More Protection,Still Gendered: The Effects of Non-Standard Employment Protection Acts on South Korean Women Workers

The growth of non-standard work since the Asian financial crisis of 1997 has emerged as the central political concern in South Korea. Important legislative interventions, the Non-standard Employment Protection Acts, were introduced in 2007 to protect workers from insecurity and precarity. This article investigates the effects of the Acts on women workers by comparing the employment characteristics before and after the introduction of the law. The Acts reduced the proportion of non-standard employment to a certain degree, but employers continued discriminatory practices against women workers and aggressively took advantage of more precarious forms of non-standard work. Due to severe sex segregation in the dualistic labour market, more surreptitious forms of discrimination against women workers remained intact. The results of this study point to the fact that social protection for non-standard work and more egalitarian gender relations in the labour market require a new paradigm of social rights.     

Women's industrial employment in Kerala,India

Abstract

This paper examines the dynamics of relations of production in Kerala industry in regard to women's employment opportunities. The changing conditions of women's industrial employment in India, and in Kerala in particular, should be examined at two levels: wage employment, especially in traditional industries; and self-employment, ranging from women's small-scale enterprises to relatively large-scale enterprises run by voluntary organizations of women, charitable institutions, and women's self-help organizations. Income opportunities are provided at both levels, and a common unifying thread is the predominantly casual nature of the work. Casual work is defined as any way of making a living that lacks a moderate degree of security of income and employment, and it is work characterized by informal relations of production.     

Piecing Together the ‘Turkish Puzzle’ on Female Labour Force Participation: Comparative Insights from Southern Europe

Southern Europe has seen remarkable turnarounds in female labour force participation (FLFP) over the past four decades. In Turkey, however, scores of women have yet to join the labour force. To address this ‘Turkish puzzle’, we present comparative data on women’s work in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece (SE-4) and Turkey. Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we identify the factors behind rising FLFP in Southern Europe to explore the prospects for a steeper rise of FLFP in Turkey. We reveal two causal pathways to rising FLFP: (i) left party rule, or (ii) combinations of higher levels of take-up of early education and care, higher levels of tertiary education among women and larger size of service sector employment.     

The Hidden Ingredient: Female Labour in Chilean Fruit Exports

Abstract — The Chilean fruit export sector has expanded rapidly over the past decade. A large army of female temporary workers is recruited annually to work in the fruit export sector, playing a key role in the preparation of high quality off-season fruit for northern markets. Despite their annual employment in a modern export sector, these temporary workers remain a marginalised force in Chile, reflected in the significant underestimation of the female agricultural labour force. This paper examines the reasons for their marginalisation. the gender segmentation of the temporary fruit labour market, and considers the potential effect of increased international competition on the employment of female temporary labour.     

The Korean economic crisis and working women

This article evaluates the impact of the 1997 Korean economic crisis on female employees. Facts on employment, labour force participation, and the changing nature of jobs (permanent/temporary) tend to support “buffer” theories of women's employment. Occupational sex segregation was reduced substantially between 1997 and 2002; nonetheless, the unexplained portion of the wage differential between men and women (a proxy for wage discrimination) increased. The crisis created setbacks for the equality of working women in Korea; however, new realities stimulated a changed strategy in the form of a union for contingent and small-firm workers among Korean women.     

Work,Wages and Gender in Export-Oriented Cities: Global Assembly versus International Tourism in Mexico

Drawing on a rich source of urban labour market data, the Mexican National Urban Employment Survey of 1998, this article addresses the question of how dissimilar export-oriented industries shape urban labour markets, particularly with respect to women workers. It compares Ciudad Juárez, which has an economy based on global assembly production, and Cancún, whose economy is based on international tourism. Employing economic base theory and location quotients, the analysis isolates the impact of the export sectors on the local labour markets. Results show that global assembly and international tourism encourage a mix of occupational and income prospects for both men and women in each of these Mexican cities. Female employment tends to be concentrated in the export-oriented sector in both cases, but the types of occupational and income opportunities therein vary. Overall, the analysis challenges common exploitation arguments that tend to stress the universally shared deleterious working conditions and low wages that result from global integration and export-led industrialisation in contemporary Latin America. It suggests that we pay closer attention to the diverse nature of outward oriented industries, which will tend to differentiate the labour market implications of increasing economic globalisation.     

Women employment in colonial Hong Kong

Women's participation in the labour market is on the rise, and employment opportunities available to working women have increased greatly. However, working women in Hong Kong are still disproportionately underrepresented in higher status occupations. Despite general improvement in their educational attainment, women are still unequally paid. Their role in the workplace is still very much constrained and impeded by their familial role. Hong Kong women's continuing subordination in the workplace lies in the domination of the Chinese patriarchal family in industrial Hong Kong. Women experience institutional discrimination insofar as other institutions and the public at large also subscribe to culturally entrenched prejudices and discriminatory practices against women. It appears that women's subordinate status will not change in the foreseeable future.     

Lean production and the German model

Traditionally the German employment system has been hailed as the surpreme example of how a symbiosis between equity and efficiency can be established in an economic system. A defining characteristic of the German employment system is how the world of work is embedded in a highly co‐ordinated system of industrial relations institutions inside and outside the enterprise. The argument of this paper is that this model of labour market organisation is coming under severe pressure as a result of a range of developments, not least the emergence of lean production as a credible alternative system of work organisation. Lean production which is based on techniques moulded and fine‐tuned in Japan affronts virtually every aspect of the prevailing model of economic citizenship in Germany. It is argued that important modifications will have to be made to key industrial relations institutions in the country so that enterprises can respond effectively to the lean production challenge.     

Organisationsmodelle in der Sozialstrukturanalyse: Der Einfluss von Betrieben auf Erwerbsverläufe

Stratification research in Germany tends to explain employment opportunities and careers of persons with reference to societal institutions rather than with reference to the structure and dynamics of work organizations. Yet, there is empirical evidence that the role of firms for employment conditions in Germany is growing. This evidence underlines the necessity to systematically ininvestigate firm-induced social inequality and the structuration of working lives by firms. Taking into account current processes of organizational change and existing empirical studies, the paper suggests strengthening analytical approaches that complement the well-established research focus of structuralist mobility research on positional systems and structures of jobs. These alternative approaches emphasize the capacity of firms for strategic action, the relevance of social relations among staff members and the cultural dimension of employment practices in firms.     

The Strategic Uses of Gender in Household Negotiations: Women Workers on Mexico's Northern Border

The study illustrates the potential of the 'doing gender' perspective to explain why employment does not always improve women's household–power. Eighteen in–depth interviews with women maquiladora workers in Mexico suggest that, depending on the gendered meanings of household negotiations, employment may help women gain new rights and extend the limits of respect accorded them by male companions and parents. Nevertheless, women were more successful when they used negotiating strategies that conformed to their gender identity, such as making offers , than when they used negotiating strategies that challenged traditional gender norms, such as withdrawing services or making threats .     

Globalisation and the changing management of migrating service workers in the Asia pacific

The advance of globalisation depends in fundamental ways on the continued flows of transnational labour it has stimulated. For semi-skilled and unskilled service workers these flows are managed through numerous controls imposed by states, employers, labour brokers and even by the expectations of their families and communities of origin. This article concentrates on female service labour originating in Indonesia and the Philippines, destined for Hong Kong and Taiwan. It emphasises the collective (family and community-based) nature of the worker's entry into this type of work. It looks at multiple intersecting discourses that shape, construct and attempt to manage the worker's behaviour at different stages of the migration cycle. It gives particular attention to the receiving workplace: the household, and in some instances, the household-based enterprise. The article shows that workers placed in these households are simultaneously governed by contractual relationships and by historically and culturally derived rules reflecting the household's functions as a property-holding, administrative and patriarchal kinship unit. Globalisation has brought far-reaching changes to patterns of labour migration, but the household as a workplace retains important vestiges of these older patriarchal discourses, and ambiguities remain about the emergence of free labour in domestic work.     

Keeping labour mobility informal: the lack of legality of Central Asian migrants in Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan's legal–regulatory framework provides for a small number of quotas for highly skilled foreign workers but has no provisions for legal employment of semi-skilled or low-skilled migrants from the Central Asian states, who enter under the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) visa-free regime and work informally in construction, household and service sectors. The lack of acknowledgement of the scale of informal labour migration has denoted an act of strategic neglect on the part of the state, allowing it to render migrant labour illegal, disposable, and keep migrants legally and statistically invisible. Unable to obtain a legal status, migrants nominally comply with the existing legal framework as they also circumvent and subvert it. The article details the entrenched informal regime of labour migration and explains why recent efforts to ‘legalize’ labour through the introduction of a labour patent (licence), as is the case in Russia, are unlikely to bring in significant reforms.     

Gender and the State in Rural Chile

Abstract — This paper focuses on SERNAM, the state institution responsible for the incorporation of gender into public policy in Chile, and the actions taken by the state to benefit women employed in the modern agricultural sector. It charts the emergence of the demands for such an institution by the women's movement, and the creation of SERNAM as an integral part of the transition to democracy. In particular, the paper analyses the Programme for the Children of the Temporeras , which is a unique state-led initiative to provide childcare facilities to enable women to enter the seasonal labour market during the summer months. The paper explores the complex relations between gender, the state, capitalist agriculture and patriarchal structures, with the aim of highlighting the sometimes unexpected convergence of interests, and the points of conflict.     

Sharecropping contracts in rural India: A note

In this article we examine the terms of sharecropping contracts using data from rural India. We examine the effect of - (1) the sharing of input costs between landlord and tenant; (2) the tenant's capacity to borrow; and (3) the existence of outside employment opportunities for the tenant — on the share parameter. We regress the share paid by the household on a set of cultivating household and village level characteristics and find that cost sharing and the existence of outside employment opportunities significantly affect the share parameter.     

Secondary Precarity in Asia: Family Vulnerability in an Age of Unfree Labour

ABSTRACT

Scholarly discussions of precarious work have identified and analysed the conditions and structures that produce precarity, the contextual nuances that characterise worker relations across a range of sites and sectors and the possibilities of resistance by the precariat. In these studies, workers are often discussed with inadequate attention to their social embeddedness. Taking workers’ embeddedness in social relations and norms as a starting point for analysis, this article explores a secondary aspect of precarity amongst families of exploited workers. This aspect is analysed according to three registers of vulnerability and risk: economic (household and livelihood), intimate (anxiety and negative emotional relations) and physical (mobility and movement). The article outlines this framework through a case study of trafficked fishers and their families from Cambodia and the Philippines. Human trafficking is an extreme form of precarious labour, characterised by unfreedom and hyper-exploitation. The article contributes to the understanding of the trafficking of migrant fishers, which has not seen rigorous academic documentation and is relatively poorly understood in comparison to other forms of trafficking.     

Willing Daughters: The Moral Rhetoric of Filial Sacrifice and Financial Autonomy in Tokyo's Sex Industry

Japan has one of the world's largest and most diverse legal sex industries. In a limited female labor market, sex industry work is a stigmatized yet lucrative form of women's short-term employment and advertisements for recruiting new employees are prominently displayed across urban spaces associated with feminized consumption. In this article, I examine the ideological impasses that adult Japanese women working in Tokyo's sex industry express when talking about their motives for pursuing this work. Female sex workers commonly justify their work as the necessary sacrifice of filial daughters. This rhetoric of reluctant acceptance for the sake of others, however, obscures the reality that many sex workers are middle-class and college-educated women who find the financial opportunity and flexibility of this industry appealing in contrast to more dominant forms of feminized labor. These women express the ambivalence of their desires for economic self-sufficiency through narrating the dependence of others on them. Examining these ambivalences, I argue that sex workers’ motivations can only be understood through considering the ethical and moral frameworks that define the gendered economies in which they labor.     

Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing

This article outlines the labour impacts and social consequences of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis and 2008–09 global financial crisis on Southeast Asia. Both had adverse consequences on output, employment, income and poverty in the region, although the impact of the global financial crisis was much less severe compared to the Asian financial crisis. Economies recovered quickly from both crises. However, labour markets continue to be characterised by informal, vulnerable and precarious employment. The crises and the ensuing efforts of employers to resort to increased flexibility in labour hiring in both crisis and recovery periods fanned labour protests despite the diminutive size of the trade union movement and the underdeveloped system of industrial relations in most countries. In turn, these protests have triggered national and regional debates on rules for labour contracting, minimum wage adjustments and social protection. These debates have remained unresolved even as the region is gearing up for fuller economic integration in 2015 labelled as the ASEAN Economic Community.     

Migration past and present: changing patterns in Kyrgyzstan

Internal and international labour migration is a main livelihood strategy for many people in rural areas of Kyrgyzstan. It is estimated that approximately one-third of the employable population of Kyrgyzstan is working abroad. However, current labour migration phenomena are not exceptional since Central Asia's history has always been characterized by the movement of people, including external and internal, forced and voluntary, legal and illegal, permanent and temporary, ethnically or economically motivated migration. This article gives an overview of the historical and present migration processes with a special focus on three village communities in rural Kyrgyzstan. It deals with the opportunities and difficulties with which labour migrants and their non-migrating family members are confronted today. The results are based on extensive field work in Kyrgyzstan.     

Neue Besch?ftigungsstrategien jenseits von externer und interner Flexibilisierung

Recent research about regular employment in core areas of high qualified service work in Germany yields contradictory findings about continuities and changes in employment stability. In addressing current debates about changing employment relations, this paper examines how organizational change and the role of customers in service work interact to shape employer demands for more flexible employment. The results of a qualitative study of employment practices in one branch of qualified service work, IT services, shows how clients?? intervention into the production process affects skill demand and firms?? use of flexible employment. At the same time, a pronounced client orientation precipitates the need for context-specific knowledge and stability of employment. The resulting employment strategies aim at developing long-term relations with free-lancers and other short-term workers. These new employment practices call into question the well-accepted distinction between internal and external forms of employment flexibility.