Reproduction Of Workers Research Articles

The Crisis of Social Reproduction among Migrant Workers: Interrogating the Role of Migrant Civil Society

Abstract: Transformations in urban economies are leading to the growth of jobs where labor and employment laws are routinely violated. Workers in these jobs are subject to harsh conditions such as low wages, hazardous work sites, and retaliation for speaking up. Many of these workers are undocumented migrants who are in a weak position to make demands on their employers or to request government assistance. These workers often turn to migrant civil society organizations for help with the multiple conflicts they face at work. Drawing on case studies of nonprofit organizations in Chicago, this paper focuses on the role of such organizations in the social reproduction of the migrant workforce. I posit that such organizations are integral to the functioning of the informal economy because the wide range of programs and services that they provide are essential to the social reproduction of migrant workers.

The evolution of honest queen pheromones in insect societies

Social insect workers are often capable of reproduction, but will not do so in the presence of a fertile queen. In large societies, queens are expected to produce a pheromone that honestly signals her dominance and/or fertility, to which workers respond by suppressing the development of their ovaries and by preventing other workers from reproducing (worker policing). However, what maintains the honesty of such queen pheromones is still under discussion. The explanation that an honest queen signal evolves simply because it serves the interest of all colony members does not seem to hold, since it is undermined by the fitness benefits of direct reproduction of workers at the individual level. A better explanation may be found in the idea that queen pheromones are difficult to produce for subordinate individuals, either because policing workers attack them, or because queen pheromones are intrinsically costly chemicals. Here, I discuss some of the arguments for and against these hypotheses and the evolutionary scenarios that each would lead to.

Em busca de "elos perdidos": projeto de assentamento e modos de identificação entre trabalhadores rurais assentados

In view of the transformations of the rural labor world, the organization of rural settlements based on agro-ecology and associativism surges as a possibility to ensure the social reproduction of rural workers. What are the ways those individuals follow when designing their lives, trying to meet the requirements of settlement projects as well as survival needs? This article discusses that issue, starting from a specific assumption: understanding the reasons, criteria and values which informed the workers about the organizational structure configuration - the formation of groups of workers - at the moment of legal constitution of a determinate settlement. By understanding identity as a preparation process and by cross-checking information obtained through document analysis, and carrying out direct observations and collective and individual interviews, I analyzed the dynamics of the nucleation process considering the characteristics of the settlement project as well as the settled rural workers', and trying to understand the existence of probable relations with the meanings attributed to cooperation by the workers.

Immune responses of bumblebee workers as a function of individual and colony age: senescence versus plastic adjustment of the immune function

Senescence may evolve in response to externally imposed schedules of survival and reproduction. It may result from cumulative damage to several tissues and organs leading to the progressive malfunction of somatic defences including the immune system, which is a relevant and accessible trait to study the evolution and the mechanisms of senescence.In social insects, reproduction of workers is negligible and their fitness relies on the colony reproductive success, which depends on workers’ longevity. Consequently, evolution of senescence in workers will rely on age‐dependent survival rate and the residual reproductive value of the colony. Using the bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, as model system, we investigated changes in constitutive and inducible immune defences. Such changes were monitored in relation to worker age and colony age and as well under a high, persistent level of parasitism. The results show that the inducible production of antibacterial peptides was not affected by the age of individual worker or the age of their colony. In contrast, constitutive defences such as haemocyte density and phenoloxidase (PO) activity decline with individual worker age and potential accumulation of physiological defects due to high and persistent levels of parasitism did not explain this pattern of immunosenescence. Interestingly, levels of worker constitutive defences were found to increase with colony age. We found antibacterial activity was strongly traded‐off against PO activity. Such a relationship was not caused by resource shortage. Overall, these data suggest that patterns of variation of immune defences with worker age and colony age are likely the result of plastic temporal adjustments of immune responses in accordance with life history predictions. Hence, control of pathogenic threat in a social system may involve optimal adjustments of immune defences at both the individual and colony levels.

Social Evolution: Community Policing in Insects

A recent study shows that, in social insects where workers suppress or 'police' the reproduction of nestmate workers, only a subset of workers act as police. This confirms that policing can serve a collective rather than a selfish interest.

The policing behavior ‘immobilization’ towards ovary-developed workers in the ant, Diacamma sp. from Japan

In social Hymenoptera worker policing that inhibits direct reproduction of workers occurs mainly in the two ways: (1) destruction of worker progenies (postovipositional policing), and (2) aggression towards ovary-developed workers (preovipositional policing). In the queenless ponerine ant, Diacamma sp. from Japan, the existence of the former type of worker policing has been reported, whereas previous studies have failed to find the latter type. We examine the presence of the latter type of worker policing in this species using more careful observational methods. By a series of experiments reuniting previously separated orphaned and non-orphaned subcolonies we found the following facts. Immediately after the colony reunification, aggression frequently took place. Unlike the one-on-one dominance interaction that occurs in non-manipulated colonies, aggression was often directed towards a single victim from multiple attackers, grasping and pulling the victim. The duration of each aggressive interaction was on average far longer in this situation than that of usual dominance interactions. Most victims consisted of ex-orphan workers, while the majority of the attackers were ex-non-orphan workers. Dissection after the above behavioral observation revealed that the ovaries of the victims were on average more active, often containing mature oocytes, than those of non-victims, while the ovaries of attackers were always inactive. The above findings indicate that worker policing via immobilization, which has been reported in some other Ponerinae, also exists in Diacamma sp. from Japan.

Workers, Firms, and the Dominant Ideology: Hegemony and Consciousness in the Monopoly Core

Theorists of work and class relations have argued that organizational processes within the monopoly ‘core’ induce employees to identify with the firm and consent to the social relations of production. The adequacy of this ‘hegemony’ thesis is evaluated using data from two Bell operating companies, whose workers hold relatively highpaying primary sector jobs and are exposed to a strong corporate culture. Although these factors should favor the thesis of managerial hegemony, the data provide only limited support. In fact, an oppositional consciousness is fairly common among the workers, but with marked variations between occupational groups. The data indicate that hegemony theory inflates the role of ideological mechanisms in the reproduction of managerial control and underestimates workers” capacity to form a critical consciousness of the employment relationship. Worker consent should be viewed as problematic—that is, as exceptional, occurring only under specific social and organizational conditions.

State education policy and the social reproduction of the Urban African working class: the case of the Southern Transvaal 1955–1976

Between its establishment in 1955, and the beginnings of its collapse in the student rebellion of 1976, the Bantu Education system significantly restructured the patterns of social reproduction of South Africa's urban African working class. This paper seeks to examine this restructuring process. It argues, firstly, that Bantu Education has to be understood as a system which helped reproduce differentiated forms of labour power. The system underpinned the gap that opened up between urbanised and migrant labour forces, and in its later years increasingly generated varying types of labour power within the urban work force. Secondly, Bantu Education is not viewed as a static entity, but as a policy which underwent significant changes as the outcome of social conflicts over education. In our chosen period these conflicts predominantly occurred within and between various capitalist interests and various arms of the state. But the dominated classes' expression of their interests in various forms also affected education policy. In recent years, radical analysis of Bantu Education has been deeply influenced by the Cheap Labour Power Thesis (CLPT) developed in the work of Harold Wolpe' and Martin Legassick. 2 To summarise crudely a complex and subtle argument,3 the thesis asserted that the maintenance of pre-capitalist agriculture in rural South Africa enabled urban employers to pay below-subsistence wages to migrant workers, thus providing the basis for a cheap labour system. In this view, the reproduction of migrant workers' families, and of migrant workers themselves, was displaced to the 'reserves' thus freeing capitalists from bearing the social costs of urbanisation. With the collapse of agriculture in the reserves and burgeoning industrialisation in the

Welfare Payments and the Reproduction of Low-Wage Workers and Secondary Jobs

Information gathered from five annual interviews with the adults in some 2,700 households in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s is used in this paper to demonstrate that welfare — Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC for unemployed parents, and the various state Gen eral Assistance programs — is an institution which helps to reproduce the sec ondary labor market by systematically reinforcing low-wage, high-turnover modes of work. More concretely, we are able to strongly refute the widely- repeated ruling-class argument that there exists a distinct "welfare class" of people unable or unwilling to work who must be supported by social programs paid for by the taxes of those who do work for a living. This divisive assertion is simply untrue; even within a single year, half of all the households that ever receive welfare over a five-year period also have at least one working adult. And the degree of mixing of work and welfare increases to the extent that, over the whole five years, 92%_of these "ever-welfare" households also contain adults who work at some time. At the macro level, labor market conditions and the need for more income exert a strong impact on whether or not welfare is ever used, whether it is used more than once, and how much welfare is received relative to total family income.