Unacceptable forms of work: A multidimensional model

Unacceptable forms of work (UFW) have been identified as an “area of critical importance” for the ILO as it approaches its centenary. Yet there is currently no comprehensive elaboration of the dimensions, causes or manifestations of UFW. This article reports on a research project that has proposed such a framework. The article first investigates and reconceptualizes key discourses on contemporary work to identify their contribution to an analytically rigorous conception of UFW. It then outlines a novel Multidimensional Model that has been designed for use by local policy actors in identifying and targeting UFW in countries across a range of income levels.     

An emerging transnational industrial relations? Exploring the prospects for cross‐border labour bargaining

Global union federations (GUFs) and multinational enterprises (MNEs) have been concluding “international framework agreements” (IFAs) to protect their interests amidst the globalizing economic landscape. By modelling the underlying bargaining processes, the authors show that IFAs can be expected when both sides exhibit risk aversion, although the agreement will favour the less risk‐averse side. Since globalization has created fewer vulnerabilities for MNEs than for GUFs, IFAs have so far typically delivered only minimal benefits for labour. But this should change in the future if strengthened transnational union capacities and abilities to threaten MNEs with reputational costs bring greater equalization of attitudes towards risk.     

Stagnation only on the surface? The implications of skill and family responsibilities for the gender wage gap in Sweden, 1974–2010

The wage differential between women and men persists in advanced economies despite the inflow of women into qualified occupations in recent years. Using five waves of the Swedish Level‐of‐Living Survey (LNU), this paper explores the gender wage gap in Sweden during the 1974–2010 period overall and by skill level. The empirical analyses showed that the general gender wage gap has been nearly unchanged for the past 30 years. However, the gender difference in wage in less qualified occupations fell considerably, whereas the gender pay gap remained stable for men and women in qualified occupations. The larger significance of family responsibilities for wages in qualified occupations is one likely explanation for this result.     

‘The house belongs to both’: undoing the gendered division of housework

This article studies 28 dual-income Spanish childless couples who were undoing gender in routine domestic work. We understand ‘undoing gender’ as defined by Deutsch [(2007). Undoing gender. Gender & Society, 21, 106–127, p. 122]: ‘social interactions that reduce gender difference’. The dual-earner couples came from different socio-economic backgrounds and were interviewed in four different Spanish towns in 2011. The analysis shows that resources in a wide sense, time availability, external help, ideas about fairness, and complex gender attitudes are key interdependent factors that can weave together to form different configurations leading to a non-mainstream division of housework. All configurations were based on principles of gender equality: some couples found it fair to have a 50/50 division of domestic work, others a 50/50 division of all work (paid and unpaid); and a third group showed conflicts in practice. These couples’ ways of undoing gender illustrate the external, individual, and couple circumstances under which spouses are able to achieve a non-traditional construction of unpaid work.     

The Global Politics of Forced Labour

This article examines the politics of governing forced labour. It develops and applies an approach drawing on Marx’s conception of the historical formation of ‘free’ labour in the process of ‘primitive accumulation’ and Gramsci’s conception of the ‘relations of force’. Viewed through this lens, rather than representing discrete ontological categories, the boundary between ‘free’ and ‘forced’ labour is repositioned as largely a contested and ambivalent artefact of governance. The concept of the ‘political relations of force’ highlights the ways in which such constructions are shaped by complex intersections between a diversity of different social forces. This approach is subsequently applied in an analysis of an International Labour Organization project on dealing with ‘traditional slavery’ in Niger.     

Affective capitalism,humanitarianism and extractivism in Colombia: old and new borders for future times

Contemporary Colombian conjuncture encompasses two dynamics. These incorporate social, economic, political and cultural aspects, whose related rationalities are yet to be mapped out and understood in their complex and multi-layered dimensions and registers. On the one hand, as I will explain throughout the text, we have been witness to on-going peace talks between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia guerrilla group, a whole set of practices of forgiveness, inaugurations of memory museums, the passing of the victims and land restitution law, as well as the recognition of victims and the effervescence of their movements and organizations. These factors have spiralled victims’ demonstrations and fuelled marches all over the country. On the other hand, there are increased rates of foreign investment in those regions that, until as little as a decade ago, were subject to appalling rates of internal displacement, massacres and disappearances, and which now constitute new borders where global capitalism has been able to reconfigure and increase its rates of capital accumulation. In this article, I analyse the processes referred to above and their complex relationships from the vantage point of a cultural studies interrogation of the affective and the popular, focusing on two Colombian regions: Montes de María and Mapiripán. My goal is to understand how different groups and actors are experiencing these processes in their everyday lives. Here, I include victims and their organizations but also government officials and entrepreneurs related to agro-industry initiatives – mentioned below – today refashioned within the new mantra of corporate responsibility. I want to understand the issue of where people are located and what they are doing, facing, consuming, or resisting in terms of these new challenges. Finally, I wish to offer an analytical study that can capture the everyday textures of these processes in a complex and concrete fashion.     

Care in a Time of Austerity: the Electronic Monitoring of Homecare Workers’ Time

Austerity places intense pressures on labour costs in paid care. In the UK, electronic monitoring technology has been introduced to record (and materially reduce) the working time and wages of homecare workers. Based on empirical findings, we show that, in a ‘time of austerity’, care is reductively constructed as a consumption of time. Service users are constructed as needy, greedy, time‐consumers and homecare workers as resource‐wasting time‐takers. We point to austerity as a temporal ideology aimed at persuading populations that individual deprivation in the present moment, self‐sacrifice and the suppression of personal need in the here and now is a necessary requirement to underpin a more secure national future. Accordingly, women in low‐waged care work are required to eschew a rights‐bearing, present‐tense identity and are assumed willing to suppress their entitlements to lawful wages as a sacrifice to the future. By transforming our understandings of ‘care’ into those of ‘time consumption’, and by emphasizing the virtue of present‐tense deprivation, a politics of austerity appears to justify time‐monitoring in care provision and the rationing of homecare workers’ pay.     

Tanzanian Women's Move into Wage Labour: Conceptualizing Deference,Sexuality and Respectability as Criteria for Workplace Suitability

Although female labour force participation in Tanzania is growing, little is known about how hiring authorities fill job positions with respect to gender. Qualitative interviews with hospitality and manufacturing managers in Mwanza (Tanzania's second largest city) reveal that female deference, sexuality, domesticity and respectability constitute important recruitment and job placement criteria. This article examines the various notions behind these criteria and how they serve to include or exclude women in the workforce. It is shown that when the interaction of these criteria is conceptualized, deference and domesticity emerge as essential elements of female respectability, supporting each other in the control of women's sexuality.     

二元经济条件下农村劳动力转移的对策研究

我国是典型的二元经济结构国家,大量农村剩余劳动力直接关系着我国经济的发展。本文在深入分析我国农村劳动力转移现状的基础上,有针对性地提出了二元经济条件下我国农村劳动力转移的思路与对策。     

区别于计划经济的新型劳动关系研究综述

1989年之后,新型劳动关系逐渐引起人们的关注,而相关的研究也随之方兴未艾。新型劳动关系的研究背景与意义、内涵与特征、建立条件与机制建设、基本评价与发展思路等问题得到了比较深入的探讨。这些研究的特点与不足需要被客观地加以检视。