Labor Interests Research Articles

Interrupted futures: co‐operative labour and the changing forms of collective precarity in rural Andean Peru

AbstractSociological interest in precarious labour has focused on the existential insecurity associated with the discontinuous work relations of contemporary modes of production and the difficulties produced for the formation of effective modes of social and political solidarity. This essay, by contrast, explores the continuities of precarious living in the Southern Peruvian Andes over the past century, with a focus on how the affective force of social obligations and responsibilities to wider collectives (such as the family, the peasant community, or the co‐operative) both support and interrupt the search for more stable personal and collective futures. Approaching precarity as a relational condition, the essay traces how precarity takes form in the movements between formal and informal labour practices.

Корпоративизм в странах Западной Европы: современное состояние и перспективы эволюции

The article conducts a political analysis of the Western European institutions of corporatism. The main task of the author is the study of the policy of harmonizing the interests of labor and capital (trade unions and employers’ associations), which is implemented in countries such as the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark etc. Dynamics of political processes unfolding in the space of Western Europe, suggests that the mechanisms of articulation and political representation of social and labour interests have significantly transformed over the past 30 years. The use of institutional and systemic approaches along with the empirical methods, leads to the conclusion that the most developed European countries are moving from the classical model of corporatism to a more pluralistic forms of interaction between the state, labour and capital. Social partnership as an instrument of collective bargaining between employees and employers is displaced from the political sphere to the sectoral and organizational levels. The typical institutions of democratic corporatism (tripartite commissions, socio-economic councils, etc.), who played a crucial role in rebuilding post-war Europe, become rudimentary organs of the national political systems. In addition, there is a tendency to weaken the political influence of trade unions, who successfully struggled for the satisfaction of collective demands of workers in the beginning of XX century. Large multinational companies prefer to influence the political decision-making centers autonomously, ignoring the associative membership in the guild organizations. As a consequence, corporatist bargaining is being replaced by direct and indirect lobbying, Government Relations and election fundraising. When accounting for identified trends, the author presents a hypothesis that the evolution of corporatism in Western Europe will lead to its gradual degeneration. Taking into account the identified trends, the author presents a hypothesis that the evolution of corporatism in Western Europe leads to its gradual degeneration.

Balancing the interests of labor and capital: an empirical analysis of Philippine Supreme Court labor cases from 1987 to 2016

Extending the litigation selection hypothesis to labor regulations in fledgling democracies, we argue that distributive rules, such as social justice policies create a selection process in the liti...

Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice ed. by Ian Thomas MacDonald

Reviewed by: Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice ed. by Ian Thomas MacDonald Myer Siemiatycki Ian Thomas MacDonald, ed., Unions and the City: Negotiating Urban Change ( Ithaca: Cornell University 2017) This book provides a more optimistic account of labour's influence on North American cities than readers might expect. In the process, its authors show commendable restraint eschewing any temptation towards wishful triumphalism. Instead, the essays in this uniformly strong collection present a highly nuanced account of successes and setbacks of union campaigns to shape the direction of two changing cities: New York and Toronto. To be sure, hard times have befallen labour in these and other cities across the continent in recent decades. Symptoms abound in both plummeting and rising trend lines: declining union density, workers' collective action, and real wages; increased precarious employment, work insecurity and income inequality. This timely work shifts the focus from class relations at the workplace to union efforts to shape the urban landscape in labour's interest. Exploring union efforts to influence urban land use, regulations, and services, the book illuminates the local state as a significant terrain of labour activism. A key theme is whether union campaigns to define urban landscapes can renew and revitalize the labour movement. It doesn't help that workers themselves are largely missing in action from these union urban struggles. This book advances the intersection of labour and urban studies. It turns from the more familiar ground of municipal worker strikes, or citywide minimum wage campaigns, to lesser studied contestations over urban space. As capital relentlessly strives to remake the city in its image and interest, this book looks at labour's rejoinder in all its commitments, coalitions, and contradictions. Editor Ian Thomas MacDonald succinctly conveys the collection's aspiration to "serve as a road map toward both a stronger labor (sic) movement and a socially just urban-ism." (1) The collection itself is a well-designed symmetrical construct. Case studies explore and compare how unions are contesting four dimensions of the postindustrial city in each of New York and Toronto. Paired chapters examine struggles to define "the hospitable city" (tourism, attractions, hotels), the "creative city" (film production), "the sustainable city" (a green economy) and "the caring city" (child care) in New York and Toronto. The focus on these cities retrieves them - from more familiar designations - as leading labour cities, past and present. Ian Thomas Macdonald's opening case study examines the successful recent campaign of unions in the New York hotel sector to block proposed redevelopment in Midtown Manhattan which would threaten existing unionized hotels with new hotels known for lower wages and antipathy to unions. Ambiguities surface with the recognition that building trades unions supported redevelopment, while key property owners allied themselves with hotel unions to block neighbourhood change. Steve Tufts provides a sophisticated study of a failed bid by Toronto's leading [End Page 258] hotel sector union to promote a downtown casino. For Unite Here, the casino proposal was "about getting the local government to prioritize postindustrial development as a means of reproducing middle-class jobs." (72) More potent was a diverse array of forces aligned against the proposal, including influential downtown residents, competing gaming and real estate corporations, and other unions opposed to the casino. The second pairing of essays examines "creative city" impulses through the lens of film production. In both instances, unions in the film sector succeeded in extracting favourable commitments from their city government. Maria Figueroa and Lois S. Gray examine the campaign to secure tax incentives for filming in New York, while Thorben Wieditz perceptively charts the progressive and problematic dynamics behind a successful campaign to preserve film studio space from redevelopment in Toronto. Both cases saw labour partner with local film industry employers. Both essays suggestively question whether union efforts were fuelled by union narrow self-interest or by broader social objectives. The next essay thematic - "the sustainable city" - sees a turn from unions waging largely defensive preservationist struggles, to labour adopting a more pro-active stance. It is the front on which unions have the least to show for their efforts. Maria Figueroa shows that New York construction sector unions have promoted retrofitting and...

O estado brasileiro e os interesses de classe na reformulação do Mercosul (2003-2010)

What were the interests of Capital and Labor’s representative groups in the disputes for the formulation of Brazilian state policy for Mercosur during Lula’s administration (2003-2010)? Deploying from Nicos Poulantzas’ reading of the capitalist state and working with a theoretical framework for a state policy formulation analysis structured in inputs, policy, and outputs, this paper investigates the demands from Sao Paulo State’s Industries Federation and from the Workers Party to the Brazilian policy towards Mercosur. After the evaluation of some Mercosur policies in the considered period, this paper’s argument does not make the case of the literature’s interpretation of a post-hegemony period for regional integration in Latin America that drove Mercosur to pursue autonomy goals. Through a Brazilian class struggles lens, the economic gains of the industrial sector are more tangible than the perceived enlargement of Mercosur’s regional integration in autonomy key.

The Argentine Dictatorship and Labor (1976–1983): A Historiographical Essay

AbstractThis article aims at briefly reviewing some of the main contributions on the transformations and role of the labor movement during the dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The analysis of the historiography will distinguish three main sub-periods: the 1980s, marked by the transition to democracy in Argentina; the 1990s, a decade during which neoliberal reforms were applied with full strength; and the post 2001-crisis, a time of economic growth and complex transformation of the academic sphere. It will examine approaches to two different complex and heterogeneous actors: the working class, its political and social role, as well as the labor force; and the trade-union movement, as the institutional organizations supposed to represent labor interests. In dialog with the historiographical analysis, the last part of the article will summarize some of the main existing open questions, as well as the possibly fruitful lines of research ahead.

Root growth and spatial distribution characteristics for seedlings raised in substrate and transplanted cotton.

In this study, transplanting cotton seedlings grown in artificial substrate is considered due to recent increased interest in cotton planting labor saving approaches. The nursery methods used for growing cotton seedlings affect root growth. However, the underlying functional responses of root growth to variations in cotton seedling transplanting methods are poorly understood. We assessed the responses of cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) roots to different planting methods by conducting cotton field experiments in 2012 and 2013. A one-factor random block design was used with three replications and three different cotton planting patterns (substrate seedling transplanted cotton (SSTC), soil-cube seedling transplanted cotton (ScSTC) and directly sown cotton (DSC). The distributions and variances of the root area density (RAD) and root length density (RLD) at different cotton growing stages and several yield components were determined. Overall, the following results were observed: 1) The RAD and RLD were greatest near the plants (a horizontal distance of 0 cm) but were lower at W20 and W40 cm in the absence of film mulching than at E20 and E40 cm with film mulching. 2) The roots were confined to shallow depths (20–40 cm), and the root depths of SSTC and DSC were greater than the root depths of ScSTC. 3) Strong root growth was observed in the SSTC at the cotton flowering and boll setting stages. In addition, early onset root growth occurred in the ScSTC, and vigorous root growth occurred throughout all cotton growth stages in DSC. 4) The SSTC plants had more lateral roots with higher root biomass (RB) than the ScSTC, which resulted in higher cotton yields. However, the early onset root growth in the ScSTC resulted in greater pre-frost seed cotton (PFSC) yields. These results can be used to infer how cotton roots are distributed in soils and capture nutrients.

Questão Social e Serciço Social: desafíos contemporȃneos à profissão no Brasil

O presente artigo tem por objetivo apresentar uma leitura sobre a intrínseca relação entre a questão social e o Serviço Social. A análise sobre a questão social parte da leitura atenta e rigorosa da teoria do Valor Trabalho e da Crítica da Economia Política apresenta por Karl Marx. É a partir dessa análise que se pretende justificar a gênese da profissão vinculada ao papel do Estado e da burguesia na consolidação do capitalismo monopolista. Parte-se da análise do Serviço Social como uma profissão inserida na divisão social e técnica do trabalho, que por sua ação, no movimento contraditório da realidade capitalista, defende interesses do capital e do trabalho. Assim como o artigo apresenta, de maneira sucinta a trajetória do Serviço Social no Brasil, seu projeto ético e político vinculada à classe trabalhadora e os desafios para a garantia dessa direção em tempos de desmonte das políticas sociais e capitalismo financeiro.

Инновационная технология смартстаффинга как фактор оптимального использования трудовых ресурсов

The article discusses the possibility of expanding the potential of smartshoppinginformation technology as an innovative technology market regulation of supply and demand for labour, based on the active use of information and Internet possibilities. It is revealed that this technology implements labour interests at three consumption levels of the information specialists of various qualifications. Personal level of technology implementation is focused on providing services to three main customer groups: students undergoing initial vocational guidance; the students and graduates of professional educational institutions; the experts having vocational education and experience in a particular area. Corporate level as the main level of the use of the information to the greatest extent possible implements the optimal use of specialists of different qualifications. The level of state and municipal management allows you to solve a number of management tasks on groups of potential consumers.
 It is proved that the innovative technology of smartshopping will allow human resources to optimize recruiting quality personnel selection; proper application of HR technology contributes to improve the governance of the organization, its effectiveness, the formation of human capital

The Big BC Shift? Is the 2017 Provincial Election the Start of New Era of Political Culture and Power in British Columbia?

The Big BC Shift? Is the 2017 Provincial Election the Start of New Era of Political Culture and Power in British Columbia?

NAFTA 2.0 What Should Be Next?

The Trump Administration’s plan to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has spurred renewed attention to the Agreement among scholars and analysts as well as in the media. Much of the commentary regarding the impacts of NAFTA on the United States has centered on the role of NAFTA-induced trade between the United States and Mexico. Trade-based analyses are clearly important and useful, but there are other, largely unstudied, ways by which NAFTA has impacted the US economy. In this article, we widen the scope of the debate by exploring the overall impact of NAFTA, with attention to trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), employment, immigration, technology, labor interests, and the environment. We then recommend policy changes, centering on updating the Agreement to bring it into line with more recent US trade agreements and with the realities of the current economic and technological landscape.

Do More Strikes Mean a Stronger Working Class's Agency: A Comparative Study in Post-Socialist China

Workers’ agency is important to understand the Chinese working class's formation and gauge its capacity to forge transformative social and political movements. Recent labor study literature posits that class inequality and volatile capital movement leads to stronger labor resistance in post-socialist China. Drawing on some of the theories on class consciousness and agency, this article re-conceptualizes workers’ agency, which is broken down into behavioral and cognitive agencies. It examines Chinese workers’ cognitive agency in the megacities and lower-tier cities via statistical survey data. This analysis of cognitive agency is new to the Chinese labor study. I argue that a relatively low class identification, poor understanding of democracy and politics, and weak sense of solidarity combine to reveal a new working class in post-socialist China that, in general, shows both weak cognitive agency and growing conservativism. This distinction of workers’ behavioral and cognitive agency is vital as it may eventually challenge all labor interest parties to re-think their current strategies of labor engagement and organization.

Center-Left Politics and Corporate Governance: What Is the 'Progressive' Agenda?

For as long as corporations have existed, debates have persisted among scholars, judges, and policymakers regarding how best to describe their form and function as a positive matter, and how best to organize relations among their various stakeholders as a normative matter. This is hardly surprising given the economic and political stakes involved with control over vast and growing resources, and it has become commonplace to speak of various approaches to law in decidedly political terms. In particular, on the fundamental normative issue of the aims to which decision-making ought to be directed, shareholder-centric conceptions of the corporation have long been described as politically right-leaning while stakeholder-oriented conceptions have conversely been described as politically left-leaning. When the frame of reference for this normative debate shifts away from state law, however, a curious reversal occurs. Notably, when the debate shifts to federal political and judicial contexts, one often finds actors associated with the political left championing expansion of shareholders' powers, and those associated with the political right advancing more stakeholder-centric conceptions of the corporation. The aim of this article is to explain this disconnect and explore its implications for the development of U.S. governance, with particular reference to the varied and evolving views of the political left - the side of the spectrum where, I argue, the more dramatic and illuminating shifts have occurred over recent decades, and where the state/federal divide is more difficult to explain. A widespread and fundamental reorientation of the Democratic Party toward decidedly centrist national politics fundamentally altered the role of and related issues in the project of assembling a competitive coalition capable of appealing to working- and middle-class voters. Grappling with the legal, regulatory, and institutional frameworks - as well as the economic and cultural trends - that conditioned and incentivized this shift will prove critical to understanding the state/federal divide regarding what the progressive agenda ought to be and how the situation might change as the Democratic Party formulates responses to the November 2016 election. I begin with a brief terminological discussion, examining how various labels associated with the political left tend to be employed in relevant contexts, as well as varying ways of defining the field of corporate governance itself. I then provide an overview of progressive thinking about in the context of state law, contrasting those views with the very different perspectives associated with center-left political actors at the federal level. Based on this descriptive account, I then examine various legal, regulatory, and institutional frameworks, as well as important economic and cultural trends, that have played consequential roles in prompting and/or exacerbating the state/federal divide. These include fundamental distinctions between state law and federal securities regulation; the differing postures of lawmakers in Delaware and Washington, DC; the rise of institutional investors; the evolution of organized labor interests; certain unintended consequences of extra-corporate regulation; and the Democratic Party's sharp rightward shift since the late 1980s. The article closes with a brief discussion of the prospects for state/federal convergence, concluding that the U.S. system will likely remain theoretically incoherent for the foreseeable future due to the extraordinary range of relevant actors and the fundamentally divergent forces at work in the very different legal and political settings they inhabit.

Weak Labour, Strong Interests: Polish Trade Unions and the Integration of EU Energy and Service Markets

AbstractThis paper examines the motives behind the EU‐level activism of CEE trade unions, which are commonly regarded as weak actors. To this end, it studies lobbying and protest actions staged by Polish labour organizations in relation to proposals for the EU Emission Trading Scheme Directive and the EU Services Directive. The analysis confirms the salience of interest‐based accounts of supranational union action, but it also shows that labour interests are context‐specific, influenced by economic conditions and regulatory changes in particular market segments. In this regard, priority given by the unions to job preservation or the improvement of social standards has important implications for their positions; it also determines the selection of their allies at national and transnational levels.

Saving the Political Consensus in Favor of Free Trade

2016 is the year that the political consensus in favor liberalized international trade collapsed. Across the world, voters’ belief that international trade agreements lead to economic inequality threatens to derail ratification of the next generation of trade agreements and undo the substantial gains made under existing arrangements. In the United States, both presidential candidates in this fall’s election have denounced the most recent effort to liberalize trade rules, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The United Kingdom voted to pull out of the European Union, one of the world’s largest and most important free trade zones. Europe’s top trade negotiator has declared European trade policy “close to death” after Germany and France held up ratification of a free trade agreement with Canada.In the face of this onslaught, trade’s defenders have run out of ideas. They point out that trade makes nations wealthier; that trade plays a minor role in creating economic inequality when compared with technological innovation; and that domestic policies unconnected to trade rules can more efficiently address economic inequality, and can do so without the need for international obligations that might be construed as limiting national sovereignty in matters of social policy. These views are right as a matter of economics. But politicians make trade rules, not economists. Right or wrong, voters’ belief that liberalizing trade leads to economic inequality creates a political constraint on trade liberalization.This Essay proposes a way to save the political consensus in favor of free trade. In order to preserve and extend the international trade regime and the extraordinary gains it has produced since the end of World War II, the next generation of preferential trade agreements should include international obligations binding on developed countries to address domestic economic inequality. In other words, trade agreements must include obligations to redistribute the gains from trade within countries. This approach differs dramatically from that taken in existing trade agreements. Since the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), trade agreements have tried to protect those who stand to lose from free trade – principally labor interests – by including labor provisions in trade agreements. These provisions are outward-looking, however. They seek to raise labor and environmental standards in developing countries (e.g., Mexico) in order to limit the loss of jobs in developed countries (e.g., the United States). Critics of trade agreements have inadvertently bought into this orientation. They argue for removing investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) from trade agreements. But removing ISDS does nothing to help those suffering economically in developed countries, and it hurts developed countries’ businesses’ when they operate overseas. The removal of ISDS thus would be both a major concession to trade’s critics and yet not one that advances their core objective of ensuring that trade agreements advance economic equality. To be sure, governments do have domestic programs to help those negatively impacted by liberalized trade rules. Trade adjustment assistance (TAA) programs offer financial assistance to those who lose their jobs due to international trade. But recent studies in the United States suggest that TAA is ineffective. Moreover, unlike trade agreements, which are in force indefinitely, TAA expires every few years unless Congress reauthorizes it – a fight each time. To put it bluntly, these approaches have failed. They have failed to staunch the loss of jobs and they have failed to persuade voters in developed countries that international trade is not a primary cause of economic inequality. An “Economic Development” chapter in future preferential trade agreements would commit developed countries to addressing their own economic inequality problems at home. An Economic Development chapter would create international obligations for member states to establish fiscal programs, such as educational and infrastructure spending, designed to boost economic opportunity for those left behind by growing inequality. These spending obligations would be indexed, so that they would rise and fall with the economic losses attributable to trade agreements. If such losses do not occur or taper off, nations’ spending commitments would naturally sunset. These obligations would be enforced through reporting and monitoring requirements, similar to human rights treaties, and dispute settlement provisions that could lead to a loss of market access, the norm in trade agreements. Tying measures designed to address economic inequality directly into trade agreements would create political coalitions in favor of continuing efforts to liberalize trade. Those who do not benefit from trade agreements could still support them as a way to obtain greater domestic benefits. And those who benefit most from the liberalized trade rules could support redistribution as the price of further globalization. Trade agreements would create a commitment device allowing those who gain from trade to commit in advance to provide those who do not with a share of the spoils.

Election of Workers' Representatives: Based on Lexicographic Preferences Ordering Method

It is very important for the labor to have a national election mechanism of workers’ representatives in order to safeguard rights and interests of labor. The essential nature of the election of workers’ representatives is to aggregate the set of different individual preferences orders of every voter into a single sequence of group preference rationally and scientifically. It has been proved that lexicographic preferences ordering provides a better fit for voting representatives due to effects of irrational factors like emotion, desire, faith and some others. The paper, at first step, makes a mathematical description of worker voters’ behaviors based on the rule of lexicographic preferences ordering, performs an evaluation operations to instruct the operating mechanism of lexicographic ordering, and then establishes associations among lexicographic ordering method, indifference curve of utility, majority vote counting method, Borda counting method and Condorcet counting method after a series of in-depth discussion of voters’ inter-behavior and their outcomes.

Teoría Pura de los Salarios

To present a Pure Theory of wages, i.e., by isolating the efficient causes that provoke them and, at the same time, to deduce logically from observing irrefutable facts of reality, is the aim of the presentwork. Thus, from the prices of final goods, the author explains the formation of wages (labor production factor prices). To refute the mythology that has been built on the ability of coercion (legislative and from labor unions) to generate benefits for employees, intervening the employment contract is another issue addressed by the author. In conclusion, for the author, wages tend spontaneously to be set at a point that coincides with the expected discounted marginal productivity of labor interest on money (the worker is paid what they contribute), and any attempt to alter this Basic economic Law produces counterproductive effects that must be solved by those who advocate the coercive intervention on the working relationships

Extensions of Tests of Indirect Effect in Mediation Analysis

This study seeks to determine economic variables that jointly mediate upon government expenditure and unemployment in Nigeria and in proven cases of mediation, determine the type of mediation that exist. It compares the two methods of calculating indirect effect which are product of coefficient and difference of coefficients respectively. Furthermore, the study compares the three methods of testing the significance of indirect effect vis-a-vis Sobel’s test, Aroian test and Goodman’s test. The differences in these three tests are due to variations in the methods of standard error computation. This study further proposed extensions for the three variations in methods of standard error computation for a case of two mediator which may also be extended for more than two mediator cases. The results show that a combination of any two of labour force population, interest rate and inflation showed a significant evidence of partial mediation. The result of indirect effect computation shows that the method of product of coefficient gave a slightly higher result when compared to that of difference of coefficient. The proposed extension of Sobel, Aroian and Goodman tests gave the same result for all cases as their standard errors are the same. The study thus recommends employing some variable selection techniques in subsequent studies which may improve mediational results; further studies may to be carried out to seek methods of ascertaining the direction of relationship of indirect effect, other than those of the regression models; and finally studies may be carried out to determine the effect of multicolinearity on mediation results.

Filling the Holes: Work Schedulers as Job Crafters of Employment Practice in Long-Term Health Care.

Although work schedulers serve an organizational role influencing decisions about balancing conflicting stakeholder interests over schedules and staffing, scheduling has primarily been described as an objective activity or individual job characteristic. The authors use the lens of job crafting to examine how schedulers in 26 health care facilities enact their roles as they "fill holes" to schedule workers. Qualitative analysis of interview data suggests that schedulers expand their formal scope and influence to meet their interpretations of how to manage stakeholders (employers, workers, and patients). The authors analyze variations in the extent of job crafting (cognitive, physical, relational) to broaden role repertoires. They find evidence that some schedulers engage in rule-bound interpretation to avoid role expansion. They also identify four types of schedulers: enforcers, patient-focused schedulers, employee-focused schedulers, and balancers. The article adds to the job-crafting literature by showing that job crafting is conducted not only to create meaningful work but also to manage conflicting demands and to mediate among the competing labor interests of workers, clients, and employers.

Labor in the Food System: A View from INFAS

The Inter-institutional Network for Food, Agriculture and Sustainability (INFAS or Network), initiated informally in 2008 and formalized in 2011, encompasses a broad group of practitioners, primarily in academic institutions, who work individually on a diverse range of topics in agricultural and food system sustainability. INFAS grew from a shared vision to expose the challenges facing the transformation of agriculture and our global food system, including the sometimes competing interests of labor, producers, and consumers in the food system. From the start, the Network was envisioned to include activists in collaboration with academics in order to broadly improve the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of the food system by spanning disciplinary and institutional boundaries, convening diverse stake-holders, and linking knowledge with action. We envision an environmentally sustainable and socially just U.S. food system. This requires that race, class, and gender no longer determine health outcomes, social status, or economic opportunity, and that healthy, restored agroecosystems and fisheries are achievable....