Participation In Wage Labor Research Articles

Archaeology, Wage Labor, and Kinship in Rural Mexico, 1934–1974

Abstract This article assesses the relationships between archaeology and wage labor in twentieth-century Mexico through an analysis of governmental payroll records from El Tajín, Veracruz. For Indigenous Totonac workers, the long-term presence of archaeological labor provided opportunities for income and social mobility in a context of dispossession and proletarianization while contributing to socioeconomic stratification. In a region where the traditional agricultural base declined during the twentieth century, participation in wage labor provided a source of regular cash income and opportunities for skill development and social mobility. Participation, however, depended on intermediaries and their kin and social networks, meaning that not all had access. The analysis suggests that state-run archaeology must be understood in practical and economic terms as well as in a regional context.

Does building the resilience of rural households reduce multidimensional poverty? Analysis of panel data in Ethiopia

Enhancing resilience capacity holds the key to welfare improvement. While there are assumptions that resilience has led to curbing poverty, in fact, the empirics are limited to ascertain the linkages between resilience and multidimensional poverty and find out implications for policy uptake in Ethiopia. This study addresses the role of household resilience capacity on multidimensional poverty reduction using the Ethiopian Socioeconomic Survey data collected by the Central Statistical Agency in collaboration with the World Bank Living Standard Measurement Study (2011/12 - 15/16). The study finds a steady decline in multidimensional poverty as a response to slight increases in resilience capacity. The reduction is emanated from a greater change in headcount than the intensity of deprivation. The fixed effect estimate indicated that enhancing resilience capacity is the most decisive factor responsible for multidimensional poverty reduction. Nevertheless, resilience is not the panacea. Therefore, the rural households curb multidimensional poverty by increasing crop income through commercialization and gradually diversifying non-farm income sources. Moreover, wage labor participation, literacy, saving, and having more economically active members are found to open up opportunities to sustained multidimensional poverty escapes. The dynamic random effect probit model also confirmed the existence of genuine state dependence of multidimensional poverty in rural Ethiopia. Findings suggested that the government policies aimed at enhancing resilience for multidimensional poverty should adopt productive inclusion and rural transformation. Promoting synergistic rural-urban linkages also ensures a balanced mix of infrastructure development that would improve market access and promote the rural non-farm sector, commercialization, and livelihood diversification. Support for migration, making urban development migrant-friendly, ensuring sustainable financial inclusion of the poor, and increasing access to basic services should also be part of the strategy. This implied that striving for sustainable multidimensional poverty reduction demands change in the patterns of labor mobility, livelihood transition, and urbanization.

Who, Being Loved, is Poor?: Poverty, Marriage, and Changing Family Structures in the Canadian Arctic

In Kangiqsujuaq, Nunavik, household composition has changed drastically over the past half-century. Although the cooperative division of labor between married couples was a cornerstone of the traditional Inuit economy, a large proportion of households in Kangiqsujuaq today are headed by single women with dependents. Examination of factors associated with marriage at the individual level and of patterns of wage labor participation within households shows that economic cooperation between married or common-law partners is associated with considerable advantages in the mixed cash/subsistence economy, particularly for households where both partners have steady, well-paying jobs. Married households have lower rates of food insecurity and are more invested in traditional harvesting and sharing than the households of unmarried individuals. Despite these benefits, there are significant challenges to forming successful households based on economic cooperation between men and women. The lower economic status of married households with only one primary wage earner, particularly in terms of per capita income, suggests that a domestic partnership may not provide any economic benefit if a prospective spouse or common-law partner is unemployed. In the current context of high unemployment in Kangiqsujuaq, this tradeoff may help explain the high prevalence of unmarried household heads and has important consequences for cultural transmission and mental health in Inuit communities.

The Drivers of Market Integration Among Indigenous Peoples: Evidence From the Ecuadorian Amazon

ABSTRACTKnowledge of the driving forces behind indigenous participation in the market is essential for practitioners intending to integrate conservation and development policies in indigenous territories. Nevertheless, empirical research on the determinants of market integration among indigenous peoples is still scarce. This article uses household survey data and multivariate techniques to examine the drivers of market integration among indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon. We use multiple measures of market integration, including the sale of crops, timber, and wildlife; the use of credit; and participation in wage labor. The results show that the way in which indigenous peoples integrate into the market depends on their endowments of human, financial, and physical capital. More educated households are able to engage in commercial agriculture and nonagricultural wage work, whereas uneducated poor households in communities in conflict with outsiders are pushed to engage in poorly paid agricultural wage work and (often illegal) timber operations.

Wage labor in historical perspective: a study of the de-proletarianization of the African working class in Zimbabwe, 1960–2010

This paper traces the rise and fall of wage labor in Zimbabwe between c.1960 and 2010. Building on Giovanni Arrighi’s seminal study, ‘Labour supplies in historical perspective: a study of the proletarianization of the African peasantry in Rhodesia’, we argue that the 1950s were the highpoint of African wage labor participation in the Southern Rhodesian/Zimbabwean economy. From that point, the percentage of wage labor as part of the economically active population fell consistently until the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy from the late 1990s onward, when it shrunk emphatically. This process is observable elsewhere in southern Africa over the second half of the twentieth century. Writing in the 1960s when the Southern Rhodesian economy was diversifying and absorbing large numbers of African workers from within and beyond the country’s borders, Arrighi overstated the stability and longevity of the proletariat. From that point, though, combined internal and external forces resulted initially in the stagnation of secondary and primary industry and commerce, and latterly in their contraction. The ensuing processes of de-proletarianization, falling wages, and heightened livelihood precarity have been the norm for an ever-increasing proportion of the African working class up to the present.

Technical Change and Gender Wage Inequality: Long-Run Effects of India's Green Revolution

New technologies can have distributional consequences that narrow or widen existing inequalities. In this paper, I estimate the effect of India’s Green Revolution on the gender wage gap in village labor markets. Widely considered the country’s most important episode of agricultural technical change, productivity gains from the Green Revolution were due largely to the introduction of high-yielding variety seeds (HYVs). Their sensitivity to water conditions advantaged locations with reliable irrigation access, which I exploit by constructing a novel dataset of historical groundwater resources as a source of exogenous variation in Green Revolution adoption. Using data from 1956-1987 in a difference-in-differences framework, I estimate that groundwater-rich districts experienced large and significant increases in HYV adoption, crop revenues, and cropping intensity. These productivity gains affected labor markets, with male wages rising, but female wages declining, jointly raising the male wage premium an average 17 percent. Additionally, census and microdata results show women substituted away from wage work, and increased their time in unpaid own-farm work and home production. These outcomes are most likely driven by the sharp yield gains achieved with wheat HYVs. As a male labor-biased crop, the expansion of wheat production contributed to declines in female wage labor participation. These findings document how new technology shocks can generate winners and losers, and offers an example of productivity growth that exacerbated gender disparities.

Increasing Compulsion to Work for Wages: Old Age Labor Participation and Supply in India over the Past Two Decades

Against the backdrop of the general absence of social benefits (for the elderly) and growing nuclearization of families, we examine the changes in determinants of wage labor participation and supply of the elderly (60 years and above) over the last two decades in India. We use national level Employment-Unemployment Surveys (1993–94 and 2009–10) and Probit as well as Heckman sample selection models for the estimation. Findings show that the negative association between wage labor participation and the age of the elderly has weakened during the study period indicating that the extent of decrease in wage labor participation due to increase in age of the elderly has come down during 1993–2010. Findings also indicate that the elders from poorer and weaker sections have higher compulsion for labor participation in both rural and urban areas and more so in 2009–10. Further, we find that the elders from smaller households (with 4 or less members) are more likely to participate in wage labor in rural as well as urban areas. Moreover, we find that the elders from the poorer sections in rural areas are compelled to work for higher number of days in a week in comparison to the richer elders and this relationship has become stronger in 2009–10. The findings call for a universal pension scheme for improved welfare of the elderly population in India.

Why Workers’ Rights Are Not Women’s Rights

“Why workers’ rights are not women’s rights” is an argument whose purpose is to make clear why workers’ rights rest on a masculine embodiment of the labor subject and it is this masculine embodiment which is at the center of employment contracts and employment relations systems. By excavating the gender subjects implicit to and explicit in regulations of labor, the paper reveals the opposition of paired terms, masculinity and femininity privileging production over reproduction and naturalizing gender-based power relations. The paper identifies various laboring activities associated with differential rights and responsibilities. An examination of the treatment of part-time employment and waged caring labor, framed in labor, welfare, immigration, and citizenship policies and practices, locates exclusions from labor standards and exemptions from entitlements due to eligibility requirements and thresholds that assume the masculine embodiment of the worker-citizen. Gendering the analysis illustrates how contemporary labor laws and conventions grant rights on the basis of, and to, a rather abstract conception of the prototypical worker-citizen. Its origins lie in what classical political economy labeled a capitalist logic, as well as the historical practices in which free class agents entered into contracts for continuous, full-time work free of care responsibilities outside of the wage/labor nexus. Thus, it is this particular abstract construction of the proto-typical worker which instantiates the separation of “rights to” from “responsibilities for”, and it is this separation that allows the masculine embodiment of the labor subject. Modes of regulation privileging rights over responsibilities will valorize the masculine worker-citizen whose rights derive from their participation in wage labor and simultaneously devalue the feminine worker who is directly connected to caring labor.

Greed in a “Tribal” Economy? Acquisitiveness and Reciprocity in Lisu Society

Comparing the Lisu economy of the late 1960s to that of the early 1990s highlights not only the transformations in village economic adaptations, but also the cultural politics of incorporation into the Thai state. The earlier Lisu economy relied on income from opium to make up for shortfalls in rice production and household acquisitiveness made reciprocity with other households possible. In the 1990s, villagers scrambled to find economic strategies to adapt to life in the post‐opium economy. In the previous economy, there were checks on overproduction to ensure relatively equal wealth among households in an egalitarian political system. The post‐opium economy included new forms of commodified agriculture such as cattle herding, contractual planting of cash crops, buying of land, and investment in trucks and motorbikes to transport produce to market, as well as participation in wage labor in urban lowland markets. Survival required capital accumulation. Is acquisitiveness greed? Not in a reciprocity economy with inherent limits to accumulation of wealth, where the standards were set by the poor families in the village. But in today's economy, acquisitiveness for accumulation and investment rather than reciprocity has given rise to accusations of stinginess among villagers and greed by Thai officials.

Increasing Compulsion to Work Among the Elderly in India: A Call for Universal Pension Scheme

Population ageing is intriguing phenomenon and especially important for India, where social benefits for the older population are low. Against the absence of social security and growing nuclearization of families, the aged individuals may have to resort to wage labor. In this context, using Employment-Unemployment Surveys (1993-94 and 2009-10) and Probit and Heckman selection models, we examine changes in determinants of wage labor participation and weekly days of labor supply of the elderly over last two decades. Findings indicate that elders from poorer and weaker sections have significantly higher compulsion for labor participation in both rural and urban areas and more so in 2009-10. Also, significant negative association is found between weekly labor supply and few poverty correlates for urban areas in 2009-10. Simulations from local polynomial smoothing regressions and ethnographic evidences are further provided to corroborate the findings. This calls for universal pension scheme, with increased pay for improved welfare of the older population.

“These Indians Are Apparently Well to Do”: The Myth of Capitalism and Native American Labor

SummaryIn many histories of Native Americans it seems that the original inhabitants of the Americas have become obscured in the national mythology of colonization. People who do not fit into the liberal capitalist notion of individualism and economic development simply vanish from the annals of history. Even histories focused specifically on Native Americans cover relatively little of Indian responses to capitalist development. Yet, in the Pacific north-west, the story is not written so simply; Native Americans responded creatively and eagerly to new economic systems through participation in wage labor and the development of business ventures. This response allowed indigenous people in the region to prosper while protecting culture and tradition.

Children's Work and Schooling in the Late Nineteenth-Century Family Economy

The concept of a family economy plays an important role in theory and research on the social impact of industrialization. Using family-level data from an 1890 survey of workingclass families in the U.S., we analyze the impact of the family economy on the school and work activities of children. Our analysis differentiates the family economy from the local economy and regionalfactors. Four hypotheses derivedfrom family economy theory predict the allocation of children's time to school and work. Our results lend strong empirical support for all hypotheses. In particular, we found that higher levels of family resources and lower levels of demand on those resources are associated with higher rates of children's participation in school and lower rates of children's participation in wage labor. These effects are stable after controls are introduced for family demographic composition, local economy, and region.

Local Economic Conditions and Wage Labor Decisions of Farm and Rural Nonfarm Couples

AbstractEffects of geographical differences in local economic conditions on wage labor demand and wage labor participation decisions of rural couples are examined for Current Population Survey households 1978–82. Wage premiums are shown to exist for localities anticipating labor demand growth, higher unemployment rates, larger share of employment in services, and higher costs of living. These effects are stronger for males than females. Effects of local economic conditions on the probability of wage work are consistent with expected market wage and reservation wage effects, and for farm households the probability of wage work increases when expected farm output prices decline or the wage increases.

INTEGRATING HOME and WAGE WORKPLACE: WOMEN'S DAILY LIVES IN A CANADIAN SUBURB

A continuing growth in women's wage labour participation suggests that taken‐for‐granted understandings of suburban life need to be re‐examined. This paper portrays women's everyday lives as social and economic restructuring reframes the conditions under which mothering work takes place. Although previous literature has emphasized the spatial and social constraints facing women, this paper focuses on women's active construction of their lives within such constraints. The use of ethnographic methods and an interpretative analysis reveal how agency, space, and structure intertwine in the constitution of mothering practices, and reveal the central significance of women's control of the domestic workplace to the integration of home, community, and the wage workplace.La présence sans cesse croissante de la femme sur le marché du travail impose un ré‐examen de la perception communément acceptée de la vie suburbaine. Cet article a pour but de décrire la vie quotidienne des femmes à un moment oÙ la société et la situation économique imposent une restructuration des conditions dans lesquelles s'effectuent les tâches maternelles. Alors que, jusqu' à présent, la littérature a surtout mis I'accent sur les contraintes spatiales et sociales auxquelles doivent faire face les femmes, cet article est centré sur la participation active des femmes dans I'organisatin de leur cadre de vie à I'intérieur de ces contraintes. L'emploi de méthodes ethnographiques et d'une analyse interprétative révèlent la manière dont les intermédiaires, I'espace et la structure s'entremêlent dans I'accomplissement des tâhes maternelles et la signification primordiale du contrôle exercé par les femmes sur le lieu de travail domestique dans I'intégration du foyer, de la communauté et du lieu de travail.

Off-Farm Work Decisions of Husbands and Wives: Joint Decision Making

Theoretical and econometric models are developed to examine joint wage-labor participation and hours decisions of a husband and wife in farm households. The econometric model is multiple equation and recursive. The specification of the off-farm labor supply equation of the husband (wife) depends on whether his (her) wife (husband) does or does not work off the farm, and this structure is endogenous. The model is fitted to data for Iowa farm households. The main conclusion is that the off-farm labor supply equation of a married individual differs significantly depending on whether his or her spouse also works for a wage. Copyright 1989 by MIT Press.

Women, remittances, and reproduction

Reproduction has become a central issue in the analysis of peasant households that supply migrant labor to capitalist enterprises. Many have argued that the physiological reproduction of peasantries in underdeveloped countries has been accompanied by the reproduction of their social and economic conditions. When peasant households finance reproduction, they subsidize the continued strength and expansion of capitalist enterprises that depend on their surplus labor, as well as maintain peasant relations and techniques of production. Jamaican peasant women use remittances from seasonal labor migrants to the United States to help meet the costs of reproducing their households and their social and economic conditions, without significant improvement. In addition, migrants' wives and girlfriends must increase their work on their peasant farms to compensate for the absence of male household members. This supports arguments that peasant participation in wage labor markets, a common means of integrating peasant households into wider social and economic systems, can result in the conservation of peasant techniques and relations of production, as well as the further subordination of women to household production and reproduction processes. [British West Indies, peasants, labor migration, international development, women's roles]