Deployment Of Labour Research Articles

The Uneven Development of the International Refugee Regime in Postwar Asia: Evidence from China, Hong Kong and Indonesia

This article contrasts three different refugee populations in Asia in order to draw attention to an aspect of the early UNHCR that has so far escaped the attention of refugee scholars. Existing research on the history of UNHCR emphasizes the agency’s Cold War origins and its evolving role in international politics. However, this article suggests that when it comes to understanding the UNHCR response to refugee crises in Asia in the 1950s, a Cold War perspective alone is insufficient. What emerges from this study is that the early UNHCR was both a Cold War era institution and a colonial era institution. UNHCR’s approach to refugee problems in Asia in the 1950s was shaped not only by a Cold War calculus but by a lingering colonial atmosphere, one in which it was taken for granted that ethnic Chinese were both unwelcome and barred from most western countries, and in which solutions to refugee problems in Asia were instead sought in older colonial understandings of the mass deployment of Chinese labour on a global scale to meet the needs of distant economies.

Regulating Working Time in Times of Crisis: Flexibility, Gender and the Case of Long Hours in Poland

On 1 July 2009, the Anti-Crisis Act temporarily amended the working-time provisions of the Polish Labour Code to allow for more flexibility and more efficient deployment of labour during the economic downturn. Following a long-term trend in Polish labour law reform and taking its cue from the European Union (EU) Working Time Directive, one of the key changes the Act introduced was a provision allowing the extension of reference periods for the calculation of average weekly hours to a maximum of twelve months. Long reference periods have become a common feature of many European working-time regimes. As this paper argues, however, Polish specificities make this form of flexibility particularly problematic. In the context of Poland's entrenched overtime culture, insecure, competitive, and unequal labour market, and high level of employment law violations (mainly in connection with working time), the extension of working hours threatens to strain the already difficult working conditions for many Poles. With the existing gender dynamics, insufficient measures for work-family reconciliation, and scarce state provision for care of dependants, what effects will the extension of working time have on the conditions of women workers? This paper examines the post-transition trajectory of Polish working-time reform and questions the sustainability of the working-time regime it attempts to create.

Fordism and Unfree Labour: Aspects of the Work Deployment of Concentration Camp Prisoners in German Industry between 1941 and 1944

SummaryThis article examines the relationship between Fordism and unfree labour in Nazi Germany. Fordism is understood here as a form of workplace rationalization (especially assembly-line production), but also as a “technology of domination” and an “exploitation innovation”. In contrast to the Weimar Republic, Fordism was established in broad sectors of German industry under Nazi rule in the form of “war Fordism”. In order to examine the connections between the specific historical variants of these two apparently contradictory production regimes – Fordism and forced labour – the article focuses on the “labour deployment” of the most severely terrorized and brutalized group of labourers in Nazi Germany: concentration camp prisoners. Surveying the existing literature, it explores the compatibilities and tensions between Fordism and the deployments of concentration camp prisoners in German industry. In closing, several theses are presented on how Fordism between 1941 and 1944 can be classified within an entire history of Fordism in Germany.

A Natural History Of 'Food Riots'

All men are intellectuals ... but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals Antonio Gramsci In the first half of 2008, 'food riots' were much in the news. The streets of the global South and the television screens of the North were filled with angry protesters as the price of grains on world markets doubled or even tripled, pushing staples out of the reach of vast swathes of populations already struggling to get by. Nearly all commentators agree that the price rises that led to these disturbances were an effect of global forces, not merely local ones, such as drought or corruption, on which such unrest is typically blamed. Competition for oil, the cost of commercial seed, fertiliser and pesticide, speculation in commodities markets, shifting of grains to use for fuel rather than food, or for livestock rather than people, all have been identified as culprits. Thus, food riots raise anew--and emphatically at a global level--the question of the limits of the market in mediating the distribution of the most basic resources. At the same time, they remind us that food is still--despite the shift to 'immaterial labour' in many sectors of the post-Fordist economy and the continuing decrease in the percentage of the human population engaged in agricultural labour--a particularly volatile site of social struggle over concrete planetary resources. Not only does the concept of sugar not taste sweet, as Althusser was fond of saying, but you can't put an advertisement for it in your coffee. (1) Even as virtualisation technologies become ever more sophisticated, the World Food Program reminds us that 25,000 people still die in the physical world every day from hunger. (2) In this context, food riots can be seen as a critique of the current determination of global priorities for the dissemination of resources, the development of technologies and the deployment of labour, as well as the failures of the market in establishing them justly. As such, they are a praxis whose theoretical implications--in addition to their practical ones-- must be recognised. This is particularly the case because Neoliberals emphatically claim that the poor want what they have to offer, and that human--and even planetary - welfare is vastly improved when regulated by markets. Starving people would be starving in any case, they shrug--or never would have been born--and the poor who are herded into sweatshops, or converted to 'modern' agricultural practices, are 'better off' to have made it onto the lowest rung of the 'value added' ladder as they start the path toward ostensible economic Nirvana. 'The problem of the poorest,' they insist, 'is not that they are exploited, but that they are almost entirely unexploited'. (3) Since they assume that there are evolutionary stages from low to high 'value added' production that every people must pass through on the road to prosperity, they argue that concern with the lot of the poor as they make this ascent is misguided. Global trade, if but allowed to function fully everywhere, in contexts of good governance, will eventually effect a general--though not, of course, equal--prosperity. It will also stave off ecological disaster as GDP rises -and the (putative luxury) of environmental concern increases--because 'negative externalities' such as pollution will be, progressively, 'internalised.' In sum, the neoliberal market is not only the best that we can hope for, but, in the influential assessment of Jagdish Bhagwati, it already has a 'human face'. (4) While readers of new formations probably do not need much encouragement to see these claims as doubtful, my purpose in drawing attention to 'food riots' as themselves a refutation of capitalism's 'human face' are two-fold: first, to recognise such resistance from below as an important mode of critique in its own right rather than merely a spontaneous expression of rage requiring post-hoc theorisation by recognised intellectuals, and, more specifically, to return to an appreciation of the importance of globally coordinated collective conscious struggle at a time in which even the left in the metropole has been floating models of political praxis that might be seen, in effect, as variants on isolationism: take, for example, the emphasis on the 'weapons of the weak' as diffuse, the fragmentation of subjectivity that (supposedly) undermines the potential for conscious alliances, and, especially, an uncritical affirmation of 'decentered' politics. …

The impact of CAP reform on farmers’ plans for the future: Some evidence from South West England

This paper considers farmer intentions following the implementation of the 2003 CAP reforms, identifies the extent to which these plans have been influenced by the introduction of the Single Payment Scheme (SPS) in 2005 and considers the implications in terms of likely structural change (i.e. changes in the deployment of land, labour and capital). The analysis uses data from a large sample survey of farmers in South West England and the results indicate that CAP reform is not stimulating rapid agricultural restructuring, rather it appears to be reinforcing many existing trends towards diversification and an increasing polarisation between the largest and smallest farms. CAP reform is impacting unevenly on the farm community and different farming situations are associated with different types of reaction. Market signals may become a more powerful driver of farmer behaviour, in which case the 2003 reforms will have proved successful in providing farmers the freedom to farm without coupled subsidies. On the basis of the results presented in this paper though, only a minority of farmers seem both well placed and well disposed to exploit such opportunities.

American multinationals and British trade unions, c.1945–1974

In the period 1945–1970 Scotland received the greatest inflow of American direct investment in the world, outside Canada. The presence of American multinational companies was welcomed by both the local and the national state as providing examples of best business practice in production methods and in the deployment of labour. All of these incoming firms were anti-union in principle, but in practice they enjoyed little success in eliminating craft sensibilities or union loyalties. There was no wholesale corporate colonization of workers’ language or identities. This has often been seen as a result of official trade unionism's success in manipulating labour shortages, labour process structures and bonus systems. By utilizing factory records, which show the day-to-day reality of industrial relations in US firms, we argue that recognition of trade unionism and collective bargaining owed as much, if not more, to grassroots pressure. This in time became the vital factor in shaping the domestication of American multinationals’ labour practices.

When it Pays to Be Friendly: Employment Relationships and Emotional Labour in Hairstyling

This article examines worker-client relationships in hairstyling. Data are drawn from interviews with 15 hourly-paid and 32 self-employed hairstylists and a self-administered survey. Relations of employment are found to be central to the deployment of emotional labour. Self-employed owner-operators are highly dependent on clients, rely on deep-acting, enact favours, and are prone to emotional breaking points when they fail to realise their ‘congealed service’. In contrast, hourly-paid stylists perform surface acting, resist unpaid favours and experience fewer breaking points. Methodologically this article demonstrates the importance of comparative employment relations analysis (CERA) for exposing the relationship between employment structures and labour process experiences.

Review article: Ethnic variations on the small firm labour process

Consistent with a growing recognition that all entrepreneurs irrespective of ethnicity are grounded in social capital, we argue that the deployment of labour in UK Asian firms is best understood by reference to the mainstream literature on small firm industrial relations. Conventionally, Asian firm owners are seen as enjoying exceptional advantages through uniquely privileged access to an unusually cost-effective co-ethnic labour force. Yet reference to the general discourse shows that one of the defining features of the small firm labour process is its great diversity, with workers subject to a varying mix of control strategies. Ethnicity of ownership is only one of a range of factors here, with influences such as sectoral location, market position and managerial role requiring greater attention. Drawing both from the mainstream small business and ethnic minority business literatures and from our own Asian firm case histories in the clothing and catering industries, we demonstrate that, while ethnic ties certainly do help to shape employer-worker relations, they do not operate independently of universal forces that are ethnic-non-specific. As Kloosterman et al. (1999)’s concept of mixed embeddedness suggests, ethnic minority firms must be seen as grounded in an external structural context as well as in their own community networks.

Governing minorities and development in Xishuangbanna, China: Akha and Dai rubber farmers as entrepreneurs

In Xishuangbanna, southern Yunnan, Akha and Dai farmers, regarded in China as “backward”, passive recipients of state-led development, have been “getting rich” on rubber and expanding rubber cultivation into neighbouring Laos. State cash crop campaigns to raise minority farmers’ incomes inadvertently turned minority farmers into dynamic entrepreneurs. This paper builds on Vinay Gidwani’s use of development as a “regime of value” to raise social and economic value to analyze these unexpected results. Local state agents believe they are the agents of development, bringing modest social and economic improvements to minority farmers of obdurate backwardness. Minority farmers see themselves as improving their own incomes and “quality”, a term in China for social value, in an era when they are responsible for their own development. National development discourse encourages citizens to raise population quality by becoming entrepreneurial, a message heard by minority rubber farmers as well as urban elites. Through creative, post-Fordist production models and agile deployment of land, labour, and capital, minority farmers have achieved incomes that exceed those of workers on state rubber farms, large plantations whose Fordist production models are losing out in the uneven transition from a planned economy to a more capitalist market assemblage. Akha and Dai rubber farmers, the “backward” minorities on China’s periphery, have unexpectedly become the forerunners of flexible production arrangements that are prevailing in the arena opened up by China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization.

Thinking about stratigraphic sequence in social terms

AbstractFor archaeologists, stratification is an important character of archaeological deposits. Through it, layering is discerned and cultural and evolutionary interpretations are proposed. Archaeologists possess much implicit knowledge about the social practices that produce stratigraphic sequence and the specific, contextualized manner in which layers were built upon or cut into previous deposits. The aim of this paper is to gather together and formalize this knowledge so as to codify conceptual ‘tools to think by’ when recording and interpreting stratigraphy. Relevant literature is widely dispersed and here can only be sampled; authors consider stratigraphy in terms of (1) techniques of terraforming, (2) processes enacted and (3) meaning and interpretation. Techniques and processes are discussed within larger social interpretations such as memory, history-building, forgetting, renewing, cleansing and destroying. Examples are drawn from the Turkish Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük and the ancestral Maya site of K'axob in Belize, Central America, to illustrate the applicability of an approach that here is called ‘social stratigraphy’. A practice-based history of stratigraphy – the recording and interpretation of strata – within archaeology is problematized in reference to codependence with geology, the deployment of labour and centralized authority within the emergent 19th- to early 20th-century field of archaeology. The contributions of and conflicts between British and American stratigraphic schools are considered in light of a potential rapprochement. Contested issues of cultural heritage – such as preservation of selected strata – suggest that thinking about stratigraphic sequence in social terms is more than an academic exercise.

Rise of the temporary employment industry in Namibia: A regulatory ‘fix’

The role of the temporary employment industry as an active intermediary in the job market can only be fully understood in the context of wider processes of restructuring and regulation at a particular time and place. In Namibia, the rise of poorly regulated employment relationships occurred in a context of expanding institutional and statutory regulation of the labour market. Here the temporary employment industry thrives within the interstices left by the limits in regulatory coverage. Nonstandard jobs are premised on a selective decoupling of the employment relationship from statutory, and hence almost invariably also collective, protective measures. The mediating role of the employment agency between the client firm and the temporary labourer allows management to evade or dilute the protections that insulate permanent employees from competitive pressures in the external market. As such, temporary agency employment constitutes both a regulatory ‘fix’ for the dilemmas associated with the deployment of labour and a mechanism for the social reproduction of a nonstandard labour supply. However, the role of labour market intermediary varies depending on whether an agency is located at the top or the bottom of the temporary employment industry.

Obstacles to diversity in construction: the example of Heathrow Terminal 5

Why does the construction industry remain a predominantly white, male, able‐bodied enclave, despite all the efforts made to make it inclusive? What are the real obstacles to women, those from ethnic minority groups, in particular black and Asian, and those with disabilities entering and remaining in different construction occupations? The recruitment, employment and working conditions on a major and prestigious project in London, Heathrow Terminal 5, where concerted attempts were made to include the local diverse labour force and to improve representation of different minority groups, are examined. Given the high level of building activity, client encouragements and serious skill shortages, the fact that the demand for construction labour was not met by the ready supply of local labour and trainees suggests that the obstacles to inclusion are not related to demand or evident supply factors. Inappropriate provision of training, as well as employment and working conditions, shape the exclusivity of the construction industry. The conclusion drawn is that adherence to traditional practices—old‐style apprenticeships, craft‐based skill structures, an itinerant workforce, and intensive deployment of labour—are the real basis of the construction industry's lack of diversity. The study is part of a project for the Greater London Authority (GLA) on diversity performance in the London construction industry, conducted jointly with the Working Lives Institute of London Metropolitan University (GLA, 2007). It is based on semi‐structured interviews with key stakeholders, including representatives of the client BAA, contractors, trainers from a Further Education College, ConstructionSkills, union organizers, convenors and officers, and workers. The aim is to provide an industry perspective of the issues related to diversity in construction.

Politician control, agency problems and ownership reform

AbstractUsing data from a recent national survey on the ownership reform of state‐owned enterprises in China, we study the effects of reducing politician control and agency problems on a number of reform outcomes. Taking into account the endogenous nature of the reform, we find that these outcome measures of the reform's success are positively affected by the lessening of politician control through increasing the firm's flexibility in labour deployment and by the mitigation of agency costs through the introduction of more effective corporate governance mechanisms such as one‐share one‐vote and shareholding‐based board structure composition. Ownership structure also matters: relative to shareholding by the state, foreign ownership has a positive effect on reform outcomes; individual (mostly employee) shareholding has a negative or insignificant effect. Somewhat surprisingly, operating autonomy (excluding labour deployment flexibility) has a negative effect on firm performance, suggesting serious agency problems in the reformed enterprises.

Cost vs. production: labour deployment and productivity in social housing construction in England, Scotland, Denmark and Germany

Labour deployment on representative large‐scale housing projects is analysed to reveal distinct differences between England, Germany, Scotland and Denmark. In the light of the debates on convergence/divergence of HRM systems and qualitatively different production systems, the paper is apposite in demonstrating structural differences in the organization of the construction process, their implications for efficiency and productivity, and their impact on employment and contract relations, innovation and skills. The effects of the overriding cost rationale of the British system are illustrated in terms of labour deployment and the efficiency and productivity of the site construction process. Labour deployment is based on the rationale of extensive subcontracting, with main contractors providing the management and cost function whilst their productive capacity rests on subcontracting supply chains. The main contractor has come to specialize in two areas, costing and the management of the process. Subcontractors provide all production personnel and thus the production knowledge for carrying out the work packages and stages. On the continent, in contrast, the economic rationale is different, as main contractors do not depend nearly as much on the production capacity of subcontracting.

The “New Labour Policy” in Nazi Colonial Planning for Africa

The National Socialist planning for a recolonization of Africa was based on a new social and labour policy and focused chiefly on the “labour question”. In designing their schemes, planners strove to mobilize wage labour and circumvent the much-feared “proletarianization” of the workers. The key problem in exploiting the African colonies had two main aspects: a shortage of manpower and migrant labour. Therefore, planners designed complex systems of organized, state-controlled labour recruitment, and formulated rules for labour contracts and compensation. An expanded labour administration was to ensure that the “deployment of labour” ran smoothly and that workers were registered, evaluated, and supervised. Furthermore, “white labour guardians” were to be assigned the responsibility of overseeing the social wellbeing of the African workers. As was evident not only in Germany but in the colonial powers, France and Great Britain, as well, these concepts all fit into the general trend of the times, a trend characterized by the application of scientific methods in solving social issues, by the increased emphasis on state intervention, and by the introduction of sociopolitical measures. Nazi planning was based on Germany's prewar politics but also reflected the changes occurring in German work life after 1933.

Between Employment Relationships and Market Relationships: Dilemmas for HR Management

The deployment of labour is regulated by rules laid down in labour laws, collective labour agreements and internal company rulebooks. The subject of this article is how changes in the nature of the company and in the nature of the employment relationship affect the type of rules regulating the utilization of labour. Starting point of our analysis is that in both the company and the employment relation, market pressures are increasing. For the company this implies that the borderline between the organisation and its environment is becoming fluid and for the employment relation it implies that elements of market relations are on the increase. In the classic company the model of wage labour under a standard labour contract still dominates, while in the modern network/virtual company contracts for services is becoming a dominant way of utilization of labour. Between these two models many hybrid employment relations are developing, combining elements of both. The hybridisation of the employment relation poses several problems for HRM policy. In this article three new instruments for the management of hybrid employment relations are assessed:

Decentralization in the Public Sector

Decentralization has been an important international development in large organizations, including those in the public sector, in recent years. The introduction of self-governing trusts in the U.K. National Health Service in the early 1990s serves as a paradigm case of public sector decentralization, managerialism and marketization. Local managers were able to develop their own employment arrangements in order to improve the recruitment, retention and deployment of labour. This article finds that pay initiatives were subverted by environmental constraints but change proceeded in the organization of working time. The findings have implications beyond the U.K. and health service context, notably the conceptual relevance of the “firm-in-sector” framework and the policy limits and potential of decentralization.

Reconfiguring the Indian: Land–Labour Relations in the Postcolonial Andes

This article considers the ways in which provincial elites in the Peruvian Andes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries addressed the task of dismantling colonial institutions and relations. It draws on material from a municipal archive to trace how the land-for-labour ‘pact of reciprocity’ linking the town of Tarma both to the central state and to the indigenous hinterland was re-worked and eventually brought to an end. The contexts in which a postcolonial discourse of the Indian emerged are explored, and are understood as linked to struggles between local government and central state over the deployment of indigenous labour.

The cultural logic of work: explaining labour deployment and piece-rate contracts in Matar Taluka, Gujarat - parts I and II

The cultural logic of work: explaining labour deployment and piece-rate contracts in Matar Taluka, Gujarat - parts I and II

The Cultural Logic of Work: Explaining Labour Deployment and Piece-Rate Contracts in Matar Taluka, Gujarat - Parts 1 and 2

This two-part essay seeks to explain why group-based and individual piecework arrangements have become the modal form of payment for a variety of agricultural tasks in central Gujarat, India. Part 1 of the essay reviews New Institutional Economics (NIE) and Marxist Political Economy (MPE) approaches to the labour process, and claims that while the 'efficiency' and 'disciplinary' considerations emphasized by NIE and MPE in their explanations of contractual change are important influences on the labour process, specific institutional outcomes depend heavily on the cultural realities of actors' practices. Part 2 challenges the epistemological assumptions of NIE and MPE narratives, specifically that agents with stable identities perform actions with fixed meanings. Instead, the recent surge in piecework employment must be viewed as part of an ongoing tussle between the dominant Lewa Patel caste and the subordinate Baraiya/Koli caste to alter their relative standings in the social order. Their unceasing attempts to reinvent their group identities have involved shifting understandings of 'work' - with direct implications for labour contracts. As a corrective to NIE and MPE, the essay proposes a semiotic approach to the labour process that bundles the notions of 'social regulation' and 'self-regulation' into the concept of 'work governmentality'.