New governance of labour rights: the perspective of Cambodian garment workers’ struggles

Globalization has implied the transfer of industrial work to countries of the Global South, where labour rights are seldom effectively protected by legal frameworks. New forms of governance that go beyond state-centred legal regulation are presented as an alternative to fill in ‘governance gaps’. This paper analyses ‘new governance’ from the perspective of Cambodian garment workers and labour movements’ struggles. Drawing on the literature on governance and private regulation and research data from Cambodia, it argues that a technocratic approach makes governance initiatives ignore the economic conflict between labour and capital but also the possible political conflict between labour and government. By ignoring trade union rights, power-blind initiatives might end up weakening both the labour movement and democratic accountability, instead of complementing state’s regulatory roles. This might serve the overlapping interests of the powerful actors both in Cambodia and internationally.     

Rights of Foreign Workers and the Politics of Migration in South-East and East Asia

The issue of cross‐border migration in South‐East and East Asia is linked to the integration of regional, if not global, labour markets. The types of labour that are currently in demand have changed substantially since the 1990s in terms of (1) overall magnitude, (2) gender composition, and (3) increased diversification. This paper, however, focuses upon those workers classified as unskilled as they constitute numerically the largest and most vulnerable group. The challenges to provide adequate protection from, and prevention of, exploitative and abusive practices that seriously minimize the socio‐economic benefits for these workers are linked to migration policies and the issue of rights in the origin and destination countries. This paper's objective is to provide a broad outline of the emerging trends and issues revolving around contemporary cross‐border labour migration and the politics of migrants' rights in South‐East and East Asia, illustrated by the difficulties experienced with the ratification of the 1990 United Nations Convention on the Rights of All Migrants and their Families (ICMR). The data this paper is based upon were collected for a report commissioned by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) with fieldwork carried out in seven countries located in the Asia Pacific region. It is argued that ratification of the ICMR is obstructed by politics and by a lack of political will. A rights‐based approach to the protection of migrant labour is thus related to a number of macro and micro level issues, revolving around development and practices of “good governance” in addition to interstate relations. This means that the promotion of migrants' rights requires a holistic approach addressing national and transnational issues in an era of increasing mobility across borders.     

The rights of migrant workers: Economics,politics and ethics

The labour immigration policies of high‐income countries are characterized by trade‐offs between openness to admitting migrant workers and some of the rights granted to migrants after admission. This empirical observation lies at the heart of the author's 2013 book, The price of rights: Regulating international labor migration. In this article, he reviews its main findings, arguments and policy implications and responds to a critical review of the book that was published in the International Labour Review in 2015. He concludes with a plea for more open debate on the linkages between migrant rights, labour migration and development among national and international organizations concerned with these issues.     

Chinese Labor Migration to Europe, 2008-16. Implications for China-EU Mobility in the Post-crisis Context

The article examines the evolution of Chinese labour migration to the UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain and Italy in order to elucidate how the flows and stocks of Chinese workers have evolved since the Global Economic Crisis, and what implications this has have for Sino-European mobility partnerships in the post-crisis context. It explains: (1) What comparative data are available on Chinese labour migration to the six principal countries of destination in Europe; (2) How have Chinese labour migration flows and stocks evolved since the GEC; (3) How may the new Chinese workers’ mobility to Europe affect their rights?     

Asymmetric Information under the Kafala Sponsorship System: Impacts on Foreign Domestic Workers’ Income and Employment Status in the GCC Countries

This article examines the legal and policy implications of information asymmetry for foreign domestic workers employed under the Kafala sponsorship system in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Drawing from ethnographic and field‐based observations in large GCC migrant destinations – including Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – we investigate the information flows and market uncertainties between five key stakeholders: labour‐receiving governments, labour‐sending governments, recruitment agencies (subagents), sponsors (employers), and social networks. Several factors contribute to asymmetric information: the lack of bilateral labour agreements and government policy coordination, programs between and among government entities, the absence of labour law for domestic workers, and the laissez faire approach of the labour‐receiving government. These sources of asymmetric information create serious market vulnerabilities for the domestic worker population, often resulting in loss of employment and early deportation. The concluding section further outlines policy implications and areas of methodological research on GCC migration.     

‘A life path different from one of labour in the Gulf’: Ongoing mobility among Nepali labour migrants in Qatar and their families

Labour migration is commonly attached to the idea of a ‘better’ future for the migrants and their families, but there is less emphasis on how this does not materialize for many labour migrants. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Nepalis working in Qatar and select families in Nepal, this article focuses on the intergenerational migration cycle or migration as open-ended and ongoing across generations. While the Gulf migration scholarship has mostly concentrated on low-skilled workers, I draw on the cases of migrants across different skill/income levels to show how the migrants’ and/or families’ desires for ‘ongoing mobility’ to the Gulf or the West panned out differently. I argue that despite wanting a different and better life path for the future generation, one unlike theirs of labour in the Gulf, many Gulf migrants are unable to meet these familial expectations; rather, migration histories repeat in a continual quest to overcome economic constraints.     

Demystifying the use of mail survey in developing countries: a case of Nepal

ABSTRACT

The mail survey is a popular data collection tool in developed countries, but little is known about its use and efficacy in developing countries. Grounded on social exchange and diffusion of innovations theories, this study sought to ascertain whether the mail survey works in Nepal – one of the developing countries, by looking at how long respondents take to respond to mail surveys, and what the determinants are of the response time. A mail survey was conducted in June–September 2012 among 863 village animal health workers. Analysis of the data derived from 500 usable surveys shows that if properly planned and executed, the mail survey will perfectly work in developing countries as well. However, response period greatly varied by respondent’s home region, program sponsor, income groups, but not by gender, age, and education. The paper concludes by outlining suggestions to improve the mail survey.     

Keeping up appearances: aesthetic labour in the fashion modelling industries of London and New York

This paper addresses itself to literature on ‘aesthetic labour’ in order to extend understanding of embodied labour practices. Through a case study of fashion modelling in New York and London we argue for an extension of the concept to address what we see as problematic absences and limitations. Thus, we seek to extend its range, both in terms of occupations it can be applied to, not just interactive service work and organizational workers, and its conceptual scope, beyond the current concern with superficial appearances at work and within organizations. First, we attend to the ways in which these freelancers have to adapt to fluctuating aesthetic trends and different clients and commodify themselves in the absence of a corporate aesthetic. The successful models are usually the ones who take on the responsibility of managing their bodies, becoming ‘enterprising’ with respect to all aspects of their embodied self. Secondly, unlike Dean (2005 ) who similarly extends aesthetic labour to female actors, we see conceptual problems with the term that need addressing. We argue that the main proponents of aesthetic labour have a poorly conceived notion of embodiment and that current conceptualizations produce a reductive account of the aesthetic labourer as a ‘cardboard cut‐out’, and aesthetic labour as superficial work on the body's surface. In contrast, drawing on phenomenology, we examine how aesthetic labour involves the entire embodied self, or ‘body/self’, and analyse how the effort to keep up appearances, while physical, has an emotional content to it. Besides the physical and emotional effort of body maintenance, the imperative to project ‘personality’ requires many of the skills in emotional labour described by Hochschild (1983 ). Thirdly, aesthetic labour entails on‐going production of the body/self, not merely a superficial performance at work. The enduring nature of this labour is evidenced by the degree of body maintenance required to conform to the fashion model aesthetic (dieting, for example) and is heightened by the emphasis placed on social networking in freelancing labour, which demands workers who are ‘always on’. In this way, unlike corporate workers, we suggest that the freelance aesthetic labourer cannot walk away from their product, which is their entire embodied self. Thus, in these ways we see aesthetic labour adding to, or extending, rather than supplanting emotional labour, as Witz et al. (2003 ) would have it.     

Proxy reporting in education surveys: factors influencing accurate reporting in the 2012 Qatar Education Study

Abstract

Proxy reporting is a common practice during survey data collection to increase response rates while reducing fieldwork costs, and agreement between proxies and self-reports is critical to make reliable and valid inferences. This study is the first to unpack what influences proxy accuracy in a non-Western setting using data from the 2012 Qatar Education Study. We find that agreement is a function of a student’s grade in school, grades, a parent’s level of education, and the interaction between immigration status and parent education. These findings suggest in multicultural contexts, agreement may vary based on factors beyond what is typically accounted when examining the components of reporting error as a result of using proxies over self-reports.     

‘Escaping’ managed labour migration: worker exit as precarious migrant agency

ABSTRACT

This article narrows in on the mundane yet extraordinary events surrounding migrant farm workers’ decisions to leave their state-approved employment and to seek a better life in Canada outside of state-managed circulatory labour migration. In so doing, this research contributes to conceptualisations of precarity, and of precarious status in particular, that are beginning to recognise its effects not only on workers’ economic survival, but also the more ordinary daily conditions surrounding workers’ sense belonging and personal autonomy. In their refusal to accept the terms of their contractual circulatory labour migration agreements through what is conceptualised here as an act of ‘escape’, workers claim a space of belonging that contradicts the precarity of their formal citizenship status. In carving out a space in which they may perform autonomy and self-determination in daily life, however, this rejection of contingent citizenship status intensifies the precarious material conditions governing workers’ relationship to the state.     

Labour Mobility in East Africa: An Analysis of the East African Community's Common Market and the Free Movement of Workers

This article advocates an institutional perspective in analysing labour mobility, since rules governing cross‐border labour markets are an embodiment of access and participation rights, and can determine the formalisation or informalisation of work and the protection and benefits accrued by migrant workers. It examines the East African Community's Common Market Protocol of July 2010, which seeks to promote the ‘free movement of workers’ within the Community. It argues that there are contradictions and inconsistencies in implementing the Protocol and provides recommendations for addressing them.     

Objective and subjective conditions for the continuity of the Peruvian extractive development model

ABSTRACT

The Peruvian economy depends for its growth on the export of its mineral resources. The core of the current economic development model is the export of the country's commodities and a free and (relatively) unregulated functioning of the markets. We argue that the continuity of the country's extractive development model is the consequence of the interplay between the objective and subjective conditions of Peruvian capitalist development. The analysis of the objective conditions is focused on the role of the country in the international division of labour, the relation between this role and the country’s economic and business structure, and the functionality of the extractive development model for the Peruvian State. In the case of the subjective conditions, the strength of the political Left, the labour movement and the social movements against mining capital are analyzed     

Remaking the labour movement in Italy: the revival of strikes at Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles in 2015–17

ABSTRACT

After the Fiat-Chrysler merger in 2009, CEO Sergio Marchionne imposed a drastic reorganization of labour relations in Italy’s plants, precipitating a profound crisis of the system of industrial relations in the country. But between 2015 and 2017 a significant section of workers at Melfi, Atessa and Termoli plants went on strike against compulsory overtime and labour intensification, establishing links with grassroots unions that successfully organized in logistics. The metalworkers’ union FIOM-CGIL, however, delegitimized the union representatives who resisted Marchionne’s plans. In this article, we trace the context and development of these still little-known strikes. Because of their growing institutionalization, we argue, the confederal unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL) have both failed to mobilize workers and repressed workers’ attempts to resist the deterioration of their conditions. The strikes at FCA and in logistics, however, show that new forms of radical unionism are emerging, pointing to new possibilities for working-class organizing.     

Worker perceptions of procedural justice in workers’ compensation claims: Do unions make a difference?

The differences between union and nonunion workers’ perceptions of the fairness of the workers’ compensation claims process are examined. The hypothesis tested is that union members should perceive this process as more fair due to union “voice.” The data were collected in a survey of injured workers in Michigan who had filed a workers’ compensation claim. The empirical results indicate that unions have little impact on the perceived fairness of the claims process and that the main contribution of unions is the provision of a complaint mechanism. From the Bill of Rights to Chief Justice Earl Warren’s recurring inquiry of counsel, “but is it fair?” fair treatment has been treated as a value enforceable by law, standing at the very core of the constitutional, political, and social rights of the individual. —Westin and Feliu (1988, p. 255)     

Beyond labour rights

The protection of workers worldwide is most often sought through reference to the International Labour Organization's ‘core’ labour standards. These rights are, in themselves, of great importance; that said, however, the blanket approach with respect to workers that results from the over-reliance on rights is gender-blind, and incapable of integrating the crucial normative dynamics of relational power, collective responsibility and mutual dependence into its analysis. By contrast, a normative framework based on a feminist political ethic of care allows for a clear picture of the actual, situated, interdependent lives of all people, and is particularly useful in highlighting existing gender imbalances with respect to responsibilities for care work. Globally, women bear by far the greatest responsibility for care work, and that burden has been multiplied exponentially under conditions of globalization. This article will argue that only a care-centred perspective can provide the necessary moral orientation and policy framework through which to begin to solve these problems of gender (as well as race and class) inequality related to both wage labour and paid and unpaid care work, as well as problems relating to the under-provision of care on a global scale.     

Intermittent labour forms in U.K. agriculture: Some implications for rural areas

Intermittent labour forms — generally conceived as ‘seasonal or casual workers’, but also including labour supplied by agricultural contractors or, under cooperative arrangements, by neighbours or family members — are an established and increasingly important part of the U.K. agricultural labour market. Unfortunately, relatively little is known about either the precise level or the detailed character of such labour. Although the MAFF June Census does collect data on ‘seasonal or casual’ workers it is limited in both its scale and depth of coverage. In this paper, the results of a survey of intermittent labour forms on farms in part of north Wales and the north and south west Midlands are discussed. In general, it is shown that the true extent of intermittent employment is almost certainly much greater — perhaps by a factor of five or more — than the MAFF Census figures would imply. From the survey data it is demonstrated that farms across the range of product and size structures make extensive use of both directly-recruited and indirectly-recruited (contract) labour. More specifically, a restructuring process and the substitution of such labour forms for regular labour is evident.Having considered the level and character of intermittent employment in modern agriculture the paper goes on to consider some of the implications for rural economies. In general it is argued that the use of intermittent labour has almost certainly precipitated some radical changes in the organisation of the farm labour force and in the ability of farmers or growers to service their own needs from within. Moreover, the restructuring process has served to erode the viability of the rural economic and social structure by replacing stable job opportunities with alternatives that offer only a marginal form of job experience and limited income and which cannot in isolation support rural communities.     

Labour segmentation and outmigration in Japan: Evidence using firm–worker matching data

Determinants of foreigner outmigration from host countries have attracted considerable attention. However, minimal research examines the influence of firms’ working environments. Although the third largest economy, Japan's inability to attract skilled foreign labour remains a concern. This study is the first to investigate the effect of Japanese firms’ labour segmentation practices on foreign workers’ outmigration intentions. Segmentation refers to firms’ concentration on foreigner-specific skills, regarding foreign labour as complementary to local workers. This is widely practised because of immigration policy's avoidance of substituting Japanese labour or causing unemployment. The findings suggest that although foreigner-specific skills are highly valued in Japan, segmentation could significantly increase foreign workers’ outmigration intention. The lifetime employment system in Japan, job satisfaction and original migration motivations also affect outmigration. The results indicate that Japanese policies encouraging firms to employ foreign workers as complementary may harm its attractiveness to skilled foreign labour.     

Rethinking the governance of labour standards in South–South regional value chains

The growth of intra‐regional trade in the Global South begs the question of whether frameworks developed for the study of North–South global value chains can be used to study labour standards in emerging South–South networks. Critical of the structuralist approaches characterizing the literature, in this article I tackle the question of how formal and informal institutions interact to shape labour standards in South–South regional value chains. This is achieved in two stages. In the first part of the article, I build on Habermas's theory of communicative action to frame labour standards as the outcome of agents’ interactions within and across firms, politico‐administrative institutions and workers’ private and public spheres. Drawing on this framework, in the second part of the article I compare labour standards across the Kenya handbag and footwear sectors. While, in the former, interaction across informal institutions favoured an inclusive and consensual debate between workers and employers; in the latter, an overwhelming process of marketization and bureaucratization failed to provide an interactive space for workers’ concerns to be voiced and negotiated.     

Innovation, workers skills and industrial relations: Empirical evidence from firm-level Italian data

The shifting of labour demand toward relatively more skilled workers has been a hot issue in the economic field for many years. A consolidated explanation for the upskilling phenomenon is that technological–organisational changes have driven the labour demand with detrimental consequences for less skilled workers (skill-biased technological–organisational change). In order to upgrade the skill workforce the firm has at least two main channels at its disposal: the external labour market strategy, mainly based on hiring and firing mechanisms; the internal labour market strategies, which improve the skill base of the employees through training activities.The main objective of the present work is to verify the relations between innovative strategies and both the workforce composition and the training activities, within an integrated framework that also leads us to consider the role of specific aspects of the industrial relations system.The firm level analysis is based on original datasets which include data on manufacturing firms for two Italian local production systems, located in the Emilia-Romagna region.The results suggest that the firms use both the two channels to improve their skill base, which is actually related to the innovation activities, although there is weak supporting evidence of the use of external labour markets to upgrade the workforce skills: the upskilling phenomenon seems to be associated to specific innovative activities in the technological sphere, while specific organisational aspects emerge as detrimental for blue collars. On the side of internal labour market strategies the evidence supports the hypothesis that innovation intensity induces the firms to implement internal procedures in order to upskill the workforce, confirming the importance of internal labour market strategies. Moreover, we have recognized the important role of firm level industrial relations in determining the training activities for the blue collar workers.     

Ethnic Institutions Reconsidered: The Case of Flemish Workers in 19th Century France1

Abstract Traditional perspectives on ethnic institutions tend to consider mainly their role in the preservation of the cultural and social fabric of ethnic communities. Increasing evidence indicates that ethno‐institutional effects are often more varied and complex. France's first industrial‐era immigrants, massively crossing the border from Belgian Flanders during the second half of the 19^th century, are a case in point. Immigrant Flemish workers introduced a new type of institution to the French working class: socialist cooperatives. These would have a long‐term impact not only on the immigrant Flemish community itself, but also on the larger labour movement, on the region, and on the country as a whole. Three elements were important in this process of institutional cross‐fertilization: Belgian workers’ rich institutional repertoire; the coincidence of their settlement with the rise of the French labour movement; and the fact that their institutional innovation was easily transferable.