Labour Government Research Articles

Forever young: China’s migration regime and age patterns

ABSTRACT Chinese institutional arrangements, particularly the hukou system, hinder long-term settlement of internal migrants by limiting their access to social benefits. This article proposes a new method for assessing migrant settlement: the use of age data to investigate the link between migrant “flow” and “stock”. We contend that migrants’ inability to settle mainly derives from two sources: the difficulties in maintaining migrant family togetherness, and the impediments to long-term residence of migrants themselves. Age-related indices were developed to compare China’s internal migration with other countries’ internal and international migration. The results indicate a “China difference” in migration age patterns – child and elderly dependents of migrant workers are discouraged from migrating, while migrants growing old tend to return to the origins than to remain in the destinations. Consequently, family togetherness and long-term residence in the destinations are often unachievable for migrants. Our analyses highlight China’s unique migrant labor regime, where temporary migrant workers are continuously “recycled” to keep destinations’ workforce “forever young”, reducing production costs of Chinese goods in global markets. Methodologically, our age-based “mobile-to-settled” transition framework and “settlement rate” of migrants in the transition are of value in examining migrant settlement chances more generally, applicable to internal and international migration beyond China.

Intervention: The invisible labor of climate change adaptation

While adapting to the impacts of climate change will require massive human efforts across landscapes, economies, and everyday social life, adaptation is rarely conceptualized as work conducted by laboring people. In this intervention, we suggest that the conditions under which this largely invisible adaptation labor is currently carried out – in which workers are frequently underpaid, unpaid or unfree - should become a key concern for scholars and advocates of climate justice and just transitions. We propose an inclusive definition of climate adaptation labor and mobilize it to examine how the conditions of life under climate change are being produced and reproduced, by whom, and for whose benefit. Drawing from diverse cases across 12 countries in both Global South/Majority World and Global North/Minority World contexts, we investigate the institutions and labor regimes through which adaptation labor is currently organized and (under)remunerated. We highlight how social difference and power entwine to devalue this work, particularly through idioms of “participation” and “contribution”, and draw attention to the agency, autonomy, and claims-making power of adaptation laborers. Crucially, we suggest theoretical and practical approaches for transforming adaptation labor into a vehicle for redistribution and just transition.

Beyond state and market: the role of labor regimes and class dynamics in the East Asian miracle

While conventional wisdom focuses on the roles of the state and the market in achieving high growth in East Asian countries, this paper offers an account focused on class dynamics. First, the paper connects post-World War II class dynamics in Japan and South Korea to the distributional outcome, i.e., the gap between labor productivity growth and real wage growth. Statistical evidence and econometric tests suggest a positive relationship between a balance of power in favor of workers and a higher growth rate in output. Secondly, the paper puts forward a labor regime framework for explaining the connection between the class dynamics and the distributional outcome, and finds it to have played a central role by using historical data and an autoregressive distributed lag (ADL) model. We further analyze China’s economic growth and conclude by stressing the importance of class dynamics for better understanding growth and distribution in capitalist development.

“Flaming Madras handkerchiefs and calico blazing with crimson and scarlet flowers”: Antebellum World Systems in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative

Abstract Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (ca. 1853–61) is the earliest known work of fiction written by a Black woman in the United States. Its distinctiveness lies in the internationalism through which the labor regimes of the southern plantation are shown to be intimately bound to global sites of colonial dispossession. Besides unpacking the entangled strands of British and American imperialisms, the author-narrator critically emulates conventions of the nineteenth-century transatlantic literary marketplace, evincing an understanding of both her embodied self and her intellectual labor as commodities in a world system built with racialized labor. Crafts’s novel revises the notion of chattel slavery as provincial, situating it instead within the Atlantic World’s expansive flows of capital and commodities. It presents not a geographically and socially demarcated institution but a plantation empire that goes far beyond the contours of the American South or, indeed, the continental United States, creating a remarkably nuanced conception of Black positionality, one informed not only by race but also by global capital. As part of a broader field-based inquiry, this article probes the affordances of thinking about antebellum Black Atlantic political subjectivity as positioned between two imperialist projects: British abolitionism and American plantocratic expansionism.

Responsive not coercive inspection: A restoration and reinterpretation of the values, principles and procedures of HM Inspectorate (abolished in 1992)

After widespread concern following the tragic death of a headteacher, the appointment of a new chief inspector for Ofsted and the prospect of a Labour government offer an opportunity for a radical appraisal of the current inspection regime. This article discusses some basic concepts and principles which might contribute to a system that is responsive, not coercive, and one that is infused by 'a duty of care'.

Extractive Labor: A Lethal Legacy of Racialized Colonial Rule

How and why does colonial domination kill off the very labor it depends on? While settler colonial studies provide one of the only theorizations of the systemic elimination of populations, they see it as antithetical to labor exploitation, and thus cannot answer this question. I therefore build on recent critiques of settler colonial studies to develop the concept of racialized extractive labor regimes: race marking labor as disposable, as realizing value through expending workers’ lives. I then articulate these dynamics through a comparison of the highly divergent cases of early colonialism in Peru and what is now the United States, first across initial settlement and then as they shifted to racialization decades later. While settler colonial studies emphasize land acquisition as colonialism’s defining feature, my comparison reveals that elites’ drive for indelible inequality actually shapes colonial projects. And in order to maintain their vaunted positions, elites ultimately construct racialized extractive labor regimes that predicate their domination on the regularized elimination of racialized Others. This analysis therein provides new insights into the elitist nature of colonialism and the logics of elimination and racialization through which it runs.

Critical education for sustainability and Chantal Mouffe's green democratic revolution

AbstractHow should the curriculum for older school students address the transition to sustainable futures? This article seeks to answer this question by reference to the marginalisation of education for sustainability (EfS) in England after 2010; its re‐emergence around 2020, prompted largely by students' protests over climate change: and the continuing need for critical approaches that acknowledge the contested nature of sustainability. Gramsci's theory of hegemony as developed by Gilbert and Williams, is used to explain the marginalisation of EfS while Mouffe's advocacy of a green democratic revolution, shaped by a blend of eco‐socialist, post‐developmental and decolonial thought, suggests what a critical EfS should cover and why it should be linked to radical global citizenship education. Neoliberal, socially democratic and eco‐socialist discourses of sustainability and a green transition should feature in the curriculum and agonistic pedagogy should be employed to enable students to reflect and act on these and so develop their political literacy. The Curriculum for Wales can accommodate such pedagogy and an incoming Labour government in Westminster can learn from its example.

The English health inequalities strategy: A time-trend study of mortality rate disparities at 65

Abstract Background Rapid population ageing is common in many Global North countries, with the UK being a prime example (with 18.6% aged 65 and over in 2021). Despite this, life expectancy in the UK began to stall around 2011, and the gap between the least and most deprived has been widening. To address these inequalities, a ‘levelling up’ programme was announced by the current Conservative government. Previously, a national health inequalities strategy was implemented (2000 to 2010) by the then Labour government, with many of the interventions targeting older age groups. To provide evidence on the effects of national health inequalities strategies on life expectancy later in life, we assessed the impact of the English health inequalities strategy on inequalities in mortality rate at age 65 by area deprivation. Methods Using ecological mortality and population data for Middle Super Output and Local Authority areas, we calculated life expectancy for individuals aged 65 and over in England from 1991 to 2016. We applied time-trend analyses methods with marginal spline terms to evaluate how mortality rate trends at age 65 changed before, during and after the strategy period. We also conducted a series of robustness analyses to considering varying cut points, deprivation levels and geographical scales. Results Prior to the programme (1991-1998), there was no change in the absolute difference in mortality rate between the 20% most deprived areas and the rest. During the programme, inequalities decreased at a rate of -0.0000936 (95% CI -0.0001281to -0.0000592) each year. However, after the strategy period (2011-2016) inequalities widened at an annual rate of 0.000078 (95% CI 0.0000166 to 0.0001395). Conclusions This study provides evidence of an association between the national health inequalities strategy and a narrowing of inequalities in mortality rate at age 65. Future strategies to address inequalities in ageing populations may benefit from adopting a similar approach. Key messages • The national health inequalities strategy (2000 to 2010) was associated with a narrowing of inequalities in mortality rate at age 65. • Future national strategies which aim to reduce inequalities in life expectancy in older age groups may benefit from adopting a similar approach.

Higher education policy and a future Labour government: distinguishing the probable from the possible

There is now the very real possibility of a change of UK government before the end of next year. This articles looks for clues as to what a Labour led government might mean for the higher education sector, at a time when substantial and radical change is desperately needed. It seems that Labour's approach to the university sector will be dominated by a focus on the economic role of higher education, combined with a fiscal conservatism that will further undermine more radical options. A longer-term transformative project remains a possibility, but its proponents must look beyond the lifetime of the next government. The realisation of any aspirational project for change will depend on the development of a broad and progressive alliance that is able to articulate, and organise around, a more hopeful and optimistic vision of the public university. There is potential for such a movement to emerge from the current industrial disputes in the sector, which have clearly exposed the limitations of the neoliberal university; but such a movement must also transcend any tendency to a narrow economism and link to a much broader political agenda

Music as Magic

Music as Magic

György Márkus, 75% mensch: On the occasion of the publication of the English version of How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible?

In this article I give an overall interpretation of the development of the Budapest School in Australia as political emigres, who initially worked and wrote in Melbourne and Sydney until the final years when Heller and Feher moved on to New York in the mid-1980s and then back to Budapest in 1993. The translation of How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? has allowed us to better grasp the motivations and theoretical innovations of the Budapest School, to appreciate their internal disputes and to recognise fundamental continuities and difference in these two key thinkers. This book was a gallant retrieval of democratic potentials in Marx. It excavated Marx’s own appreciation of needs produced by, and critical of, the alienations of the capitalist system. Ultimately, this early work was unable to realise its ambition to educate the diverse progressive movements of the times. I will show later that the retrieval of progressive potentials took a more social democratic form in the work of Maria Márkus on needs as she encountered them later in the Hawke Labor Government of Australia from 1983. Introducing the world media to the Budapest School in The Times Literary Supplement on 15 February 1971, Lukács described Márkus as ‘75% mensch’. When Lukács first met him, George already had his own philosophical interests, which he would bring with him when he became a key figure in ‘the Budapest School’. Márkus had studied in Moscow where he wrote his dissertation on the topic History and Consciousness and met his Polish wife, Maria. George used to modestly say that he was an expert only on the works of Karl Marx. That was despite that he had taught the history of modern philosophy at Eotvös Loránd University to Hungary’s most promising philosophers for a decade and later to philosophy students at Sydney University for the next 20 years. In the early 1970s, George invited Janos Kis and György Bence to work on his next project that would become the Hungarian version of Überhaupt, which was to become How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? The new English translation published by Brill this year opens this important rethinking of the work of Marx to an international readership.

Social reproduction in crisis: Gendered labour regimes in agro‐export sectors in Ecuador and Chile

AbstractThe pandemic lays bare the centrality of social reproduction in upholding global commodity networks. Capitalism's reliance on gendered and racialized systems of social reproduction has deepened structural contradictions and socio‐economic divides across agro‐export sectors and agrarian communities. We analyse how COVID‐19 policies and responses in Ecuador and Chile are reshaping systems of social and labour protection in feminized agro‐export sectors. We integrate labour regime and gender regime frameworks, showing how they are (1) co‐constituted via global forces, national policies, institutional pressures and local practices; (2) intertwined in neoliberal and social‐democratic development models; and (3) forged through control, consent and resistance. We analyse national legal frameworks and policy responses to COVID‐19, as well as industry, union and worker reactions, illustrating how ‘neutral’ policies have gendered outcomes, (re)creating false binaries between production and reproduction and paid and unpaid work. We find that the pandemic has reshaped gendered labour regimes in agro‐exports: in Ecuador, undermining the fragile commitment to a social‐democratic gendered labour regime and in Chile, strengthening social‐democratic supports and promises of a more equitable gendered labour regime. In both cases, states and firms have neglected to include social reproduction in the ‘costs’ of development, thus threatening national development models grounded in the exploitation of cheap female labour in agro‐export sectors.

Grand strategy and public diplomacy: A case study on China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its reception in the Australian press

This article examines China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a public diplomacy grand strategy at the macro-level of inter-state relations. It does so from the perspective of Australia, where the Andrews Labor government in the state of Victoria was, for a period, a signatory to the program. Specifically, this study uses content analysis to consider the reception of the BRI in the Australian press and the complex interactions of news values and ideologies that influenced its representation. This study shows that the effectiveness of the BRI as a grand strategy was undermined by the two interacting news cultures dominating media coverage in Australia, one of which stems from the liberal traditions of the press and the other from the conservative ideological proclivities of the Executive Chair of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch. In so doing, this study contributes to research on the different communication strategies mobilized by states in their geopolitical wrangling, as well as how contextual variables can pre-determine the success or failure of specific public diplomacy campaigns.

Tukhta: labour and resistance in the audit regime of the Soviet Gulag

ABSTRACT Working from the memoir literature of Soviet Gulag survivors, the article explores the curious practice of tukhta as contrived by the toiling zeks of the archipelago. In a labour regime tasked with accumulating surplus, destroying political dissent, and transforming the subjectivity of the imprisoned, tukhta proved to be a tactical means for resisting the logic of Gulag as an audit regime. The subtle labour control of numbers effected by Gulag demanded equally sophisticated practices of resistance on the part of the zeks subjected to its technique, and tukhta was one of those practices. When treated as a kind of phronesis, the informal and ethical quality to the practice of tukhta can be appreciated in a way that more formal social scientific epistemology and historical method would miss. Perhaps the most salient counter-conduct to be found in the experiences of Gulag’s orchestration of labour control, tukhta has the potential to reveal a great deal about audit regimes generically beyond the historical bounds of Soviet Russia. Historical inspiration for engaging audit regimes can therefore be derived from the ethico-political practice of tukhta, where otherwise there might just be pessimism, demoralization, and resigned acceptance to the awesome power of those regimes.

How common is low pay in Britain? New findings from linked data

ObjectivesThe Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) is the main source of public statistics on low pay in Britain. As part of the ADR-funded Wage and Employment Dynamics Project, we identify and adjust for non-response biases in ASHE and generate new estimates of the incidence of low pay.
 MethodsWe linked the ASHE data to the Business Structure Database – a research-ready version of the UK’s official register of businesses. This linked dataset enabled us to identify which types of employers were more or less likely to respond to ASHE in a given year, and to generate non-response adjustments to the existing ASHE weights.
 We then used the unique personal identifier on ASHE to link observations across years. We compared rates and correlates of longitudinal attrition in ASHE with rates and correlates of employment exit observed in the ONS Annual Population Survey, generating longitudinal weights to account for non-random attrition.
 ResultsWe find that jobs in smaller organisations, younger organisations and those in the private sector are under-represented in the annual achieved samples from ASHE, relative to their prevalence in the wider economy. The percentage of jobs paid at or below the National Minimum Wage is under-estimated by around one fifth if one does not take account of these cross-sectional response biases.
 We find that longitudinal attrition is more likely to affect younger employees and those with low job tenure. However, we do not find that estimates of the rate at which employees move off the National Minimum Wage to higher rates of pay are biased by non-random patterns of longitudinal attrition.
 ConclusionData linking enables us to identify observable response biases in the UK’s official source of earnings statistics (ASHE). These biases affect our view of the bottom of the wage distribution, and have the potential to affect decisions around a key area of government labour market policy.

Online Advanced Skill Acquisition Program

Online ASAP is an innovative initiative implemented jointly by the Higher Education, General Education, Labour, and Local Self Government Departments of Kerala. Started in 2011, the program aims to empower the young community of Kerala by providing them with skill training and employment opportunities. This initiative aligns with the Prime Minister's nationwide campaign to skill 50 crore young people by 2023. To effectively execute the skill training program, a comprehensive state skills plan is being developed. This plan encompasses the identification of skills required within Kerala, as well as across India and globally. Additionally, it focuses on positioning Kerala as a destination for skills training, attracting students and learners from various regions. The Online ASAP project comprises several modules to facilitate its objectives. The Admin module enables administrators to manage course details, approve students and teachers, coordinate resources, conduct exams and practical sessions, and issue certificates. The Students module allows for student registration, verification, and participation in online classes with fixed schedules. Students can also post doubts and access practical videos. The Tutors module facilitates tutor registration and verification, ensuring quality instruction through online classes and addressing student queries. Resource Teachers play a crucial role in coordinating the program, including course and tutor coordination, setting timetables for students, and arranging exams and practical sessions. They also respond to student queries and concerns, ensuring a smooth learning experience. Recognizing the importance of employment, the Corporate Job Portal module allows employers to register, post job vacancies, view candidates' resumes, and conduct campus placement events. The Job Administrator module empowers administrators to approve corporate accounts and employee profiles, manage qualifications and notifications, and monitor candidate applications and progress throughout the recruitment process. Through Online ASAP, Kerala is committed to nurturing its young population, equipping them with essential skills, and providing them with employment opportunities. By leveraging technology and collaboration between various departments, the initiative strives to make a significant contribution to the national skill development agenda, fostering economic growth and prosperity for the state and the country as a whole.

Stanley Kubrick, the 1974 Finance Act, and the crisis of the British film industry: a case study of access, power and privilege in British media and politics

Between 1975 and 1977, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick secretly campaigned to overturn the new tax provisions of the Labour government’s 1974 Finance Act. His aim was to develop a crisis narrative in which the legislation that affected the amount of earnings foreign residents would pay tax on in the UK was deemed directly responsible for the imminent and absolute collapse of the British film industry. Drawing on archival sources from the Stanley Kubrick Archive, the Harold Wilson papers, and The National Archives, the article reconstructs Kubrick’s actions during this period to reveal how he planted stories in the press, lobbied MPs, ministers, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the prime minister, manipulated trade union officials, and secretly wrote press releases and campaign letters under the name of the general secretary of the ACTT, Alan Sapper. The archival case study widens understanding of the narrative of crisis pertaining to the British film industry in the 1970s and how this was exacerbated and exploited by powerful and wealthy individuals like Kubrick for personal gain. The article also contributes to the broader topics of access, power, and privilege in British society and how the rich subvert and undermine democracy, thereby aggravating structural inequalities, inequalities that have only deepened since Kubrick’s political interventions and machinations.

Relational care and ordinary repair in diverse craft economies

The commentary attends to India's rapidly changing craft economy to notice how individual economic actors in the craft sector make complex and often contradictory ethico‐political choices realising hopeful possibilities. Through the mode of care and repair, the commentary examines how the artisans operating within diverse economies negotiate with exploitative labour regimes and survive a dwindling craft sector. It considers how a woman owner‐artisan creates an atmosphere of togetherness and extends her notion of family by cooking for her team of workers. Care ethics, in this analysis, is not only a gendered feeling but realigns with co‐dependent economic exchanges essential for collective survival. The second case focuses on the everyday repair of musical instruments as an alternative act of ordinary ethics. The commentary argues, even when these small doings do not bring immediate and intentional change in the economic organisation of the two crafts, they require pivotal consideration as already existing alternative value systems anchored within everyday world‐making practices.

Reflections on the Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy, 1975–1977, Chaired by Alan Bullock

The Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy, 1975–77 (chair: Alan Bullock) was established to explore the Trades Union Congress’s proposals for board-level workers’ representation, which it saw as a means to locate workers’ interests within corporate strategy. Two issues emerged in the committee’s work: the macro division of class and ideology chiefly between union and union-sympathizing advocates of worker directors on the one hand, and business and business-sympathizing opponents on the other hand; and the micro division within the trade-union movement over worker directors. Two reports were published: the Majority Report recommended that one-third of company directors be elected, on a statutory basis, by union members employed in the company, whereas the Minority Report proposed the establishment, on a voluntary basis, of below-board committees elected by all workers. The Labour government did not accept the Majority Report and its White Paper proposed a diluted version of the Minority Report. There was no attempt to legislate. Comparing the Bullock Committee with the Low Pay Commission (of which he was the first chair) reinforced a central tenet of Bain’s experience of industrial relations, which is that meaningful redistribution of authority from employers to workers has only ever been achieved in the UK with a level of government support that is sufficient to override business opposition.

George Bain and Memories of the Bullock Committee on Industrial Democracy

George Bain was interviewed on 26 January 2023, using the format of a life-course interview to frame his memories of the Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy, 1975–77, chaired by Alan Bullock, which explored how industrial democracy could be advanced through proposals made by the Trades Union Congress in 1972–73 for board-level workers’ representation, which it saw as a means to locate workers’ interests more centrally within corporate strategy. Two issues emerged in the workings of the committee: the macro division of class and ideology, chiefly between union and unionsympathizing advocates of worker directors on the one hand, and business and business-sympathizing opponents on the other hand; and the micro division within the trade-union movement over worker directors. Two reports were published. The Majority Report recommended that one-third of company directors be elected by trade-union members employed in the company. This was not supported by the Labour government, which proposed a diluted version of the Minority Report. The government made no attempt to legislate.