Women workers and flexible specialization: the case of Tokyo

Restructuring in flexible specializtion in the post-yen-shock era (since 1985) has created new and different employment opportunities for women in Tokyo and has led to a more flexible use of women workers so that corporaions can maintain flexibility (e.g. in developing new products and dversifying businesses) for quicker response to market changes or for the creation of new market demand. This paper explores effects of restructuring on the female labor market in the information industry in Tokyo's informaion-industry district. The central arguent is around the skill formation of women and a flexible workforce. The paper concludes with some thoughts on relations between flexible specialization and patriarchy.     

Corporate Identity and Solidarity Among the Railway Workers of Atbara, 1924-1946

This article examines the way in which railway employment and urban life have led to the development of a unique identity among the railway workers of Atbara, headquarters of the Sudan Railways. During the period covered by this article, Atbara's railway men formed the core of the Sudanese working class and inaugurated one of the best and most dynamic labor movements in Africa and the Middle East. As many scholars have noted, the development of labor activism, solidarity, and strong social bonds are among the most important characteristics of railway workers worldwide. This article argues that the development of these attributes were closely associated with the nature of railway employment, which involved intensive socialization and acculturation into the norms of the industry.     

The Impact of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act on the U.S. Poultry Industry: A Comparative Analysis

IRCA's impact on the U.S. poultry industry has been uneven across industry sectors and regions. In California, where undocumented immigrants have been present for some decades, IRCA strengthened unions in the processing sector without constricting labor supplies. In other areas of depressed local economies and high unemployment, IRCA has had little impact. Where low-wage industrial recruitment has increased competition for unskilled workers, however, plants have been relying on documented and undocumented new immigrants for labor. Although new immigrants stabilize industry work forces in the short run, over time these immigrant inflows reinforce high labor turnover and fuel the tendency for technological changes to accommodate an unskilkd labor force.     

Why Immigrants Stay in Fashion: Insights from New York's Garment Industry

For many observers the influx of immigrants into New York's garment industry seemed to exemplify the deleterious impact of undocumented immigration: native displacement and a simultaneous deterioration of wages and working conditions. This article argues that this conventional view is incorrect. There is little evidence linking immigrant presence to the availability of undocumented workers. Rather, the immigrant presence is the consequence of the industry's basic labor strategy; immigrants have moved into garments as an older labor force deriving from earlier waves of migration has cyckd out.     

Pathways to work for low‐income workers: The effect of work in the temporary help industry

This paper provides new evidence to inform the policy debate about the effect of a newly important industry—the temporary help industry—on the labor market outcomes of low‐income workers and those workers who are at risk of being on public assistance. The core issue of whether temporary help work harms the long‐term prospects of disadvantaged individuals depends critically on the alternatives available to the worker. Temporary employment results in labor market outcomes that are better than not working at all. For example, while nonemployed public assistance recipients have only a 35 percent chance of being employed a year later, those who were in temporary employment have almost twice the likelihood of being employed in the same period. These findings, if correct, would support the use of temporary agencies by welfare programs. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Re-slicing the Big Apple: New Immigrants and African-Americans in the New York Economy

The continuing convergence of immigrants on New York City is a puzzle. On the one hand, the decline of the city's manufacturing sector and the growth of advanced services appear to provide little demand for immigrant labor; on the other hand, the deep penetration of immigrants into the city's economy has been paralleled by a deteriorating employment situation among native blacks. This article, seeks to unravel this puzzk in the light of two conflicting perspectives, the restructuring and the replacement labor hypotheses. The paper assesses each perspective using data from the 1970 and 1980 Censuses of Population and merged sampks of the June 1986 and 1988 Current Population Surveys.     

Introduction: Immigration and U.S. Integration, Policy Reforms, and Economic Change

The economic and political ramifications of immigration will become increasingly evident in the United States during the coming decade, particularly in view of recent immigration policies that guarantee that the magnitude and diversity of the inflow will continue to grow. This symposium presents research that examines the role of immigrants in industrial restructuring and evaluates the effects of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. The importance of English language skills for economic advancement, and of government-supported training for refugees, are also examined. Together, this body of research directs our attention to the need for a more active public and private sector role in assisting all U.S. workers prepare for the demands of the labor market of the future.     

Latino immigrant workers in the Los Angeles apparel industry

Abstract

The apparel industry is one of the most globalized industries in the world. Apparel manufacturers are moving production to areas of the world where they can obtain the lowest wage labor. Imports of clothing to the US have risen dramatically, while garment jobs have dwindled. Los Angeles is the one area of the country that is running counter to this trend, in part because of its access to a large, Latino workforce, many of whom are undocumented. This paper considers the organization of the apparel industry in Los Angeles today, especially the return of sweatshops. It examines the role of Latino immigrants as operatives in the industry, and the conditions under which they must work. The fundamental problem lies in the lack of political power of these workers, who must labor under an apartheid‐like system that denies them basic civil rights. Even recent signs of growing Latino political mobilization cannot bring immediate relief. Garment workers need to unionize in order to protect themselves. The problems and prospects for organizing are briefly considered.     

TJTC and the promise and reality of redistributive vouchering and tax credit policy

The Targeted Jobs Tax Credit (TJTC) is a representative redistributive incentive. Initially, proponents saw TJTC as an elegant program, efficiently promoting labor market behavior that would solve the employment problems of many disadvantaged job seekers. However, interest groups distorted the credit into a windfall for businesses that hire large numbers of low wage workers. The policy theories incorporated into TJTC, which emphasized continual program reform and minimized program management by public administrators, provided a setting conducive to interest group distortion. Because few representatives of the disadvantaged participated in the oversight process, special interests undermined TJTC being reformed through empirical evaluation. This experience indicates that without major changes in the policy process, narrowly targeted rzdistributive policies should be avoided.     

Forging a Migration Policy for Capital: Labor Shortages and Guest Workers

The expanding use of guest work is the wave of the future global neoliberal capitalism, but is a recurring theme in capitalism. The trade in global labor was pervasive during the Victorian age, second only to trade in finance. As the United States lost manufacturing to the global South, service and professional workers and their unions found it reassuring that that their jobs could not sent abroad. In the last decade, importing service workers from the global South is a dominant trend. As the United States is closing doors to traditional forms of immigration, it promotes migrant labor as a means to fill job shortages created by capital to lower wages. Guest work destabilizes the working class through turning “good jobs” into “bad jobs.” If comprehensive immigration reform includes guest work, borders will close and free migrant labor will become indentured labor. The World Bank and WTO view these programs as the new development model for the global South. Promoting export of skilled and unskilled labor benefits a bare few while driving most workers and peasants into abject poverty while heightening exploitation of labor worldwide.     

Low-Income Issues in Electricity Restructuring

Lower prices. New technologies. More choices. These are benefits that competition through electric industry restructuring was supposed to bring customers. Thus far, results have been disappointing, and harmful to the most vulnerable–low‐income people. Restructuring is no longer under active consideration in any state that has not already enacted it. In several states, restructuring has been reversed. This article focuses on the few states that have retained electric industry restructuring, providing a menu of necessary protections, strategies for putting them into place, and supporting arguments to keep them there. However, low‐income protections are appropriate for anactment in all places because vulnerable low‐income families live in states with both restructured and traditional electricity regulation.     

Guest workers or unauthorized immigrants? The case of forest workers in the United States

This study examines regional differences in the legal status of forest workers in the Pacific Northwest and Southeastern United States, using United States Department of Labor data and qualitative fieldwork in Alabama and Oregon. The authors find that there are significantly fewer H-2B guest workers on federal lands in Oregon than on privately owned forest plantations in Alabama, and the Southeast more generally. By contrast, numerous workers on federal lands in Oregon are undocumented. This difference may largely be explained by variations in the economies of scale in forest work in the Pacific Northwest (federal lands) and the Southeast (mainly private lands). The study also finds that there is no real difference in the working conditions of undocumented immigrants and guest workers—both groups face labor exploitation. Guest workers in the forest industry, many of whom have no previous work experience or access to social networks in the United States, face extreme isolation at worksites, are beholden to contractors, fear losing their jobs if they complain, and are generally unaware of their basic rights. By contrast, many undocumented forest workers in Oregon belong to established social networks through which they are recruited onto forest labor crews. However, unauthorized workers are also vulnerable to labor exploitation because they fear deportation and are obliged to their kin-employers. Policy recommendations to improve labor conditions and enforce existing labor laws for all forest workers include: better tracking of workers across states to monitor labor abuses, allocating more resources to state labor departments to facilitate worker outreach and worksite inspections, and better communication among land management officials and the Department of Labor.

全球化时代企业劳动者权益保护面临的挑战和对策

经济全球化、全球市场的开放和融合使全球范围的竞争加剧。为了降低生产成本,提高竞争力,许多国家都把压低本国劳动力成本作为首选的方式。这就使政府对劳动关系规制放松,企业拥有更多的工作场所的支配权,采取了更为灵活的雇佣方式,雇佣更多非全日制员工、短期员工、租赁员工等。而这些非“正式”员工的劳动保障和待遇往往都很低,一些基本的劳动权益很难保障。本文分析了全球化对劳动者权益的影响,指出劳动者权益缺失产生的严重后果,最后提出相应的解决对策,即政府应加强对劳动者权益保护,加强企业社会责任,强化工会职能,三管齐下维护劳动者权益。     

From the Wagner Act to the Human Rights Watch Report: Labor and Freedom of Expression and Association, 1935-2000*

This paper examines the legal restrictions on the labor movement's right to picket and strike since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or Wagner Act in 1935. The NLRA was seen as a statutory equivalent of the First Amendment for the labor movement, guaranteeing workers rights of association and expression they had been denied historically through the use of court injunctions, criminal conspiracy prosecutions, and extra-legal violence. Supreme Court decisions of the late 1930s, often arising out of labor conflicts, also significantly expanded rights of freedom of association and expression. Yet a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 2000 concluded that US workers lacked the basic rights to organize, bargain, and strike required by international human rights standards. It found that US labor laws permitted employers to fire, harass, and intimidate workers with impunity. This paper examines the decline of these rights since the Wagner Act, seeing the roots of the legal decline in the ambivalent legacy of the Act itself. On the one hand, both the Act and the Court legally recognized unions as legitimate political organizations and extended to them many of the associative and expressive freedoms that had been available to other groups. On the other hand, the legal price for this recognition of legitimacy was the restriction of a range of expressive activities. Subsequently, labor's rights came to be treated more under the framework of industrial relations and economic policy than of civil liberties and constitutional freedoms. This gradual legal retrenchment, along with political and economic developments, left the labor movement severely weakened by the end of the century, with significantly less legal protection than its counterparts in other economically advanced countries. I explore these developments by relating them to the literatures on American exceptionalism and industrial relations. Theoretically, I rely on work which examines the relationship between institutional structure and human agency to understand the strategic choices made by corporations, state actors, and the labor movement. The paper concludes with an assessment of recent calls for labor law reform as a strategy for reviving the labor movement.     

Promotion Tournament,Labor Market Tightening and Pension Generosity: A Comparative Public Policy Analysis of Pension System for Urban Workers in China (1997–2013)

Abstract

This article conducts a comparative public policy analysis of China’s generous urban worker basic pension system. It is commonly believed that Chinese local governments, which are motived by office-seeking incentives under decentralization, may foster economic growth at the expense of citizens’ social rights and thus “promotion tournament competition” comes into being. This article challenges this view by arguing that such competition can increase the generosity of social programs such as public pensions, especially in the condition of labor scarcity. This argument is supported by time-series cross-section analysis of 31 Chinese provincial units (1997–2013) using a novel indicator of the intensity of inter-locality competition. When the labor market tightens, workers can leave a locality to seek better compensation. Motivated by the promotion tournament competition to develop the local economy, which requires the issue of labor shortage to be addressed, local governments then provide generous local pension schemes to retain workers. Operating in a macroeconomic climate of labor scarcity, promotion tournament competition becomes an unlikely catalyst for welfare expansion in China.     

IRCA and the Unionization of Mexican and Central American Undocumented Workers in Los Angeles County

This article explores the likely impact of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) on the unionization o f undocumented workers. Research conducted prior to IRCA challenges the conventional wisdom that undocumented workers cannot be organized because of their fear of apprehension and deportation by the INS. Preliminary research subsequent to the passage of this legislation in 1986 suggests that essentially the same factors that mitigated the fear of the INS and made the undocumenteds as receptive to unionization as other classes of workers similarly located in the labor market prior to IRCA are operating in the post-IRCA period. The future "organizability" of undocumented workers rests considerably on unions'determination to organize them and whether they continue to be protected by U.S. labor laws.     

The Labor(s) of Degrowth

The degrowth debate so far has lacked a clear vision of what social subjects, and which processes of political subjectivation, can turn its vision into a political strategy. In this contribution to the debate on degrowth and eco-socialism, I point to the place of labor in the politics of socio-ecological revolution, arguing that degrowth should aim for a truly democratic, workers’ controlled production system, where alienation is actively countered by a collective reappropriation of the products of labor and by a truly democratic decision-making process over the use of the surplus. Such strategy must be based on an extended concept of class relations that goes beyond the wage labor relation, and toward a broader conception of work as a (gendered and racialized) mediator of social metabolism. I conclude that ecosocialist degrowth should take the form of a struggle for dealienating both industrial and meta-industrial labor.     

Value,Nature, and Labor: A Defense of Marx

In this theoretical intervention, I argue that Karl Marx’s theory of value remains a powerful way to understand nature–society relations under capitalism. I suggest environmentalist critiques often misunderstand Marx’s value theory as a theory that “values” workers over nature. His critical theory is better understood as an explanation of how capitalist value exploits both workers and the environment. My defense of Marxian value theory is articulated through five “theses.” I provide empirical illustration based on recent research into the nitrogen fertilizer industry. (1) Value theory does not refer to all values. (2) Marx’s contention that nature does not contribute to value helps us explain its degradation under capitalism. (3) Marx’s value theory rooted in production allows for a critique of environmental economic valuation schemes (e.g. payments for ecosystem services) which are based on neoclassical value theories rooted in consumption/exchange. (4) Value is abstract social labor, but that means it also abstracts from nature. (5) Capital does value certain parts of nature and that matters. I conclude by advocating a “value theory of nature” in the spirit of Diane Elson’s powerful articulation of Marx’s “value theory of labor.”     

Resettling Refugees in Rural and Regional Australia: Learning from Recent Policy and Program Initiatives

Conscious policy and program support for the resettlement of refugees in regional and rural areas is a relatively recent trend in Australia. Resettlement is a complex process that hinges on the establishment of viable communities. This review suggests that its outcomes, especially for refugee communities, are potentially mixed. However, an appropriately resourced, well managed and well planned refugee resettlement program can potentially provide beneficial outcomes for refugees and host communities. This article draws on existing empirical data and contributions made at a VicHealth Roundtable in late 2007 to thematically explore the challenges facing rural and regional resettlement programs. Given that settlement is a dynamic process and the approaches to rural and regional settlement are evolving, this article provides 12 propositions for a more effective and integrated approach to policy and practice.     

Application Districts: An Emerging Spatial Form in the Computer Software Industry

This paper presents a stylized theory of the geography of the computer software industry. It is timely because countries around the world, and at different stages of development, have targeted that industry for attention because of its growth and stability, and the quality of the jobs it provides. I demonstrate that the software industry is decentralizing away from the centers that were first established in the 1970s, but there is no process of de-concentration underway. Old clusters are losing their share of national employment, but they are being replaced by new clusters, and not by a generalized dispersal of the industry. I explain this pattern in terms of a spatial division of labor emerging in the software industry. This division is not based on a low-skill/high-skill labor dichotomy, as in high tech manufacturing, but on a distinction within high-skilled labor between those working on general-purpose technology and those developing applications for specific uses. I call the new clusters where specialized applications are developed application districts.