Casualization Of Labour Research Articles

Exploitation of Contract Workers in the Banking Industry: Study of Banks in Sokoto, Nigeria

The study assessed the exploitation of casual workers in the Nigerian financial sector, with a specific reference to banks in the Sokoto megalopolis. The objective of the study was to examine the working condition of utmost casual staff in these banks. The study was explicatory and employed a qualitative exploration design; for the purposes of the study, a total of five banks were used as a sample, accounting for 70% of the banks in Sokoto metropolitan. Fifty respondents (casual/contract workers) were purposefully picked from the 171 casual staff members of the selected banks by random sampling to form a sample of the population. Using a key informant interview guide, five management staff members, one from each selected bank, were also interviewed. The study found that the salaries to casual staff in the bank is not commensurate to the work executed, Business Solution enterprises were the major agents in the exploitation of casual workers of banks in Nigeria and these BSFs are possessed by the top directors of the banks; denoting double exploitation, casual staff are being deprived of certain social benefits, allowances, and social security of jobs. The study recommends the perpetration of the transnational labor laws and making of laws to check the casualization of labor in fiscal institutions, that government should ensure strict compliance with the labor laws, and unionization was explosively recommended as a move toward negotiating the rights of casual staff, among others. Keywords: casual, business solution firms, exploitation of workers, workers’ performance. DOI: https://doi.org/10.55463/hkjss.issn.1021-3619.60.80

English

The study assessed measures in curbing casualisation of labour in financial institutions with a specific study of banks in Sokoto metropolis. The exploitative nature of most commercial banks in Sokoto reflects on the working condition of most casual staff in these banks as payment is not commensurable to the work done. While the casual staff is being deprived of certain social benefits, allowances and social security of jobs, such exploitation necessitated the need for stratifying measures in curbing casualization of labour for equal status of staff in the banking industry. The study was exploratory and employed a qualitative research design; 60 participants (casual staff and bank managers) were selected for the interview sessions. The study found that Business Solution Firms (BSFs) were the major agents in the exploitation of casual workers in commercial banks in Nigeria. In proffering solution for achieving the targeted objectives, the study recommended that there is a need for concerned individuals, labour ministry or lawmakers to legislate laws (where absent) or ensure strict compliance with existing labour laws (if available) regulating recruitment, salary payment, promotion or regularization as well as retrenchment of casual workers in the financial institutions, and erring banks should be properly sanctioned. Furthermore, unionization was strongly recommended as a move towards negotiating the rights of casual staff.   Key words: Bank, casualisation, contract staff, exploitation, labour laws.

The evolving perspectives on the Chinese labour regime in Africa

This article explores the logics, persistence and evolution of perspectives on the Chinese labour regime in Africa. Studies find that Chinese firms’ labour practices engender abuse via casualisation of labour, low remuneration, and a general lack of adherence to occupational safety. Contrarian studies however demonstrate variations among Chinese firms’ labour practices as mediated by the labour dynamics of host countries, labour specificities and industrial capitalism dynamics. The article concludes by questioning the ‘talent gap’ dynamic in Africa in relation to Chinese firms’ managerial hiring practices and calls for an engaged scholarship on how Chinese investment in Africa’s human resource base is altering the ‘talent gap’ phenomenon.

Casualization in Occupational Settings: An Investigative Study

Introduction: This research explored the Effects of Casualization on the Welfare of Workers using a de-identified multinational oil company in Nigeria as a representative case.
 Objectives: The objectives of the study were to examine the effects of casualization of workers, associated irregularity of work, and deprivation of workers’ right.
 Methodology: A close-ended questionnaire was used to collect primary data. Out of 150 copies of the questionnaire administered, 122 were dully filled, returned and analysed using descriptive statistics.
 Results & Discussion: Three hypotheses were proposed and analysed using multiple regression of ordinary least square (OLS) statistical method and tested at 0.05 level of significance for the hypotheses. The result showed that there were significant negative effects of casualization of workers for a short-term contract work, irregularity of casualization of work, and deprivation of workers right to negotiate.
 Conclusion: Hallmarks of casualization of labour include short term contract work; irregularity of work; and deprivation of workers’ right to negotiate adversely affects the welfare packages of workers. These practices have inherent occupational health implication on workers.
 Recommendations: Casualization of labour as seen in this study is a despicable model that should be discontinued. However, if it must be practiced, the human resources, industrial relations, labour union and occupational health experts in such organizations should repackage such contracts to include allowances, job security, negotiation rights, dignity, benefits and welfare clauses as in permanent full time employment.

Casualisation of Labour as Coping with Cyclone Aila: Peasants’ Perception in the Sundarbans Area of Bangladesh

This paper investigates the coping processes of Bangladeshi peasants after the disaster of Cyclone Aila in 2009. The focus is on the experience of peasants and how they respond to the losses caused by the cyclone. Using 72 in-depth interviews with peasants, shrimp farmers, local leaders, labour contractors, engineers and NGO staff, and surveys of 850 households, this paper analyses the aftermath of Cyclone Aila in two villages in the Satkhira district located in the Sundarbans delta of Bangladesh. One of the villages, Gorkumarpur, was economically backward and poorer than Mollapara village because of its vulnerable geographical location and damaged embankments. By illustrating resilience as the function of coping with vulnerabilities, this paper finds that the peasants can cope with this natural calamity by taking up a range of casual jobs, such as earthwork and brick kiln, to improve their lives and livelihoods. Such casual employment is essential after the initial relief initiatives ended, which shows the ability of the local peasants to protect their family’s survival and secure livelihoods.

A Circular Economy: Where Will It Take Us?

The avalanche of environmental challenges, from local to global and back, has prompted responses at all levels from personal to inter-governmental. The results of these responses have fallen in the range between useful and counterproductive, with many examples on each side, but the scale of the overall challenge continues to escalate. Moving towards a zero-carbon global economy through absolute reductions in fossil fuel usage is a sure way of mitigating climate change, and a range of environmental, social and economic benefits would follow. The case for a Circular Economy (CE), however, is less clear. Whilst some CE initiatives may lead to the decoupling of economic growth from resource extraction, this does not necessarily equate to reducing the rate of extraction. Thus, the contribution of CE to the achievement of environmental objectives globally cannot be taken for granted. In terms of social impact, the best that can be said is that CE might be neutral. Technologies that promote the ‘sharing economy’ for instance, often suggested as a crucial CE strategy, create opportunities for individual wealth accumulation, but are also a route to the gig economy and the casualisation of labour. CE is arguably a business imperative, but definitive evidence to support the idea of a circular economy that meets social and environmental goals needs development.

Casualization of Labour: Implications of the Triangular Employment Relationship in Nigeria

Casualization is a global phenomenon. It is a form of nonstandard work arrangements practized in both developed and developing countries with varying degrees of regulation. Employers see it as a means of cutting costs and achieving flexibility, while workers see it as a work arrangement that denies them the right to employment benefits and to unionize and bargain collectively. This paper examines the concept of casualization and the implications of the triangular employment relationship in Nigeria in the context of international labour standards. It also examines the rights of casual workers to employment benefits and trade union rights in Ghana and China. It argues that the triangular or disguised employment relationship, which is the commonest form of casual employment in the banking and oil and gas sectors in Nigeria, fall outside the purview of the Labour Act. Amongst other things, the paper finds that the triangular or disguised employment relationship does not yield itself to the rights and benefits provided for workers in the traditional employment relationship and that it has segmented the labour market into core, non-core and peripheral zones. The paper calls for a comprehensive review of the Labour Act in line with international labour standards. It recommends the Ghana model with the necessary changes to suit local circumstances.

Casualisation of Labour under the Nigerian Labour Relations

Casualisation of Labour under the Nigerian Labour Relations

Development-Induced Displacement Risks and Coping with Resettlement

The scale of development-related displacement has been growing rapidly over the past few decades in most developing countries. This paper tries to examine the household and other characteristics that make displaced households vulnerable to different types of risks and help them in confronting these risks successfully. This study harnesses a large primary dataset from 1,070 affected households in four irrigation projects along the Godavari River Basin in Andhra Pradesh. The analysis shows the loss of land, casualisation of labour, and loss of livestock assets in the resettlement process. The households perceive economic followed by health-related risks as major risks. Econometric analysis shows that land ownership, education, social category, gender of the head of household, dependence on forests and family size are significant variables in explaining household’s exposure to risk. Further, a sense of satisfaction with housing and the time taken for resettlement has a positive effect on households’ ability to confront displacement risks, whereas episodes of illness have a negative influence. Resettlement and rehabilitation programmes tailored to include vocational training, assistance for self-employment, and strengthening of SHGs and other community-based organisations (CBOs) can have a significant impact on households that have lower adaptation capacity to confront and overcome displacement-related risks. The difficulty in overcoming displacement risks calls for providing full compensation, investment on post-settlement welfare and benefitsharing measures by not only recognising resettlement as a dynamic process, but also by understanding the heterogeneous impacts of this process on seemingly homogeneous households and communities.

Effect of Casualization on Workers Performance in Organizations

Casualization of labour in the world and indeed Nigeria is against the tenets of labour and this has caused continuous conflict between workers, labour unions, and employers across organizations in Nigeria and the world over. It is even more appalling to note that casual workers are barred from unionizing (trade union), denying them access to certain benefits in the organization. This is the essence to which the paper undertakes to examine the “impact of casualization on workers’ performance”. The objective of this study is to examine if casualization of work affects the productivity and output of casual workers. Descriptive survey research design was adopted in this study, the population of the study was from Coca-cola Bottling company (food and beverages), and Lolitta Manufacturing company makers of X-pression Hair product (Cosmestics industry) selected using simple proportion and random sampling techniques. The sample size was 152 respondents. Data was collected using structured questionnaire. Correlation and Regression tools were used to analyze the data. Results shows that casualization policy (absence of leave and leave allowance, absence of injury compensations and other social benefits) affects performance and effectiveness of casual workers. The study recommends stringent measures to ensure compliance with the provisions of the Casualization Prohibition Bill, 2010 leading to equal rights to all workers. This study further suggest a maximum period of six (6) month probation upon which all casual workers are converted to permanent staffs across organizations in Nigeria. The study also suggest that defaulting organizations are made to face the penalty irrespective of the status of the organization or owners. This way, organizations in Nigeria will attain acceptable human resources practices status as stated by ILO.

Decolonizing the Curriculum? Unsettling possibilities for performance training

Abstract: This essay problematizes the term ‘decolonization’ as applied to university dance and performance curricula. It does so via Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s (2012) argument that colonization is rooted in a worldview that positions beings as exploitable things. Addressing efforts to foster diversity within studio training, choreography, and scholarship, the casualization of labor within university departments is also examined. The essay considers the structure of the university as both a colonial and corporate entity, signaling its relationship to the precarity of neoliberalism. The paper concludes by suggesting that arts and humanities scholarship and teaching create opportunities for alternate ways of living and interacting beyond neoliberal, neocolonial paradigms.

Non-Farm Employment and Implication on Agriculture Sector in Rural India

Indian economy has been witnessing a transformation in its occupational structure since the past few decades. There is an increase in rural non-farm employment along with a decline in the agricultural employment. The present study analyzed the trends, patterns, and distribution of rural workforce in rural India using different rounds of Employment and Unemployment Survey data by NSSO. We explored various dimensions such as farm size, education, skill, gender and regions and its implication on agricultural sector. The study shows that the non-farm employment in rural India was gaining momentum due to the growth in economy resulting in economic diversification. Agriculturally forward states like Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, had shown a stupendous increase in non-farm employment from 1993 to 2015. Gender disaggregated employment of workforce reveals that the rate of increase in non-farm employment among male workers in rural India is much higher than their female counterparts. Casualization of labour was also highest in female workers. While landless and marginal rural workforce was shifting to non-farm employment, the medium and large farmers were still dependent on agriculture for occupation. It was also observed that educated and skilled workforce in agriculture and moving out to non-farm sector. The study reveals that these transformations are bringing newer challenges to agricultural sector.

Agricultural commercialisation models, agrarian dynamics and local development in Ghana

The renewed commitment of African states to modernising agriculture has reignited longstanding debates about different models of agricultural commercialisation. Which forms of commercialisation models will reduce land dispossession and the impoverishment of smallholders, and transform smallholder agriculture and the wider economy? Of the three broad models of agriculture commercialisation in this debate – plantation, contract farming and medium-scale commercial farming – contract farming has been identified as central to the future of Africa’s commercial agriculture. This paper provides empirical evidence from Ghana on the impacts of these three models on land, labour/employment, livelihoods and local economic linkages. Our findings show that the plantation and the commercial farming areas have highly commercialised land relations, land scarcity and high land prices, compared to the outgrower area where traditional systems of accessing land still dominate, enabling families to produce their own food crops while also diversifying into wage labour and other activities. Food insecurity was highest in the plantation area followed by the commercial area, but lowest in the outgrower area. Here, semi-proletarianised seasonal workers combine self-provisioning from their own farms with wages, and this results in better livelihood outcomes than for permanent workers in plantations and commercial farms. Due to the processing units in the plantation and the outgrower models, they provided more employment. However, the casualisation of labour and gender discrimination in employment and access to land occur in all three cases. All three models generated strong economic linkages mainly because they combined attributes such as processing, provided markets for nearby farmers, induced state infrastructural development and diffused technology in competitive ways. The effects of the models on household and local development are coproduced by their interaction with pre-existing conditions and wider national economic structures.

Exploring experiences of Personal Support Worker education in Ontario, Canada.

There is growing attention to the training and education of Personal Support Workers, or PSWs, who work in community, home and long-term care settings supporting older people and people with disabilities. In Ontario, Canada, amid a volatile policy landscape, the provincial government launched an effort to standardise PSW education. Using qualitative methods, this study considered the question: What are the central educational issues reflected by students, working PSWs and key informants, and are they addressed by the PSW programme and training standards? Phase one was a public domain analysis completed between January and March 2014 and updated for major developments after that period. Phase two, completed between August 2014 and March 2015, included 15 key informant interviews and focus group discussions and mini-phone interviews with 35 working PSWs and current PSW students. According to the participants, the central educational issues are: casualisation of labour that is not conveyed in educational recruitment efforts, disconnect between theory and working conditions, overemphasis on long-term care as a career path, and variability of PSW education options. While the standards should help to address the final issue, they do not address the other key issues raised, which have to do with the structural organisation of work. There is thus a disconnect between the experiences of students, PSWs and key informants and the policy decisions surrounding this sector. This is particularly significant as education is often touted as a panacea for issues in long-term and community care. In fact, the curriculum of some of the PSW programmes, especially those in public college settings, is robust. Yet, the underlying issues will remain barring a structural overhaul of the organisation of long-term and community care sectors founded on a social revaluing of older people and the gendered work of care.

Service outsourcing and labour mobility in a digital age: transnational linkages between Japan and Dalian, China

AbstractIn this article, I examine the transnational mobility of digital workers and the control of their labour across multiple production sites. The digitalization of work has progressively allowed businesses to outsource IT‐enabled service jobs to cheaper production sites offshore. The growth of the ‘offshore outsourcing' of white‐collar service jobs in East Asia has produced the mobility of cheap digital labour from Japan to Dalian in northeast China. They work at call centres and other Japanese‐speaking workplaces in the lower echelons of the city's IT sector, typically earning salaries in Chinese yuan at, or even below, the average Japanese minimum wage. Based on ethnographic findings, I argue that in the global digital economy, digital services are rendered exploitable through their transnational mobility and that this form of labour migration has developed because of the partial, fluid and contingent nature of the transnational links between the two locations. I analyse how the neoliberal logic of exception underpins the creation of IT parks in China and the casualization of labour in Japan to enable new forms of transnational labour control and capital accumulation.

Precarious Japan by Anne Allison (review)

Reviewed by: Precarious Japan by Anne Allison Louella Matsunaga (bio) Precarious Japan. By Anne Allison. Duke University Press, Durham, 2013. x, 246 pages. $84.95, cloth; $23.95, paper. Precarious Japan begins with a striking image: a 52-year-old man found starved to death in his apartment in Kita-Kyushu City in 2007. This story attracted widespread media attention in Japan at the time, and, as Anne Allison notes, a particularly shocking, and repeatedly emphasized, detail in the retelling of the man’s death was his last diary entry: “I want to eat a rice ball” (onigiri tabetai) (p. 1). Allison takes this story as her starting point for an examination of what she argues is the loss of connectedness in [End Page 173] contemporary Japan and, relating to this, a sense of hopelessness, loss of confidence in the future, and crisis of the self. Many elements of this crisis have become familiar both in the mass media and in academic writing since the 1990s. In place of the portrayal of Japan as a “middle mass” society characterized by homogeneity and consensus, the term kakusa shakai (gap society) has gained traction, as has a sense of a Japan divided between winners (kachigumi) and losers (makegumi).1 In the realm of work, the growth of the nonregular workforce has led to certain categories of casualized labor—particularly the furiita (“freeters”) and more recently the haken (dispatch workers)—becoming recognizable archetypes in popular culture and the focus of a number of academic studies.2 Others on the margins of (unable to access or opting out of) the once normative life course of graduation from school, employment, marriage, and parenthood include hikikomori, NEET (not in education, employment, or training), and parasite singles—all of whom have been the object of both mass media concern and academic interest.3 Turning to family life, the falling birth rate and aging population have been topics of public concern for some years now, together with the concomitant issues of elder care and the changing configurations of the Japanese family.4 Writing in 2009 of the growing perception of Japan as a kakusa shakai, Yoshio Sugimoto referred to “an unacknowledged paradigm shift” in the public discourse of Japanese culture,5 a move toward greater attention to inequality and social and cultural diversity within Japan. In Precarious Japan, Allison focuses on this shift and on the emergent precariat in Japan—those whose lives have become unstable and precarious in the domains of both work and home. Allison cites shocking numbers: although it is well known that Japan has the world’s third-largest economy, it is less well known that Japan has the second-highest level of poverty in the OECD, with 15.3 percent [End Page 174] of the population receiving less than half the median national income (the highest level of poverty among OECD countries is in the United States) (p. 5). Allison also notes that a large number of Japanese living in poverty are employed: the English phrase “working poor” has become part of the Japanese language. The casualization of labor and the growing inequality in terms of access to wealth and resources are clearly not phenomena confined to Japan. The emergence of a precariat whose working and living conditions are insecure, and who receive very low pay, coupled with an increase in the concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite, has become a global concern. Allison (p. 6) traces the use of the word precarité to 1970s Europe, with Pierre Bourdieu one of the first to use the term. More recently, the term “precariat” has been popularized by Guy Standing, who uses it to refer to an emergent class arising from the new economic formations of a globalized neoliberalism.6 Insofar as this can be seen as a distinctive new phenomenon, posing troubling questions throughout the industrial and postindustrial world, this is a paradigm shift stretching far beyond Japan. While acknowledging this broader global frame, Allison is concerned with the particular localized Japanese experience of precarity and suggests that this needs to be understood in the context of hegemonic representations of Japanese culture and identity in the postwar period. She argues that...

Keeping Workers at a Distance: The Connection Between Borders and Finance in Andrew Niccol’s In Time

ABSTRACTThis article presents In Time (Andrew Niccol, 2011) as a film that illuminates the role of borders at a local level and their relationship with the transnational interests of financial corporations. In Time imagines a near future in which time has replaced money as the currency. In this world, people have been genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, so, when they reach that age, they have to earn time or they die within a year. The film, shot in Los Angeles, portrays a world divided into “zones” and focuses on two of them: Dayton, a working-class area, and New Greenwich, a financial district. Drawing on this setting, In Time explores the roles of borders in the processes by which the later extracts value from the former. In order to investigate such processes, I consider the different kinds of borders that appear in the film, including not only fences and walls, but also other borders related to wealth, time, etiquette, behaviour, race, and surveillance. Close examination of borders, spatial dynamics, and characters’ behaviour elucidate the rationale behind the socioeconomic structures that the film depicts, who benefits from them, and what their interests are. Focusing on such aspects, this article argues that the different borders that appear in the film control the movement of people and money, thereby contributing to several conditions that benefit financial firms: the generalisation of debt, the casualisation of labour, workers’ resignation, the protection of the financial sector, and the criminalisation of the poor.

Unstored Energies

This essay draws on the example of Emily Dickinson's experiments with meter and line to review the multiple valences that attach to precariousness, a term that is sometimes synonymous with précarité and the casualization of labor but that also carries a less negatively charged sense of flexibility, provisionality, and dependence on the morrow. It examines the irony whereby contemporary capitalism's reliance on stored energies not only has produced crises of insecurity unprecedented in scale but also threatens this other kind of precariousness, eliminating both the risk and the pleasure of proximate dependence.

Labour Scarcity and Farm Mechanisation: A Cross State Comparison

The paper has analysed the trends in labour use (casual labour and family labour), machine use and labour productivity for five major crops namely, paddy, wheat, cotton, sugarcane and chickpea in the major states. The paper test the hypothesis that there are significant changes in the labour use, farm mechanisation and labour productivity across the states and crops by using the data collected from comprehensive cost of cultivation scheme for the period 1997 to 2010. The labour use per hectare decreased mainly in wheat, chickpea and paddy. The farm mechanisation is speeded up replacing both human and bullock capital. This transformation started in Punjab and Haryana and spread to other states. It increased labour productivity significantly when compared to land productivity. There is also a process of casualisation of agricultural labour as reflected in the increased share of casual labour in states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat and Haryana. However, in most of the crops in Orissa, West Bengal and in some crops in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan still the share of family labour is high with low level of farm mechanisation and less labour productivity which reflects the prevalence of subsistence agriculture. The positive association among farm mechanisation, displacement of family labour and increased casualisation of labour is observed across many states and crops. Some less developed states are catching up in the process. In this process, there is a steep increase in the labour productivity in agriculture, but the growth rates in wage rates are not commensurate with labour productivity growth. There is huge labour productivity gap that exists across the states with Punjab and Haryana leading with Madhya Pradesh and Orissa at the lower level

Resettlement and risk of adverse incorporation: the case of the Polavaram dam

This article argues that people involuntarily displaced by development projects face the risk of adverse incorporation into local processes of development, and that resettlement programmes should aim at mitigating this risk. The article also contends that investigating the risk of adverse incorporation enables the identification of context-specific factors and processes that are likely to affect the outcomes of resettlement. The argument is applied to the case of the Polavaram dam in Andhra Pradesh, India, which will displace 200,000 people. It demonstrates that the affected people face the risk of being exposed to landlessness, fragmentation of landholdings, and casualisation of labour as a result of resettlement.