Conditional Universalism: Immigration and Nationalist Trade Unionism in 1980s Corsica

This chapter describes and analyses Austrian trade unions’ attitudes and actions towards immigration and migrant workers during the past two decades. This recent history has been tumultuous and European Union membership provided for far-reaching changes to migration controls, leaving trade unions with much less influence on migrant workers’ access to the Austrian labour market than before. When trade unions are still in a position to exert influence, they essentially stick to their orthodoxies of how they handled immigration and immigrant workers in the past. Wherever possible, they try to maintain control using their role in the labour market to test newly entering migrants. The integration of migrants continues to be interpreted in terms of cultural difference, not in terms of discrimination. Equal treatment policies continue to disregard unequal obstacles.

It was only in the last decade that oral history began to be practised by Chinese scholars of sport history. Only tens of peer-reviewed journal articles and a couple of monographs have been published so far. Most oral sport history projects were concerned with the heirs of endangered traditional martial arts. This limited focus is a result of the fact that studies of the social and cultural aspects of sport history in which oral methods are more heavily relied upon have gained little momentum in China, coupled with a growing emphasis on preserving indigenous Chinese sports as one of the principal tasks of Chinese sport historians under the current State policies of ‘Cultural Renaissance’. The application of oral history methods is potentially beneficial for both the historical study and development of the inheritance of Chinese martial arts. However, it has been found that the advantages of using oral testimonies have not been significantly demonstrated when compared to studies using archive sources and that the politicized sporting environment is challenging the authenticity of oral sports history. Nonetheless, oral history is still a useful and promising methodological tool, as is now recognized by a growing number of sport historians, and many domains of sport history in China have the potential to engage with oral history.

Reviewed by: Master and Servant Law: Chartists, Trade Unions, Radical Lawyers and the Magistracy in England, 1840-1865 Ron Harris Master and Servant Law: Chartists, Trade Unions, Radical Lawyers and the Magistracy in England, 1840-1865, by Christopher Frank; pp. x + 283. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010, £65.00, $119.95. This book's title sounds quite conventional and not particularly innovative, but its subtitle indicates the dramas the text reveals. Master and Servant Law does not deal directly with the worn-out question of the transition from status to contract or the belated passage of master and servant law into the freedom of contract era that arguably dominated Victorian England. It does not focus on the doctrinal legal questions [End Page 740] dealt with by many legal historians. It does not content itself with the question that preoccupied social historians—was Victorian labor "free" or "unfree"? Nor is it satisfied with one that interested economic historians—was the labor market at all affected by restrictive legal regulation? The subtitle reflects the advances Christopher Frank has made. Frank, like Douglas Hay, his mentor at York University, goes beyond the history of legal doctrine and into social and labor law. The book relies on a variety of rich sources, including newspapers, parliamentary papers, and archival sources, which allow Frank to present fascinating micronarratives on court cases, their employer initiators, their consequences for prosecuted workers, the intervention of radical lawyers, the unfolding of the proceedings, and their wider political implications. The agents of change in the book are not high court judges, as legal histories might assert, but justices of peace on the one hand and radical cause lawyers on the other. The basic narrative proceeds as follows: with the advance of industrialization in the first half of the nineteenth century, labor regulation required adjustments because older master and servant regulation did not cover new sectors, occupations, and modes of employment. Industrialists lobbied Parliament, which provided the requested adjustments and made master and servant law even more legally complex than it was in the eighteenth century. The growing regulatory maze made its application, traditionally and statutorily in the hands of magistrates, even more liable to mistakes. By the mid-nineteenth century, this group of local officials was composed of more industrialists and fewer landed gentry than in previous generations. Major employers themselves, they were more one-sided than their predecessors and aimed to rule against workers and in favor of employers. They were less professional than earlier magistrates who were better prepared for the job educationally and politically. Lawyers committed to Chartism, radicalism, and the trade unions—the most prominent of whom was William P. Roberts—defended workers in legal proceedings. Although they realized that they didn't stand much chance in the petty and quarter session levels, which were controlled by the biased magistrates, they anticipated mistakes by these lay and unprofessional magistrates who struggled to navigate the growing complexity of the law. They resorted to prerogative writs of habeas corpus and certiorari and moved cases to the high court where they revealed the magistrates' mistakes and utilized them to the utmost. These lawyers felt at home in the high courts. They and the professional judges of these courts shared the same vocabulary, mode of thought, and legalistic values. Both lawyers and judges resented summary judgments by magistrates and expected the latter to meet high formal standards. Once mistakes in magistrates' decisions were revealed, Roberts and his fellow radical lawyers targeted the magistrates personally, suing them for illegal imprisonment and filing damage claims. They also litigated to voice the grievances of workers and to increase class consciousness among the working classes. The next stage in the narrative involves the backlash by justices of peace and industrialists, who pushed amendments through Parliament known as the Jervis Acts of 1848. These acts increased the powers of magistrates, providing them with simpler procedural rules and personal immunity. Unlike legal historians who view the Jarvis Acts as a modernized restatement of the ancient magistracy system designed to instill best practice, Frank views them as emerging from the struggle between pro-employer [End Page 741] magistrates and radical lawyers. In other words, for Frank, Roberts unintentionally...

This paper studies the impact of labor market policies on growth and unemployment in labor-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The analysis is based on a framework that captures many of the main features of the labor market in these countries. We conduct a variety of policy experiments, including a reduction in payroll taxation, cuts in public sector wages and employment, an increase in employment subsidies, a reduction in trade unions' bargaining power, and a composite reform program. Our key message is that to foster broad-based growth and job creation in the region, labor market reforms must not be viewed in isolation but rather as a component of a comprehensive program of structural reforms.

Labor market reforms, growth, and unemployment in labor-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa

Travels and Travails of Settler Colonialism in Queer Natal

This chapter focuses on trade union strategies to represent immigrant and ethnic minority workers in the Netherlands. Since the early 1990s, trade unions in the Netherlands countries started developing policies to better represent the rights of immigrant and ethnic minority workers. Trade unions focused on the labour market inclusion of ethnic minority workers by promoting and supporting initiatives related to education and training, and measures aimed at fighting labour market discriminations. These initiatives were mainly developed through tripartite and bipartite negotiations within an industrial relations system characterised by a strong tradition of social dialogue which also guaranteed a high degree of institutional embeddedness in trade unions. According to the analytical framework presented in Chapter 1, the dominant logic of action of Dutch trade unions was between race/ethnicity and social rights.

Empowered through Labor and Buttressing Their Communities: Mayan Women and Coastal Migration, 1875-1965

Mobility-Related Implications of COVID-19 for Receiving Countries

Totalitarian states control information space, watching closely the appearance of only that information that does not contradict an official one. In this way, on the one hand, “classical archival” sources had been preserved, with content controlled by the totalitarian regime. On the other hand, ignored and repressed society members who had been persecuted or committed crimes against humanity remain unheard. Taking into account often liquidation by the dictators not only direct witnesses of their crimes, but also indirect ones (documents), it turned out that it is oral history is often the only proof able to be used in a court against the guilty in genocide. Mostly documents of local level have been preserved after archivocide in the Ukrainian archives of the party organs. These sources contain facts mostly «allowed» by the party. «Unallowed» facts as part of Holodomor history have to be searched for first of all in oral history. The goal of the research is to review some thematic aspects of Holodomor from the pint of view of their correlation in archival sources and oral history. Because of intentional liquidation of the sources of the Holodomor epoch (1930s), we do not have many facts from specialists in agriculture, medicine, education. Such facts, as well as a set of others, often absent or partly present in archival sources, can be found in oral history. Therefore, present in archival sources about the famine spots are often covered by oral history testimonies. Besides, sources of personal origin suggest vision from «below», often correlating with information blocks of archival sources: level of mortality, expressed in description of amount of corpses on the streets; methods of food confiscation; fate of kids; escape from a village as a survival strategy; black boards. Such parallel reading allows «revealing» of the sources produced by the Soviet totalitarian state.

The world of work is changing rapidly, and concerns abound that ‘non-standard’ forms of work are challenging the social and collective dimension of work. In particular, the rapid growth of the ‘gig economy’ has brought these concerns to the forefront of the debate. For trade unions, the growth in non-standard work has long been considered problematic. However, the high degree of individualisation and lack of human contact characterising the gig economy raise profound questions about how trade unions should both organise, and represent, workers in this ‘sector’ at a time when trade union membership is in decline and there is a continuing lack of legislative support for collective bargaining. Much of the debate in the existing literature takes as its point of departure, the ‘standard’ (male) worker, and sees the rise in ‘non-standard’ work and work in the gig economy as a threat to this model. This is despite the fact that trade unions have been challenged by ‘non-standard’ work since their inception: the non-standard arrangements, which have now entered the mainstream, have long been the norm for many women workers. Yet historically, within the labour law and industrial relations literature, women and gender have rarely been the subject of discussion, although this has changed since the 1980s. In addition, much of the British literature examining the novelty of the gig economy has focussed on the scope and ability of labour law to respond to these work arrangements, and there has been less engagement with trade union responses to these ‘new’ forms of work, even though the growth in such work also creates pressure for changes in the institutions that regulate labour markets. Against this background, and in light of this book’s overarching theme, this chapter calls for a new research agenda that considers the challenges of non-standard work, and of work in the gig economy, for trade unions within the context of the ‘feminisation of work’. The geographical focus of this chapter, in this regard, is the UK. The chapter argues that trade unions are struggling to shake off their image as the representatives of white, working-class, and blue-collar men. As a result, many of the successful efforts at organising non-standard workers, including workers in the gig economy, have been undertaken by ‘non-traditional’ trade unions (and other forms of grassroots organisations). This raises the question as to whether ‘traditional’ trade unions are able to effectively respond to the rise of non-standard forms of work, and to the gig economy in particular. It is suggested that part of the difficulty for these trade unions lies in the way in which they prioritise the functions that they adopt within the labour market, and the labour law system; functions which are based on a gendered understanding of the labour market, and which in turn hamper trade union efforts to reach out to an increasingly feminised labour force. The chapter therefore suggests that a conscious conceptual shift should take place, when thinking about the purpose of trade unions, if these organisations are to respond effectively to the feminisation of work.

This chapter provides a cross-country comparison of union stances towards immigration and migrant workers by following the analytical framework discussed in the introduction. First, it provides an analysis of union responses to the three ‘dilemmas’. It subsequently comments on the extent to which the explanatory variables included in the framework account for observed differences across countries. Our comparative analysis has resulted in the identification of patterns in unions’ policies and actions across three groups of countries: the central-eastern European countries – the Czech Republic and Poland – whose trade unions have relatively undeveloped policies in relation to immigration and migrant workers; the north-west European countries – Austria, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK – whose trade unions have focused on the defence of migrant workers’ conditions in the labour market; and the Mediterranean countries – France, Italy and Spain – in which the defence of social rights has also been important.

Drawing on archival sources, this chapter contextualises the BUMIDOM and examines how it operated as a colonial institution. The chapter questions why the Bureau was created, how recruitment operated and what the consequences of this institutional migration policy were for people on both sides of the Atlantic. It argues that labour migration was organised around both gender and race and thus contradicted the French ideology of universalism, according to which all citizens are equal and identify solely as French. In addition, the chapter explores the demographic impacts the BUMIDOM has continued to have, even after it was closed down in 1982. The outward migration of young people to the metropole to work and study continues to be encouraged today, and the French government thus persists in positioning the Caribbean islands as peripheral spaces in relation to the ‘central’ mainland of France.

10 | International Union Rights | 27/3 FOCUS | IMPACTS OF COVID-19 ON WORK AND THE CHALLENGE FOR UNION RIGHTS The Swedish model and the pandemic: trust, trade union rights and collective self-regulation ‘Normality’ in a society takes place on a narrow mountain plateau supported by democracy and trade union rights. On one side of the peak, the slope downwards into the dark valley of technocracy is steep. The other side falls away into the crevasse of populism. Both form the pit of authoritarianism, where democracy and trade union rights are but lofty dreams. Life on the mountain plateau can seem safe. But the security of ‘normality’ is deceptive. When Covid19 rocks the foundations, life on the plateau sways. The democratic state suddenly does not feel so secure. Some argue that a pandemic was expected; that our western capitalist economies were bound to enter a crisis. So it might be, but Covid-19 has also proven to be an unpredictable threat not only to human lives and our post WW2 political and economic system, but also to democracy and trade union rights. How can Covid-19 be fought back? Each country has had its different strategies. Some countries have experimented with curfews, lock downs and closed borders. The consequences for the wellbeing of citizens and the economy have been severe. Other countries have trusted their citizens to take on more personal responsibility. Everyday life and economic activities, albeit somewhat slower, have been able to continue. The latter approach, the Swedish way, has caught international attention. This article argues that much of the foundations that underpin the Swedish collective self-regulatory labour market model have also been conducive to the Swedish Covid-19 strategy. Conditions vary between countries. One must do the best with the conditions where one finds oneself. Social capital, trust and responsibility are some of the key ingredients. The collective self-regulatory labour market can be used as tool to understand why a different path was possible in Sweden, but also to illustrate the importance of appropriate national solutions. Trust and self-regulation as a legislative strategy Trade unions and employers in Sweden are well organised and enjoy a large autonomy to regulate matters between them. There is no legislative minimum wage or system to declare generally binding collective agreements. The Swedish collective self-regulatory system, as professor Otto Kahn-Freund, the father of collective labour law, would have put it, is a laissez-faire system. The Swedish legislator trusts employers and trade unions. But the social partners generally also trust the legislator. Autonomous collective agreements cover all economic activity on the labour market in practice – and also establish norms for nonorganised employers and workers. Collective self-regulation also makes matters easier for the legislator. Most conflicts and problems generated by technological, organisational development and changed conditions in general on the labour market can be solved by the social partners. The legislator’s attention can then be elsewhere. Trust often grows out of actions. Trade unions and employers in Sweden have largely been acting responsibly since the 1930s. Many national crises have been solved, partly or fully, through the adaptability that collective agreements provide. Some recent examples are the economic crisis in the 1990s, when the wage-formation system was transformed, but also in 2008 when special collective agreements provided solutions to the liquidity problems caused by the financial crisis. The strong self-regulatory Swedish labour market model has many advantages. It gives the buyers and sellers of work power to regulate the price and conditions of labour. Agreements can win legitimacy, but they can also balance and change local power relations. Self-regulatory models often make a difference for people. They engage people in conditions at their workplace and often make real change. An authoritarian dynamic is never far away in society In country after country, authoritarian traits are becoming more prominent. The framework of populism falsely posits the ‘proper people’ against the ‘corrupt establishment’. It is an authoritarian tradition that tends to restrict democratic freedoms and rights, especially the right of expression and association – the same fundamental rights that form the basis for trade unionism. Populist politicians tend to ignore the experts and pretend to be...

Reviewed by: Regeneration through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic by Margaret Cook Andersen Michele Gerring Margaret Cook Andersen. Regeneration through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 250 pp. This is the first work that analyzes depopulation as a primary motive for France’s increased imperialist efforts between the devastating Franco-Prussian War and World War II. Margaret Cook Andersen explores the way in which post-1870 France encouraged migration to its colonies and more successfully, used pronatalist concepts to increase the populations [End Page 149] of French settlers in Madagascar and North Africa. One of the seminal contributions of this work is the provision of evidence that pronatalists were intentional in their advocacy of the development of the French empire as a principal strategy for the regeneration of France (9). Andersen’s first chapter skillfully sets the stage for this examination by emphasizing the critical nature of the “French depopulation crisis” following the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1872, and worsened by World War I (25–60). She describes France’s subsequent plan to augment its standing in Europe by raising its population, both in la métropole and in the colonies (2). Chapter 2 explores France’s efforts to recruit some of its citizens to these colonies (61–109). L’Union coloniale française aimed to recruit men to the colonies by valorizing the image of the rugged masculine settler and to convince unmarried and educated women (les non-classées) to move to the colonies, by stressing employment opportunities and in the hope that these settlers would marry and raise families (84, 89). Andersen frames Chapters 3, 4, and 5 as “case studies” of policies, based on pronatalism, that were used in Madagascar (Chapter 3), Tunisia and Morocco (Chapter 4) and le Maghreb as a whole (Chapter 5) in order to bolster their populations (20). In Chapter 3, Andersen analyzes the project of the colonial government in Madagascar to develop a “labor reservoir” for the French, taking advantage of their other possessions nearby (122). By incentivizing marriage, childbirth, and paternity (133–36), Governor-General Joseph Gallieni raised the population of Madagascar (150). He also established a system of public health care aimed at medicalizing more childbirths and preventing the spread of disease (124). Meanwhile, Chapter 4 takes the reader to French North Africa during l’entre-deux-guerres, examining the implementation of family suffrage in Tunisia and Morocco, largely motivated by French fears of losing these protectorates to Italy and Spain (185, 190). Familial suffrage, a system in which parents voted for their children and for themselves (160), gave more representation to large families, thus favoring population growth (180). While the enactment of family suffrage was encouraging to French pronatalists, ultimately, it did not result in a large increase in the French settler birthrate in North Africa and France itself never adopted family suffrage (198–99, 197). Chapter 5 examines advocacy for family rights among settler communities in North Africa after World War I, seen as a means to rectify the “depopulation crisis” there, and concurrent with the campaign for family rights in France (200–36). Familialist organizations in le Maghreb and French pronatalists strove to secure state support for the settler famille nombreuse (200–01), [End Page 150] supporting naturalization laws aiming to make settlers from other European nations French (203). They also worked to have laws passed that would make it financially easier for French settler families to raise their children (211). Lastly, these organizations encouraged French settlement in North Africa (206), portraying it as a “colonial fountain of youth” (234). Regeneration through Empire is a convincing, meticulously-researched, and thought-provoking work that establishes a strong link between metropolitan concerns with depopulation, pronatalism, and expansion into France’s colonies. Another admirable trait of this book is Andersen’s sensitivity towards the experiences of the colonized during this period. She often acknowledges the way in which the colonized sometimes defended their cultures from criticism from the French. For example, the Malagasy denied a causal link between Madagascar’s depopulation and their personal behaviors. Andersen categorizes some of this...