Labor Movement Research Articles

Legal Change and Legal Mobilisation: What Does Strategic Litigation Mean for Workers and Trade Unions?

This article addresses the question of what strategic litigation means for workers and trade unions. Drawing on the existing literature and on a series of semi-structured interviews with union officials, lawyers with experience in representing them and other actors from across the labour movement, it explores how U.K. trade unions and actors within them understand and experience strategic litigation and legal mobilisation, what they seek to achieve, and what has been effective and ineffective for them. Uncovering both differences and commonalities between different unions, it suggests that the decision to devote union resources to – usually very costly – litigation is never taken lightly. Trade union approaches to strategic litigation involve neither a straightforward embrace of it nor an outright scepticism regarding its potential.

Culture workers against big oil: the importance of labor education in fighting the climate crisis

This article argues for the importance of labor education in fighting the climate crisis, a vital form of education too often overlooked in the climate movement. Drawing on a case study of unionized culture workers in the United Kingdom, the article seeks to show the distinctive embedded nature of labor education. Success of labor education on the climate crisis hinges not so much on a particular pedagogy or curriculum in any one classroom setting, but on the ways in which a range of formal and informal educational actors and spaces work together across the labor and environmental movements, as part of a mobilizing project that seeks to link worker interests directly to the climate crisis, and identify actions that workers can take to address the crisis effectively. Labor education has a central role to play in ensuring a just transition in the move away from a fossil fuel based economy.

Formation of soviet sports diplomacy: structures and practices

The article is devoted to the formation of a new foreign policy practice - sports diplomacy - in the USSR in the 1920s. The key documents that established the order of interaction of sections within the Red Sports International, as well as Soviet athletes with the external environment, are analyzed. These resolutions clearly reflected the contradictions in the accents of the activities of the RSI and the SCPC: the aspiration for mainly propaganda work and the consolidation of the labor movement collided with the desire to raise the competitive level of Soviet sports. Despite these contradictions, in the 1920s it was possible to unify the practice of international work-sports interaction, to make it systematic. The evolution of working methods has been studied: both competitive forms of interaction and non-competitive practices - patronage and socialist competition. It is shown that the tools of sports diplomacy of the USSR in the first decade of its existence were not static, it changed in accordance with new tasks and challenges - from overcoming foreign policy isolation to strengthening the internal structure of the movement and the formation of self-defense squads by foreign sports clubs. The circle of interaction of the RSI and the SCPC with supranational organizations and Soviet institutions of power is defined. Intensive ties with the CEC, the PCFA and the Soviet embassies, which provided financial support, accelerated visa issuance, as well as advisory assistance, indicate a great attention to foreign policy sports contacts of the highest state bodies of the USSR. The conclusion is made about the formation of a systematic and regular practice of sports diplomacy of the Soviet state since the early 1920s.

International cooperation on (counter)publics between tradition and reorientation: Social democracy and its media in the Cold War era

Abstract Since its early days, the labor movement has considered itself to be surrounded by a hostile bourgeois public and sought to counter this with a party press. As a result of the Cold War, Western social democratic parties abandoned in part their traditional beliefs about demarcation. Nevertheless, with the International Federation of the Socialist and Democratic Press, an organization emerged from 1951 to 1982 that manifested separation from the bourgeois public sphere. Drawing on an analytical framework derived from counterpublic theory, this article analyzes ideas and practices developed by members of the organization linked to the Socialist International. The analysis of archival sources reveals that social democratic journalists and publishers remained wedded to the idea of a socialist press countering a hostile public sphere. However, the ideas and practices were mostly limited to strategies aimed at adapting to the existing media structures and only later included media policy approaches.

‘With the law behind us’: Resource mobilisation and legal repertoires in the Peruvian labour movement

In contrast to the emphasis placed on the links between political parties and trade unions in many Global South labour studies, this article underscores the importance of analysing the role of legal advisors in labour dynamics. Focusing on the Peruvian experience, the author examines how legal advisors leveraging their networks and expertise have replaced activists as crucial players in a period of crisis in the country’s political party system. Based on extensive field research with trade unions and lawyers, the study highlights how this shift has influenced three interrelated aspects of labour strategies: the development of norms within the organisation, the framing of challenges faced by unions, and the choice of mobilisation repertoires, which have increasingly centred on legal proceedings rather than public demonstrations. The article explores the empirical and theoretical implications of these findings for labour studies in Latin America.

Centering Race in Studies of Low-Wage Immigrant Labor

This review examines the historical and contemporary factors driving immigrant worker precarity and the central role of race in achieving worker justice. We build from the framework of racial capitalism and historicize the legacies of African enslavement and Indigenous dispossession, which have cemented an exclusionary economic system in the United States and globally. We consider how racism and colonial legacies create migrant displacement and shape the experiences of immigrant workers. We also detail how racism permeates the immigration bureaucracy, driving migrant worker precarity. The traditional labor movement has played an important role in closing this gap, but increasingly so have worker centers and the immigrant rights movement as a whole. These partnerships have had to navigate coalitional tensions as they build new strategies for realizing immigrant worker rights.

Diverse and dynamic Slovenia, towards the necessary changes

Cultural heritage is a value in all its forms. As an important and indivisible part of local, regional, national and European identity, it represents the quality of the living environment and is a key source of balanced development. Heritage is the foundation of Slovenia’s cultural diversity, which is intertwined with remarkable landscape and biological diversity and the country’s attractiveness for living, education, development, artistic creation, tourism and other economic activities. Cultural heritage broadens Slovenia’s visibility in the international community. In a Eurobarometer survey (2017), 92% of Slovenians surveyed said that cultural heritage is important for our country, and 76% said they are proud of our common heritage. Naturally, cultural heritage cannot exist without the people who protect, preserve and popularise it. This is precisely where we need to work on the challenges and problems that have arisen as a result of the free movement of labour and the emergence of market activities.
 One of the biggest challenges facing the conservation-restoration Þeld is the regulation of the profession. The regulation of the conservation-restoration professions is relevant in Slovenia for the public sector and in the case of persons who independently perform a specialised profession through recognition fees, from the point of view of covering the social instruments in the Þeld of self-employment in the cultural heritage sector. The status of self-employed persons in the cultural heritage sector is granted by the Ministry of Culture. However, the profession isn´t regulated on the market since anyone who believes they have sufÞcient knowledge, even without appropriate education, can create and register a conservation and restoration business in any Þeld without examination by a commission. Conservation and restoration activities in Slovenia can therefore be based on three different starting points: The Public sector (regulated), the Status of self-employed persons in the cultural heritage sector (regulated), and Independent entrepreneurship in the Þeld of conservation and restoration (unregulated).

Between Land Reclamation and Labour, Empathy and Asian New Wave Film: Fungibility in Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined 幻土

Yeo Siew Hua's film A Land Imagined (2018) is interspersed with long scenes at a work site. The camera often rests on the droning work of machines and workers carting and sorting gravel. But for all the movement that is displayed, no change has taken place. Piles of gravel are demolished and moved to make new piles. The persons in the film appear similarly fungible: an injured laborer can become a driver, a corpse may or may not explain a disappearance. Ultimately, the site is revealed to be a land reclamation site which reveals that movement of gravel is not a closed innocuous system, but is part of a zero-sum game, in which one country grows bigger by cannibalizing those around it. Using Sadiya Hartman's work on fungibility as a lens through which I consider the modern-day ‘coolie' in the film and Lisa Lowe’s writing on immigration and citizenship, I argue that Yeo allegorizes the movement of land across bodies of water for the similar movement of indentured laborers in order to critique the invisibility of foreign low-wage labor in Singapore, at the same time that the products of their labour are put on brash display. Critics like Hartman and Lowe, whose critical interests connect exchange, labor, and transnational movement across oceans and bodies of water, offer a critical framework with which we can think about how the film takes up the racial, national, and gendered intersections of these issues. Finally, in drawing from and inserting itself within an extant body of work by Asian New Wave directors, A Land Imagined ultimately enacts an imaginative and responsible form of transnational assemblage, connecting cultures and people across oceans not through labour or even soil, but through art.

Social Movements in Europe, from the Past to the Present

Abstract Over time, the concept of social movement has evolved as society has changed, but has always implied collective action in the public space. The form of social contestation has changed, according to the conjuncture of each historical period. In 18th century, the transition from the Old Regime to Liberalism provoked movements considered by some authors as “primitive” or “premodern”, as they were spontaneous, sporadic and depoliticized. Industrial society of the 19th century gave rise to the labor movement and trade unionism, which from then on organized the social movements. In the 20th century there were changes and innovation in the collective way of acting, there was the emergence of a series of social movements that differ from the traditional in terms of the objectives and actors involved, such as the pacifist, ecologist, feminist movements, acting on the fringes of parties and unions. The 21st century has witnessed a set of movements that begin on social networks, such as Generation Scratch, Outraged, Occupy Wall Street, Screw the Troika, and quickly outgrow local scales to become global. Through the use of a theoretical and conceptual framework derived from the theories of social movements and taking into account the current transformation of collective action that has been witnessed in the 21st century, we intend to verify if we are facing a new social phenomenon or another phase of “repertoire” change.

Varieties of Just Transition? Eco-Social Policy Approaches at the International Level

‘Just transition’ is a concept originally developed by the labour movement to reconcile workers’ rights with the necessity to combat climate change. More recently, supra- and international organisations have also adopted this idea. However, it remains unclear to what extent these actors follow the eco-social ambitions of organised labour. In this article, we develop a conceptual framework to capture diverse just transition approaches by distinguishing between the goal, policy, and governance dimension. We apply a multi-method approach to gauge the extent of variation in the just transition conceptualisations of three actors: the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Union (EU). We identify a cleavage between the ILO where just transition refers to an ambitious eco-social agenda on the one hand, and the IMF’s emphasis on macroeconomic adaptation on the other. The EU takes up a middle position by promoting a ‘green growth’ strategy with medium emphasis on environmental and social risk mitigation.

Migration in Central Asian Countries in the Context of EEU Integration and New International Realities

Integration processes in the Eurasian space are the result of the evolution and transformation of approaches to cooperation and rapprochement of the members of the association, including the convergence of the development of all “four freedoms” of the EEU (movement of goods, movement of services, movement of labor and movement of capital). The EEU is now the only effective economic integration association in Eurasia, and the migration component is one of the key aspects that influences the other three and increases the integration potential of Central Asian countries that are not members of the associations. This study is aimed at analyzing the integration potential of Central Asian countries through the prism of existing and possible migration effects. The study carried out an overview analysis of the potential of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the possibility of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan joining the EEU, with an emphasis on the potential and role of labor migration for these countries in the context of the EEU. The relevance of the study is due not only to the importance of economic integration processes in the Eurasian space through the prism of migration effects for Central Asia, but also in general in the context of gaining important experience, processes of unification and raising common standards throughout the Eurasian space, and in particular, in the migration field. The effects of labor migration within the EEU for Central Asia will not only be indicators of rapprochement and integration, but also the expansion of cooperation in general at the regional and interregional level. Such experience is also important for the EAEU, since it is important for the Union, along with expanding the list of economic partners, to develop new mechanisms for coordinating labor migration.

칠레의 사회 변동과 노동운동: 사회정치적 노동조합주의(Sindicalismo Sociopolítico)를 중심으로*

칠레의 사회 변동과 노동운동: 사회정치적 노동조합주의(Sindicalismo Sociopolítico)를 중심으로*

INVESTMENT COOPERATION OF THE EAEU COUNTRIES IN CONDITIONS OF ECONOMIC INSTABILITY

In the conditions of modern international political contradictions, the main task for any state is to strengthen trade, economic and investment cooperation with neighboring countries. On January 1, 2015, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), which unites the states of Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, began its work. The purpose of this regional integration organization is the freedom of movement of goods, services, capital and labor, as well as ensuring the implementation of a coordinated, coordinated and unified policy in the sectors of the economy.Despite numerous studies devoted to the consideration of the foundations of mutual investment cooperation of the EAEU countries, the peculiarities of the modern world economy require studying the structure of mutual investment cooperation within the framework of the main geopolitical and macroeconomic partnership. The article analyzes the main trends in the investment activity of the EAEU member states based on mathematical statistics methods, analyzes the features of the structure of mutual direct investment, the volume of investments in the fixed capital of the Union countries by type of economic activity. In the course of the study, the problems facing the Union states on the way to effective investment cooperation were identified, the investment intensity index was evaluated and the prospects for economic and financial integration of mutual cooperation were determined.

Challenges and Prospects of the Independent Labour Movement in Post-Crisis Belarus

Challenges and Prospects of the Independent Labour Movement in Post-Crisis Belarus

China’s Transition to Collective Labor Relations: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Mechanisms

Abstract The article analyzes the development, characteristics, and tendency of China’s labor relations and the labor movement in recent years. It points out that China has begun the transition from individual labor relations to collective labor relations with the strike wave in the summer of 2010 as the main turning point. In the process of transformation, there are two kinds of forces and two ways to accomplish the labor movement. One is the top-down labor union movement led by the authorities within the system; the other is the bottom-up labor movement formed spontaneously by workers outside the system. The article particularly analyzes the emergence of, and mutual relationship between these two types of transition, as well as their influence and significance on China’s labor relations.

The Nexus between Protest and Electoral Participation: Explaining Chile's Exceptionalism

AbstractThe literature on political participation has consistently found that protest positively and significantly correlates with voting. However, Chile can be considered a deviant case to this pattern. During the last decade, Chileans who participated in street demonstrations were unlikely to participate in elections. What explains this anomaly? We argue that this rupture between participation in protest and in elections results from an effective distancing between social-movement organisations (SMOs) and institutional politics. However, this distancing of SMOs from party politics has not been homogeneous. To examine this heterogeneity, we conduct a comparative design of two cases: the labour and student movements. Based on a mixed-methods study that combines interviews with movement leaders and surveys of protest participants in marches, we seek to highlight the mediating role of SMOs in the promotion of different forms of political participation.

Do female labor‐migrated households have lower productivity? Empirical evidence from rural rice farms in Bangladesh

AbstractThe labor movement from rural areas and the remittance flow from migrants is a common household livelihood strategy in rural Bangladesh. While migration can offer economic benefits through remittances, it can be a source of hardship for migrants and their families due to societal culture. This study examines the differences in farm productivity and technical efficiency between female and male labor migrants by focusing on female and male laborers who have lived away from their homes for 6 months or more within the country and its reflection on farm production. Using data on 2271 rice plots from Bangladesh Integrated Households Survey in 2018, we estimate plot‐level stochastic meta‐frontier approach for households with female‐labor migrants and male‐labor migrants separately emphasizing technological difference and heteroskedastic technical efficiency. The empirical result shows that the female‐labor migrants' farms have 10.3% lower production frontier (maximum frontier yield) and 6.1% higher technical efficiency than male migrants' farms, indicating that they have 4.2% lower productivity. Lower production frontier reflects lower management ability and less attention to farm practice. Moreover, the study reveals that female‐labor migrants' farms are closer to the meta‐frontier, suggesting smaller technology gaps. However, some farmers failed to achieve the highest possible output in relation to the meta‐frontier, indicating that farmers can boost their production by adopting and disseminating new rice production technology.

We have fed you all 1000 years: nineteenth-century radical song and the rise of North American labor

ABSTRACT Political song, especially that which fits new words to existing melodies’ semiotic associations, has been used by Americans as an oppositional tool throughout the history of the United States. Activists employed tunes’ “virality” to disseminate political stances and these practices played a key role in the rise of the modern labor movement. This article traces that history, through a succession of contextualized examples linking nineteenth-century political song to contemporary activism.

Transnationalism, class and national identity in the Cuban labour movement (1898-1902)

ABSTRACT For a Cuban anarchist movement intent on promoting harmonious class relations, attachment to national identity within the working classes was a divisive wedge which limited this objective. Transnationalism – understood here as the process of Spanish migration to Cuba, as well as the anarchist network between the U.S. and the Caribbean – combined with this divisive context; it intermeshed with a Cuban working class marked by their recent emancipation from Spanish colonial rule. On the one hand, this article will show how transnationalism was instrumental to building the strength of the anarchist movement in Cuba. Simultaneously, my intervention destabilizes conventional assumptions about transnationalism: rather than simply a generative process which inexorably led to the growth of anarchism in Cuba, it was constrained by, and at times reinforced, antagonistic relations on the basis of national identity. In doing so, this article furthers understandings of how transnational processes impact social movements, particularly in the context of imperial hegemony. Moreover, by foregrounding the domestic situation in Cuba and questioning the benefits of transnationalism, it reasserts the agency of Latin America in labour histories, rather than adopting the common framing of the continent being a passive recipient of influences from mainland Europe.

Chipping Away at the Right to Strike

Abstract: On June 1, the Supreme Court issued a significant decision against the labor movement in Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters Local Union No. 174. In an 8–1 split, the Court found that the National Labor Relations Act does not protect striking cement truck drivers from being sued by their employer, who alleges damages for lost cement caused by their work stoppage. The decision, perhaps by design, has received little public outcry.