Comparing the Experiences of Highly Skilled Labor Migrants in Sweden and Japan: Barriers and Doors to Long-term Settlement

As labor markets become increasingly global, competition among industrialized nations to attract highly skilled workers from abroad has intensified. Spurred by concerns over future economic needs caused by the demographic challenges of an aging population, both Japan and Sweden have joined this global competition. This article examines Japanese and Swedish immigration policies for highly skilled migrants and compares the highly skilled migrants’ experiences in the two countries through interviews with these migrants. Despite Japan and Sweden's completely different approaches to immigration itself, both countries’ policies, as well as the experiences of the skilled migrants, are strikingly similar. Highly skilled migrants experience language barriers and prejudice in both countries, making it difficult to build social networks with natives. Career development seems to be perceived as a common problem, although less so in Sweden, where labor markets are more flexible. Overall, these issues reduce both Japan's and Sweden's ability to retain skilled migrants. While they share similarities, Sweden's famed work–life balance and gender equality give it an edge in the competition for skilled migrants, which Japan does not share. This comparison identifies which social conditions facilitate or impede skilled migrant settlement.     

农村劳动力转移就业的多元路径选择

长期以来，我国农村劳动力转移就业基本上是以流向东部沿海经济发达地区为主的单一模式。近年来，受东部沿海地区产业向中西部地区转移进程加快和内地经济快速发展的影响，区域间的比较优势逐渐弱化，农村劳动力远距离就业的选择空间越来越大，当地政府必须通过调整农业经济结构、鼓励农民自主创业、加大招商引资力度和开辟国外劳务市场等途径探索多元转移就业路径，实现农村劳动力合理转移就业。     

“But we still try”: affective labor in the corporate mommy blog

This article studies three “mommy blogs,” online platforms catering to (in these cases) American mothers of various sub-demographics, through an affective labor framework. Using digital labor and Althusserian subject formation to inform my reading of the common rhetorical gestures made in these blogs, I ask how they conceive of their readership and contributors. I argue that mommy blogs should be understood as sites of digital labor because of the ways in which their publishing conditions and rhetorics establish labored expectations of the “mommy” subject. Contestations of the nature of affective labor in motherhood are reflected by anxieties around digital labor, which play out via ideological conflicts that manifest rhetorically in the blogs under discussion. This analysis is informed by affect theory, Althusser and Butler’s work on subject formation, and the existing feminist literature on digital labor and the mommy blog.     

Expediting youth's entry into employment whilst overlooking precariousness: Flexi‐employability and disciplinary activation in Hong Kong

With an emphasis placed on supply‐side interventions such as skills training and incentives enhancement, active labor market polices (ALMPs) are strongly promoted by international organizations and widely adopted across different welfare regimes to boost employment rates. This article first presents the under‐examined relationship between ALMPs and employment precariousness, which has posed a challenge to the neoliberal notion of employability and activation. Youth‐focused employment policies tend to speed up employment entry whilst downplaying the risk of precariousness and the importance of job quality, and thus further reinforcing the belief that engaging in precarious employment is tolerable if not inevitable. The article then examines the case of Hong Kong, which illustrates that its relatively low rate of youth unemployment may conceal the unfavorable employment conditions confronted by youth. It is argued that the service‐led employment policies and short‐term vocational training define the employability of young workers in terms of labor flexibilities. The coined phase of “flexi‐employability” is characterized by promoting youth's readiness for, and adaptability to, the volatilities and changing demands of the labor market. Arguably, the disciplinary approach to youth activation would only strengthen the work‐first principle by enforcing young people to take up jobs available and leave welfare as soon as possible, but without thoroughly addressing the risks and insecurities generated by the labor market in undermining their well‐being.     

The politics of leisure and labor mobilities: discourses of tourism and transnational migration in Central Java,Indonesia

This article presents narratives and tropes of transnational tourism from a less considered perspective: rural migrant-origin villagers of Central Java. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cilacap and Yogyakarta, I analyze how and why some former temporary labor migrants depict their typically harsh experiences in terms of tourism and leisure. Addressing the tendency in current research to approach labor migration and tourism as mutually exclusive or unrelated class categories and experiences, I consider the ways in which former migrants and non-migrant villagers evaluate or identify labor migration in terms of gender, class, religious, and ethno-national subjectivities associated with ‘tourist’ and/or ‘migrant’ categories. Popular and commercial imaginations of leisure travel and tourism importantly shape the subjectivities and positionalities of precarious labor migrants. Foregrounding the relations between tourism and labor migration reveals the multi-scalar ways in which associated discourses and infrastructures of both mutually shape and constitute global socio-economic inequalities.     

Globalization and Collective Labor Rights

The impact of globalization has been a perennial source of contention, and issues regarding labor rights have been a visible aspect of this struggle. Despite the popular controversy about a potential “race to the bottom” regarding globalization and labor rights, the empirical record on these linkages remains mixed. Moreover, despite the multifaceted nature of globalization, extant literature in this area has focused purely on several specific facets of economic globalization, such as trade and FDI. We focus on two additional aspects of globalization, social and political integration, as well as a broadly based measure of economic globalization, and examine how they influence collective labor rights—both in terms of labor laws, as well as their enforcement in practice—in the developing world from 1986 to 2002. We find that all three facets of globalization are negatively related to labor rights. Specifically, social, political, and economic globalization are related to the decoupling of labor practices from extant labor laws; that is, labor practices deteriorate while labor laws remain largely unaffected.     

Domestic help and the gender division of domestic labor during the COVID-19 pandemic: Gender inequality among Japanese parents

The enduring COVID-19 pandemic has gradually transformed our everyday lives. This study focuses on changes in work and family arrangements, with particular focus on changes in domestic help, and examines its impact on the division of domestic labor. Using a social survey of work and the family conducted in November 2020 and May 2021, the results show that from January 2020 (pre-pandemic) to May 2021, approximately 40% of respondents experienced a reduced gender gap for housework and childcare, while a large gender gap is still observed in the absolute frequency of undertaking domestic labor. Some lifestyle changes triggered by the pandemic, such as an increase in the use of takeaways or delivery meals, and the expansion of working from home, are found to be able to contribute a shift toward more equal sharing of domestic labor. However, the fact that the access to such lifestyle changes is more common among those with a relatively high income or high educational background suggests that the lifestyle changes imposed by the pandemic may exacerbate class disparities in the gender gap in domestic labor. Furthermore, the results show that decreased kinship support results in a greater childcare burden being placed on women.     

Doing business or leading care work? Intersections of gender,ethnicity and profession in home care entrepreneurship in Sweden

This article critically explores assumptions underpinning Swedish elder care policies that the introduction of market practices in publicly funded eldercare services advances women's entrepreneurship. We argue that gendered privileges and disadvantages are being recreated on tax‐funded home care markets; furthermore, gendered inequalities intersect with ethnicity and profession in the management of small‐scale care companies' dealings with authorities governing home care services and standards for home care work. However, we find that the salience of categories depends on the context in which they emerge. While gender and profession are dominant in management, gender and ethnicity influence interactions with authorities. Only in standards for home care work do all categories simultaneously shape the business approaches of care entrepreneurs. Our analysis, based on data on size and growth of home care companies and interviews with small‐scale care entrepreneurs, suggests that regulations and practices privilege big companies and care entrepreneurs who echo the white, masculine gendering of entrepreneurship as ‘doing business' and disadvantage small‐scale entrepreneurs focusing on leading care work to produce quality care.     

Corporate Quotas and Symbolic Politics in Advanced Democracies

ABSTRACT

This article identifies trends in the adoption and implementation of quotas for corporate boards, an underresearched topic in political science. Corporate quotas—like legislative quotas—constitute the “fast track” to gender equality but appear more commonly in advanced democracies. These corporate quotas fall into three categories: laws covering all companies; laws covering state-owned companies only; and nonbinding (voluntary) measures in corporate governance codes. Despite on-paper differences, these corporate quotas are largely toothless. First generation corporate quotas, like first generation legislative quotas, operate symbolically. By raising the specter of stringent legislation in the long run, corporate quotas induce firms into voluntary compliance in the short run.     

从交往异化到雇佣劳动批判——赫斯哲学补论

在1844年以前,赫斯将"资产阶级社会"称为"金钱贵族制",并把费尔巴哈对宗教批判的人本主义异化史观直接运用到对现实资产阶级社会的批判中来,提出了所谓货币是人的交往类本质的异化的观点。在他看来,正是这个颠倒的金钱世界,造成了更加普遍的剥削和奴隶制。而在后来的研究中,赫斯开始关注现实中的劳动,但并未用哲学人本主义的逻辑来描述资产阶级社会中的劳动状态,而是使用了比较准确和实证的概念:雇佣劳动和奴隶劳动。