‘Decent Work’ – Historical and Cultural Varieties

Journal of Labor and Society, 2021

Informal and precarious work remains an enduring reality across the Global South and is growing fast in the North. A recognition that this form of work is the norm globally rather than the exception has ignited debates around analytical frames, activist strategies and development interventions. Engaging with Southern realities, as this special issue aims to do, helps contribute to a better understanding of this rising form of work globally while also providing insights into workers’ resistance and development policy limitations. Through detailed case studies from across the Global South, this special issue argues that informal and precarious work needs to be studied as embedded in concrete, historical, political and social contexts. It highlights the heterogeneity and complexity of intersecting social and material relations that underpin informal and precarious work which has crucial implications for class dynamics and political agency of labour.

Colonialism, Institutional Change, and Shifts in Global Labour Relations, 2017

The introduction explains the purpose of this volume: to explain the development of labour relations by looking at the institutions pertaining to various economic resources in society: commodities, land, labour, and capital. Rather than looking at the effect of colonial institutions on economic growth and viewing labour in a static and generic manner, we want to establish a more precise relationship between colonial institutions and changing labour relations. Therefore the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods are taken into account and we carefully look at changes over time in the institutions and the various forms of labour relations that prevailed, both free and unfree. The agency of the workers and their possible options to opt out of the labour system that was established by the colonizers are explicitly included.

Rawlinson, M, Vandekerckhove, W, Commers, R & Johnston, T (eds) (2014). Labor and Global Justice. Essays on the Ethics of Labor Practices under Globalization. Lexington Books ISBN 9780739193693 & 9780739193709 URL https://rowman.com/ISBN/978-0-7391-9370-9 Philosophical discussions on global ethics and global justice centre around notions of cosmopolitanism, equity, global redistribution, and migration. Absent however is an explicit questioning of labor practices and labor market policies as these have been affected by globalisation. The book is a collection of essays from scholars in IR, anthropology, philosophy, political economy, and sociology, and provides what had gone missing in discussions of global business ethics: labor.

African Studies, 2007

Global Labour Journal, 2015

Global Labour Journal, 2013

The past thirty years have been tough for organized labor. New technologies have changed labor processes and intensified capital mobility; global economic pressures have altered relationships between states and capital, prompting global institutions to present economic policy in terms of a choice between jobs and labor protections. With a growing sense of desperation, labor activists everywhere are realizing that they may have to rethink strategies inherited from an earlier era, and look for new ways to assert labor's voice. In their thoughtful introduction to Labour in the Global South, editors Sarah Mosoetsa and Michelle Williams note the challenges that an ever-more integrated global economy and new patterns of industrial production have created for traditional unions. New technologies mean that employers can move production easily, undermining workers' ability to threaten disruption. That threat is enhanced by new management techniques, as employers can easily outsource production to sites not covered by union contracts. Even the character of workers has changed: designed to represent largely male industrial workforces, unions in much of the world find it difficult to attract workers whose 'atypical' experiences don't fit easily into existing union culture. Outside the workplace, new challenges expose new vulnerabilities: too often, when shredded safety nets and global environmental degradation threaten workers' communities, traditional unions' workplace focus can become a set of blinders. Unions everywhere are struggling in this brave new world, but perhaps especially so in the global South, in post-colonial societies too often marked by longstanding inequalities and authoritarian political cultures, where governments seem especially vulnerable to global pressures, and where, too often, labor protections exist only on paper. As the various research articles in Labour in the Global South make clear, new production processes and global pressures have combined to further erode workers' power to disrupt production, and reduce broad community support. Especially in the post-Cold War world, labor is struggling to mobilize workers and their communities, and to mount an effective challenge to market fundamentalism. Several articles underscore the difficulties posed by new kinds of work, and new workers. Akua Britwum, Karen Douglas and Sue Ledwith describe the tensions many unions face as more women become workers: with leaders and organizational cultures long dominated by male workers, many unions find it difficult to fully incorporate women's concerns and women's voices into their bargaining agenda. Similarly, new technologies and new kinds of work can create new organizational puzzles; when the South African government decided to create municipal call centers, hoping to make government more accessible, the country's public sector unions seem to have been ill-prepared

Dialectical Anthropology, 2018

Bryan Palmer has written a much welcome call for the renewal of working class studies in History and Anthropology. His focus, as his subtitle indicates, is on the Canadian working class and its achievements and failures. His consideration of class as "defined by the diverse experiences of dispossession fundamental to capitalism's origins and ongoing social relations," however, opens a window to a broader comparative perspective. His expanded definition of class invites consideration of the multiplicity and unevenness of class and labor relations not only in Canada, on which he focuses, but globally and the possibilities and limitations it poses for our understanding of labor and class more generally (see Carbonella and Kasmir 2014). Toward this end, I start with a consideration of the world-historical anthropologies of Eric Wolf (1982), Cedric Robinson (1983), and Sidney Mintz (1985), who were writing at precisely the moment when the unmaking of national working classes and the globalization of labor processes was intensifying. Collectively, they situated the differentiated 19th century processes of labor formation within transnational and global orbits, and tied them to the production of distinct racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies. Their collective emphasis on global labor, rather than class formation, allows us to consider not only the multiplicity of laboring populations, but the possibilities and limitations they hold for solidarity across categories, regions, and borders. As Sharryn Kasmir and I defined it, "labor is a pointedly political entity, whose social protests, and quietude, organizations, and cultures reflect its multiple engagements with capital and state, as well as relationships with other workers locally, regionally, and globally." Our definition was meant to encompass not only the myriad forms of extant labor within temporal and spatial processes of capital accumulation, but the power laden processes of categorizing, differentiating, or unifying those laborers (ibid, 7). In doing so, we relied heavily on W.E.B. Du Bois' argument in Darkwater (1969 [1920]) the lived experience of dispossession and the production of difference and inequality are conjoined, simultaneous processes" (ibid).

The paper examines how forced labour is currently framed within national legislations and introduces a continuum of exploitation and interventions, ranging from decent work to extreme exploitation.