Indigenous Workers Research Articles

Meaningful Careers: Employment Decisions Among Indigenous Art Centre Workers in Remote Australia

This study investigates the reasons behind why Indigenous workers decide to work or leave their positions in Indigenous art centres in remote areas of Australia. This has significance for managemen...

Para beneficiar la plata: mano de obra, papel, y posición social en una refinería de plata durante el primer siglo del imperialismo español en el pueblo de Porco

Before the Spanish conquest, the town of Porco, in the Department of Potosi in modern-day Bolivia, was the site of one of the most important Inca mining projects. During the viceregal period it became the focus of the first Spanish silver mining operations of the in the Andes. This region offers an excellent opportunity for historical archeology to ask questions about the relationship between the states that organized such mining projects and the workers who exploited the ore. Such an undertaking grants us a better understanding of the dynamics that had a profound impact on the origins of the modern Andean economy. This article presents ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence in order to discuss the organization of colonial labor categories, and the development of the changing social roles and status of skilled workers associated with the south-central Andean mining industry. In doing so, I trace the regional transitions in labor from the Inca to Spanish empires. Excavations at the colonial site of Ferro Ingenio, a silver refinery in the San Juan Valley, southwest of the village of Porco, shed new light on labor in the first century of Spanish colonialism and how skilled indigenous workers negotiated their positions within colonial society.

Whose business is it to employ Indigenous workers?

AbstractResearch about the demand for Indigenous labour and the relationship of Indigenous workers to their employers is relatively scarce. Even less is known about Indigenous businesses. Supply Nation defines an Indigenous business as those where Indigenous stakeholders hold majority equity, but some researchers have argued that this definition could be relaxed to include businesses in which Indigenous people hold only half the equity in the enterprise. This article uses data from the Industry Capability Network Queensland, which has collected basic business information on a large number of businesses operating in Queensland. The findings reveal that Indigenous businesses have substantially better outcomes for Indigenous employment than non-Indigenous businesses – a result that holds even when the definition of Indigenous business is relaxed. The article also documents how Indigenous employment is concentrated in larger businesses, in particular industry sectors. Non-Indigenous micro-businesses employ relatively few Indigenous workers, and future research can usefully explore why this is the case. To understand the issues involved, it will be necessary to collect multi-level data that link detailed information on employers and employees (including a substantial sample of Indigenous workers).

(Not) getting political: indigenous women and preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV in West Papua

This paper builds on critiques that call for a more nuanced and contextualised understanding of conditions that affect HIV prevention by looking at West Papuan women’s experiences of prevention of mother-to-child transmission services. Drawing on qualitative, ethnographic research with indigenous women and health workers, the paper demonstrates that women experience poor-quality HIV education and counselling, and that indigenous practices and concerns are largely not addressed by HIV services. We attribute this to a combination of national anti-indigenous and anti-separatist political concerns with donor-led interventions that result in limited localisation and reduced effectiveness of HIV prevention measures. In West Papua, services are needed that enhance cooperation and shared commitment, and that acknowledge and work to overcome existing inequalities, ethnic tensions and discrimination in the health system. Beyond Indonesia, donor-led HIV programmes and interventions need to balance avoidance of politically sensitive issues with complicity in perpetuating health inequalities. Translating global health interventions and donor priorities into locally compelling HIV prevention activities involves more than navigating local cultural and religious beliefs. Programme development and implementation strategies that entail confronting structural questions as well as social hierarchies, cleavages and silences are needed to render more effective services; strategies that are inherently political.

Sudsy Sovereignty: Indigenous Workers and the Hops Industry of the Pacific Slope

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indigenous people in the Pacific Slope—California, Oregon, and Washington—worked in the hops industry. After the Civil War, the cultivation of hops, one of the principal ingredients used to make beer, moved from the Midwest to California, Oregon, and Washington to take advantage of developing urban transportation networks, a long growing season, and good soils. Native workers erected hop poles, trained vines, picked hops, and transported the crop to urban distribution centers. In return for their labor, Native peoples earned cash wages, which they used to compensate for poorly provisioned reservations. In addition to earning cash wages, Indigenous people used hop picking to establish credentials for leaders, participate in social activities banned on reservations, and create kinship bonds. Hops and the food product it made—beer—were not used to undermine American Indian power on the Pacific Slope; American Indians used hops and beer to reclaim what had been lost during the colonization of the Pacific Slope and to articulate their sovereignty.

Ruta Mixteca

“Ruta Mixteca” is the name given to the circular migrations of indigenous farm workers between the Mexican state of Oaxaca and California long studied by Michael Kearney and his collaborators. Indigenous migrations to the United States have expanded in recent years as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement and changes in Mexico’s agrarian legislation that led to increased privatization of land and natural resources, dispossession of the traditional peasantry, and numerous local land- and resource-related conflicts. The Zapatista uprising stimulated the growth of a host of militant indigenous organizations, now also emboldened by constitutional changes that recognize the human rights of indigenous peoples according to international standards. Indigenous transnational migrations need to adapt to these changing conditions. “Ruta Mixteca” es el nombre dado a las migraciones circulares de campesinos indígenas entre el estado mexicano de Oaxaca y California que han sido estudiadas durante mucho tiempo por Michael Kearney y sus colaboradores. En años recientes aumentaron las migraciones de indígenas a Estados Unidos como resultado del Tratado de Libre Comercio de Norteamérica y los cambios en la legislación agraria en México, que han conducido a la creciente privatización de la tierra y los recursos naturales, al despojo del campesinado tradicional y a numerosos conflictos locales sobre tierras y recursos. El levantamiento zapatista generó el surgimiento de gran cantidad de organizaciones indígenas militantes, ahora también estimuladas por los cambios constitucionales que reconocen los derechos humanos de los pueblos indígenas de acuerdo con las normas internacionales. Las migraciones indígenas transnacionales necesitan adaptarse a estas condiciones cambiantes.

Far from Home, But at Home: Indian Migrant Workers in the Iranian Oil Industry

This article revisits the life and times of Indian migrant workers in Persia/Iran during the first half of the twentieth century, and discusses their contributions to the founding, development and eventual consolidation of the Persian/Iranian oil industry. A number of factors that shaped this experience are investigated. They include the geographic and ethno-religious origins of Indian labourers; the policies adopted by the oil company (APOC), labour agencies and the Government of India to recruit workers and regulate their working conditions and terms of contract; and the lived experience of the workers once they were hired and began working in the Persian/Iranian oil industry. Across nearly half a century, Indian workers in the Persian/Iranian oil industry faced a variety of labour experiences ranging from coerced recruitment as indentured workers during wartime, to wage labour with a negotiated contract and protection under colonial labour laws. I will discuss how these workers responded to the various recruitment policies, the demanding working conditions and labour discipline imposed on them, their remuneration and wage-structures, and their living conditions and housing situation. Records of the lengthy presence of Indian workers in the oil industry provide us with numerous stories of contestation, resistance and negotiations for better working and living conditions. Ultimately, the story of Indian migrant workers is also a story of accommodating within an emerging multinational corporation. I situate the history of migrant labour agencies within the framework of colonial labour practices. By examining the workers’ encounter with multiple class, ethnic and territorial identities, I survey the changing relations of both solidarity and discord between Indian migrant workers and indigenous Iranian workers.2

Gender and ethnic inequalities in LAC countries

This article examines the structure of gender and ethnic wage gaps and the distribution of both paid and unpaid work in LAC countries. Its main contribution is to expose the double discrimination endured by women in the region. Indeed, the results indicate that women are highly discriminated in the job market and undertake most of the domestic activities in the household, allocating in average 40 hours per week to paid market activities and another 40 hours to in-home unpaid activities. The indigenous population also suffers from discrimination, but the wage gap is mainly explained by the difference in endowments, highlighting their limited access to education and their concentration in rural areas. The wage quantile decomposition results suggest the presence of sticky floor effects for both women and indigenous workers. J22; J31; J71

Political Posters for the Twenty-First Century: A Spotlight on the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative

Political Posters for the Twenty-First Century: A Spotlight on the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative

Historical Archaeology at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla, Puebla, Mexico

Since 2004, archaeological, ethnographic, and archival investigations at the ex-hacienda San Miguel Acocotla in Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico, have explored the lives of indigenous workers who toiled at the hacienda from 1577 through the twentieth-century Mexican Revolution. The aim of this project is to understand the ways in which incorporation into an industrial capitalist system impacted individual and community identity. This report presents a summary of the archaeological components of the project. Research focused on the area of worker housing, the calpanería, in an effort to expand our understandings of the conditions of daily life of the hacienda's indigenous workers. I describe the completed fieldwork and summarize the results of studies of nineteenth-century domestic architecture andfoodways. These data challenge assumptions about the quotidian experiences of hacienda laborers, often made using incomplete historical records, and allow us to connect the ethnographic present with the prehispanic past by illuminating the transformative processes at work in rural Mexico during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Diabetes in Torres Strait Islanders: Challenges and opportunities for remote area nurses

Torres Strait Islanders living in the Torres Strait region have the highest prevalence of Type 2 diabetes in Australia; more than three times the rate of other Australians. Abdominal obesity and insulin resistance are the main causes for these high rates of the disorder. Further, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders diagnosed with diabetes have poorer glycaemic control and much lower rates of insulin use than non-Indigenous Australians diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes alongside extremely high rates of renal failure and other comorbidities. Interventions have been instigated in order to overcome these issues. Previously a simple recall system managed by local health workers achieved significant improvements in diabetes care, reduced diabetes-related hospitalisations by 40% and led to the implementation of a chronic disease register and recall system throughout the Torres Strait region. Nurses, Indigenous health workers and other health professionals play important roles in ensuring these interventions continue.

Comments: A Global Skills Problem

Editor's column Government, industry, and labor representatives met recently to discuss solutions to the technical skills shortage in the global oil and gas industry. Although the discussion was wide-ranging, the group came to a consensus on several key points. The Global Dialogue Forum on Future Needs for Skills and Training in the Oil and Gas Industry, held in Geneva, drew 84 participants representing a variety of countries and viewpoints. The 2-day meeting was sponsored by the International Labour Organization, an agency of the United Nations. The group concluded that the industry has had limited success so far in alleviating what many see as a chronic shortage of skilled technical professionals, and that industry, governments, and labor organizations need to collaborate more on this issue. What was clear is that different countries face different challenges in overcoming the skills shortage. Some developing countries struggle to offer the industry an adequately trained and educated workforce, and complain that operators do not offer enough information on the skills they need and do not provide enough specialized training to indigenous workers. A government representative from Ghana pointed out that there is not enough detailed information on skills shortages needed to identify gaps. In addition, technology is advancing rapidly and new curricula must be developed to meet these changing needs, especially in countries where oil and gas production has recently begun. Whether the industry should favor university degrees over industry experience was also debated. In developing countries, industry image and the boom-and-bust cycle that follows oil prices were seen as major deterrents in attracting younger professionals. The group did reach consensus on several points, including: More data on the types of skills needed by the oil and gas industry would help stakeholders identify shortages in developed and developing countries and in different sectors such as deepwater or onshore operations. Operators in particular would need to cooperate in supplying this information. Governments in countries where oil and gas operations are taking place have the responsibility to set adequate safety, health, and environmental standards and should ensure that regulations and contract terms are met. But industry has the responsibility to provide job opportunities for local populations and skill and technology transfer. Similarly, government has the responsibility to provide the industry with a basic educated and trained workforce. But industry should provide specialized training needed in using complex technologies or methods. That could come through apprenticeship programs and knowledge sharing. In addition, industry should provide workers with opportunities to take advantage of continuous training, skills upgrading, and lifelong learning. Several programs have been successful in helping improve technical skills among the workforce, including promotion of science and engineering in the classroom, distance learning, apprenticeships, and training programs funded by governments, industry, and labor organizations. Measures should be taken to improve worker gender equality globally as well as health, safety, and environmental standards. This would improve the industry’s overall image and attract new workers.

Sharing stories: Indigenous alcohol and other drug workers' well‐being, stress and burnout

Indigenous alcohol and other drug (AOD) workers' roles are often exhausting, poorly paid and under-recognised. There has been relatively little examination of work-related stressors on their health and well-being. This national study identified Indigenous AOD workers' experiences and perspectives on well-being, stress and burnout along with strategies to improve worker well-being. Focus groups were conducted with 121 participants (70 Indigenous, 20 non-Indigenous, 31 unspecified) from metropolitan, rural and remote locations around Australia, selected via a purposive sampling strategy. Audio files and interview notes were analysed to identify key themes. Main themes identified included excessive workloads, extensive demands and expectations, workers' proximity to communities, loss and grief issues, lack of recognition, inadequate rewards, stigma and racism, and Indigenous ways of working. Stressors were compounded by workers' complex personal circumstances, profound levels of loss and grief, and lack of culturally safe working environments. Indigenous workers' stress was exacerbated by close links and responsibilities to their communities and a 'dual accountability', being constantly on call, playing multiple roles, complex personal and professional lives, and needing to interact with multiple agencies. Many Indigenous AOD workers had developed mechanisms to deal with work-related pressures and received valued support from their communities. The study identified the importance of workforce strategies to improve Indigenous workers' well-being and reduce stress, including: mutual support networks, training in assertiveness and boundary setting, workloads that take account of Indigenous ways of working, adequate remuneration, supervision and mentorship, and cultural sensitivity training for non-Indigenous workers.

Bad attitude? Migrant workers, meat processing work and the local unemployed in a peripheral region of the UK

In the context of financial crisis and recession, concern has grown in the UK and elsewhere over the relationship between labour immigration and indigenous unemployment. This article argues that, to understand this relationship, it is necessary to adopt a historical perspective and examine closely both the experiences and representations of migrant and indigenous workers and the unemployed together, as these develop and evolve in local labour markets over time. Presenting a case study of employment shift at a meat processing factory in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, the article demonstrates how the promotion and acceptance by employers and others of a discourse that constructs Merthyr locals as bad workers reframes a history of local labour conflict as a matter of endemic worker deficit, and shifts attention away from problems of poor job quality to alleged problems of poor local labour supply, thus legitimating the turn to employing migrant workers in the first place. It is argued that investigating these kinds of local labour market histories is essential for developing appropriate and effective policy on immigration, employment and unemployment alike.

Best practice in early psychosis intervention for Australian indigenous communities: indigenous worker consultation and service model description

The aim of this study was to identify promising elements of best practice relevant to mainstream mental health service (MHS) delivery of early psychosis intervention (EPI) to Indigenous communities. In a companion paper, a comprehensive literature review identified a promising service model with potential for delivering EPI: an Indigenous sub-team embedded within a mainstream health service. This paper describes a consultation process with Indigenous Mental Health Workers (IMHWs) in south eastern Queensland. A case study of the Sunshine Coast Cultural Healing Program (CHP-SC) was carried out during the consultation process. IMHWs agreed that the Australian clinical guidelines for early psychosis were relevant to improving outcomes for Indigenous patients. IMHWs unanimously identified the CHP-SC as a best practice mainstream MHS for delivering EPI. The CHP-SC, which represented an Indigenous sub-team model, was found to be associated with substantially improved engagement of Indigenous young people. We provisionally conclude that specialist EPI could be delivered by specialist Indigenous sub-teams (rather than specialist EPI teams) embedded in mainstream MHSs that incorporate culturally safe practice and are fully integrated with Indigenous primary care services, and recommend that the model be formally evaluated.

Organização do serviço de controle da tuberculose em Distrito Sanitário Especial Indígena Potiguara

ABSTRACT The objective was to analyze the organization of the tuberculosis control service in the Special Potiguara Indigenous Health District, from the view of indigenous health workers. This qualitative study was performed at the referred indigenous health district in the state of Paraiba, with 23 health workers. The empirical material was produced based on the foal group technique and analyzed according to the analytic approach of the discourse analysis technique. The identified strengths included the availability of resources for performing the bacteriological examination, guarantee laboratory functioning and timely results. Regarding the weaknesses, it was found that the organization of the service favors an interruption of the actions; fragmentation of care; inefficient communication between the different points of care. It is recommended that management mechanisms be adopted to overcome the bureaucratic barriers and consolidate an innovating and coordinated proposal, whose organization is mainly based on relationships that involve people, technology and resources. Descriptors: Tuberculosis; Indigenous Population; Health Services Evaluation; Public Health Nursing.

Action research as a both-ways curriculum development approach: Supporting self-determination in the remote Indigenous child care workforce in the Northern Territory of Australia

This article gives a detailed example of how action research theory can inform an innovative approach to education and training through its use as a curriculum design device within the both-ways philosophy of Indigenous education. This work was undertaken through a VET training program at the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. The specific target group was Indigenous people currently working in early childhood services in remote Indigenous communities in the NT where few hold the necessary qualifications. The curriculum development methodology described in this article embeds an iterative and reflexive approach to learning that is intended to support the empowerment and self-determination of the Indigenous early childhood workers while delivering a nationally recognized ‘mainstream’ qualification.

Towards cultural citizenship? Cultural rights and cultural policy in Taiwan

This article reviews existing literature on the construction of cultural citizenship, and argues that cultural citizenship expands the concept of ‘citizenship’, promotes citizens' consciousness and ensures the protection of minority rights. Since the 1990s, three cultural policies have arisen related to cultural citizenship in Taiwan: ‘Community Renaissance’, ‘Multicultural Policy’ and the ‘Announcement of Cultural Citizenship’. ‘Cultural citizenship’ has expanded the concept of citizenship in two ways. First, it has led to the consideration of the minority rights of Taiwanese indigenous peoples, the Hakkas, foreign brides and migrant workers in ‘citizenship’; and second, it has placed emphasis on ‘cultural rights’ in addition to civil rights, political rights and social rights. This article begins by exploring what approach to cultural citizenship is used in cultural policy, and what approach is suitable for practising cultural citizenship in Taiwan. I argue that minority groups practise their cultural rights with the public participation of Community Renaissance. Taiwan's case bears out Stevenson's view: a society of actively engaged citizens requires both the protection offered by rights and opportunities to participate. Finally, this article shows the challenges and contradictions of cultural citizenship in Taiwan: the loss of autonomy and the continuation of cultural inequality.

Indigenous Professional Development Workers in Haiti

ABSTRACTIndigenous development professionals in southern Haiti occupy an intermediary position between actors and institutions of the international development industry and the rural peasant beneficiaries of development projects and programs. Educated and trained as agronomists or development technicians, these professionals facilitate the transmission of northern development standards and ideologies to southern subjectivities. By first situating Haitian development into greater post-structural understandings of how the global south is produced, these agents of globalization will be oriented as rural intellectuals in the Gramscian sense. In the rural communes surrounding the city of Les Cayes in southern rural Haiti, indigenous professionals have a place in the social field that characterizes localized development practice, which itself is located in larger regimes of power and representation that typify development processes around the world. These frequently urban-based professional agents carry western-based discourses surrounding modernity, secularism, and scientific capitalism to local peasant communities that are ideologically constructed as antitheses to these discourses. However, a case study of these processes demonstrates that the produced “truths” regarding aid and development are mediated and negotiated through social encounters between development intermediaries and aid recipients. This article concludes that localized development intermediaries represent new and important intellectual strata through which the peasantry engages global governance institutions.

Builders, bodies and bifurcations: How London construction workers ‘learn to labour’

This article examines how the ideas about working-class culture presented in Paul Willis’s classic monograph (1977) Learning to Labour apply or do not apply to the data generated by an ethnographic analysis of a London construction site that I conducted in 2003/4. While Learning to Labour had significant relevance to understanding the class-bound masculine cultures of the construction workers, because building work has a pre-industrial history and a post-industrial contemporary, the claim that working-class masculinity is driven predominately by the features of industrial work life is found wanting. Rather than being bound exclusively to industrial work, the exigencies of working-class-bound masculinity could be found in the builders’ problematic and attenuated relationships with the modern state and its legal and moral injunctions. Such relationships to the modern state illuminate why fundamental features of working-class masculine culture are reproduced in a post-industrial global London by both migrant and more indigenous workers, and thus also illustrate part of the reason why class and ethnic inequality persist in the contemporary UK.