and adopt an inter-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach to revisit trafficking through the lens of labor migration and extreme exploitation and, in the process, rethink the law and governance of trafficking. This volume considers many key factors, including the evolving international law on trafficking, the relationship between trafficking, slavery, indenture and domestic migration law and policy as well as newly emergent techniques of governance, including indicators, all with a view to furthering prospects for lasting economic justice in a globalized world.

A Global Alliance Against Forced Labour

A Global Alliance Against Forced Labour
Author: International Labour Office
Publisher: International Labour Organization
Total Pages: 100
Release: 2005
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9221153606

This report is an account of contemporary forced labour to date. It provides the first global and regional estimates by an international organization of forced labour in the world today, including the number of people affected and how many of them are victims of trafficking, as well as of the profits made by the criminals exploiting trafficked workers.Based on these data, the report highlights the gravity of the problem of forced labour. From this data emerges three major categories of forced labour: forced labour imposed by the State for economic, political or other purposes, forced labour linked to poverty and discrimination and forced labour that arises from migration and trafficking of workers across the world, often associated with globalization.The report provides evidence that the abolition of forced labour represents a challenge for virtually every country in the world industrialized, transition and developing countries alike. It assesses experience at the national level in taking up this challenge, with particular emphasis on the importance of sound laws and policies and their rigorous enforcement, as well as effective prevention strategies. The report also reviews the actions against forced labour taken over the past four years by the ILO and its tripartite partners governments, employers and workers. It calls for a new global alliance to relegate forced labour to history.

Migrants at Work

Migrants at Work
Author: Cathryn Costello
Publisher:
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0198714106

There is a highly significant and under-considered intersection and interaction between migration law and labor law. Labor lawyers have tended to regard migration law as generally speaking outside their purview, and migration lawyers have somewhat similarly tended to neglect labor law. The culmination of a collaborative project on 'Migrants at Work' funded by the John Fell Fund, the Society of Legal Scholars, and the Research Centre at St John's College, Oxford, this volume brings together distinguished legal and migration scholars to examine the impact of migration law on labor rights and how the regulation of migration increasingly impacts upon employment and labor relations. Examining and clarifying the interactions between migration, migration law, and labor law, contributors to the volume identify the many ways that migration law, as currently designed, divides the objectives of labor law, privileging concerns about the labor supply and demand over worker-protective concerns. In addition, migration law creates particular forms of status, which affect employment relations, thereby dividing the subjects of labor law. Chapters cover the labor laws of the UK, Australia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Germany, Sweden, and the US. References are also made to discrete practices in Brazil, France, Greece, New Zealand, Mexico, Poland, and South Africa. These countries all host migrants and have developed systems of migration law reflecting very different trajectories. Some are traditional countries of immigration and settlement migration, while others have traditionally been countries of emigration but now import many workers. There are, nonetheless, common features in their immigration law which have a profound impact on labor law, for instance in their shared contemporary shift to using temporary labor migration programs. Further chapters examine EU and international law on migration, labor rights, human rights, and human trafficking and smuggling, developing cross-jurisdictional and multi-level perspectives. Written by leading scholars of labor law, migration law, and migration studies, this book provides a diverse and multidisciplinary approach to this field of legal interaction, of interest to academics, policymakers, legal practitioners, trade unions, and migrants' groups alike.

General Labour History of Africa

General Labour History of Africa
Author: Stefano Bellucci
Publisher:
Total Pages: 784
Release: 2019
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1847012183

The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide.