Singapore’s Phantom Workers

In 2009, the Singapore state prosecuted a string of businesses for listing fictitious local workers on their books in order to stretch their foreign worker entitlement. These “phantom” worker scams, prevalent since the 1980s, appear out of place in Singapore – a country with a strong international reputation for its government’s efficiency and strict legal enforcement. This paper examines the state’s prosecutions of the phantom worker scams in the context of the exceptional economic and political stresses in 2009, when Singapore was most severely affected by the global economic crisis, in order to address the employment regime in Singapore. It argues that the belated efforts to tackle the phantom worker scams reflected the pro-business state’s reluctance to tackle illegalities crucial to facilitating employers’ otherwise unlawful access to wealth and resources in Singapore.     

Nomadic by nature? Contradictions and precarious work in Mongolian tourism

ABSTRACT

Mongolia's transition to a democratic, market economy has created widespread change, especially among pastoral herders. Pastoralists have been depicted as archaic and independent ‘nomads’ who exist outside the modern economy. Still, pastoral culture is a key asset in tourism products and advertising. Tourism could provide fair economic benefits, but inclusive growth depends on how shareholders participate. Using interviews with tour company employees, I investigate how tour companies incorporate pastoralists into their products. The results demonstrate several barriers to inclusive growth. Companies feel individually responsible for managing tourism assets, and to maintain the guise of pastoral authenticity, they limit pastoralists’ participation in business through informal and contingent work contracts. These contracts reveal problematic asymmetry and give pastoralists little job security, control, or access to employee benefits. These circumstances oppose inclusive growth paradigms and demonstrate elements of precarious work. The shared interest in maintaining pastoral culture may unify this fragmented industry.     

Precarious Elderly Workers in Post-Industrial South Korea

This article examines how the combination of immature welfare state and expansion of the service economy, in particular, contributes to the precariousness of the elderly labour market in South Korea where nearly half of the elderly live below the poverty line. It completes an empirical analysis of how elderly workers in Korea are participating in the labour market and examines their situation using a conceptualisation of “precariousness.” It is explained how the elderly in an immature welfare state are pushed into bad jobs resulting in a large number of precarious “elderly workers” in an economically advanced country. Results of the statistical analysis suggest that, due to severe precariousness, the Korean elderly are unable to escape from poverty even though they work. Also, gender segregation of precariousness in the service industry has been exacerbated in the elderly labour market. Structural change such as the rapid transition to a service-oriented economy has a greater impact on elderly women than middle aged or elderly men because elderly women tend to have lower skill levels and shorter careers, mainly entering service occupations where the bad jobs are concentrated.     

Shifting Tides of Informal Worker Resistance in Mexico: A Domestic Work-Construction Contrast

Informal workers in Mexico, the majority of the country's workforce, have organised to demand rights, but with varying results. In this article, we contrast recent organising by Mexico's domestic workers and informal construction workers. Household worker movements have succeeded in institutionalising significant new organisations and raising public awareness. Construction workers, despite earlier militant counterexamples, have remained trapped by corporatist structures, and their organising capacity has atrophied. We place these outcomes in the context of the overall decline of labour, suggesting conclusions for the limits and possibilities of contemporary Mexican labour mobilisation.     

新加坡公民社会组织的兴起与治理中的合作网络

新加坡的政治文化和国家意识正在经历变迁."新加坡21远景计划"的制定反映并强化了这一变迁的趋势.这是新加坡公民社会及其组织兴起所必需的结构性因素.新加坡各类公民社会组织积极回应政治系统发生的变迁.现有组织力图淡化传统的角色功能,寻求赋予其自身新的合法性.新兴组织则利用大好机遇和可待开发的广阔社会空间努力发展自己.公民社会组织的兴起,为新加坡在稳健而又似乎缓慢的民主化进程中重新界定国家与社会的关系提供了新的路径.     

The Gender Deficit: Everyday Practices of Differentiation in the Chilean Labour Market

We focus on the reproduction of gender inequality in the labour market, analysing everyday practices of social boundary demarcation that exclude women from accessing resources at work. We argue that women's diminished position in the labour market – or gender deficit – is a result of taken‐for‐granted, day‐to‐day practices, conditioning the distribution of resources. Taking Chilean professional women as a case study, we focus on labour market practices that uphold gendered evaluation criteria, reproduce social classifications, and engender exclusion through social boundary work that limits women's access to labour market benefits and rewards.     

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.     

Gender Wage Work and Development in North East Brazil

The last three decades have witnessed a major expansion of export agriculture in Latin America and the emergence of largely feminised labour forces. Research has illustrated how farms purposefully construct gendered divisions of labour and how women often experience worse pay and conditions than men. However, it is also important to consider how and why gender divisions of labour change. This article does so by examining export grape production in North East Brazil. It locates farms' practices of gendering work within a three-pronged context of rising buyer requirements, changes in labour supply and the influence of rural trade unions.     

Racialisation of Immigrants at Work: Labour Mobility and Segmentation of Peruvian Migrants in Chile

This article explores the emergent racialisation of Peruvian migrants as one element conditioning the labour segregation that characterises Peruvian insertion in Chile. We understand racialisation as a process of construction of categories in which both individual and collective actors participate, and whose expression is demonstrated by the differentiation and inequality that affects the racialised group. We tackle the articulation of racial differences among individual actors, both Chilean employers and Peruvian migrant workers, to suggest that the attribution of naturalised characteristics to migrants is related to segregation, mobility, and specific trajectories in the labour market.