Labor Abuses Research Articles

Migration -Trafficking nexus in Post-Soviet Tajikistan

Human trafficking, for the manipulation of migrant labour, is a violation of human rights. The spike in human trafficking is partly due to the rapid expansion of labour migration in the neoliberal period. The former Soviet zone has become one of the world's major human migration sections in the last decade. The article analyses the case of migration and trafficking in Tajikistan as remittances amounted to nearly half of the country's gross domestic product. In Tajikistan, lack of economic prospects, increasing poverty level, presence of blurred boundaries, leads to the cycle of illicit migration flows which resulted in human trafficking. Human trafficking is a multidimensional issue exacerbated in the countries of destination by poverty and gaps in economic openings versus unmet labour hassles and stern migration commandments. The migration of the Tajik people shortly began after the independence of the country and largely to support subsistence to the families leaving behind. Majority of these migrants prefer Russian federation as their main destination to work where corruption and human trafficking problem is huge. There are limited governing bodies to regulate recruiters' activities, so migrant workers are at the mercy of recruiters who are known to charge exorbitant fees that indebted migrant worker before arriving in their destination countries. Labour trafficking is a global humanitarian issue but there is scarcely any quantitative research on the issue. This study examined labour abuse indicators among migrant Tajik workers in the Russian Federation and the subsequent human trafficking risks with fresh vulnerabilities created by the economic crises and the covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

“Because That’s What His Consul Had Ordered”: The Chilean Consulate as a Labor Institution in Mendoza, Argentina (1859-1869)

Objective/Context: This article examines the place of the Chilean consulate in conflicts related to control over labor in western Argentina during the 1860s, a decade of national consolidation and economic expansion. It explores how changes in the laboring classes’ experiences and interests in the mid-nineteenth century expressed themselves through the Chilean consulate and the meaning of being Chilean. Methodology: Using consular records, foreign relations records, and criminal records, it analyzes how Chilean laborers—and Argentines claiming to be Chilean—petitioned the consulate to protect them from military conscription and labor abuses. Originality: While transnational labor migrations feature more prominently in histories of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than in those on the post-independence period, this article adds to understandings of the end of the post-independence period through such migrations and the institutions that supported them. Conclusions: By focusing on the interaction of laborers and the Chilean consulate, this article makes the case for a correlation between non-European transnational labor migrations and the development of a sense of political belonging distinct from republicanism, patriotism, or civic participation, and one that sought exclusion from the obligations of society and one decidedly more oriented towards notions of class and nationality.

Low-Skilled Labor Shortages Contribute to Forced Labor — Evidence From Myanmar and Thailand

Over 25 million people are victims of forced labor globally; the vast majority are low-skilled migrant workers who migrated from a different country or region. Evidence so far indicates that much of labor exploitation has roots in the recruitment process. This motivates the question of whether there are characteristics common to low-skilled labor recruitment that can serve as reliable indicators of forced labor risk in the workplace. Leveraging unique data sets from the Myanmar Government and the Issara Institute on weekly demand for Burmese migrant workers in Thailand by Thai companies, and on worker voice hot-line data from 2018-2020, we find that unexpected labor shortages in the workplace significantly increase migrant worker abuse. Using an Instrumental Variable (IV) approach, we find that an increase of one standard deviation in low-skilled labor shortages in the workplace leads to a 34.5% or higher increase in worker-reported labor abuse in the two to four weeks that follow. Shocks of such magnitude occur about 10% of the time. We also find a visible correlation between provinces whose labor markets are more stressed on average and the frequency of unexpected labor shortages in a province, suggesting that stressed labor markets are also more prone to unexpected shortages and abuse. Overall, this research suggests that inefficiencies in matching supply and demand for low-skilled labor play an important role in determining labor abuse outcomes, and that reducing these inefficiencies in the labor recruitment process could help mitigate labor abuse.

"A World of Debt": Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, The Wealth Of Nations, and the End of Finance

Although not usually listed among critics of Adam Smith, the formerly enslaved author Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (in Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, 1787) described a causal relationship between corporate financing of national debt and the perpetuation of slavery that anticipates more recent analyses of cyclic economic crisis by Thomas Piketty and David Graeber as a legacy of labor abuse. Cugoano argued for economic discourse that retains its connection to morality and theology at the moment that the dehumanization of economics by profiteers of slavery and industrialization inhibited a reckoning of moral and financial debts.

Satellites can reveal global extent of forced labor in the world’s fishing fleet

While forced labor in the world's fishing fleet has been widely documented, its extent remains unknown. No methods previously existed for remotely identifying individual fishing vessels potentially engaged in these abuses on a global scale. By combining expertise from human rights practitioners and satellite vessel monitoring data, we show that vessels reported to use forced labor behave in systematically different ways from other vessels. We exploit this insight by using machine learning to identify high-risk vessels from among 16,000 industrial longliner, squid jigger, and trawler fishing vessels. Our model reveals that between 14% and 26% of vessels were high-risk, and also reveals patterns of where these vessels fished and which ports they visited. Between 57,000 and 100,000 individuals worked on these vessels, many of whom may have been forced labor victims. This information provides unprecedented opportunities for novel interventions to combat this humanitarian tragedy. More broadly, this research demonstrates a proof of concept for using remote sensing to detect forced labor abuses.

Assessing the role of information and communication technologies in responding to ‘slavery scandals’

The media spotlight on controversial ‘slave labour’ practices in the Asia-Pacific region has highlighted poor labour conditions across the seafood sector. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are being promoted by NGOs, businesses and governments to help handle such labour challenges. This systematic review examines the state of knowledge and trends in the peer-reviewed literature related to the use of ICTs in offshore fisheries. While we hoped to find a robust literature in the area of ICTs-fisheries-labour, a coherent literature does not yet exist. However, our initial analysis suggests that two technologies hold promise for addressing labour abuse in fisheries, namely, (a) detection technologies, which include surveillance of the high seas, and, (b) the creation of mobile apps, particularly to help workers navigate work in fishing. This is where further evidence-based research is needed.

Reflections from the Field: Disparate responses to labour exploitation in post-Katrina Louisiana

Hurricane Katrina was a devastating natural disaster that changed the landscape of the United States’ Gulf Coast. This was followed by a human-made disaster of failed policies, poor governmental oversight, and rampant labour abuse. This article compares how the anti-trafficking and labour rights movements responded to the widespread labour abuse following Katrina. It examines how the worker rights movement responded to systemic issues impacting labourers, and explores the anti-trafficking movement’s criminal justice response to severe forms of exploitation. It shows how the anti-trafficking movement failed to adequately address severe forms of labour abuse, as opposed to the more successful organising efforts of the worker rights movement. The article concludes by considering how the two movements may respond to conditions of labour exploitation emerging as a result of a new disaster impacting workers in Louisiana: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Modern Heroes, Modern Slaves? Listening to migrant domestic workers’ everyday temporalities

This essay draws on multi-sited, performance art-led research with Filipinx migrant domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon. It explores a dichotomy at work in the portrayal of some workers as bagong bayani or ‘modern heroes’—a phrase coined by then Philippine president Corazon Aquino—and as ‘modern slaves’, a term more recently associated with the humanitarian and state processing of survivors of human trafficking and labour abuse. Simultaneously victimising and venerating workers, I argue that both terms spectacularise experiences of migrant domestic work, untethering it from lived, material conditions. In so doing, the everyday nature of exploitation and abuse encountered by many migrant domestic workers is obscured, as well as the everyday expertise that enables them to evade, de-escalate, and survive it. Through making collaborative soundwalks with migrant domestic workers—a creative form similar to site-specific audio guides—my research identifies ways in which performance methodologies can be attentive to the specific temporalities of their lived experiences and to their decisions about self-representation.

Strategic Redirection through Litigation: Forgoing the anti-trafficking framework to address labour abuses experienced by migrant sex workers

Response to the ATR debate proposition ‘It is worth undermining the anti-trafficking cause in order to more directly challenge the systems producing everyday abuses within the global economy.’

Instruments of health and harm: how the procurement of healthcare goods contributes to global health inequality

Many healthcare goods, such as surgical instruments, textiles and gloves, are manufactured in unregulated factories and sweatshops where, amongst other labour rights violations, workers are subject to considerable occupational health...

Improving Working Conditions in Global Supply Chains: The Role of Institutional Environments and Monitoring Program Design

Activism seeking to improve labor conditions in global supply chains has led many transnational corporations to adopt codes of conduct and to monitor suppliers for compliance. Drawing on thousands of audits conducted by a major social auditor, the authors identify structural contingencies in the institutional environment and program design under which codes and monitoring are more likely to be associated with improvements in conditions. At the institutional level, suppliers improve more when they face greater risk that nongovernmental organizations and the press will expose harmful working conditions. They also improve more when their buyers have experienced negative publicity for supply chain labor abuses. At the program design level, suppliers improve more on average when audits are pre-announced, when auditors are highly trained, and especially when both elements are present. Extended analysis of variations across violation types reveals nuances to these findings. For instance, pre-announced audits were followed by greater improvement in occupational safety and health practices but not child labor practices. These findings can inform strategies for improving supply chain working conditions.

Figuras del mal gobierno: “españoles soberbiosos e indias putas” en la obra de Guaman Poma de Ayala

En la segunda sección de su obra, denominada “Buen gobierno”, Guaman Poma nos ofrece algunas de las más detalladas y vívidas descripciones del funcionamiento del poder colonial. Este ensayo revisa dichas interacciones a partir de dos perspectivas complementarias: (i) la inmensa brecha entre el “deber ser” y la acción social frecuente de esas autoridades; (ii) la condena a la violencia ejercida contra los indios, la cual adoptaba las fguras del castigo físico, el robo, la explotación laboral, la violación sexual, la amenaza verbal, entre otras. La explicación de esta violencia como ejercicio del poder colonial se solía representar con dos vicios: codicia y lujuria. A partir de la problemática social que la obra de Guaman Poma revela, me interesadestacar la función que desempeñó la representación del cuerpo de los indios como un espacio en el que se materializaba el poder colonial, así como el ambivalente rol de la sexualidad en dicha dinámica.

Bringing the Dark Side of International Business into the Classroom

We contend that positioning dark side activities (DSA) as a more central component of IB coursework is important for students to understand the legitimacy and performance consequences of such phenomena. We draw on six types of DSA: environmental degradation; questionable marketing practices; accounting or financial fraud; corruption; labor abuses; and cultural imperialism. We suggest that IB educators expose students to concrete examples illustrating when MNEs may drift to the dark side and provide three short case studies. We provide informational resources and discussion prompts for human trafficking and outline a United Nations framework to structure in-class discussion of DSA.

Labour Market Shocks and the Demand for Trade Protection: Evidence from Online Surveys

AbstractWe study preferences for government action in response to layoffs resulting from different types of labour-market shocks. We consider: technological change, a demand shift, bad management and three kinds of international outsourcing. Support for government intervention rises sharply in response to shocks and is heavily biased towards trade protection. Trade shocks generate more demand for protectionism and, among trade shocks, outsourcing to a developing country elicits greater demand for protectionism. The ‘bad management’ shock is the only scenario that induces a desired increase in compensatory transfers. Trump supporters are more protectionist than Clinton supporters, but preferences seem easy to manipulate: Clinton supporters primed with trade shocks are as protectionist as baseline Trump voters. Highlighting labour abuses in the exporting country increases the demand for trade protection by Clinton supporters but not Trump supporters.

The Theatre Feminist: A Manifesto

This manifesto passionately argues that theatre is not Feminist until it is transformative and unless it includes all of us. The Theatre Feminist is not a formula where you “just add women and stir.” It’s not just plays that are by, about, and for women. Feminist requires a fundamental shift in hierarchy and power that does not implicate people only individually and personally, but collectively and entirely. Its goal must be to overthrow cis-hetero-patriarchy, and there is no overthrowing patriarchy without overthrowing capitalism and racist colonial imperialism at the same time. As I explore the relationship between feminism and communism in this manifesto, and debunk some easy assumptions about the Theatre Feminist along the way, I ground my ideas in reflections on my play Behaviour, recently produced by the Great Canadian Theatre Company and SpiderWebShow. Behaviour demands a recognition of the audience’s gaze and complacency. It asks for action from the people in the audience who may not be victims or perpetrators of sexual assault and labour abuse. And it refuses to leave the audience feeling enriched and satisfied with themselves for having had their awareness raised.

Counter-Fashion as Critical Practice

The Rational Dress Society (RDS), an experimental design collective, traces the history of fashion and counter-fashion, defined as the practice of dressing to express shared political beliefs. The current fashion system, dominated by fast fashion corporations, is inseparable from environmental devastation and labor abuses. A return to counter-fashion might serve as a corrective to the contemporary garment industry. The RDS introduces their counter-fashion garment, JUMPSUIT, as an example of the ways that counter-fashion can help us reimagine our relationship to dress. What if you never had to pick out an outfit again?

«Про що не мовчать дитячі голоси?»: проблематика «небезпечного» в українській еміграційній літературі для дітей та юнацтва

The article deals with works for / about children written by Ukrainian emigres writers in the 20th century. Through comprehension of the issues of “dangerous” in the collection of stories by V. Vynnychenko “Necklace”, the story by B.-B. Fedchuk “Gania”, Olga Mak’s “Stones under the curve” and L. Brizgun-Shanti’s “Black clouds over the golden field”, etc., two types of children’s voices are analyzed. Voice as expressing passive contemplation, as presented, e.g. in the stories of the cycle “The Necklace” by V. Vynnychenko. Here, children rebel against social reality with its poverty, exploitation of child labor, social inequality and child abuse, which occurred in Ukrainian life, in the time of being a colony of the Russian Empire. Vynnychenko gives voice to his small child heroes both to identify the child’s individuality, and to draw attention to the necessary changes needed in the society at that time. This idea makes the cycle close to writings by Ch. Dickens, and A. Lindgren. Voice as a resistance against a silent majority, is related to the “terrible” themes devoted to the tragic pages of the world and national history suppressed in the Soviet Union, and still largely unknown to the world community. In particular, this refers to the occupation of Ukraine in the Second World War and the genocide of Ukrainians by the Stalin’s regime (named “Holodomor-33”). The children’s narratives in the literature of Ukrainian Diaspora (Olha Mak, L. Bryzghun-Shanta, B.-B. Fedchuk, O. Tsehelska, etc.) had become the opposition to the silent majority. The authors promote ideas of the responsibility in “the face of the other” (E.Levinas) and of tolerance to the culture of the other. Similar senses are actualized by the modern writers like J. Boyne, J. Elvgren, etc.

Child Protection And Household Vulnerability

This paper explores child protection based on three factors; child abuse, child labour and child substance abuse. The analysis is based on a cohort of 17,848 vulnerbale households and the children in therein studied over a period of four years under the “sustainable comprehensive repsonses for vulnerable children and tehir families project” implemented in rural Uganda between 2011 and 2017. We find overall child protection factors mentioned above improved over the four years alongside household vulnerability. Howveer we observe that compared to the rest of the vulnerable households, the children who had experience child abuse, used susbanctes and alcohol and experience child labour were less likely to transition out of vulnerability compared to the others. We also found out that these children were less likely to be enrolled in school over the foru years and were more likely to be absent from school. We conclude that poor child protection indtcaors amongst the vulnerable children compound their household and individual vulnerability and increase the likelihood that their basic rights will be violated. We recommend that child protection issues, and child rights specifically should be brought at the forefront of all child protection interventions.

Modern slavery and the race to fish

Marine fisheries are in crisis, requiring twice the fishing effort of the 1950s to catch the same quantity of fish, and with many fleets operating beyond economic or ecological sustainability. A possible consequence of diminishing returns in this race to fish is serious labour abuses, including modern slavery, which exploit vulnerable workers to reduce costs. Here, we use the Global Slavery Index (GSI), a national-level indicator, as a proxy for modern slavery and labour abuses in fisheries. GSI estimates and fisheries governance are correlated at the national level among the major fishing countries. Furthermore, countries having documented labour abuses at sea share key features, including higher levels of subsidised distant-water fishing and poor catch reporting. Further research into modern slavery in the fisheries sector is needed to better understand how the issue relates to overfishing and fisheries policy, as well as measures to reduce risk in these labour markets.

Gender, Class, Race, and Region in “Bilingual” Bolivia

This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, linguistic, and class difference in highland Bolivia. I examine both ethnographic and mediatized moments in which bilingualism and its traces contribute to the contours of racialized humiliation or, alternately, antiracist ethnic affirmation. In some moments la bilingüe becomes a metonym that stands in for racial and gender alterity, including when la bilingüe denotes a racialized, gendered, wage-labor category—the domestic servant working in the home of wealthy whites. The figure of the Indian Maid is a figure of historical and literary tropes but also of contemporary political mobilization against labor abuses, racial humiliation, and sexual violence. The figure of the chola is both a remnant of categories of personhood that organized racial and gender hierarchies during the colonial period, namely, the sistema de castas, and a contemporary social and demographic category that fuses language, ethnicity, and gender. Anti-Indian caricatures in televised comedy and other popular discourse connect features of bilingual speech to presuppositions about the Indian body. Chola-centric beauty contests replicate the form of public celebrations of white femininity, like Miss Universe pageants, but operate with other criteria, including eloquence in indigenous Andean languages.