Production Politics and Migrant Labour Advocacy in Singapore

Since 2005, NGO activism, calling for greater legal protection for contract migrant workers has been the most concerted challenge to Singapore’s migrant labour regime. Despite a severely restricted civil society space, migrant labour advocacy has delivered small but significant reforms to laws covering migrant labour. The existing literature on migrant labour advocacy focuses on the importance of civil society space in determining the outcomes of organised contention. In the Singapore context, the limitations of advocacy are emphasised and explained in terms of the illiberal nature of the People’s Action Party-state and the strategies deployed by non-governmental organisations. Such an approach is limited in its explanatory potential as it only states what political spaces are not available without examining how spaces for contention are created. In contrast, this article identifies the production politics between migrant workers and their employers as crucial in influencing the extent to which spaces for non-governmental organisation contention can be carved out. Accordingly, this article argues that forms of production politics leading to worker desertion from the workplace, rather than tactical accommodation, have provided non-governmental organisations with the impetus to push forward reform agendas within an authoritarian political environment.     

Social movements amidst democratic transitions: Lessons from the Brazilian countryside

Democratic transitions represent unique opportunities in which movements of the poor can coalesce, place their demands on the national agenda, and institutionalise their access to authoritative decision‐making centres. The opportunities and constraints movements of the poor face during transitions, however, remain little understood and under‐theorised. This study develops an analytic approach that links national‐level democratisation processes to the local‐level movement dynamics that make collective action possible, particularly the creation and reproduction of collective identities and organisational structures. The approach theorises how changing elite alliance patterns during transition cycles, and redefinition of institutional linkages that bind state and society, shape the opportunities and constraints movements face at successive stages of democratic transitions. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by examining the new unionism in rural Brazil, in that country's democratic transition during the 1980s.     

Impediments to the implementation of voluntary codes of conduct in production factories of the Global South: so much to do,so little done

A common consequence of the fragmented supply practices of multinational corporations are unfair and exploitative working conditions in the global South. Many corporations face this, and the resulting reputational damage, by installing voluntary codes of conduct in their supplier factories, leading to a vast range of implementation practices by the factory managers. Despite this effort, the literature shows that the positive impact of these codes on labour conditions in such factories remains insufficient. This article argues that this insufficiency is rooted in the exclusiveness and eurocentrism of codes of conduct and elaborates on why corporations tend to prefer influencing certain labour conditions over others. It concludes by briefly discussing multi-stakeholder organisations as a possible solution to these predicaments, and points the way to further research on the topic.     

劳动争议基层调解制度质疑

劳动争议基层调解是由设在用人单位内部的劳动争议调解委员会主持下进行的调解。这种调解制度自身存在一系列缺陷,影响了劳动争议处理的效率,所以应该废除,并可以通过一系列制度设计来避免由此带来的震荡。     

The violence work of transnational gangs in Central America

Abstract

According to international relations scholars, an important change taking place in the post-Cold War context concerns the lethality of non-state armed groups (NSAGs). Underlying this observation is the conventional assumption that non-state violence is intrinsically illegitimate. This article shifts the analysis of violence away from the terrain of legitimacy, which tends to moralise the difference between state and non-state forces, and towards the terrain of work, where their violence features as part and not separate from a shared political economy. I propose the notion of violence work as a resourceful analytic into the dialectics of everyday violence and the complex processes of value production in social life. Against the background of the extreme cruelty attributed to transnational gangs in Central America, I argue that their violence work is expressive of prevailing modes of accumulating wealth in the region. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico, I show how gang violence work animates a system of economic cooperation that engages a wide array of subjects who traverse state/non-state and legal/illegal divides.     

二战前英属马来亚印度劳工的政治生活简析

从20世纪初开始,马来亚印度人的民族主义逐渐兴起,一方面表现在印度人希望获得马来亚的公民权,但更多地体现在印度劳工希望殖民统治者给予他们公平、合理的待遇。然而,印度人温和合理的政治诉求遭到殖民当局的拒绝,因此他们采取了更为激进的罢工。罢工的失败促使印度人争取祖国印度独立自由的民族主义情绪的高涨,进而在日据时期掀起了一场较有声势的独立运动。日据时期的马来亚印度人的独立运动是一场无果而终的民族解放运动,也是一场失败的民族主义运动,但这场独立运动具有一定的正义性。     

Irrigating the famished fields: The impact of labour-led struggle on policy and action in Nigeria (1999–2007)

Between 1999 and 2007, a broad-based labour-led movement which focused most of its energies on its struggle against unpopular fuel price hikes in Nigeria was able to exert considerable, though limited, influence on an Obasanjo-led executive arm of government that was at best quasidemocratic in its orientation. This article argues that, despite the very important roles played by other factors (notably the presence of more democratic space in Nigeria post-1999), the movement's adoption of a mass social movement approach facilitated its ability to exert such influence.     

Child Workers in India: Context and Complexities

This paper portrays the nature of child workers in India and seeks to understand its many complexities. It looks at the definition of child labour, the extent of its prevalence, the reasons why children work, and the occupations they are engaged in. It outlines India’s position on international obligations, its expanding domestic laws, and the tardy implementation of these laws. It examines some of the inherent cultural constraints and the role of values and beliefs in perpetuating child labour. It analyses the relationship between education and child workers, and a possible solution in the form of compulsory education. The paper emphasises that child workers in India are from the marginalized sections and do not work out of choice. It stresses that this phenomenon is, above all, a problem for the children. The paper concludes by advocating the need to discard attitudes that are discriminatory or rationalise abuse, and the need to adopt a rights-based, child-centred approach to counter the increasing number of child workers.

Game fences in the Karoo: reconfiguring spatial and social relations

In this article, we discuss how farm conversions to wildlife habitats result in the reconfiguration of spatial and social relations on white-owned commercial farms in the Karoo region of the Eastern Cape in South Africa. Farmers and landowners justify such conversions stressing economic and ecological rationales. We illustrate how conversions are (also) a reaction to post-apartheid land reform and labour legislation policies, which white farmers and landowners perceive as a serious threat. They seek to legitimate their position in society and reassert their place on the land by claiming a new role as nature conservationists. We argue that game farms should be interpreted as economically and politically contested spaces for three reasons: (1) whereas landowners present the farm workers' displacement from game farms as the unintended by-product of a changing rural economy, the creation of ‘pristine’ wilderness seems designed to empty the land of farm dwellers who may lay claim to the land; (2) game farms further disconnect the historically developed links between farm dwellers and farms, denying them a place of residence and a base for multiple livelihood strategies; (3) this way the conversion process deepens farm dwellers' experiences of dispossession and challenges their sense of belonging. Game fences effectively define farm workers and dwellers as people out of place. These dynamics contrast government reform policies aimed at addressing historical injustices and protecting farm dwellers' tenure security.     

Book reviews

“Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729–1776. By A. Roger Ekirch. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 305 pp. $23.50.

Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident and Murder in Nineteenth‐Century Philadelphia. By Roger Lane. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1979. ix, 193 pp. $22.00.