18,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Work & Society
- Sprache: Englisch
From the rise of fully automated factories to the creation of new migrant workforces, the world of work, employment and production is rapidly changing. By reshaping the global distribution of wealth, jobs and opportunities, these processes are unleashing profound social and environmental tensions, as well as new political movements. As a means to address these crucial themes, Global Labour Studies elaborates an innovative interdisciplinary framework that builds upon the concepts of power, networks, space and livelihoods. This approach is deployed to explore core topics including global production networks, labour market dynamics, formal and informal sectors, migration and forced labour, agriculture and environment, corporate social responsibility and new labour organizations. Written in a lively and engaging format that draws upon a diverse range of illustrative case studies, the book provides the reader with an accessible repertoire of analytical tools and offers an essential guide to the field. This makes it a uniquely rich text for undergraduate courses on global labour issues across the fields of geography, politics, sociology, labour studies and international development.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 467
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Ähnliche
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Introduction: Thinking Global Labour Studies
Why Global Labour Studies?
What is the ‘Labour’ in Global Labour Studies?
What’s the ‘Global’ in Global Labour Studies?
Global Labour Studies
Further reading
Notes
Chapter 2 The Toolkit of Global Labour Studies
Political Economy and the Study of Power
Economic Sociology and the Question of Networks
Human Geography and the Analysis of Space
Development Studies and the Livelihoods Perspective
Towards an Integrated Perspective
Further reading
Notes
Chapter 3 Labour Regimes
Producing Workers
Reproduction: Households and the State
Mobilization: Labour Markets and Segmentation
Motivation: Discourses of Labour
Utilization: The Workplace and Strategies of Labour Control
Labour Regimes in Motion
Further reading
Notes
Chapter 4 Global Production Networks
Making Production Networks
Social Embedding in Global Production Networks
Putting the Power into Global Production
Typologies of Network Governance
Putting Analysis into Practice
Further reading
Notes
Chapter 5 Formal Work in Transition
What is Formal Work?
Fordism, the Welfare State and the Expansion of Formal Work Relations
The Crisis of Fordism and the Rise of Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism, Labour Market Flexibilization and Workfare
The Rise of a ‘Precariat’?
The Uncertain Futures of ‘Post-Formal’ Work
Further reading
Notes
Chapter 6 Labour in the Informal Econo
my
What is the Informal Economy?
Explaining Informality
Breaking Down the Informal Economy
The Politics of Informality
Further reading
Notes
Chapter 7 Agrarian Labour
Agricultural Modernization and the Intensification Imperative
Exporting Intensification: The Green Revolution and Peasant Agriculture
Rural Livelihoods and Global Integration
The Contrasting Politics of Agrarian Change
The Futures of Agrarian Labour
Further reading
Notes
Chapter 8 Migrant Labour
Understanding Labour Migration
Migration and the History of Uneven Development
States and Migration
Contemporary Trends in Labour Migration
Further reading
Notes
Chapter 9 Forced Labour
What is Forced Labour?
How Do People Fall Into Forced Labour Arrangements?
Why is Forced Labour Attractive to Some Employers?
Further reading
Notes
Chapter 10 Environment and Labour
Producing Nature
Oil and Labour in the Niger Delta
Planetary Transformations: Work and the Anthropocene
Labouring through the Anthropocene
Beyond Decoupling?
Thinking Forward
Further reading
Notes
Chapter 11 Corporate Social Responsibility
What are Labour Codes of Conduct?
Codes of Conduct and the Politics of Consumption
Codes of Conduct and the Politics of Production
The Uneven Outcomes of Labour Codes of Conduct
Beyond Codes of Conduct?
Further reading
Notes
Chapter 12 Organizing Global Labour
What is Labour Organization?
Labour Organization and Power Relations
Workers North: The Decline of Organized Labour in the West
Workers South: New Working Classes and Labour Movements
New Forms of Labour Internationalism
Labour Organization Moving Forward?
Further Reading
Notes
Chapter 13 Conclusion: The Futures of Global Labour
Global Inequalities and the Persistence of Poverty among Plenty
Technological Change and the Spectre of Jobless Growth
Global Environmental Change and the Ends of Production
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
ii
iii
iv
vi
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
Work & Society Series
Thomas Janoski, David Luke & Christopher Oliver, The Causes of Structural Unemployment: Four Factors that Keep People from the Jobs They Deserve
Karyn Loscocco, Race and Work: Persistent Inequality
Cynthia L. Negrey, Work Time: Conflict, Control, and Change
Marcus Taylor & Sébastien Rioux, Global Labour Studies
GLOBAL LABOUR STUDIES
Marcus Taylor and Sébastien Rioux
polity
Copyright © Marcus Taylor and Sébastien Rioux 2018
The right of Marcus Taylor and Sébastien Rioux to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station Landing Suite 300Medford, MA 02155 USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0410-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Our greatest intellectual debt goes to labour scholars who, through research, fieldwork and theoretical and conceptual developments, have shaped global labour studies. Amy Williams and Jonathan Skerrett from Polity deserve special thanks for their commitment, help and support throughout the project. We also acknowledge the contribution of two anonymous reviewers who provided us with positive and constructive criticisms. At a more personal level, we thank Susanne Soederberg and Sibel Ataogˇul for their profound help and support. Nicholas Bernards and Josh Travers kindly provided useful feedback on sample chapters.
Chapter 1Introduction: Thinking Global Labour Studies
It’s a slightly chilly late September day and we are sitting in a café in downtown Montreal. While chatting and occasionally typing on our laptops, we each sip a cup of steaming black tea. This moment of consumption appears as an isolated act, something we might do on a daily basis without giving it a passing thought. For our part, we simply chose from an extensive list of excellent teas, paid the cashier and thanked the server when the hot mugs arrived at our table. Our actions, it seemed, were localized. After all, they took place in a small corner of a café in a backstreet of Montreal. And yet, through the simple activity of buying tea we are immediately yet unknowingly inserted as one nodal point within a dense web of productive activities that link thousands of people across continents. Although the leaves in our cups are predictably silent about their path from production to consumption, it turns out that they were grown in the Sri Lankan highlands half a world away. If you run a quick Google search, you’ll see that these tea plantations have a rather idyllic appearance, with lush green foliage flowing down across picturesque hillside terraces. Owing to humid subtropical temperatures and a fertile soil that is amply watered by seasonal monsoons, the region provides excellent conditions for cultivating Camellia sinensis, the bush from which all tea is produced. This was certainly the impression of the nineteenth-century British colonial authorities who imported tea plants from China and conscripted thousands of indentured labourers from India to start the first commercial tea operations in Ceylon, now the nation of Sri Lanka. Fastforwarding 150 years, these plantations have risen to become one of the biggest tea exporting sites in the world.
Putting the serene vistas of the Sri Lankan terraces to one side, we can start to map out the complex network of labouring relationships that collectively turn the leaves of a hillside shrub into a marketable commodity distributed to consumers via shops and restaurants many thousands of miles away. Tea, of course, is not an unduly complex commodity, yet the sheer variety of actors involved in this process is notable: from female tea pickers on the plantations, to various workers in the local companies where the tea is dried and processed into teabags, through to managers in international corporations that buy the bulk tea and market it to stores globally. Together, these agents – each with different roles, interests and degrees of power – have collectively shaped the journey of tea through its sequential stages of production, distribution and consumption. In so doing, they form part of a chain of lives and livelihoods that spills over a vast geographical terrain, stretching from the terraces of Sri Lanka to an unassuming café on another continent. Importantly, each actor has an unequal ability to shape the conditions under which they participate in the network. This affects not only the relative gains such as wages or profits that they accrue, but also the type and level of risks they face from their participation.
The tea leaves swilling in our cups, for example, are picked by a predominantly female workforce that is descended from Tamil indentured labourers imported by the British well over a century ago. These workers have spent generations assiduously labouring for poor pay and under arduous working conditions on the terraced hillsides. While tea picking is largely portrayed as women’s work, men from the local villages typically look for jobs in the processing companies that transform the raw leaves into finished teabags. Despite their long hours, jobs on the processing side tend to be slightly better paid and have less punishing working conditions in comparison to the pickers. These inequities indicate how the division of labour in the tea industry is highly gendered. Women disproportionately occupy lower paid, more arduous and less secure tasks and, as a result, experience a strong degree of marginalization with very little power to challenge their conditions of work or pay. Although they actively seek to improve conditions for themselves whenever possible, many women tea workers strive to ensure that their children gain sufficient educational achievements to pursue other paths of work, far away from the plantations on which they themselves often feel trapped.
The production of tea, of course, does not begin and end upon the terraces. It is filtered through the regulatory structures and political power of firms, states and other organizations, each of which exerts its own influence on how tea is made, including the conditions of workers at the foot of the industry. Although the lowly status of pickers is contested by the activities of workers and supportive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that seek to improve conditions within the sector, both plantation owners and processers have often been resistant to such initiatives. Noting the strong international competition in the tea industry – with rival plantations in Assam, Fujian and other parts of Asia – they decry the potential adverse impacts on profitability that substantive wage rises would entail. The plantations themselves form the lowest link in a chain of companies headed by retailing corporations that market the tea internationally. The tea processors occupy a middle tier: buying leaves from the plantations before selling the processed product onwards to the retailers. At the top of the chain, these retailers actively seek to ensure that their suppliers provide low-priced yet high-quality goods so as to maintain their market share and profit line. Most consumers in distant markets, they note, are more interested in the price tag and flavour than in the social conditions of workers on plantations. At the same time, the Sri Lankan government has also provided an extremely facilitating environment for the plantations and processors owing to the status of tea as an important export crop.
Through this cursory glance at the journey of a simple teabag, we can lift the lid on an intricate web of labouring activities and livelihood struggles that link production in the hills of Sri Lanka to the consumption of a warm beverage in Montreal. We’ve noted diverse power relations at play – between workers with limited options and employers seeking cheap labour; between genders; between different tiers of firms – and we’ve taken note of the different connections and networks that cross space, to link producers and consumers across the globe. There are many more steps we could add to make this web more complete. Think about the activities of transportation, advertising, retailing and even the post-consumption question of who deals with the waste. All of a sudden, it becomes clear that a teabag is never just a bag of tea! It is a nexus point for a complex array of relations between thousands of people labouring in different corners of the world.
Why Global Labour Studies?
As an academic field, global labour studies seeks to map out precisely these kinds of relationships in order to analyse their contrasting implications for the actors involved at each node. By exploring the interconnections that link the production, circulation and consumption of goods and services, we seek to open up essential questions concerning who is producing what, for whom, under what conditions and with what long-term effects. This makes global labour studies an extremely useful way of engaging some of the most pressing concerns facing us in the present era. Several compelling issues stand out. First, the networks that link production, distribution and consumption have become increasingly intricate, creating a more unified global economy that is able to produce vast amounts of diverse commodities and distribute them across long distances. Looking out at any university food mall, for example, you can easily discern the globality of contemporary production and consumption. You’ll find a mix of foodstuffs for sale, with ingredients sourced from around the world: from fresh bananas to ramen noodles to cans of Pepsi. Electronic goods are also in clear display, such as cellphones and laptops designed in North America, Japan or Europe, but most likely assembled in East Asia. Even the standardized tables and seats we’re sitting on turn out to have been produced in locations ranging from Mexico to Indonesia.
That this zone of consumption is a meeting place for commodities from all over the world seems very natural and we likely don’t give it much thought. That said, when we reflect a little more deeply, the logistics involved in making all this happen on a daily basis suddenly appear breath-taking. Take, for example, that fresh-sliced mango in the package sitting next to the bananas. Less than forty-eight hours ago that fruit was hanging from a tree in central Brazil. After being picked, it was transferred by van to a refrigerated facility where a workforce of 184 Brazilians can process close to 200,000 mangoes per hour. There, the workers cut, skinned, sliced and diced the mango before sealing it away in its own personal plastic container. Once stacked in crates, those containers were loaded onto planes in São Paulo airport and then shipped outwards and onwards to retailers across Europe and North America. From tree to table across the length of a continent in just two days – now that’s fast food!1
Despite this incredible productivity, however, the workforce that underpins the global economy is stratified by vast inequalities in income and working conditions both within and between countries. A quick glance at working conditions in the Brazilian fruit picking and processing sector, for example, shows how low paid and arduous such occupations are. Under conditions of intense competition for contracts with European and North American supermarkets, juice producers and other fruit retailers face strong downward cost pressures. These constraints are frequently transmitted onto those at the very bottom: i.e., the labourers who have little power to shape the terms of their employment. In the orange picking sector, workers are typically paid by volume so they must collect a huge amount of fruit per day in order to make a minimum wage. They do so by working long hours on temporary contracts in difficult conditions, wrapped in cloth despite the heat to protect themselves from the blazing sun, yet nonetheless exposed to a range of chemicals used in production.2 In short, the social context of precarious labour in Brazil is intimately connected to the fresh fruit sitting in our university food mall.3 In this respect, we need not only to understand who has the opportunity to enter into relatively well-paid and secure work, but also how different forms of employment sustain uneven patterns of consumption at a global scale.
By exploring the tangible processes that create astonishing levels of wealth alongside persistent poverty, global labour studies offers crucial tools to better decipher the ways in which individuals and households work towards a more materially secure life, while also highlighting the many barriers and constraints to such outcomes. To do this, global labour studies provides a framework to better understand the structures and forces that shape lives and livelihoods across the globe. This is done explicitly in order to seek more equitable and sustainable forms of production, distribution and consumption in our increasingly interconnected and rapidly changing world. Examining these questions requires us to ask how goods are produced and exchanged through the daily activities of people who work, communicate, cooperate and conflict within diverse and contrasting circumstances. For this task, we use a series of concepts and approaches drawn from fields that include political economy, sociology, geography and development studies. Building upon these foundations allows us to understand what we might term ‘economic life’ outside the quantitative reductions of mainstream economic analysis.
This kind of quantitative economic analysis certainly has its place in our understanding of the world, but it must be kept in its place. It would no doubt be possible, for example, to transform the processes that underpin the production of Sri Lankan tea into a set of dollar values regarding gross domestic product (GDP), trade flows, per capita income and so forth. Yet to do so would be to produce a decisively weak brew. We would immediately rule out understanding the complex social and political dynamics that operate between plantations and their workers; between genders in production; between the international tea companies and their localized suppliers; and between those who consume goods and those who make them. In short, we would turn a blind eye to all the social, geographical and political processes through which the global economy functions on a day-to-day level. This book, in contrast, seeks to excavate precisely those processes and bring them to light. Before we can move on to that task, however, two definitional questions need to be addressed. What do we mean when we refer to ‘labour’ and why is it prefaced by the term ‘global’?
What is the ‘Labour’ in Global Labour Studies?
To grasp the significance of the term labour we can helpfully compare it to the related idea of work. In formal terms, work can be described as the conscious application of physical and mental energies necessary to produce something. The thing being produced might be a tangible item like a handcrafted guitar, an intangible good such as a piece of computer code that exists virtually, or a service such as sweeping a kitchen floor. In all cases, work is the deliberate expenditure of energy necessary for a productive activity. Now, whereas you might say that you worked really hard on designing a piece of art or writing an assignment, you are unlikely to term this as labour. The reason for this is that labour is a broader category that captures not only the purposeful expenditure of energy, but also the social context under which such work is performed.
The concept of labour therefore opens up a broader set of questions and issues than simply the physical and mental exertions involved in work. Consider, for example, how we talk about ‘slave labour’ rather than ‘slave work’. We do this to highlight the deeply uncomfortable proprietary relationships in which one individual has legal possession of others and compels them to toil on their behalf. Similarly, we term the work performed by children outside basic household tasks ‘child labour’ as a way to highlight the ethical questions inherent in putting children to work. Finally, the idea of ‘wage labour’ encapsulates how our ability to work has become a commodity that we sell to an employer in exchange for a wage. So when we talk about labour, we are deliberately engaging a set of questions around who is performing work for whom, under what conditions, and how such work fits within the wider production of goods and services at a society-wide level.
To talk about labour is therefore to put work as a productive activity in its social context. As the following chapters elaborate, we find a vast diversity of forms of labour at a global level. We often think of work in terms of waged labour in which workers sell their ability to work for a wage and – potentially – other benefits such as social security. However, there are many forms of labour, including self-employment through to forced or coerced labour. We follow up on these issues at length in further chapters, but it’s helpful to highlight a few key common issues that global labour studies must address.
Workforce
It seems obvious, but for work to happen there must be workers. Yet workforces do not simply exist. Rather, they must be produced and reproduced. This means that a key task of global labour studies is to understand how workforces with specific skills, attributes and characteristics are created and put to work, both on a daily and a generational basis. Without doubt, questions of education and training are key to making workforces, but we must also think of the relative rights that workforces enjoy regarding pay, conditions, security and so forth. For example, the presence of low-skilled workforces, composed primarily of rural migrant women, that were expected to do large amounts of forced overtime work at times of peak consumer demand was an important factor behind the growth of light manufacturing industries in southern China during the 1990s.4 So a key question concerns how these workforces are created, mobilized and put to work.
Workplace
Work always occurs somewhere – whether in a factory, an office, a marketplace or the back room of someone’s home. Different workplaces are structured by different kinds of technology, but also distinct relationships between workers and their employers. Bicycles, for example, can be made in a state-of-the-art factory in California or in an informal workshop in the backstreets of Bangkok. The end product might not be too different, but the process through which work occurs – including the activities, hours, conditions and compensation of work – will be worlds apart. We therefore need to consider how different workplaces shape, and are shaped by, the social contexts of work. This leads us directly to a third domain of study.
Regulating institutions
Productive work is essentially a collective activity involving the combined efforts and energies of a workforce. Whether in an office or a factory, these collective activities will be regulated by institutions. Institutions are conventions that govern behaviour, including formal rules, such as government stipulated laws enforced by courts, and informal rules, such as the shared norms about accepted behaviour in an office. When we think about key institutions that regulate the production and distribution of goods and services, government authority is evidently a key factor. States typically regulate the minimum level of wages, the details of contracts, worker rights and social benefits, and the conduct of workplace relations such as collective bargaining and dispute reconciliation. The state, however, is not the only regulatory institution. Firms themselves regulate relationships within the organization through various types of incentives and punishments, including under the rubric of ‘corporate social responsibility’. In other work contexts, particularly those characterized by an absence of effective state regulation, it can be informal networks that shape work relations, including in small family businesses or community associations of street vendors.
Cooperation and conflict
One of the paradoxes of global labour studies is that the production, distribution and consumption of goods requires intense cooperation and generates enduring conflicts. As we noted in the example above, the passage of tea from bushes in Sri Lanka to cups in Montreal requires the cooperation of multiple actors, from pickers to processors to marketers to retailers. Producing any commodity is a collective process that involves coordination and cooperation. At the same time, however, it is also a process riven with conflicts of interest: from gender inequalities over the division of jobs; conflicts between workers and management over wages and conditions in both fields and factories; tussles between large corporate wholesalers and small processing companies over the price of bulk tea; and, potentially, conflicts between activist consumers demanding socially responsible products and retailers seeking to keep prices down. This duality of cooperation and conflict is a key thematic of global labour studies and arises repeatedly across the following chapters.
What’s the ‘Global’ in Global Labour Studies?
When we attach the adjective ‘global’ to ‘labour’, we do so to explore how lives and livelihoods in any one part of the world are intimately connected to processes ongoing in others. In this sense, using the term global is not to suggest that there is some exterior global realm or level that exists ‘out there’ in a global space distinct from the local or national. On the contrary, as the example of the Sri Lankan teabag demonstrated, the global is very much present here and now in our localized, everyday relations and lived spaces. Each of the activities involved in producing, distributing and consuming that tea was local – in the sense that they happened somewhere specific – yet each was also global in that they were closely connected through processes occurring across continents. In short, the relationship between the global and the local is not one of opposition. Rather, we must seek to understand the conditions under which localized actions have impacts on a global scale.
As a result, the global in global labour studies is an invitation to analyse what forms of interconnection exist, how are they established and reproduced, what scale they operate on and to whose benefit they function. Although we sometimes think in terms of a heavily globalized world, we need to keep a close eye on the unevenness of such connections. As the historian Fred Cooper puts it, structures and networks may shape certain places and make things happen with great intensity, yet their impacts may tail off sharply elsewhere.5 As a result, within global labour studies there are some key modes of interconnection that we need to consider.
Markets
We often hear talk about how global markets create an important form of interconnection between peoples through trade. Yet to operate on a world scale, markets must first be made global. For this to happen, they need a dedicated set of institutions and technologies to underpin them and no shortage of political determination to maintain them. The market for wheat, for example, is currently heavily globalized with political agreements in place to allow the movement of grain between borders and an infrastructure of transportation and storage in place to facilitate its travel across vast distances. As a result, a fall in production owing to a localized drought in the American Midwest is quickly transmitted onto prices at a global scale, affecting the price of bread across continents. In contrast, the market for labour is strongly constrained. As we shall see in chapter 8, the movement of people is actively controlled and migrants are frequently unable to legally work in countries they may move to. The degree of globality of markets, therefore, is politically grounded, open to contestation, and is something that must constantly be reproduced over time.
Firms
Most firms in the world are extremely small: from tiny workshops to street-side food stalls and corner shops. In terms of numbers, these businesses make up the vast majority of the world’s enterprises and are for the most part localized in their operations. At the other end of the spectrum, transnational corporations are emblematic of globalization. Owing to their expansive scale, such firms shape the contexts of production, work and consumption therein, linking lives and livelihoods across space. Walmart, for example, is the world’s biggest multinational in terms of sales and has established extensive supply chains that source massive amounts of goods from across the world into its many thousands of stores. It was estimated that Walmart alone accounted for 10 per cent of Chinese exports, many of which are produced under typically austere working conditions.6 This has often led critics to assert that Walmart has played a lead role in facilitating a ‘race to the bottom’, depreciating labour standards on a global scale. From its perspective, Walmart would claim that it has fashioned an incredibly efficient division of labour, uniting producers and consumers through its state-of-the-art logistics in a way that provides jobs at one end and ever cheaper goods at the other. Either way, the role that the firm plays in coordinating a global production network that links quite simply millions of workers and consumers across national spaces is of extreme importance, and we examine this in detail in chapter 4.
International organizations
We argued above that regulating institutions are crucial to shaping the social contexts of work. In this respect, a number of key international organizations play a pivotal role in extending regulation at a global scale. Consider how the World Trade Organization (WTO) creates a system of rules and regulations governing trade and investment that applies to all 164 member states, providing a degree of conformity of such regulations on a global scale. To be clear, not all countries uniformly apply WTO regulations and there are vast differences in the ability of different countries to shape WTO agendas, to challenge its rules and regulations, and to make motions against other countries under its protocols. While the WTO provides trade regulations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has a mandate precisely to promote decent working conditions at a global level. It does so by producing conventions on workplace rights that it invites its 187 member countries to sign up to. Unlike the WTO, however, the ILO has no direct power to enforce its conventions even though the vast majority of countries have ratified them. As this indicates, different international organizations have vastly uneven levels of influence to shape the world of work at a global level, with the protection of trade and investment rights much more closely guarded than worker rights despite formal recognition of both.
Social networks
As all users of Facebook know, building social networks across long distances has never been easier. And while it might be easy to dismiss such networks as simply a means to share the latest cute cat video, we should not underestimate how informal social networks can facilitate flows of money, information, goods and authority across contexts that strongly influence the world of work. For example, rural to urban migrants often use informal networks to gain information to help connect them to potential employers. Equally, such social networks within migrant communities can also be used to pass money back to families without recourse to the formal banking system. On a different scale, informal social networks are frequently key to international labour rights movements which seek to link the struggles of workers in a specific factory with consumer activist groups in the West. In short, social networks are an important way in which the challenge of distance is overcome.
Global Labour Studies
This brief discussion of the terms ‘labour’ and ‘global’ primes our discussion for the following chapters where we begin to unpack and analyse the changing world of work. On this basis, the next chapter turns to how we should go about doing global labour studies. It begins to put together a toolkit of concepts that can help us examine and explain the social contexts of work and the forms of interconnection that produce an increasingly unified division of labour on a global scale, while also reproducing stark differences and inequalities of opportunity and outcomes.
Further reading
As a field of enquiry, global labour studies can be traced back to debates over the New International Labour Studies movement of the 1980s. You can read these approaches in foundational texts such as Ronaldo Munck’s The New International Labour Studies (London: Zed Books, 1988) and Robin Cohen’s Contested Domains: Essays in the New International Labour Studies (London: Zed Books, 1991). More recently an important attempt to update these themes was provided by Edward Webster, Rob Lambert and Andries Bezuidenhout in Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of Insecurity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).
Notes
1
. Ellis (2013).
2
. Cavalcanti and Bendini (2014).
3
. For a robust critique of labour conditions in Brazil’s fruit sector, see the short film
Squeezed: The Cost of Free Trade in the Asia-Pacific
by a fruit worker advocate group called the Association of Conscientious Consumers,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MmI1Vn6Fn4
.
4
. Pun (2007).
5
. Cooper (2001).
6
. Chan (2011).
Chapter 2The Toolkit of Global Labour Studies
In the previous chapter we defined global labour studies as the study of work in its social context. To grasp what we mean by this, consider the case of Raj, a software engineer from Bangalore in India who currently holds a H-1B visa that allows him to work temporarily at an IT firm in Silicon Valley. He got this visa by paying an Indian contracting company to use its networks in the United States to seek out potential employers. Successful in this pursuit, Raj’s visa is valid for an initial three years and is renewable for a further three if his employer lobbies on his behalf. In the meantime, Raj is to all extents and purposes bound to that firm, with extremely limited opportunities to shift his visa to work for a different company. Further, although his wife, Priti, and their daughter have accompanied him to California, Priti is explicitly denied the right to work in the United States under the conditions of the visa, despite her university degree in psychology.
For Raj, the H-1B visa is both an opportunity and a burden. On the one hand, there is a possibility that, with his employer’s firm support, he may be able to renew the visa and eventually apply for the Green Card that would allow the family to remain in the country permanently. Raj is therefore strongly tied to his employer, who holds the key to his visa renewal and, therein, his hope to remain permanently in the United States. A power relation emerges between these actors, in which temporary hires like Raj are expected to work very long hours at pay levels typically some 15–30 per cent below the industry norm. Only by conforming to these conditions does Raj have a chance of maintaining his employer’s support for the visa renewal. More likely, however, once Raj has completed his three years of work for the US company, either his employer will seek a visa for a new temporary worker or the state will turn Raj’s renewal application down and he and his family will return to India to rejoin the Indian software sector. There he will hope to translate his employment experience in the United States into leverage within the crowded Indian job market.1
This brief example illustrates the complexities of studying labour in its social context. It shows how we need to pay close attention to the connections and institutions that link together labouring activities across space. It pushes us to analyse how such relationships shape the distribution of opportunities, benefits, costs and risks between actors. In this instance, we get a hint of the important networks that source workers into jobs through contractors who work closely with US firms to place temporary Indian workers into the American IT sector. We also see how institutions, such as the H-1B visa itself, strongly shape the relationships and conditions operating within the workplace. The outcomes are evidently complex and uneven. For Raj, the H-1B visa undoubtedly represents an opportunity in which he was prepared to invest heavily. Yet in the immediate future it keeps him locked into a dependent relationship with his employer who expects intense work in return. For Priti, the conditions of the visa mean setting aside her own career aspirations for up to six years, creating a strong gender imbalance in career opportunities within the marriage. For the employer, the visa programme allows the creation of a labour segment that is typically caught in a dependency relationship that encourages disciplined work at a cost below labour market rates for full-time workers from within the United States. There is no doubt that American companies benefit strongly from these relationships and many argue that they are key to their continuing global competitiveness. Others point out that such disposable temporary workers – who account for up to 30 per cent of new hires – depress wages and conditions across the sector, leading to a downgrading of work and pay.
This microcosm of work in its social context illustrates how we might sharpen our analysis by more explicitly confronting questions of power, networks, space and livelihoods. For instance, you’ll note how in the above example there is a clear power relationship between Raj and his employer, and also potentially one between Raj and Priti. Yet what exactly do we mean by power, what forms does it take, and how is it exercised? Equally, we can also see how networks shape livelihoods across space. But again, we might first ask what we mean by networks and livelihoods: how do they take shape and for what ends? Answering these questions forces us to rely on more precise concepts about power, networks, space and livelihoods to make our assumptions explicit and consistent. Given that the questions posed in global labour studies are multifaceted, we need to integrate insights from across disciplinary traditions to build a suitable analytical toolkit. Four influential perspectives are noteworthy and we explore these below (see Figure 2.1): (1) political economy and the study of power; (2) economic sociology and the study of networks; (3) human geography and the analysis of space; and (4) development studies and the livelihoods perspective. The following sections map out concepts stemming from these four influences and talk about how we might usefully synthesise them into a coherent framework.
Figure 2.1 Global labour studies
Political Economy and the Study of Power
Much of what is written in the tradition of global labour studies is rooted in the framework of political economy. Unlike contemporary economics, political economy is not focused on creating ideal-type mathematical models to help explain real world events. Rather, it seeks to understand qualitatively how the relationships and institutions through which goods are produced, distributed and consumed have taken shape over time, and how the risks and rewards involved in such processes are distributed among actors. Take, for example, the question of markets. While economists tend to see markets as a natural way of organizing economic life that operate according to a universal principle of supply and demand, political economists reject such assumptions. They argue instead that markets are socially constructed through a range of supporting institutions, including money, property rights, state regulations, the presence of suitable workforces, shared behavioural norms and cultural values. Given that all the latter vary greatly across contexts, how markets work will shift according to the character of these supporting institutions. An informal market selling foodstuffs in Johannesburg, for instance, will operate very differently from a financial market based in New York or London. On this basis, political economists approach markets by asking how and why any given market has been created. What institutions and actors structure its operations? What power imbalances exist within it and what forms of agency are required to reproduce it over time?
Whether they are trying to understand the operations of a rice market in rural India or the informal labour market in the restaurant sector of Barcelona, political economists will start by conceptualizing how its unique structure of actors, institutions and social relations have taken shape. On this point, political economists are very clear: actors make history, but they do not do so in conditions of their own choosing. A smallholder farmer in rural Indonesia, for example, is manifestly less able to shape rice markets than a large European supermarket chain determined to increase its flexibility and profits by expanding within the subcontinent. Should the Indonesian government suddenly ban foreign retailers from operating within its borders, the resources and institutional capacities at the disposal of the supermarket chain would count for little. As a result, everyday actors from corporations to bureaucrats to worker organizations to smallholder farmers are aware that they must actively seek to shape the contexts in which they operate. Put simply, they seek to accumulate and exercise power. The study of power therefore stands as a pivotal focus of political economy. For our purposes, power can be usefully thought of in terms of the relative capacity of social actors to shape the context in which they and others interact. More powerful social agents are ones that have a greater ability to shape their own opportunities and those of others around them. Conversely, weaker social agents have their conditions set from elsewhere.
To elaborate, consider the following. When a municipal official in Cusco, Peru, tells an informal street vendor to move her stall away from a lucrative selling location outside a major bank on pain of being arrested or fined, this is an example of power relations over who can use public space. For the official, the street seller is emblematic of an unruly informal economy that lowers the prestige of the area and detracts from the modernity of the city. Conversely, for the vendor, finding a suitable location to sell goods is a major determinant of her livelihood. Failure to be able to effectively plead with or bribe the official to allow her to occupy this space and continue to sell means a greatly reduced ability to earn a living. Potentially, she might be able to assert her right to sell goods in this location through a legal challenge, but such an action would necessitate having resources, time, knowledge and contacts that she simply does not possess. Given this level of relative disempowerment, her best hope might be some form of collective action. If enough street sellers repeatedly establish themselves in this location, they might be able to force officials to accept their presence for fear of a wider social mobilization or political protest.2
This focus on power as a relation between actors in a given context is central to global labour studies. Power is typically exercised for two reasons. First, actors deploy power to ensure that a larger set of gains, profits or resources flow to them. Second, they also do so in order to displace risks or costs onto others. In this way, the exercise of power is simultaneously enabling or facilitating for some, and constraining or disabling for others. Power is fundamentally relational. It allows some actors to systematically seize opportunities and, at the same time, it reduces the ability of others to shape their respective conditions or to avoid costs being placed upon them. A firm like Walmart, for example, exercises power over smaller suppliers that depend upon the retail giant for contracts. While Walmart is renowned for offering ‘everyday lower prices’ to its customers as a key element of its profitability, to do so it has garnered a reputation of squeezing suppliers, who are expected to find ways to deliver products at ever cheaper unit costs. Given the concentrated market share that Walmart holds, many suppliers view the threat of losing their contract as a sizeable problem. As a result, they feel compelled to bear the brunt of Walmart’s cost cutting and find ways to meet the larger company’s demands. The power that Walmart holds, backed by the threat of moving business to a competitor supplier, is therefore a way of displacing costs onto suppliers while reaping the benefit from such efficiency gains. It is possible that both firms will ultimately benefit, although they are unlikely to do so equally given the strong power imbalance that structures the market.3
The exercise of power takes different forms and it is useful to focus on three overlapping types in turn. The first can be thought of as direct power. This form of power manifests itself in the immediate relationship between two or more parties in which one actor is able to directly compel another into a specific course of action, through force, persuasion, payment or threat of punishment. Direct power often translates into an explicitly coercive type of relationship. Korean textile factories operating in China in the 1990s and early 2000s, for example, became renowned for deploying a militaristic work discipline in which male production managers would enforce incredibly intense working conditions upon largely female workforces through a mixture of verbal threats and instant punishments, such as deducted wages, confiscated documents and the ultimate threat of being fired. This represents the systematic exercise of direct power across the workplace in order to increase productivity and profitability. Given that factory owners habitually delayed wage payments – meaning that workers were typically owed two months of back wages – being fired implied not only the loss of future income but also the forfeit of wages already earned. Factory owners used these direct power methods to enforce a particularly intensive application of work.4
If direct power is explicit and often coercive, a second form of power is more subtle yet arguably more important. Indirect power refers to the ability to shape the institutional context in which actors operate in a given domain. Put simply, certain actors have more influence to set the ‘rules of the game’ in a manner that is advantageous to their own interests. Indirect power is therefore actualized not through direct coercion, but through creating institutions, constitutions, formal norms and informal rules of behaviour. In the working of labour markets, for example, regulations set the conditions on which employers may hire, fire and otherwise use the workers they employ. If employers are able to lobby for a more flexible set of regulations that enable them to quickly fire workers without needing to pay severance, they are able to increase their ability to respond to market changes and will also have greater control in the workplace, where the threat of dismissal will be more acute. Workers, on the other hand, will see a decrease in their security and find themselves more exposed to market fluctuations.
Our final type of power – sometimes overlooked – is symbolic power, which refers to the ability to shape how things are represented and interpreted. Being able to frame an issue in a particular way greatly affects how it is understood, analysed and resolved (or potentially left unresolved). It shapes who has legitimacy or expertise to speak to an issue, affects how people view their own status within society, and defines what counts as normal and justified or exceptional and illegitimate. Of particular interest within global labour studies is how specific types of work are represented as being suited to certain social groups. For example, when the labour-intensive assembly zones known as ‘maquiladora industries’ were being established in northern Mexico as export platforms into the United States, a struggle broke out over the representation of an ideal worker. Factory managers universally sought to establish the idea of a passive, young, disciplined woman as the archetypal worker for this industry. This was done for two reasons. First, it was a means to attract investment by projecting a compliant workforce to foreign firms. Second, in consolidating an image of maquiladora workers as diligent and passive women, managers sought to use this norm to police workplace relations by disciplining or firing those who did not conform. As a result, imposing the image of the maquiladora worker as a passive female was a key strategy in shaping the industry even though the women who were hired actively contested such representations. This led to many bitter struggles and some peculiar outcomes. As sociologist Leslie Salzinger notes, one manager in the factories she studied sought to make up for a shortage of women workers by hiring effeminate gay men as substitutes. For this manager, the representation of maquiladora labour as uniquely feminine work was to be maintained at all costs.5
Economic Sociology and the Question of Networks
If political economists have made major contributions to understanding how power shapes the social contexts of work, economic sociology has made a parallel impact based on its interrogation of social norms and networks. To grasp the importance of economic sociology’s contribution, it’s helpful to briefly contrast its conceptualization of how economies operate to that of mainstream economics. For the latter, individuals and firms are assumed to act in a universally strategic way. Whether buying a good or entering a contract for a specific service, they are assumed to calculate their options and choose the one that makes the most economic sense in terms of future returns. In this framework, agents are isolated and their interactions largely accidental. It is simply a matter of strict economic rationality – i.e., the pursuit of optimal benefit or profits – that determines who does business with whom.
For economic sociologists, these kinds of assumptions about how people behave are strongly questionable. In the real world, most economic transactions occur between people who know each other to a greater or lesser extent. As a result, their interactions are not simply governed by an unflinching cost-benefit analysis. Rather, they are shaped according to a social context of shared norms, values and habits. These do not necessarily follow a narrow economic rationality but represent a wide range of mutual expectations about how people should interact that are shaped at a broader, societal level. Indeed, as economic sociologists emphasize, when people do make decisions based on short-term profit-orientated mentalities, this is itself a cultural disposition that must be explained rather than assumed.
In their insistence that society matters, economic sociologists argue that we must consider closely the social and cultural contexts in which all economic transactions are embedded. The concept of embedding is important to this aim because it captures how individual choices and actions are set within prevailing norms and values operating at a societal level. Put simply, all economic action is embedded within a cultural context. Whether we are analysing interactions in a marketplace, a factory, a corporation or a family farm, we need to understand how prevailing social norms influence the ways in which people act and the decisions they make. While an economist might assume that individuals act in ways that are narrowly rational and self-serving, economic sociologists would emphasize that such decision-making may well be strongly influenced by powerful social norms such as deference and reciprocity, trust and duty, obligation and caring. The latter may be established at the level of family and kin or at a broader level of community or society that shapes our shared values and perceptions.
For economic sociologists, one particular manifestation of this role of embedding is the importance of networks as a key feature of material life. A network corresponds to an enduring set of relationships or social ties between actors that reinforce shared expectations and a degree of reciprocity between participants. Such ties can be relatively weak – for example, a loose network of college graduates who keep in touch on Facebook. However, they can also be extremely strong – such as a close kinship group that meets in person frequently and has strongly engrained values of mutual support. As the empirical studies of economic sociologists reveal, such networks are widespread and form a basic foundation of everyday life. We can find such networks present across the world of work: from the shantytowns of Ulaanbaatar through to the corporate boardrooms in Silicon Valley. In the former, networks based on kinship often provide a vitally important means for marginal groups in Mongolia’s capital city to access food and other goods from rural areas.6 In the latter, groups of executives can become closely linked by social ties in which they share information and strategies about regulatory changes over a weekly round of golf.7
For economists, these networked relations and the social ties they rest upon would stifle efficient economic activity because they dampen the ability of agents to make rational decisions based on purely economic criteria. What economic sociologists have shown, however, is that networks can be vital for promoting stability and addressing key problems in the organization of economic life. They do so because repeated interactions that consolidate shared norms help to build trust and familiarity that can be vital for doing business, solving problems and making ends meet. Networks can therefore facilitate the flow of goods, services, information and other important assets among participants. Moreover, the trust that networks create can enable collective problem solving and promote forms of reciprocal behaviour that are greatly valuable yet might be impossible outside a networked context. As a result, if networks are strong and their values are widely shared among members, actors will frequently seek to maintain the network and their position within it even at the personal cost of avoiding more immediately profitable courses of action.
