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The papers presented here originated at a wonderful conference held at Middlesex University in London attended by experts on the subject of vulnerable workers and precarious work from all over the world. The aim here is to examine different aspects of these topics, showing the need for developing further research in connection with these areas of study.

Over the last half century, two major developments have transformed the nature of workers'rights and altered the pathways available to low-wage workers to combat their exploitation. First, while national labor law, which regulates unionization and collective bargaining, has grown increasingly ineffective, employment laws establishing minimal workplace standards have proliferated at the state and local levels. Second, as labor unions have declined, a diversity of small, under-resourced nonprofit “alt-labor” groups have emerged in locations across the United States to organize and support marginalized workers. In Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers'Rights, political scientist Daniel J. Galvin draws on rich data and extensive interviews to examine the links between these developments. With nuance and insight, Galvin explains how alt-labor groups are finding creative ways to help their members while navigating the many organizational challenges and structural constraints they face in this new context. Alt-labor groups have long offered their members services and organizing opportunities to contest their unfair treatment on the job. But many groups have grown frustrated by the limited impact of these traditional strategies and have turned to public policy to scale up their work. They have successfully led campaigns to combat wage theft, raise the minimum wage, improve working conditions, strengthen immigrants'rights, and more. These successes present something of a puzzle: relative to their larger, wealthier, and better-connected opponents, alt-labor groups are small, poor, and weak. Their members are primarily low-wage immigrant workers and workers of color who are often socially, economically, and politically marginalized. With few exceptions, the groups lack large dues-paying memberships and are dependent on philanthropic foundations and other unpredictable sources of funding. How, given their myriad challenges, have alt-labor groups managed to make gains for their members? Galvin reveals that alt-labor groups are leveraging their deep roots in local communities, their unique position in the labor movement, and the flexibility of their organizational forms to build their collective power and extend their reach. A growing number of groups have also become more politically engaged and have set out to alter their political environments by cultivating more engaged citizens, influencing candidate selection processes, and expanding government capacities. These efforts seek to enhance alt-labor groups'probabilities of success in the near term while incrementally shifting the balance of power over the long term. Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers'Rights comprehensively details alt-labor's turn to policy and politics, provides compelling insights into the dilemmas the groups now face, and illuminates how their efforts have both invigorated and complicated the American labor movement.

Contingent Workers'Voice in Southern Europe investigates the manifold challenges posed by the continued expansion of the platform economy, the rise of non-standard forms of employment, and the diversification of work identities. Leading authors explore the potentialities and barriers for collective protection and representation of contingent workers in the platform economy, based on the experiences, needs, and aspirations of workers in Italy and Spain. Chapters undertake in-depth analyses of a diverse and innovative variety of initiatives for the protection, organization, and representation of contingent workers. The book ultimately constructs a framework to interpret the evolution of contingent workers'experiences, allowing trade unions, social movements, and cooperatives to develop organizational and representative practices that better respond to their needs. This incisive book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of sociology, international relations, political science, and labour law. Its practical insights will also enable trade unionists, activists, and policymakers in the field of labour relations to make informed decisions and identify possible avenues for development.

In The Future We Need, Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta bring a novel perspective to building worker power and what labor organizing could look like in the future, suggesting ways to evolve collective bargaining to match the needs of modern people—not only changing their wages and working conditions, but being able to govern over more aspects of their lives.Weaving together stories of real working people, Smiley and Gupta position the struggle to build collective bargaining power as a central element in the effort to build a healthy democracy and explore both existing levers of power and new ones we must build for workers to have the ability to negotiate in today and tomorrow's contexts. The Future We Need illustrates the necessity of centralizing the fight against white supremacy and gender discrimination, while offering paths forward to harness the power of collective bargaining in every area for a new era.

This book adopts a multi-stakeholder approach to exploring the issue of labour rights in global supply chains in three dimensions. It starts by addressing the potential causes of labour rights violations and visualising them using fishbone diagrams to show how these causes interrelate. The book proceeds by proposing a novel worker participatory approach for measuring these violations by considering workers as experiencers and observers of them. It then discusses how workers and their representatives can eradicate rights violations and advance workers'interests in a contested environment by examining three case studies from China, Bangladesh and Jordan.

‘Work hard, have fun, make history'proclaims the slogan on the walls of Amazon's warehouses. This cheerful message hides a reality of digital surveillance, aggressive anti-union tactics and disciplinary layoffs. Reminiscent of the tumult of early industrial capitalism, the hundreds of thousands of workers who help Amazon fulfil consumers'desire are part of an experiment in changing the way we all work. In this book, Alessandro Delfanti takes readers inside Amazon's warehouses to show how technological advancements and managerial techniques subdue the workers rather than empower them, as seen in the sensors that track workers'every movement around the floor and algorithmic systems that re-route orders to circumvent worker sabotage. He looks at new technologies including robotic arms trained by humans and augmented reality goggles, showing that their aim is to standardise, measure and discipline human work rather than replace it. Despite its innovation, Amazon will always need living labour's flexibility and low cost. And as the warehouse is increasingly automated, worker discontent increases. Striking under the banner ‘we are not robots', employees have shown that they are acutely aware of such contradictions. The only question remains: how long will it be until Amazon's empire collapses?

With the world changing at breakneck speed and workers at the whim of apps, bad bosses and zero-hours contracts, why should we care about unions? Aren't they just for white-haired, middle-aged miners anyway? The government constantly attacks unions, CEOs devote endless time and resources to undermining them, and many unions themselves are stuck in the past. Despite this, inspiring work is happening all the time, from fast food strikes and climate change campaigning to the modernisation of unions for the digital age. Speaking to academics, experts and grassroots organisers from TUC, UNISON, ACORN, IWGB and more, Eve Livingston explores how young workers are organising to demand fair workplaces, and reimagines what an inclusive union movement that represents us all might look like. Working together can change the course of history, and our bosses know that. Yes, you need a union, but your union also needs you!

In the field of'climate change', no terrain goes uncontested. The terminological tug of war between activists and corporations, scientists and governments, has seen radical notions of'sustainability'emptied of urgency and subordinated to the interests of capital.'Just Transition'is the latest such battleground, and the conceptual keystone of the post-COP21 climate policy world. But what does it really mean? Just Transition emerged as a framework developed within the trade union movement to encompass a range of social interventions needed to secure workers'and frontline communities'jobs and livelihoods as economies shift to sustainable production. Just Transitions draws on a range of perspectives from the global North and South to interrogate the overlaps, synergies and tensions between various understandings of the Just Transition approach. As the concept is entering the mainstream, has it lost its radical edge, and if so, can it be recovered? Written by academics and activists from around the globe, this unique edited collection is the first book entirely devoted to Just Transition.

For the past few decades, the U.S. anti-sweatshop movement was bolstered by actions from American college students. United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) effectively advanced the cause of workers'rights in sweatshops around the world. Strategizing against Sweatshops chronicles the evolution of student activism and presents an innovative model of how college campuses are a critical site for the advancement of global social justice. Matthew Williams shows how USAS targeted apparel companies outsourcing production to sweatshop factories with weak or non-existent unions. USAS did so by developing a campaign that would support workers organizing by leveraging their college's partnerships with global apparel firms like Nike and Adidas to abide by pro-labor codes of conduct. Strategizing against Sweatshops exemplifies how organizations and actors cooperate across a movement to formulate a coherent strategy responsive to the conditions in their social environment. Williams also provides a model of political opportunity structure to show how social context shapes the chances of a movement's success—and how movements can change that political opportunity structure in turn. Ultimately, he shows why progressive student activism remains important.

This book showcases the inequalities experienced between the Global North and the Global South by exploring the production and distribution model of goods and services worldwide through an analysis of why the structure, framework, and interconnectedness of global supply chains increases the persistence of worker rights'violations. The narrative explains the power relationships between multinational corporations, their subcontractors, governments, non-governmental organizations, labor unions, and workers. The text focuses primarily on competition between workers in the Global South and the Global North who are compelled to work in global supply chains for their survival and takes a macro-look at how global supply chains operate, how they are governed, who invests and why, and who wins and who loses. From the workers'perspective, the text highlights the millions of low-wage workers who suffer exploitation and abuse at the hands of greedy multi-national corporations who are able to distance themselves from any liability for workers'welfare through an institutional system created by national/state governments, trade agreements, and tax and investment strategies which protect property rights over workers'rights. The fragile plight of workers crescendos through examples of exploitation and abuse in the fishing, mining, apparel, electronic and manufacturing industries, focusing events of workplace disasters, and slave-like working conditions, then climaxes by providing strategies to help strengthen workers through legislative and policy initiatives, collective action, and social and public pressure.

Homework; work that is categorised as informal employment, performed in the home, mainly for subcontractors and mostly undertaken by women. The inequities and injustices inherent in homework conditions maintain women's weak bargaining position, preventing them from making any improvements to their lives via their work. The best way to tackle these issues is not to abolish, but to bring equality and justice to homework.This book contributes a gender justice framework to analyse and confront the issues and problems of homework. The authors propose four justice dimensions – recognition, representation, rights and redistribution – to examine and analyse homework. This framework also takes into account the structures and processes of capitalism and the patriarchy, and the relations of domination that are widely held to be the major factors that determine homework injustice. The authors discuss strategies and approaches that have worked for homeworkers, highlighting why they worked and the features that were beneficial for them. Homeworking Women will be of interest to individuals and organisations working with or for the collective benefit of homeworkers, academics and students interested in feminism, labour regulation, informal work, supply chains and social and political justice.

Informal Workers and Collective Action features nine cases of collective action to improve the status and working conditions of informal workers. Adrienne E. Eaton, Susan J. Schurman, and Martha A. Chen set the stage by defining informal work and describing the types of organizations that represent the interests of informal workers and the lessons that may be learned from the examples presented in the book. Cases from a diverse set of countries—Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Liberia, South Africa, Tunisia, and Uruguay—focus on two broad types of informal workers:'waged'workers, including port workers, beer promoters, hospitality and retail workers, domestic workers, low-skilled public sector workers, and construction workers; and self-employed workers, including street vendors, waste recyclers, and minibus drivers.These cases demonstrate that workers and labor organizations around the world are rediscovering the lessons of early labor organizers on how to aggregate individuals'sense of injustice into forms of collective action that achieve a level of power that can yield important changes in their work and lives. Informal Workers and Collective Action makes a strong argument that informal workers, their organizations, and their campaigns represent the leading edge of the most significant change in the global labor movement in more than a century.ContributorsGocha Aleksandria, Georgian Trade Union ConfederationMartha A. Chen, Harvard University and WIEGO Sonia Maria Dias, WIEGO and Federal University of Minas Gerais, BrazilAdrienne E. Eaton, Rutgers, the State University of New JerseyMary Evans, Rutgers, the State University of New JerseyJanice Fine, Rutgers, the State University of New JerseyMary Goldsmith, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-XochimilcoDaniel Hawkins, National Trade Union School of ColombiaElza Jgerenaia, Labor and Employment Policy Department for the Ministry of Labour, Health and Social Affairs, Republic of GeorgiaStephen J. King, Georgetown UniversityAllison J. Petrozziello, UN Women and the Center for Migration Observation and Social DevelopmentPewee Reed, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Republic of LiberiaSahra Ryklief, International Federation of Workers'Education AssociationsSusan J. Schurman, Rutgers, the State University of New JerseyVera Alice Cardoso Silva, Federal University of Minas Gerais, BrazilMilton Weeks, Devin Corporation

Worldwide labor migration has transformed and reshaped various fields of government policy and professional practices. Labor migration is associated with the non-economic social phenomena that scholars have increasingly paid attention to in both sending and receiving destinations. For practitioners in the field of education, medicine, nursing, social work, mental health, public health, and other professional practices, the human face of labor migration — migrant workers'and their families'daily challenges — often reveals the human cost of migration behind the image of economic gain and benefits. Migrant workers and their families are facing vexing challenges ranging from basic needs to psychosocial well-being, despite who they are and where they come from. Traditional ways of thinking and knowing cannot address these challenges adequately; rather, established divisions of professions, systems, disciplines, and/or areas of practice might just be the factor that constrains the ability to clearly articulate compelling problems and adds an additional layer of complexity to problem solving. This book focuses on country policies and practices, and draws on theoretical ideas that provide the intellectual basis. In addition, it offers vivid examples of how migrant workers manage to work, pursue economic security, strive and adjust in new communities, define and negotiate self and identity, and seek health and well-being. While the book illuminates shared challenges and experiences for each group of migrant workers (i.e. low-skilled workers, internal migrants and other types of migrating laborers), it also synthesizes the intersectionality across all migrant workers, as they remain committed to bettering the lives of their families and communities in their origin countries as well as new host countries and communities. This volume reflects the efforts of interdisciplinary research and collaboration. Based on empirical studies and policy analysis, the researchers draw broader implications for evidence-based practice and policy in migration studies, and offer practical suggestions for policy and service delivery design, including formal and informal mechanisms of support which can inform the professional reader.

The world was shocked in April 2013 when more than 1100 garment workers lost their lives in the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka. It was the worst industrial tragedy in the two-hundred-year history of mass apparel manufacture. This so-called accident was, in fact, just waiting to happen, and not merely because of the corruption and exploitation of workers so common in the garment industry. In Achieving Workers'Rights in the Global Economy, Richard P. Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein argue that such tragic events, as well as the low wages, poor working conditions, and voicelessness endemic to the vast majority of workers who labor in the export industries of the global South arise from the very nature of world trade and production.Given their enormous power to squeeze prices and wages, northern brands and retailers today occupy the commanding heights of global capitalism. Retail-dominated supply chains—such as those with Walmart, Apple, and Nike at their heads—generate at least half of all world trade and include hundreds of millions of workers at thousands of contract manufacturers from Shenzhen and Shanghai to Sao Paulo and San Pedro Sula. This book offers an incisive analysis of this pernicious system along with essays that outline a set of practical guides to its radical reform.

Paid work is absolutely central to the culture and politics of capitalist societies, yet today's work-centred world is becoming increasingly hostile to the human need for autonomy, spontaneity and community. The grim reality of a society in which some are overworked, whilst others are condemned to intermittent work and unemployment, is progressively more difficult to tolerate.In this thought-provoking book, David Frayne questions the central place of work in mainstream political visions of the future, laying bare the ways in which economic demands colonise our lives and priorities. Drawing on his original research into the lives of people who are actively resisting nine-to-five employment, Frayne asks what motivates these people to disconnect from work, whether or not their resistance is futile, and whether they might have the capacity to inspire an alternative form of development, based on a reduction and social redistribution of work.A crucial dissection of the work-centred nature of modern society and emerging resistance to it, The Refusal of Work is a bold call for a more humane and sustainable vision of social progress.

This year's recurrent discussion focuses on four policy areas: wage policies; working-time arrangements; occupational safety and health (OSH); and maternity protection. These policy areas were at the heart of the ILO's founding in 1919. They are central to the employment relationship and are important determinants of the competitiveness and innovativeness of enterprises.

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Privacy poses a challenge to companies, which strive to strike a balance between economic interests and moral obligations. Employees claim their right to privacy, but economic reasoning seems to warrant restrictions of employee privacy, since less privacy means more control. However, is there really a conflict between privacy and profit? In his study Andreas Ostermaier investigates effects of employee privacy that are in line with company interests and thus might resolve the conflict between privacy and profit. Specifically, the author investigates how intrinsic motivation, creativity, and job satisfaction are related to privacy. It turns out that employees who can achieve as much privacy as they desire are more motivated and more satisfied with their job. The study contributes to the ongoing debate about privacy in organizations as well as society at large. It introduces a measure to quantify the manifold aspects of privacy and finds support for positive effects of privacy, but also shows that these effects are not obvious. The study is therefore a first step toward making the business case for employee privacy.

Today, hazardous work kills 2.3 million people each year and injures millions more. Among the most compelling yet controversial forms of legal protection for workers is the right to refuse unsafe work. The rise of globalization, precarious work, neoliberal politics, attacks on unions, and the idea of individual employment rights have challenged the protection of occupational health and safety for workers worldwide. In Hazard or Hardship, Jeffrey Hilgert presents the protection of refusal rights as a moral and a human rights question. Hilgert finds that the protection of the right to refuse unsafe work, as constituted under international labor standards, is a failure and calls for a reexamination of worker health and safety policy from the ground up. The current model of protection follows an individual employment rights framework, which fails to protect workers against the inherent social inequalities within the employment relationship. To adequately protect the right to refuse as a human right, both in North America and around the world, Hilgert argues that a broader protection must be granted under a freedom of association framework. Hazard or Hardship will be a welcome resource for labor and environmental activists, trade union leaders, labor lawyers and labor law scholars, industrial relations experts, human rights advocates, public health professionals, and specialists in occupational safety and health.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.Trouble in the workplace - whether it is bullying, harassment or stress - is always in the headlines. Yet, in many discussions, the research and statistics that are cited prove unreliable. This book summarizes the largest specialist research programme on ill-treatment in the workplace so far undertaken. It provides a powerful antidote to half-truths and misinformation and offers a new way of conceptualizing trouble at work, moving the discussion away from individualized explanations - and talk of'bullies'and'victims'- towards the workplace characteristics that cause trouble at work. The biggest problems arise where organisations fail to create a workplace culture in which individuals really matter. Paradoxically, these are often the organizations which are well-versed in modern management practices.

The current global economic crisis has rendered governments, employers and workers concerned about the effects on people, enterprises and employment. Prepared in the context of the Paris Declaration for AID Effectiveness, this guide systematically addresses all relevant aspects that value chain facilitators need to take into account.