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.     

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.     

Jakarta’s Precarious Workers: Are they a “New Dangerous Class”?

In his 2011 book, The Precariat, Guy Standing claims that the precariat is “a new dangerous class.” This article seeks to revisit this claim and assess it using the case of young workers engaged in urban situations in Jakarta that fit the definition of precarious work. It will particularly focus on young workers who are often identified as potentially “dangerous” because they join vigilante groups. It is argued that these precarious workers share characteristics with the broader working class, and the claim that they constitute a new class in a developing country such as Indonesia is challenged. It is found that membership in vigilante groups is important for providing social bonds that support these young precarious workers in dealing with labour-related insecurities. The social bonds also moderate their anger, anxiety, anomie and alienation, and act to integrate them within society. It is also suggested that where these young precarious workers may be considered “dangerous,” it is a characteristic common to the lumpenproletariat. This shapes their class consciousness and affects their ambiguous relations with the rest of the working class.     

Muhacir Bulgarian Workers in Turkey: Their Relation to Management and Fellow Workers in the Formal Employment Sector

This article is concerned with Muhacir Bulgarians in Turkey - Turkish term for immigrants from the Balkans, particularly from Bulgaria. It considers them as a distinct sociological presence in the formal manufacturing sector of the Turkish labour force and examines their employment, means of material support, their position in the labour market, and their relation to management, trade unions and other workers. Possible future developments are considered. The article focuses mainly on those employed in the Bursa textile industry, but reference is also made to other workers employed in the Izmit triangle and its environs who work in the metal goods sector. Where possible, comparison is made with Turks of non-Bulgarian origin.     

PATRONAGE AND CLASS IN URBAN PAKISTAN

Of the rich academic literature that has emerged on the growth and dynamism of the “informal economy” in South Asia in recent years very little work has focused on the Pakistani context. This article builds upon the growing body of work on “informal employment” by identifying and explaining modes of labor control in the housing construction industry in metropolitan Pakistan. The crucial role of the subcontractor and his exploitative relationship with workers is discussed in a Gramscian framework. Workers are ensconced in a hegemonic relationship with contractors due to oppressive structural conditions as well as a culture of dependency that contractors have nurtured. Against the backdrop of the shift from Fordist to flexible accumulation regimes, the author argues that the present conjuncture is marked by the prevalence of extra-economic forms of control such that workers conceive of contractors as patrons. The instrumentalization of cultural norms of reciprocity by contractors does not mean that the labor–capital relationship is unchanging and rooted in “culture.” In fact, personalized patronage networks coexist with impersonal market ethics dynamically so as to produce and sustain the hegemony of capital.     

Positioning the product: Indonesian migrant women workers in Taiwan

There are two important phenomena at work relating to migrant labourers, and in particular to “caregivers” or “carers,” in the labour market of contemporary Taiwan. First, the formulation and promotion by brokers of nationality-based stereotypes that tend to channel migrant workers of different nationalities into different segments of the labour market. In terms of gender, women are predominantly channelled into sectors that are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. In the category of care giving, we see a trend toward a hierarchical structuring between Filipinas and Indonesians, with Indonesian women often doing the dirtier and more demanding jobs of caring for the sick and elderly. Second, despite the fact that the majority of Indonesian women workers are contracted to work as carers, a significant number actually work in various capacities in family businesses as well as working as maids in the family home. This reality does not reflect the picture projected by government statistics on migrant workers in Taiwan. Nor indeed is it given sufficient recognition in the research on Filipina domestic workers in Taiwan, which, for the most part, focuses on domestic workers working in that capacity. What appears to be a tightly controlled arena for migrant workers is, in fact, open to manipulation often resulting in a “double-exploitation” of the Indonesian woman worker.     

Paid work and socio-political consciousness of garment workers in Bangladesh

During the era of globalization, while international capital and world market factories are shaping the course of industrialization and “development” in many countries, it remains to be seen how far such “development” is conducive to increasing and improving women's paid work specifically, and labour rights, and empowerment in general. Using my research in Bangladesh, I juxtapose garment workers' experience to assess the implications of world market factories on women workers, their wages, work conditions, skill development, organizational links, and empowerment. In this article, I argue that women's multiple responsibilities and specific social locations as women and paid workers create distinctive form of activism and political consciousness. In addition, I suggest that the intersections of women's lives in the family and the workplace and their networks with other women create what Morgan and Bookman (1988) call “double consciousness” as women and as workers. This double consciousness generates multiple forms of resistance and social movements against the nexus between the state, multinational and local entrepreneurs.     

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.     

Rise of the temporary employment industry in Namibia: A regulatory ‘fix’

The role of the temporary employment industry as an active intermediary in the job market can only be fully understood in the context of wider processes of restructuring and regulation at a particular time and place. In Namibia, the rise of poorly regulated employment relationships occurred in a context of expanding institutional and statutory regulation of the labour market. Here the temporary employment industry thrives within the interstices left by the limits in regulatory coverage. Nonstandard jobs are premised on a selective decoupling of the employment relationship from statutory, and hence almost invariably also collective, protective measures. The mediating role of the employment agency between the client firm and the temporary labourer allows management to evade or dilute the protections that insulate permanent employees from competitive pressures in the external market. As such, temporary agency employment constitutes both a regulatory ‘fix’ for the dilemmas associated with the deployment of labour and a mechanism for the social reproduction of a nonstandard labour supply. However, the role of labour market intermediary varies depending on whether an agency is located at the top or the bottom of the temporary employment industry.     

Creating Surplus Labour: Neo-Liberal Transformations and the Development of Relative Surplus Population in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Many among the world’s population are surplus to the requirements of capital accumulation. These are people who become engaged in precarious employment both in rural and urban contexts and those who are involuntarily unemployed. Their presence has been particularly acute in “peripheral countries.” Mainstream economic literature explains this in terms of the dual labour market, where it is argued that surplus labour will eventually disappear with market-led economic development. Contrary to this explanation, this article argues, using Marx’s concept of relative surplus population (RSP), that under the existing neo-liberal framework such labour vulnerability is continually being created. This article charts the developmental history of Indonesia and demonstrates that the growth of RSP is an outcome of a neo-liberal transformation which favours capital accumulation at the service of global markets. Neo-liberal adjustments shape the development of RSP in three related ways. First, the adjustments change class relations and transform state orientation. Second, the reconfiguration of class dynamics and the state shapes the model of accumulation. Third, the model of accumulation eventually affects the size of RSP. It is argued that the disconnection between the domestic agricultural development and industrialisation has contributed to the maintenance of a large RSP in Indonesia.     

The prostitute

Migrant domestic workers rarely take part in — let alone organize — public protests in the countries where they work. Public protests are virtually unheard of among migrant domestic workers in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, and especially in the Middle East and the Gulf States. Over the past decade and a half, however, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong — mostly Filipinas and Indonesian women — have become highly active, organizing and participating in political protests. Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers protest in a place where they are guest workers and temporary migrants, denied the opportunity of becoming legal citizens or permanent residents. Increasingly, these workers, their grassroots activist organizations, and the nongovernmental organizations with which they are affiliated frame their concerns in terms of global, transnational, and human rights, not merely local migrant worker rights. This article takes the “Consulate Hopping Protest and Hall of Shame Awards” event — part of the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Hong Kong in 2005 — as an ethnographic example of domestic worker protest and as an entrée through which to ask what it is about Hong Kong and about the position of women migrant workers — whose mobility and voice is both a product and a symptom of globalization — that literally permits public protests and shapes their form and content. The article illustrates how migrant workers’ protests and activism have been shaped by domestic worker subjectivities, by the dynamics of inter-ethnic worker affiliations, and by the sociohistorical context of Hong Kong as a post-colonial “global city” and a “neoliberal space of exception.”     

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.     

Hooking Workers and Hooking Votes: Enganche,Suffrage, and Labor Market Dualism in Latin America

Labor market dualism—the segmentation of workers between formal, legally protected employment and informal, unprotected status—has long drawn attention from scholars and policymakers in Latin America. This article argues that lasting patterns of economic and political segmentation of workers arose earlier in the region's history than has previously been understood, well before the classic “incorporation” period. Late‐nineteenth‐century practices for the recruitment and retention of workers shaped Latin America's first sets of labor laws, most notably those governing union organization and individual worker job stability. Subsequently, these first laws served as important templates for development, constraining and conditioning the labor codes adopted under mass‐based politics. Using historical data drawn from Chile, Peru, and Argentina, this article shows how differing recruitment practices and variation in the extension of effective suffrage rights and electoral participation shaped early legal labor market segmentation and inequality in Latin America.     

Temporeras and Household Relations: Seasonal Employment in Chile's Agro-Export Sector

Abstract — This paper considers how the growth in non-traditional fruit and vegetable exports has affected female employment patterns and the consequences this may have for household and gender relations. Within export agriculture, there has emerged a demand for specifically female labour, providing rural women with employment opportunities that had not previously existed. The majority of the female workers have only seasonal work and this has led to their designation as temporeras. Through a variety of interview material drawn from the experiences of women living and working in Region IV and VI, the paper seeks to reveal the complexities involved in attempting to conceptualise women's involvement in this emergent labour market. The composition of the household and the level of household income are important factors in determining women's labour force participation. The case studies appear to show that in spite of the hard work and unprotected conditions, working as a temporera is a desirable employment for women. The paper argues that the sweeping changes in the agricultural sector, in which women had previously been marginalised as'unpaid family labour', have created opportunities for them to rework household relations.     

‘We Could be Rich’: Unemployment,Roadblocks and the Rhythms of Hydrocarbon Work among the Guaraní of the Argentine Chaco

In the Argentine Chaco, indigenous Guaraní lives are deeply entangled with the oil and gas industry. In response to the hydrocarbon sector's shifting dynamics, unemployed Guaraní have found innovative ways to make claims and mobilise for temporary employment. This article emphasises the perspectives of these mobilised populations and describes the political difficulties that precarious labour forces confront. It also draws attention to the temporalities of extraction and to the accompanying rhythms of flexible employment. In doing so, it extends the concept of precarity to highlight continuities between the impermanence of employment and the instability of mobilisation.     

Precarious Work and its Complicit Network: Migrant Labour in Singapore

ABSTRACT

How does precarious work entail social vulnerabilities and moral complicities? Theorists of precarity pose two challenges for analysing labour conditions in Asia. Their first challenge is to distinguish the new kinds of social vulnerability which constitute precarious work. The second is to assign moral responsibility in the social network that produces vulnerability in depoliticised and morally detached ways. In this article, the social and normative dimensions of precarious work are connected through a conceptual investigation into how Singapore allocates responsibility for managing temporary migrant labour. First, it analyses how various management strategies, driven by globalisation and government deregulation, increase worker vulnerabilities. These strategies intensify relations of dependence, disempowerment and discrimination, which the workers may accommodate or resist in limited ways. Second, it assesses why the strategies leave the state, employers, agents and others complicit in producing the vulnerabilities. These actors enable, collaborate with, or condone the production of precarity. Their complicity is complicated by varying support or resistance to reforms. The result is a novel conceptual scheme for analysing the complicit network behind precarious work, which can be used in other sites of precarity where some are complicit in the vulnerability of others.     

Studentische Hilfskräfte im deutschen Bildungswesen

The article takes a critical look at the situation of graduate assistants at German universities. For this purpose the paper is based on two sociological perspectives. On the one hand, being employed as a student assistant can be regarded as an important individual strategy to gather privileges in the German higher educational system. On the other hand, working as a student assistant is a paradigmatic example of labor conditions in modern society due to the fact that higher qualified persons need to be profoundly flexible and have to work under precarious employment conditions. The analysis highlights that the problematic working conditions of student assistants are caused by the specific structures of the German education system. It is the difference between individual prospects and objective possibilities which makes these precarious labor conditions possible.     

Another Form of Aboriginal Exemption — Employment as Protection Against Removal

The Queensland Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, which introduced the system of exemption certificates, also initiated another form of “exemption” — one based on employment. The Act permitted “lawfully employed” Aboriginal people to be “excepted” from forcible removal to reserves. Those placed on an Aboriginal reserve faced a restrictive life of disconnection from Country, kin networks, and traditional practices and way of life. Many Aboriginal people found employment in the pastoral industry and thus avoided the Act's provision of removal to a reserve. This paper interrogates government records and reports to provide an understanding of the development and implementation of this legislation and the racial ideologies underpinning it. The 1898 diary of a Queensland pastoralist who employed Aboriginal men on his station is also examined to obtain an understanding of the roles, experiences, and position of Aboriginal people in the pastoral industry during this period. These findings reveal that despite hardships faced in the pastoral industry, Aboriginal people found advantages in this form of employment. Through their highly sought-after pastoral skills and expertise, and strategic engagement with Europeans, Aboriginal people excelled in the pastoral industry, and many achieved significant levels of freedom and success.     

ALIENS AND AIDS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA: THE MALAWI-SOUTH AFRICA DEBATE

Between 1988 and 1992, about 13,000 Malawian mine migrant workerswere repatriated from South Africa. The official reason givenwas that in the previous two years some 200 of them had testedHIV/AIDS positive. The South African Chamber of Mines requestedthe Malawi government to screen all the prospective migrantworkers from the country for HIV/AIDS before leaving for employmentin South Africa. The Malawi government refused, and the Chamberstopped recruiting labour from the country following a governmentban on the employment of foreigners with HIV/AIDS. Strong armtactics were employed in the repatriation of the Malawian workers,causing heated debates between the Chamber and the Malawi government,and the latter and its repatriated citizens. Within South Africaitself, opinion was divided. The Chamber wanted to keep itsMalawian workers for their skills, work discipline and lackof militancy. Some white conservative elements in the governmentdemanded the repatriation. They based their arguments on issuesof public health, emphasizing the risks the foreign workersposed to the local-especially the urban communities. A criticalanalysis of the issues involved, and the way the Malawians wererepatriated, suggests that HIV/AIDS was used as a smoke screen.The South African mining industry was going through a periodof crisis which necessitated massive retrenchment of workers,and especially foreigners. Desultory migrants were being replacedby career miners as part of the labour stabilization process.There was also a shift towards the recruitment of local workers.Malawi was no longer an important source of labour for the industry.     

Liberalisation in India: Does it Resolve or Aggravate Employment Problems?

ABSTRACT

This article discusses whether liberalisation has moderated or aggravated India’s employment problems. Since the Modi government’s election in 2014 and the introduction of the flagship “Make in India” policy, various government officials and academics have argued that India’s employment situation has improved and is showing promising signs of growth and development. However, in this article, it is argued that India’s liberalisation policies have generated numerous problems: employment has delinked from GDP growth due to the increasing financialisation of accumulation; job growth is equal to or below labour force growth; and informalisation is increasing. A structural shift is occurring in India and is causing rural–urban migration due to increased agricultural input costs, reverse tenancy and the mechanisation of agriculture without the creation of new employment. This has led to a redistribution of existing employment in the urban informal sector.