How Social Wealth Funds Could Help Tackle Inequality

This article examines the potential to tackle the roots of inequality by the introduction of one or more social wealth funds. Such funds would aim to capture some of the financial gains from the private ownership of capital—a principal driver of inequality—and use the proceeds for wider community benefit, such as investment in social infrastructure. In recent decades a number of countries have introduced a variant on such funds, mostly taking the form of state‐owned sovereign wealth funds resourced through the exploitation of oil, and used for a diversity of economic purposes. In contrast, the UK has failed to take the opportunity to create such funds by, for example, reinvesting the revenue from the sales of public assets. So would it be possible to build one or more such collectively owned funds in the UK, and if so, how should they be financed? As well as funding social investment and anti‐inequality programmes, could such a scheme also help finance a regular Citizen's Dividend payment or a Citizen's Income scheme?     

Apartheid Policing: examining the US migrant labour system through a South African Lens

This article draws a parallel between the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the post-IRCA immigration regime in the USA. I argue that both regimes were organised around Apartheid Policing, which may be defined as a legal process consisting of three mutually reinforcing mechanisms: differentiation of migrants into non-citizen insiders with legal residence rights and non-citizen outsiders without them; stabilisation of migrants as permanent or long-term residents, enabling the growth of the migrant workforce; and marginalisation of migrants as politically vulnerable outsiders, including exploitation at work. But the two regimes were supported by different political and ideological apparatuses. While placing a disproportionate burden on Latino migrants, the post-IRCA immigration regime differed from the Apartheid regime in that it was not organised around an explicit racial hierarchy, and offered non-citizens a greater array of rights. As a result, Apartheid Policing under the post-IRCA immigration regime is potentially more politically sustainable.     

Utopia in Crisis? Subaltern Imaginations in Contemporary Bihar

Abstract

The Subaltern Studies Collective inaugurated an important point of departure in Indian historiography and social sciences by demanding that attention be directed to subalterns (a term adapted from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks) as makers of their own destinies. Their scholarship raises three issues, which are discussed in this article. The first of these relates to the empirical observation about subaltern resistance to elites. The second pertains to the analytical dichotomy between elite and subaltern modes of conducting politics. The third centres on the valorisation of a putatively coherent fragment that seeks autonomy from the totality of the state. The fundamental problem with the perspective advanced by the subaltern studies scholars stems from their implicit assumption that utopian ideals centred on reclaiming dignity and asserting social equality are necessarily derivative of European Enlightenment ideals.     

论劳动关系中的保密义务和竞业禁止

用人单位与劳动者约定竞业禁止可以减少用人单位商业秘密被侵犯的机会,但劳动者的保密义务不以当事人之间的明示约定为前提。用人单位与劳动者之间的竞业禁止协议必须建立在真正的契约自由的基础之上,以用人单位存在可保护的商业秘密为前提,并不得侵犯劳动者的基本人权。     

Noncompetition Clauses: Unreasonable or Efficient?

Generally, legislators and courts look upon noncompetition agreements unfavourably. This paper questions the assumptions underlying the traditional theories on noncompetition clauses and advances two theories that have previously not been found in the legal literature. It is argued that noncompetition clauses are used as a device to self-select employees who desire a long-term contract with the firm. Furthermore, employees agree to these clauses to guarantee that the employer will make specific investments in the employment relationship. The noncompetition agreement protects the creation and distribution of the surplus of the employment relationship. Legal restrictions on noncompetition clauses have the danger of decreasing the ex ante value of the employment relationship. The result will be lower investments and lower wages.     

浅析经济国际化与当代劳动关系法律制度的变革

本文从经济法理论出发,初步分析了上世纪80年代以来,西方主要工业化国家在劳动关系法律制度领域发动和推展的“去管制”运动的过程,指出新的经济活动形式,即经济国际化的加剧发展是其根本原因。在我国当前急需完善相关劳动关系法律制度中,尤其需要重视和研究这一问题。     

创新劳动初探

创新劳动是指运用智能发明创造新的产品、新的劳动手段和新的制度、方法等 ,以大幅度提高生产力的活动。它与非创新劳动相比有自己独有的特点 ,即原创性、不可拟性、生产周期的不确定性和高弹性、高风险性、价值的叠加性等 ,把握这些特点有助于我们深化对马克思的劳动和劳动价值论的认识和研究。     

Digital humanities and the history of working women: a cascade

In this introduction to the special issue on ‘Women's work in changing labour markets’, we argue that a combination of digital advances, notably the digitization of individual- and contextual-level data, the creation of internationally comparable occupation-based classifications, and the development of statistical models allowing for contextually informed analysis, has brought us to the brink of new developments in the field of women's work. Census and vital registration data contain more information on occupations of women than previously thought, and when used in combination with other digitized sources they allow one to assess the possible under-registration of women's work, as illustrated by some of the contributions to this special issue. Other contributions show how standardizing occupation-based classifications allows for temporal and regional comparisons of women's work and makes it feasible to study how community or regional characteristics influence that work. None of these developments – large-scale digitization of individual-level data, standardization of occupational titles and measures of stratification, and contextually informed analyses – is completely new; in some cases they are actually rooted in a venerable research tradition. However, in combination they might well constitute a cascade in the history of working women.     

劳动教养制度存废之争及评析

劳动教养制度是一项具有中国特色的法律制度,它既是我国法学理论界争论的焦点,也是西方社会攻击我国人权状况的主要层面.本文对劳动教养制度存废争论的主要观点进行梳理,并结合法学理论对之进行评析,认为劳动教养制度不能废除,应该完善.     

Chinese Eastern Industrial Zone in Ethiopia: unpacking the enclave

Abstract

This paper examines China’s engagement with Africa through economic zones (EZs). It moves beyond the conceptualisation of EZs as undifferentiated enclaves of foreign investment to a dynamic perspective on the locally negotiated process of zone development. Such a perspective entails critical unpacking of the specific zone regime to understand the diverse and evolving relationships among different state and non-state actors. Drawing upon empirical research on the Eastern Industrial Zone (EIZ) in Ethiopia, we explore the complex process of learning and adaptation by government, developers, investors, and workers throughout the development of a zone regime, with specific attention to capital–labour and expatriate–local relations. We find that despite the EIZ being a state-level cooperation project, private Chinese developers work diligently with the Ethiopian government to improve the institutional support for EZs. Chinese investors also collectively generate a management regime to enhance their overseas operational capacity and experiment with various tactics to transform local recruits into an industrial workforce. Local workers, with limited protection by official labour unions, turn to individual- and group-based agency to improve their working conditions. Despite the momentum created by multiple stakeholders, there are concerns regarding the long-term contributions of EZs to engender sustained industrial transformation and skills development.