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This paper examines recent institutional innovations aimed at improving workplace conditions among the paid in-home care workforce. The ranks of care workers who serve the elderly, young children, and people with disabilities are rapidly expanding, and civil society and government actors are adopting new strategies to ensure that these workers receive the pay and treatment guaranteed to them by law. In recent years, worker organizations and labor unions have won new policies, such as Domestic Workers' Bills of Rights, yet a disconnect persists between rights on paper and labor conditions in household workplaces. This paper explores one initiative that seeks to mend that disconnect: the creation of a local government agency in New York City charged with promoting rights enforcement among paid care workers. Through interviews with staff of worker organizations and government offices, I analyze the strengths and weaknesses of this institutional innovation. Preliminary findings suggest that this model offers promising but limited tools for defending workers' rights in home-based care. Some limitations may be overcome by further reforms, but others are more formidable, such as the dilemma of regulating individual households who directly hire care workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the gig-economy in the last decade has caused a furor of public interest and debate. The argument centers on whether this phenomena is positive for workers and society. From an employment and labor standpoint the key component of the gig-economy is that companies operating in this space claim that they have no employees and that those who use their app to work are instead independent contractors. This paper places this debate in the context of the wider urban sphere. The disavowal of an employment relationship is not only a challenge to urban labor markets but also presents a massive challenge to our urban regulatory regimes. Adopting the gig economy's legal claims and promises at face value represents an ideological shift in the responsibility cities have historically taken for the maintenance of their urban infrastructure, both physical and social, and serves to further privatize a city's social political economy. To evaluate the impact of the gig-economy on cities themselves this paper evaluates how cities have responded to the advent of gig-employment, particularly transportation network companies (TNCs), such as Uber and Lyft. Through a combination of original data, reevaluation of previous studies' data, and government data this study provides a detailed analysis of the predictors of urban response to the arrival of TNCs in the largest U.S. cities. This analysis is conducted through detailed descriptive statistics and an ordered logit regression analysis of urban regulatory responses to the gig-economy. This study finds that cities have largely abdicated their responsibilities, engaging in passive privatization, especially in California where these companies are based. Where cities have attempted to regulate the gig-economy this study finds that it is larger cities, cities with stricter existing regulation, and cities where the gig-economy came later that took the strongest response. Finally, this paper ends with a discussion of how workers and unions are fighting back against the gig-economy's passive urban privatization of municipal transit systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy transitions are often portrayed as inexorable technological advances that displace earlier energy systems because of the new energy source's greater technical efficiency and cost savings for capital. However, a few have argued that interest in new energy sources is often motivated by a desire to reduce vulnerability to labor (e.g. oil required much less labor than hand digging for coal in the late 1800s and early 1900s and typically requires less labor than even modern large scale coal mining, LNG production and transport takes almost no labor). In this paper, we utilize our raw materialist lengthened GCCs approach to focus on the role of labor in the development of new energy sources over the last two centuries. Rather than being a simple matter of technical and cost superiority, these transitions can be better characterized as the addition of new energy sources to the capitalist world-economy (Ciccantell and Gellert 2018). We argue that much of this process of addition of energy sources is the result of capital's desire to reduce its vulnerability to demands and disruptions by labor organizations by creating new energy GCCs that incorporate new energy supplies in new areas worked by new and often unorganized workers. In the two newest forms of energy extracting and production, hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas and renewable energy wind and solar power, we find a surprising reversal of this long term trend toward using less labor per unit of energy produced. The goal of our final paper will be to deeply probe these empirical patterns and attempt to move our conceptual understanding of how labor, tempered by various global political economy and world-system forces, factors into the changing mix of energy sources in particular countries and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an important yet little-understood phenomenon governing alternative work arrangements: the rise in the "multi-layered labor contracting" structure in which the recruitment of nonstandard workers is outsourced to an intermediating organization who then selects qualified workers from a group of competing suppliers. I make the very first scholarly attempt to examine the link between such multi-layered contracting arrangements and subsequent economic outcomes for both the hiring lead firms and the workers. Based on power-dependence theory, I argue that the lead firm's discretion to work with one additional intermediating organization in this technological platform compresses supplier power, which then incentivizes suppliers to transfer the competitive price burden to workers. Using proprietary data from employment records of about a million workers seeking nonstandard work at 49 large firms, I find that an additional contracting layer between the lead firm and the worker is associated with higher returns to the firms and lower returns to the workers. When workers gain bargaining power, however, through a pre-existing firm-worker relationship, the results show that the loss from an additional contracting layer is significantly reduced. The results hold even when controlling for supplier fixed effects to control for unobservable supplier characteristics, as well as when controlling for detailed measurement of skill requirements for nonstandard jobs that may instead dictate the price-setting process. Findings from this paper have potential for improving our knowledge of hiring practices in organizations and social structural inequality using the theoretical constructs of power and price-setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like other sectors globally, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) activities have proliferated in the humanitarian aid sector as organizations strive to demonstrate their impact, accountability and transparency through measurement (Espeland and Sauder 2007). At the same time, organizations increasingly call for the localization of aid, often understood as the growing reliance on local actors to make aid work. While we know this desire for data has changed how various types of aid organizations (INGOs, NGOs, CSOs, IOs) signal and demonstrate their impact to donors at the organizational level, we know less about how this, in conjunction with localization processes, are reshaping how the workers within these organizations actually "do" evaluations and data collection to demonstrate impact. This is particularly important to think about in the case of local workers, who are central targets of these localization shifts, and are already estimated to represent 90 percent of the aid workforce globally (Roth 2015: 8). This paper subsequently asks: How do two concurrent trends within the aid sector--localization and the turn to M&E--shape and affect the role of local workers? Based on over seven months of fieldwork in Jordan, a major aid hub globally, I find that workers' understandings of their relationship with their employers-- and their position as local staff--significantly matter to how they perform the role of the evaluator and contribute to data collection for the organization. Workers are aware that --that are sometimes misplaced--of their "local knowledge." At the same time, workers are aware of the growing importance of these data collection processes to their jobs and livelihoods, and subsequently work to produce desirable results for their employers both in their formal work roles, but informally and outside of the workplace as well. By using the lens of the worker as the point of departure in this paper, I show how the drive for numbers, coupled with localization, affects and is shaped by local workers in ways that is perhaps not fully accounted for in the literature just yet. By thinking about evaluation as a case of labor relations, this papers hopes to elaborate understandings of measurement practices beyond relational negotiations at the macro level between donors and NGOs. This paper further hopes to broaden our knowledge of the "unintended consequences" (Viterna and Robertson 2015) of aid practices not only in terms of beneficiaries and communities they target, but also in terms of how it structures and transforms workplace relations and hierarchies within the sector as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether certain firm policies regarding work-life balance and flexible work places increase women's wages, thereby decreasing the gender wage gap in Japan. In particular, this paper focuses on the influence of (1) firms' personnel policies that "encourage employees to fulfill their potential regardless of gender," which hereinafter is referred to as the GEO (Gender Equality of Opportunity) policy, (2) whether firms have systematic work-life balance (WLB) promotion policies in place, and (3) whether firms have work-location-restricted regular employment systems. The linked survey data between Japanese firms and their employees taken from the 2009 International Comparative Survey on Work-Life Balance conducted by the Research Institute of Economy Trade and Industry are used in the analysis. A selection bias occurs because companies' policies and measures are not randomly assigned. In this paper, the selection bias caused by firm and employee characteristics is eliminated through the use of propensity-score weighting. Furthermore, the analysis takes into account unobserved heterogeneity in company characteristics and interprets the causal relationship of the analytical results accordingly. The analytical results are as follows. (1) Compared with situations in which the GEO policy is not in place, women's wages increase and the gender wage gap decreases in cases in which it is in place. (2) The effects of the presence of both the WLB promotion policy and work-locationrestricted regular employment systems depend on the presence of the GEO policy. When the GEO policy is in place, the effects of both increase women's wages and decrease the gender wage gap over and beyond the effects of the GEO policy. (3) When the GEO policy is not in place, the presence of work-location-restricted regular employment systems has no significant effect on the gender wage gap, whereas the presence of the WLB promotion policy actually increases the gender wage gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Record contracts deploy copyright as the means through which record labels turn musicians into workers. In this paper, I discuss Karl Marx's analysis of England's land enclosure acts. Then I demonstrate the parallels between the process of land enclosure, and what I call, copyright enclosure. Many describe copyright as an intellectual property right, but it is not property in the traditional sense. Rather, law creates a set of statutory rights that some describe using an analogy to property. In turn, copyright law allows record labels to profit from musician labor similar to how land enclosure allowed landowners to profit from farm workers' labor. This paper highlights the institutional incentive to sign a record contract under the current political economy of the recording industry. This process ultimately creates an underclass of musicians who precariously work for record labels without rights as workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on wage theft experienced by workers in precarious jobs in Ontario, Canada. Employers engage in wage theft when they pay employees less than the legal minimum wage or fail to remunerate them for overtime work as required within the Employment Standards Act. Workers in precarious jobs are often particularly vulnerable to wage theft. This paper focuses on the more subtle forms of wage theft which workers' experience, described by one respondent in this study as "roundabout" wage theft. We argue that the enforcement of the Employment Standards Act requires not only action on overt wage theft but also a proactive approach which challenges employers' subtle practices which result in wage theft. We highlight three sets of practices which result in wage theft, even though these practices may not in themselves represent violations of the law. First, employers use discourses of futurity where promises of future work or payment are evoked to deter employee action; second, processes are set up that require of high levels of unpaid and hidden work for workers to "chase" the money they are owed, and third, employers set up confusing payment structures which require extensive bookkeeping to trace errors. The widespread experience of roundabout wage theft suggests that many workers feel that employers are purposeful and intentional in their evasion of minimum labour standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some literature on migration claims that national citizenship has lost its importance in the present era of globalization and suggests that citizenship rights are irrelevant and labor rights take precedence. However, this study on the immigrant women in Taiwan show that citizenship still remains central to these women’s migratory experiences. Based on action research in the past ten years, this paper analyzes the situations of immigrant women who originated from Southeast Asia and Mainland China and migrate to Taiwan through marriage. Their situations are closely related to their acquisition of formal and substantive citizenship. Moreover, although multicultural citizenship seems ideal and does provide prospects for challenging the exclusionary models of incorporation in globalization era, this paper illustrates how multiculturalism can soon be co-opted without changing the substantive rights or even formal rights of citizenship for the immigrants. This paper concludes that without linking the struggles for citizenship rights to the broader issues of capitalist globalization, immigrant women, especially those in economic needs, can barely practice substantive citizenship rights even if they ever obtain formal citizenship rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the prospects for labor rights in light of the globalization of production and increasing privatization of regulation. In a world in which the annual sales of transnational corporations approaches $5 trillion, representing a third of the world?s productive assets, how can labor fight back against oppressive and exploitative conditions? The paper is divided into two parts. The first part examines the changing field confronted by labor organizers in terms of three trends related to the organization of production ? the growth of buyer-driven commodity chains, particularly the rising power of retail conglomerates such as Wal-Mart, and the rise of giant transnational contractors such as Nien Hsing, Bookim, and PouChen. The second part develops a framework for advancing labor?s interests in light of these trends, looking at four developments within the field of labor rights: the evisceration of state-centered enforcement in the U.S., particularly at the federal level; the absence of internationally-binding (and enforceable) labor law; the privatization of regulation and enforcement; and cross-border unionization efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Deal?s federal works program comprised a third tier of social policies that were institutionally distinct from social insurance and public assistance. This paper examines the political consequences of these work programs in comparison to the political consequences of social insurance and public assistance. In addition, the paper draws on Pierre Bourdieu?s notion of "classification struggles" to criticize and improve upon social citizenship and social control theories of the welfare state, which have been linked respectively to the social insurance and public assistance tiers of the U.S. welfare state. I argue that while the constitution of relief recipients as a clearly demarcated pariah class may facilitate their regulation, attempts by the state to regulate ill-defined subjects encourage political contention over the very constitution of those subjects. A careful examination of political contention over the Works Progress Administration (WPA) illustrates this thesis and provides historical evidence for it. First, I show how the WPA positioned its workers in contradictory ways that resembled both public employment and public assistance. Second, I show how the contradictory location of WPA workers expanded opportunities for them to contest their classification as paupers, not by shunning public aid, but by redefining it as legitimate employment. Third, I argue that these claims were contentious because of the potential material and symbolic profits that corresponded to the status of employee. As other New Deal institutions like the National Labor Relations Board granted new rights to workers in private industry, WPA workers demanded similar rights and privileges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing Indian women's employment, particularly women's formal urban employment has been a policy concern for decades. In India, the Information Technology (IT) sector and the nursing profession are two significant sources of formal women's employment. Drawing on 111 in-depth interviews with IT workers and nurses in the cities of Hyderabad and Chennai, this paper examines the current challenges for women workers and the pitfalls of the current regime labor protections aimed at protecting women's employment. These include namely, the provision of maternity leave and regulations protecting women's security. I argue that first, the enforcement of maternity leave and the focus on women's security serve to uphold women's status quo vis-à-vis safeguarding their sexual identities as mothers, daughters, and sisters, but not as workers. Second, this focus by the state and employers does little to alleviate the actual challenges that women workers face, and consequently, address India's low female labor force participation rate. This focus of state regulation ignores how firm and hospital policies disempower women workers under the guise of women's empowerment, and the material consequences it has for their wellbeing. In both sectors, the sources of women's marginalization remain unaddressed: in nursing, relatively low wages, and in IT, the structural disadvantage that underpins women's exit from work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The logistics revolution transformed the ways that goods are produced and transported around the world producing numerous deleterious outcomes for workers, including the deterioration of wages and labor standards, attacks on unions, and the increase of precarious contingent labor conditions. A related, yet underexplored, process related to the logistics revolution has been the role of racialization in further amplifying the deterioration of working conditions across the global supply chain. Therefore, this paper explores how the racialization of labor impacts logistics workers in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan region. Drawing on case studies of low-wage, non-union Latinx workers in the warehouse and port trucking industries of Southern California, I argue racialization accelerated the negative labor impacts related to the logistics revolution across these sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluation is a rapidly growing field. The number of professional evaluation associations exploded from two in 1981 to currently 173 organizations with 53,000 members worldwide. While sociologists have noted the turn toward quantification and reporting in science, including in universities, there has been little research on how the people doing the work--evaluators themselves--navigate the call to deliver objective measures of complex social processes. This paper investigates the role evaluators see themselves playing in knowledge production, and the puzzles their work raises for scholarship on professionalization and scientific work. The data come from 30 interviews with paid evaluators of projects funded since 2015 by the NSF's NRT program (for interdisciplinary graduate training, successor to the IGERT program). The NRT solicitation requires evaluation of every training grant. Evaluators occupy a variety of employment positions across the projects including: independent contractors, employees in evaluation firms, and colleagues at the same university as the NRT PI. Evaluators must balance insider roles advising PIs with outsider roles in reporting to NSF on the effectiveness of the funded project activities. As befits a professionalizing field, evaluation is far from standardized and rife with tensions. In navigating the inherent tensions, evaluators are reshaping what the work and profession of evaluation actually is, at times at odds with discourses of knowledge production surrounding evaluation. As evaluators become ever more present authorities, the need for empirical study and theoretical development that better reflects both the daily work and professionalization of evaluation is clear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration scholars view ethnic economy either mobility trap where immigrants with limited human and social capital are exploited by their co-ethnics or refuge that provides alternative paths for upward mobility. In either view, women in ethnic economy have been epitomized coethnic expiation both in paid and unpaid work. Using an in-depth case study of Korean immigrant In Home Supportive Service (IHSS) workers in Los Angles, this paper illuminates how the ethnic economy becomes a double-edged sword for Korean immigrant women workers. In Los Angeles, gendered immigration experience and a racialized labour market set a context in which middle-aged Korean immigrant women were funneled into publicly-funded quasigovernmental yet precarious care job in LA Koreatown, where tacit cultural norms replaced government regulations. When the IHSS operates within ethnic economy, what makes appropriate "Korean ways" of care and who can provide it become subjects of contestations. Documenting how these workers, who are pushed to care work as their last resort, utilize oppressive cultural norms around appropriate care for their labour protection and selfmobilization that center on broadly-defined Korean ethnicity, I highlight workers' capacity to develop alterative protection strategies even when they are heavily constrained in an insular community. By examining workers in publicly funded program, this case study also allows us to draw the state in the analysis of ethnic economy. Presenting how workers' perceptions of the culturally appropriateness, quality care and negotiations with their recipients becomes a core of organizing principle of their work in the stateless conditions in the publicly-funded program, I argue that the ethnic economy in LA Korean town maintains throughout the production of Koreanness. By locating the case in the nexus of gender and immigration rather than cultural particularity, this study allows us to see how the social cost of care burdens the aging ethnic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the writing on labour market flexibilisation focuses on non-regular employment, this article explores one overlooked aspect, the experiences of increasingly precarious young regular workers. These jobs take the form of standard employment, but workers are often subjected to even more precarious and exploitative working conditions than non-regular workers. Drawing on the case of Japan, this ethnographic study has three aims. First, it clarifies the underlying mechanisms of labour exploitation in precarious regular employment. Second, it illustrates these mechanisms at work by examining the experiences of young workers. Third, it explores the potential of such young workers to disrupt these mechanisms through an individualistic form of collective action. By comparing one successful dispute with seven less successful cases, this paper tries to identify mechanisms that likely to lead precarious workers' collective organizing to gain support from the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists and scholars of labor studies have long been interested in questions of labor control. Early ethnographic accounts show how workers strategize to thwart managerial efforts to micromanage their labor process, and historical accounts trace how Tayloristic practices like deskilling made workers replaceable and shifted power towards management. Research has also shown how workers engage in "shop floor games" to maintain a sense of themselves as autonomous, or even to foil managerial attempts at control. Power disputes between workers and managers have long been central to the study of work, which raises new questions for labor scholars as the "gig economy" becomes an ever more entrenched facet of the labor market landscape. This paper asks how workers negotiate a sense of themselves as autonomous and powerful in the context of the gig economy, drawing on 50 in-depth interviews with individuals who work as rideshare drivers. Findings show that rideshare workers engage in forms of gameplaying to provide structure to their workday and to maintain a sense of control and autonomy. Rideshare workers engage in two forms of game-playing: "structure games," which provide a sense of organization to the workday; and "comfort games," which create a sense of control over the otherwise unpredictable labor process. These "games" function to provide workers with economic rewards in the forms of better ratings and higher tips, as well as the psychological rewards in the forms of mitigated anxiety surrounding the unstable nature of gig work and a greater sense of autonomy and control over their own labor and effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state of Chinese workers protests in response to severe rates of direct exploitation in the private sector and mass layoffs in the state sector has been framed as struggles to expand the range of democratic citizenship by a number of China scholars both in China and abroad. This analytical framework has been employed as a way to avoid what are seen as errors of both neo-liberal ideologists of free markets and dogmatic forms of Marxist ideology. There is little question that workers in China are advancing protests on the terrains of legal and political terrains consistent with the democratic citizenship frame. However, does the frame necessarily challenge neo-liberal ideologies that bolster privatization? Does that frame miss certain key dialectical features of the contexts in which workers protests, especially how that frame can benefit the key institutions responsible for and benefiting from the declining status of Chinese workers? This paper bases its critique of the democratic citizenship frame base on primary and secondary data from a dramatic and militant protest against fraudulent privatization at a paper factory in Zhengzhou, the capital city of Henan Province. It suggests that frameworks that conceptualizie workers protests in China as battles over democratic citizenship rights ultimately limit our understanding of why battles led by Zhengzhou Paper Factory workers failed to challenge the new terms of domination that characterize Chinese workers' encounters with China's transition away from state-socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing corporate power, the geographic fragmentation of production, and the predominance of neoliberal policies have challenged and undermined traditional methods of labor market regulation. Globalization processes have produced a downward pressure on labor standards that neither nationally based labor laws nor international institutions such as the International Labor Organization have been effectively able to counter. Thus, unions and other civil society organizations have pushed for new approaches to the regulation of labor standards. In this context, privatized forms of regulation have emerged as alternatives and/or supplements to legislative mechanisms. This paper assesses International Framework Agreements (IFAs) - labor standards agreements negotiated between TNCs and Global Unions - in attempt to determine their capacities to construct effective mechanisms of transnational labor rights regulation. The paper argues that by facilitating social dialogue between TNCs and global unions, IFAs show potential to provide stronger accountability mechanisms than do unilateral corporate codes of conduct. Yet IFAs are limited by a top-down, voluntaristic approach to labor rights regulation. For mechanisms of transnational labor rights regulation to move beyond these limitations, they must more effectively combine emergent privatized initiatives with traditional regulatory strategies such as local labor laws and collective agreements to ensure the enforcement of international labor norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the centrality of gender in China's internal migration, studying why women and men migrate for employment and how they experience and deal with problems of human insecurity and citizenship in the process and outcomes of migration. I argue that interaction of the state, the economy, and the patriarchal family greatly shapes the ways in which gender is embedded in the migration process and outcomes, differentiating how women and men experience human security and derive the meaning of their citizenship. Using the structural approach in migration theories, I analyze how gendered institutions and ideology provide the material, social-political, and cultural bases for explaining labor migration within China. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, I compare how women and men migrants experience various dimensions of human insecurity similarly and differently. I also explore how migrant laborers embrace the meaning of citizenship, deal with host destination's receptivity and even resist against mistreatment and discrimination in the new environment. Finally, I discuss implications of the findings related to worker's human/women's/labor rights issues and the role of civil society and the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the 1990s and into the early years of the 21st century, campaigns by labor rights activists brought the issue of labor exploitation by Northern transnationals (TNCs) operating in the Global South into the centre of public debate. Labor rights scholars raised the possibility of a broader Polanyian 'double movement' in the global economy, as the polarizing effects of neoliberal globalization produced anti-globalization movements and shifts towards forms of social protection through emerging approaches to transnational labor rights regulation. One of the results of these processes was the adoption of a human rights discourse by TNCs as they sought to re-define their public image in response to growing public awareness and condemnation of sweatshop labor practices. Read through a Polanyian lens, these developments would seem to confirm that a double movement was in fact producing a more socially responsible capitalism where the 'satanic mill' of the sweatshop would be moderated through corporations proclaiming respect for human rights. In this paper, I examine the adoption of human rights principles by corporate actors as both normative framework and business practice. I argue that rather than a double movement from market liberalism to social protection, the dynamics present in this process indicate tendencies towards the construction of a new hegemonic discourse to support neoliberal globalization - that of the 'socially responsible' corporation where business practices and human rights principles intersect. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I draw on 43 interviews with workers in San Jose and Houston to explore the relationship between undocumented status and legal consciousness. I find that despite a more robust set of labor protections in California, undocumented workers remain limited in their ability to make claims on these rights. Though I support the common assertion that undocumented workers are more susceptible to abuse, I also show that workers are actually fairly knowledgeable of their formal rights (in large part due to the role of local Spanish language media and community outreach efforts in both places.). I offer three main explanations for why, despite increased incidence of abuse and considerable access to resources, aggrieved undocumented workers are less likely to seek recourse. First I suggest that a Foucauldian self-discipline is in effect, whereby the constant fear of deportation makes speaking up and drawing attention to oneself undesirable (i.e. "Es mejor evitar problemas"), making the supposed clean separation of powers between government agencies irrelevant. Secondly, I argue that undocumented workers often take on an alternative hegemonic identity that may rationalize their present working conditions. Lastly, I show how many undocumented workers are oriented towards an idealized future in their home country that justifies the working conditions here, which are in turn seen as temporary and bearable. I emphasize that these dynamics are not inherent to the unauthorized immigrant worker, but rather created by the state's reluctance to accept and incorporate these workers are full members of American society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a comparison between tactics for advocating for low-wage Latino immigrant labor rights in two cities: San Jose, CA and Houston, TX. Drawing on interviews with key immigrant labor unions, community-based organizations, advocacy groups, and government agencies, I argue that the very divergent policy contexts in these two cities have given rise to different strategies for advocating for immigrant labor rights. The thick state policy structure in San Jose has encouraged claims-making on formal legal grounds through bureaucratic proceedings and labor unionism. Community organizations in San Jose, though numerous, have generally relegated employment and labor rights issues to state agencies and unions. Local government, which relies on the strong state apparatus to enforce labor rights, has played an almost non-existent role. However, the relatively thin state policy structure in Houston has created an opening where the local government - in conjunction with community organizations and various Latin American consulates- has played a larger role in an arena where they typically do not have jurisdiction. A paradox thus emerges in Houston where a distant federal government combined with a weak state government empowers a stronger and more involved local government. This local government relies closely on community leaders as liaisons to the immigrant community who are aware of the antagonistic political context in which they operate, and who employ a broad base of strategies to garner rights for immigrant workers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares two cases of transnational labor monitoring, which are frequently referred to as successful examples of independent monitoring of labor conditions. Both the Sullivan Principles in South Africa, and Rugmark in India, involve efforts by non-governmental organizations to certify that companies have improved the conditions of their workers. The paper uses the comparison to tease out some of the promise and limitations of the transnational monitoring approach to protecting labor rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the battle for the new labor contract law between the post-socialist party-state and the transnational corporations at the turn of the 21st century. Human rights advocates usually focus on the post-socialist party-state, pointing out all sorts of human right violations it committed in China. On the other hand, globalization is often promoted by its corporate sponsors as a way to improve rights and standards. However, during the battle for labor rights in China, their role is reversed: The Chinese socialist party-state were seen as actively promoting the expansion of labor rights, while the transnationals came out in blocking and cutting back of labor rights in China. The paper will examine the historical process of the formulation, revision, and the implementation of new labor law in China at the turn of the 21st century. It will discuss how the lobby of the business community had resulted in a much weakened version of labor law which considerably scales back protections for workers. In the end, the paper will discuss the implications of the new labor law for China's development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using examples from India, Africa, Latin America and Asia, this paper will make a case for the establishment of 'Labor Rights' that require independent third-party inspection and enforcement powers exercised by local, national and transnational political authorities in conjunction with international and local labor organizations acting as stakeholders in the judicial process. When governments and private corporations seek to ensure labor standards, they tend to regard them as minimal requirements on conditions, safety and wage levels. The codes of responsible conduct adopted by corporations vary a great deal and there is considerable flexibility in the interpretation of labor standards within the terms of the UN Global Compact and the established practices of transnational, outsourced and subcontracting companies. In this paper, we argue that manufacturing companies in developing societies (including intra-regional developing-company firms) are forced to keep costs low while, at the same time, have to live up to the codes of the brand corporations, often generating false accounts to conceal child labor, actual wage levels, overtime hours and conditions. Weak and compromised social and environmental auditing keeps workers in sweatshops and continues bad practices in terms of health and safety for both employees and local communities and leads companies to employ migrant labor (stateless migrants have few if any entitlements/rights in many countries). We are not proposing that labor standards and rights should be seen as mutually exclusive and in this paper argue that each has a role, i.e. the success of one depends on the effectiveness of the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines meanings of empowerment and citizenship in the development of the 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride and post-ride coalition development. From September 20, 2003 through October 5, 2003, 18 buses originating from 9 different cities, traveled through 48 states and 140 different cities and towns to bring attention to immigrant workers and rights. The ride and coalition provide a unique opportunity to examine how meanings are constructed and negotiated in the development of an immigrant rights movement. Additionally, heavy involvement of the national AFL-CIO and numerous union locals allows for deeper analysis of ways that unions are involved in immigrant rights campaigns. Data for this case study was collected using participant observation, semi-structured interviews, media analysis, and photo-documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on human resource (HR) policies in the workplace suggests that formal policies can contribute to variation in discrimination by altering employers' behaviors. We consider an alternative manner by which HR policies influence formal discrimination complaints. HR policies, especially those targeting employees, can raise employees' rights awareness and encourage them to seek remedies for discrimination at work. Using unique data organization-level from 84 hospitals linked to hospital-specific discrimination charge data obtained from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's (EEOC) Charge Handling Database, we examine the extent to which four organizational HR policies-the presence of an equal employment office/manager, the existence of a written affirmative action plan, management diversity training, and employee diversity training-affect variation in discrimination-charge filings against hospitals. Two key findings emerge. First, HR policies involving written affirmative action plans or the presence of an equal employment office are not related to the filing of discrimination claims against hospitals. Second, management diversity training reduces the likelihood that a hospital receives a discrimination claim while employee diversity training increases the likelihood of receiving a claim. These findings support the idea that not all HR policies are equally effective and imply that employee rights' awareness is a key mechanism in identifying and eventually eliminating discriminatory actions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on the policy studies of East Asia in general, and Taiwan in particular, by analyzing the discursive politics affecting the articulation of women's productive and reproductive labor rights in policy development within a historical context. In the last 50 years, Taiwan has gone through three distinct eras, each characterized by different articulations of nation-building. However, each also share the same core ideology of nation-building as benefiting the collective good.

Abundant evidence now exists that, since the late 1960s, dramatic changes have occurred in the way the rights of employees and the obligations of employers are defined in the American workplace. One of the biggest shifts has been the emergence of the concept of formal rights that may exist independently of collective bargaining agreements or specific government mandates. However, this research also shows that legalization is not all of a piece. We hope to push the neoinstitutional model forward by shifting attention to the relational properties among various employment relations policies and how those relations change over time and across organizations. We conduct a formal relational analysis of a wide range of employment relations practices and structures across a broad sample of organizations over a 30-year period. We seek to answer three substantive questions. First, do practices and structures cohere in distinctive ways that form recognizable management regimes? Second, how do these regimes change over time? Third, what are the structural and ecological correlates of various regimes?what kinds of organizations come to occupy particular niches and display particular identities? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This manuscript analyzes emerging forms of resistance to corporate-driven global capitalism. It explores some of the unique strategies and organizing tools activists are employing to enhance network-building and information sharing across local, national, and international levels. By undertaking an in-depth analysis of a successful worker strike against the New Era Corporation in upstate New York, this research sheds light on how the struggle for workers? rights is interconnected across the global North and South. To carry out this research I interviewed the leader of the local union and the area director of the national union that represented the workers, as well as the directors of key NGOs and community groups that worked in solidarity with the Derby plant labor force. Internal documents and memos were made available to me by the area director of the national union. An exploration into the tactics used in the struggle, strategies for coordination and networking, and the motivation for the participants involved gives us a better understanding of how New Social Movements (NSMs) operate. The literature on new social movements (NSMs) provides a way to examine how power dynamics in the contemporary global economic system can be contested at the local level. While much of the research on NSMs draws attention to the need to build solidarity among various groups, the real specifics regarding how these networks are formed and maintained is often underreported. Also, while much has been written on transnational struggles to support workers in the apparel and footwear industries in the global South, struggles in the North have not received much attention (most likely in part because of the decreasing importance of industrial capitalism in the North). This research, therefore, attempts to go beyond previous studies by focusing on workers in the global North, and investigating in greater detail the dynamics of grassroots organizing around the issue of global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of recently published reports by international labor rights organizations have brought worldwide attention to the extensive use of violence to repress and discipline workers across the globe. While spanning the gamut of work environments - formal and informal, global north and global south, and industrial and agricultural, these studies show that labor rights violations have been particularly strong in Latin America's banana export sectors, where banana producers systematically cut production costs and repress labor organizing in order to profitability adapt to a competitive global export market. This paper draws from a world historical sociological perspective to examine the global institutional and structural factors underlying this pressure to sacrifice worker rights for profitability concerns characterizing the market for Latin America's bananas. The author finds that the "race to the bottom" characterizing the banana market did not result from the rapid and global mobility of banana capital in the present era. Rather, it was a perverse institutional outcome of US efforts to quell economic nationalism and maintain hemispheric hegemony over Latin America during the postwar developmental decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on labor relations in the South Korean shipbuilding industry have emphasized that employers and managers fostered cooperation with manual workers, achieving industrial peace. What these scholars have often neglected to note is the extraordinary growth of lower-paid non-regular workers and the wage inequality between regular and non-regular workers. Given that the large-scale shipyards have historically been an epicenter of labor unrest and a stronghold of democratic labor unions in South Korea, both the enduring dualism and the relative lack of solidarity between regular and non-regular workers are especially puzzling. Through an in-depth case study of the Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI), one of the world's largest ship manufacturers as well as a birthplace of militant labor unionism in South Korea, this article develops a relational account of dualism and inequality in the workplace. The author maintains that employers at HHI, in an attempt to reduce labor costs and improve export competitiveness, installed and perpetuated the dualism and inequality beginning in the early 1990s. The author also highlights the changing pattern of interaction between regular and non-regular workers from solidarity to fragmentation which contributed to increasing the workforce dualism and wage inequality at HHI. By investigating the dynamic interactions between regular/formal and non-regular/informal workers as well as the changing laborcapital relations, this article can enhance our understanding of how relational processes of exploitation, opportunity hoarding, and claim-making played key roles in strengthening or weakening the dualism and inequality in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the labor literature, with its predominant focus on wage workers, self-employer workers are too often ignored and under-examined as part of the modern proletariat. However, this neglect of self-employed workers creates major blind spots in our understanding of the multiplicity of agents of social change that are engaged in class formation outside the Global North. By focusing on the overlooked self-employed tenant shopkeepers' agency in waging creative collective actions to protect their rights to their shops, my case study of Seoul presents an optimal site to analyze how the precarity caused by tenants' lack of ownership over their shops--a crucial means of production for tenant workers--can activate the formation of a new class consciousness. I examine how, in cities beyond the often-theorized and studied West, the intensifying commodification of urban space is becoming both an enduring source of inequality as well as a locus for new workers' power. In particular, I focus on the workers' ability to produce spaces to their own advantage and analyze how cities--with their density, proximity, and diversity--offer an ideal ground to fortify and amplify the workers' power that emerges from such spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes and tests a novel explanation for individual variation in financial risk-taking that operates at the organizational level, namely, the role of firm compensation plans. In the course of financialization of the U.S. economy, American employers increasingly introduced new compensation plans as a labor management tool to reward, retain, and attract employees. However, these compensation plans also may have had an unintended consequence of socializing employees into financial risk-taking through exposing them to financial instruments or shaping the social meaning of money received as part of compensation above base pay. Drawing on data from a survey of employees in fourteen American companies, I show that both individual- and group-based (i.e., profit and gain sharing) bonus plans are associated with higher financial risk-taking among employees, potentially due to their social meaning of extra addendum to base earnings. In contrast, 401(k) pension plans are associated with lower levels of financial risk-taking among employees, possibly reflecting risk aversion with respect to financial security at old age. Finally, equity-sharing compensation plans (i.e., stock options, stock purchase plans, and employee stock ownership plans) show no significant associations with employees' financial risk-taking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates how specialist organizations survive regulatory categorizations despite typically lacking the resources to adhere, relative to generalist firms. We blend ecological and institutional literatures to demonstrate that organizational identities create malleability in the resource space between specialist and generalist organizations to offer the latter more resources needed to survive instances such as the introduction of a regulation. To explore this process, we assessed how vape shop owners and employees used their organizational identities to frame responses to the FDA's proposed regulatory categorization of e-cigarettes to garner public support. We collected 64 news articles and 865 corresponding comments from May 4th - May 11th, 2016 to capture discussions occurring before and after the FDA announced its plan to re-categorize e-cigarettes as tobacco products on May 5th. We used news articles to assess vape shop owners and employees' responses. We added additional insights to these responses, by integrating news article comments to understand the perspective of their constituents (e.g., consumers). Thematic analysis revealed that vape shop owners and employees worked to garner public support by using the attributes associated with their identities to frame responses in a manner that bolstered authenticity. First, they categorized e-cigarettes as passion products that they were committed to introducing people to as the product helped them quit traditional cigarettes. Second, they categorized e-cigarettes as customizable products which meant they helped people explore their vaping preferences. Third, they voiced concerns regarding the true intentions behind the FDA's regulation, which was a sentiment reinforced by their constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The platform economy is rapidly growing and transforming the dynamics of the labor market. For digital optimists, it is providing alternative kinds of work that are characterized by flexible work hours, enjoyment, and creativity. Yet, critics point out that workers' rights are jeopardized and most work in this industry is precarious. Drawing on US nationally representative data from the American Trends Panel 2016, we examine who participates in the platform economy and what their motivations are for working online. Our findings show that different demographic and socioeconomic factors predict gig work and online selling. We also find that participation in the platform economy is more complex than previously presented in the literature. We find support for both sides of the argument depending at what type of work we examine. Rideshare drivers, cleaners, and sellers of homemade goods or consumer brands were all motivated by incomeneeds. Supporting the arguments of digital optimists, online task workers join the platform economy because of its intrinsic enjoyment and deliverers because of its flexibility in work schedules. We discuss the implications of occupational sorting for the platform economy and the developed of labor policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explain labor policy continuity in Chile. Focusing on the labor reform attempt carried out by President Michelle Bachelet, it seeks to explain why the collective labor laws established during Pinochet's dictatorship have still not been repealed. This article proposes interpretation based on the notion of class and associational power. It centers on the ways that the two main class-based organizations--the Confederation of Production and Commerce (CPC) and the Workers Unitary Central (CUT)--organize and act collectively to defend their class interests and influence, in interactions with state actors, the legislative process. The article argues that the main factor accounting for labor policy continuity in Chile is the disparity between capitalists' and workers' associational power. This disparity is observed, for example, in employers' stronger ability to unify class-wide, cross-sectoral interests vis-à-vis the reformist government and, as a result of that, in their greater capacity to influence policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]