Resistance to Chronic Violence in Informal Workplaces: The Strategies of Domestic Workers in Brazil (2003–2018)

This article analyses the repertoire of individual strategies utilised by domestic workers to resist routinised workplace violence in the cities of São Paulo and Ilhéus, Brazil. Findings suggest that domestic workers favour two strategies of resistance: exit (quitting work without prior notice) and voice (negotiating workplace conditions). The latter strategy is divided into two subtypes: voice-pleading (appealing to decency) and voice-confrontation (warning and rights-claiming). Voice strategies appear more effective than exit in ameliorating patterns of chronic workplace violence, particularly when they incorporate labour rights claims and when emotional ties exist between workers and employers.     

Bureaucratic Migration Politics: German Support for Common EU Policies on Labour Migration

As a macrostructure, this article uses a bureaucratic politics framework to understand the preference formation of the German federal government on liberalising economic migration policies. This allows unpacking the process of preference formation and linking it to a number of causal factors, which, by influencing the costs and benefits distribution of the relevant actors, shape the position of the government. The article argues that the misfit between the existing national regulations for economic migration and European-level policies has to be zero – otherwise the economic and political adaptation costs for the actors involved are too high. A heated national debate on immigration is negatively related to governmental support for such measures, as the political costs of support skyrocket. Conversely, if the decision-making process happens bureaucratically, this helps to attain governmental support, as the political costs of doing so are kept minimal.