试论工会干部应对突发事件的能力提升

突发事件是指在一定区域内突然发生的,规模较大且对社会产生广泛负面影响的,对公众生命和财产构成严重威胁的事件和灾难。在应对突发事件的过程中,工会组织要正确定位与党委、政府、企事业行政的关系,工会干部要努力提升应对突发事件的能力。     

The Africa-China relationship: challenges and opportunities

The dramatic growth in the relationship between Africa and China is one of the great stories of the twenty-first century, part of the profound transformations taking place in the global political economy. It has been greeted with excitement, consternation, and confusion. To its cheerleaders, it represents the enduring partnership between Africa and China, spawned by the historical affinities of struggles against Western imperialism and humanistic aspirations for development. To its critics, it is reminiscent of European colonisation a century earlier, in which Africa serves as a cheap source of raw materials, a lucrative export market for Chinese manufactured goods, and an outlet for its surplus capital. Rather than a development partner, some see China as Africa's biggest development competitor, whose explosive growth and insatiable quest for global markets threatens Africa's industrialisation and competitiveness. This paper examines the factors behind the development of Africa-China relations, especially its economic magnitude, and the challenges and opportunities it offers both regions.     

资本主义国家工会危机对中国工会的警示

目前资本主义国家工会正在遭遇重大危机,大部分资本主义国家的工会组织建制率出现了持续下降的趋势.与之相反,中国工会“一枝独秀”,工会组织建制率和职工入会率不断攀升.但是中国工会不能在数字面前盲目乐观、高枕无忧,应警惕资本主义国家工会危机,强化中国工会群众性基础.资本主义国家工会危机与其工会自身存在的问题密切相关,尤其是与其不断弱化的群众基础有直接关系.中国工人阶级呈现“国际重组”的队伍特征、中国工人阶级的“自觉、自为”意识逐渐觉醒、中国工人阶级组织化呈现多条途径,工人阶级出现的这些特征变化都要求中国工会强化群众性基础.扩大工会会员范围、切实履行工会维权职责、创新工会服务职工的活动内容是强化中国工会群众性基础的路径策略.     

Labour flexibility in export horticulture: a case study of northeast Brazilian grape production

This article analyses the nature and extent of labour flexibility, defined as lack of permanent and secure employment contracts, within an emerging export horticulture sector in northeast Brazil. Whilst much has been written about flexible employment systems in agriculture, it is important to show exactly why, how, and to what extent these systems are flexible, and conversely, what kinds of strategies and practices are available to workers to ameliorate their conditions within such systems. This article illustrates how a combination of processes – farms' ability to produce two harvests per annum, northern retailers' increasing demands for product quality, employers' requirements for relatively skilled labour, and workers' ability to organise and extract concessions from employers – contribute, within the conditions of the São Francisco valley, to specific labour regimes and forms of labour flexibility.     

‘Not Simple,Not Pure’: Revisioning of Mythical Wicked Women in the Stories of Sara Maitland

The British novelist, feminist and religious thinker Sara Maitland (b.1950) is renowned for her short stories, many of which involve the rewriting of fairy tale and classical and biblical myth. This article situates Maitland's retellings within the contemporary feminist tradition of literary revisioning, but emphasises that her retelling of old tales is distinguished by a deep—and often discomforting—engagement with questions of morality. This is rooted in Maitland's political commitment and Christian faith, and is particularly evident in her treatment of mythical female evil. Her short stories take a morally ambiguous approach, paying attention to the moral and psychological complexities of the wicked stepmothers in fairy tale, gorgons and child-killers of classical myth, and temptresses of the Hebrew Bible. Maitland's feminist revisioning of mythical wicked women does not flinch from their darkness, or impose simple ethical lessons, but at the same time she is (sometimes horribly) aware of their moral significance. This article examines the portrayal of feminist theology's concept of the ‘female sin’ of passivity in Maitland's revisioning of Delilah (in Daughter of Jerusalem, 1978) and ‘Helen of Troy's Aerobics Class’ (in On Becoming A Fairy Godmother, 2003); how the crimes of mythical wicked women are retold as being motivated by revenge against men in ‘Deborah and Jael’ (Daughter of Jerusalem), ‘Siren Song’ and ‘The Swallow and the Nightingale’ (Far North and Other Dark Tales, 2008). The latter of these raises issues of women's conflicting loyalties, which is also considered in ‘The Swans’ (2008). The taboos of incest and child abuse are explored powerfully and sensitively in ‘Jocasta’ (2003) and ‘The Wicked Stepmother's Lament’ (A Book of Spells, 1987), and resistance to simplistic moralising is encapsulated in the story of a menopausal Eve, in ‘Choosing Paradise’ (2003).     

Paving the way for farm animal welfare in international relations: an EU–Brazil case study

As a sensitive area in international trade, animal welfare measures have encountered resistance in negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Consequently, alternative avenues have been pursued to reach international trade policy convergence. To further understand the contemporary trade politics of animal welfare, an empirical investigation was conducted on the interplay between European and Brazilian actors in the context of livestock production. By drawing upon diplomatic studies and the global governance literature, this study identifies and analyses initiatives that parallel the WTO approach and through which the development and implementation of mutually acceptable farm animal welfare measures have been pursued. Research findings indicate that a constellation of international non-diplomatic actors are currently engaged in influencing the future development of farm animal welfare measures. Among the initiatives that enable the alignment of European and Brazilian animal welfare policies and practices, there are soft instruments such as knowledge sharing and private standards. The rise of new actors and the use of soft instruments have been, to a certain extent, able to mitigate the tardiness of a WTO consensus regarding the use of animal welfare measures. However, there are concerns that the use of private standards has become a shortcut to circumvent the rigours of the multilateral trading system. This concern deserves a closer look because instead of paving the way, private standards may hamper trade relations which in turn hamper progress in animal welfare matters.     

Fair Trade and justice: a comment on Walton and Deneulin

In this article we first point out that the different conceptualisations of Fair Trade, which are sometimes analytically contradictory, actually form a coordinated set. Understanding the Fair Trade project is impossible without taking these interlinked conceptualisations into consideration. Second, this set basically forms a mechanism of structural, institutional and moral reforms that guide actions. In this way Fair Trade sets out to produce less injustice than is usually the case with the structures and institutions that govern conventional trade. Nevertheless, it does not try to define what a just society is or even to perfectly define ‘fair trade’. This implies the adoption of a comparative justice angle. It is precisely by linking comparative individual situations with the structures that produce these situations that relative justice can find its strength and purpose.     

Death and the erotic woman: the European gendering of mortality in times of major religious change

This paper explores the use of European erotic death imagery produced in the Death and the Maiden (D&M) genre in two time periods. It compares and contrasts D&M imagery produced by the Germanic-speaking proto/early-Reformation artists, Hans Baldung (alias Grien) (c1484–1545), Niklaus Manuel (known as Deutsch) (c1484–1530) and Sebald Beham (known as Hans Sebald Beham) (1500–1550) which highlighted the folly, futility and transience of earthly vanities during the transition from Roman Catholic to Protestant Christianity, with contemporary calendar art produced by Cofani Funebri (from 2003) and Lindner (from 2010) which advertise coffins manufactured in the increasingly secular countries of Italy and Poland. Drawing on Biblical narrative, Augustinian theology and European socio-cultural perceptions of gender, this paper argues that these D&M images are highly eroticised and place woman as signifiers of transcient life (vanitas) and earthly pleasure (voluptas), juxtaposing her with a masculine/male representation of death; Death being imaged as an individual in the sixteenth century, and as a coffin in the contemporary works. The paper also contextualises the imagery in terms of traditional European Christian notions of life and death, as informed by the Biblical Fall narrative, with its elucidations of sin, concupiscence and punishment. It thus asserts that both socio-cultural and religious attitudes towards gender are highly significant in D&M imagery and indeed in terms of the artworks, argues that the masculine signifier of Death can be placed as Adam, whilst the Maiden, as fecund life, represents Eve. However, the overt eroticism of both sets of artworks also allows for a reading that draws on Messaris' [(1997). Visual persuasion; the role of images in advertising. London: Sage] notion that visual images ‘make a persuasive communication due to iconicity; the emotional response to the visual image presented’. Thus, this paper contrasts D&M imagery produced over 400 years apart to examine consciously erotic gendered thanantological allegories of women as vanitas and voluptas, and the male/masculine as representations of Death.     

The Attlee government and welfare state reforms in post-war Italian Socialism (1945–51): Between universalism and class policies

The purpose of this article is to analyse how the Italian socialist movement viewed the social reforms of the Attlee Labour government introduced just after the Second World War. The intention is to study the extent and limits of the labour influence on Italian socialism. The Labour Party made the re-founding of a new interclass social pact, a universal matter intending to meet the needs of both the working and middle classes. The Italian socialist movement monitored the Labour government’s changes with interest, assessing them from two different perspectives. The reformist wing had a better grasp of the political–ideological implications of Labour’s approach to the welfare state. Vice versa, the majority of the Italian socialists pursued a class socialism and a strong alliance with the Communist Party, rejecting the Labour social policy model. After the split of 1947, however, the two views of Italian socialism failed to develop and implement a political programme for a welfare state based on the British universalistic tendency model. The political weaknesses of Italian socialist organizations in the field of social policy contributed to the characterization of the Italian welfare state in the post-war period and fundamentally delayed its universalistic implementation, at least until the 1960s.     

Beyond trade unions’ strategy? The social construction of precarious workers organizing in the city of Buenos Aires

The paper presents preliminary findings of qualitative research, case study based, on the organization and collective mobilization of two groups of precarious workers in the city of Buenos Aires. Contrary to research that looks at trade unions’ institutional strategies for organizing precarious workers and at workers’ responses to these, the article starts with a bottom-up approach centred on workers’ self-activity. This helps to show empirically how a complex net of structural and contextual factors, which includes the spatial organization of the labour process, the institutional and legal framework and the socio-political context, creates material circumstances that generate processes of workers’ association. This approach is rooted in long-standing theoretical debates about the structuring of workers’ collective interests and action and helps to ground debates on the perspectives of precarious workers’ organization within the context of currently and locally existing capitalist relations rather than in more abstracted trade unions’ strategies and responses.