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Canada has recently emerged as a hotspot in a burgeoning global surrogacy bio‐economy. On the grounds that any commercial trade in reproductive capabilities would result in the exploitation of marginalised women willing to sell their eggs and wombs, Canada's Assisted Human Reproduction Act (AHRA) bans commercial surrogacy, allowing only for altruistic arrangements. Drawing together analysis of the AHRA and related legal, regulatory, and policy documents, feminist political economic theory, and a growing body of critical social scientific scholarship on surrogacy, this paper troubles altruism as a means of insulating surrogacy from market‐based exploitation. It contributes to the extant literature an explicit focus on the law as a key site in the reproduction of the gendered division of labour. Acknowledging the serious concerns that dog commercial markets in reproductive biology, it argues that the legal constitution of gestational work as altruistic is part of a broader juridico‐economic apparatus that has systematically devalued reproductive labour under capitalism. Efforts to insulate surrogacy from the market by legally designating it as a gift freely given facilitate the ongoing appropriation of reproductive labour, which is assigned, once again, to the realm of non‐value. A feminist political‐economic critique of altruism, this paper does not forward an argument in favour of commercialisation. Rather, its aim is to upend the commercial/altruistic binary that has circumscribed so much of the thinking and legislating around surrogacy. This paper explores the role of the law in devaluing reproductive labour under capitalism. It does so via an examination of Canada's burgeoning surrogacy bio‐economy and the legislation – the Assisted Human Reproduction Act – designed to regulate it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrants are vital to agricultural production in the United States, and nearly half the crop workforce is unauthorized. Previous attempts to reform the immigration system have not successfully legalized the farm workforce or caused substantive rise in farmworker incomes. Current proposed legislation would legalize unauthorized farmworkers, streamline the H‐2A agricultural guest worker program, and provide a pathway to citizenship for H‐2A workers while simultaneously requiring agricultural employers to check the immigration status of workers using E‐Verify. This paper discusses proposed farm labor legislation in the context of current farm labor market conditions, outcomes of historical farm labor and immigration policies, and ongoing immigration trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign workers holding H‐1B visas gained recourse to federal employment rights under the Immigration & Nationality Act (INA) for the very first time when Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990 (IMMACT90). This paper examines H‐1B employment rights enforcement under the INA as it has intersected with broader features of the American legal system: what political scientists call judicial retrenchment and the quasi‐judicial state. I first show how H‐1B rights, already limited by the domestic politics that shaped the IMMACT, became subject to judicial retrenchment when the federal courts confined H‐1B disputes under the INA to the quasi‐judicial state at the Department of Labor (DOL). I then use published data on DOL investigation outcomes, published and unpublished administrative case records, and judicial cases reviewing agency action to examine the extent to which and how H‐1B workers can use the quasi‐judicial state to solve workplace problems. My empirical findings contribute to a new understanding of the relationship between rights retrenchment, the judiciary, and the rise of alternatives to court in immigration and employment law and point to possible fine‐grained changes for future immigration reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housekeeping and sanitary workers are crucial for the functional efficiency and hygiene of healthcare facilities. In India, women from oppressed castes and backward classes are predominantly recruited in these occupations. The work, regarded as "polluting," is stigmatized, devalued, and lies at the historical and sociocultural intersections of caste, class, and gender. In the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic, this paper utilizes the concepts of "feminization of labor" and "care ethics" to read caste into an intersectional theoretical analysis of the organization of marginalized women's labor in such essential, yet invisibilized healthcare work. An exploratory narrative review of literature focusing exclusively on marginalized healthcare housekeepers and sanitation workers in India is undertaken and supplemented with a critical analysis of labor laws and policies to trace the sustained reproduction of the caste‐based sexual division of labor in these occupations. I propose that their exploitative terms and conditions are sustained by what I refer to as the "feminine caste contract" – a complex sociopolitical and legal arrangement of precarious, casteist, and gendered work conditions. Recognizing the exploitation inherent in this contract, recommendations are made for social work education and practice to play a key role in restructuring marginalized women's labor in essential care work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on to[pics including labor law and environmental management in the context of early modern Venetian fishermen; accounting practices in early modern India and solar eclipse of May 29, 1919.

The domestic bases of trans‐governmental regulatory networks are controversial. While rational choice accounts expect insecure regulators to join larger networks that promise to bolster and justify their authority back home, public interest accounts expect independent regulators to join smaller networks populated by like‐minded and informative peers. Are regulatory networks more likely to attract self‐aggrandizing servants of insecure agencies or public‐spirited representatives of their independent counterparts? What are the implications for network size and orientation? I address these questions by examining the regulators who administer labour and employment law in Latin America and find that, in keeping with the public interest account, they are more likely to go abroad when they are independent bureaucrats than when they are vulnerable to political pressure, and less likely to join larger networks of powerful allies than to teach and learn from their Iberian and Latin American peers. The results suggest that trans‐governmental networks rest on Weberian foundations – themselves mediated by linguistic, cultural, and historical factors – that contribute to the reproduction of a multipolar regulatory world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation: Child labour persists in the global South. After ratifying the International Labour Organization's Convention No. 138, on "the minimum age for admission to employment and work," many southern countries have legislated minimum age criteria to fulfil their International Labour Organizations obligations. Often, however, making law has neither significantly reduced child labour nor boosted school attendance—largely because of states' inability to ensure compliance. Purpose: We investigate, using the case of Nepal, whether legal knowledge about minimum age standards among parents supplying, and employers demanding, child labour makes a difference to child labour. Methods and approach: Drawing on data from communities in the Terai of Nepal, we use mixed methods to find correlations between legal knowledge, compliance with child labour laws, and prevalence of child labour. We draw on two novel data sets: a large household survey of parents and children, and a small census of owners of brick kilns, where child labour is often seen. We also make use of qualitative interviews with citizens in one community in the Terai. Findings: We show that when parents and employers know the law on child labour, they are more likely to comply with it. Perceptions of the law also matter, independently of legal knowledge. When individuals know the legal working age and believe it is appropriate, we see even more compliance. Policy implications: These findings suggest that, even when enforcing the law may be difficult and costly, informing and educating parents and employers may be a less costly way to reduce child labour. Such measures would be even more effective if paired with efforts to change perceptions of the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploiting the staggered passage of labour protection laws in the United States, we find that higher labour adjustment costs increased the likelihood of observing zero leverage firms by 22%. This effect is significantly larger in states with stronger unionization, in industries with higher volatility and concentration, and in firms with higher labour intensity. Both within‐firm changes in debt policies and higher propensity of newer firms to be debt‐free are important in explaining these patterns. Overall, our work contributes to the literature on the relation between financial and labour markets by highlighting the role of labour laws in explaining the zero‐leverage puzzle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the contentious political dynamics of the largest workfare program in the world, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) of India? Combining quantitative analysis with a close reading of government documents and a survey of the existing literature, we suggest that the Indian government's counter‐insurgency strategy against the Maoist unrest is a significant dynamic shaping the distribution of MGNREGA benefits. In our empirical analysis, we examine the effect of Maoist incidents on household income due to MGNREGA by merging a nationally representative household survey (Indian Human Development Survey‐II) and a Maoist incidents dataset. Controlling for relevant household and district characteristics, we show that higher intensity of violent conflicts is associated with higher MGNREGA benefits. This result is robust to using a variety of alternative specifications and estimation methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of who falls within the 'personal scope' of employment law is of fundamental importance to the field but remains highly contested. This article makes a novel contribution by examining the implications of human rights in this context and advocating a fundamental shift in the courts' approach to personal scope. It suggests that where employment legislation functions to protect human rights the scope of these statutes should, at the level of normative principle, be construed inclusively with any exclusions needing to be justified. The article then argues that the effect of the Human Rights Act 1998 is to introduce a new human rights approach to employment status into English law which closely reflects this proposal. It sets out the frameworks that domestic courts should apply, and critically assesses a line of recent cases which illustrate the emergence and significance of this human rights approach to personal scope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the problem of questionable consent in contracts of employment. We suggest that in the context of employment, consent should be understood as a continuum that includes some level of coercion and some level of choice. We show that despite labour law's assumption of inequality of bargaining power, consent is still legally valid in various contexts of employment. We propose some solutions: procedural rules increasing the chance of free and informed consent, and substantive standards restricting recognition of consent due to public policy considerations. The 'menu' we put forward includes some solutions already recognised by law (in some specific contexts) and we also propose some new ones. We then demonstrate how the proposed solutions, both procedural and substantive, can be applied in common contexts where employee consent might be put into question: variation of contractual terms, waiver of access to courts, waiver of legislated rights, waivers related to human rights, and implicit waivers of employee status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coerced work on parole occurs when people are required to work under the threat of criminal legal repercussions. In the face of barriers to "good" work for people after prison, coercion helps to funnel parolees into positions at the bottom of the labor market. Parolee workers in these positions experience issues common to precarious, low‐wage work (low pay, hazardous working conditions, and labor law violations), as well as heightened vulnerability to predatory employers and exposure to parole‐prohibited activities. Because of the threat‐backed requirements to work, however, parolees must choose to either accept this "bad" work or face potential sanctions. Using mixed‐methods, including a novel form of respondent‐driven sampling I call "Hybrid‐RDS," this article documents the prevalence of coerced work for people on parole in Los Angeles County, identifies the mechanisms through which coercive work operates, and illustrates the problematic employment conditions of coerced work after prison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Motivation: Urbanization and the increasing number of double‐income households has led to a rise in demand for domestic workers in many African countries. With a population of over 75% people below 30 years of age, young people's unemployment is a major challenge for Uganda. Approximately 90% of young people work in the informal economy. Domestic workers' informal employment is unregulated and precarious. Purpose: The article examines the role of social and gender norms in voicing and formal reporting of sexual harassment. It demonstrates the intersecting risk factors that create exposure to sexual harassment, challenges relating to voicing, as well as how restrictive norms are reproduced by other actors. Methods and approach: The study adopted a qualitative research approach; desk review, qualitative, and visual methods. Primary data collection included safety audits and body mappings with groups of live‐in domestic workers and firm workers, and in‐depth individual interviews with domestic workers. Safety audits discussed forms of harassment and response mechanisms while the body mappings focused on language. Findings: Isolated working conditions increase the risk of experiencing sexual harassment and limit avenues for reporting. Social and gender norms undermine domestic workers' ability to report it formally. The culture of silence and notions of victim blaming, stigmatization, and lack of a language that raises matters of sexual harassment all hinder women's voice towards self‐care and justice. Social and gender norms contribute to the persistence of sexual harassment through its normalization. Policy implications: Domestic work should legally be recognized as work and labour laws need to extend to domestic workers. Workplace sexual harassment policy needs to extend to all workspaces, regardless of the number of employees. Domestic workers need better access to information, co‐workers, and associations, for instance through information technology. Advocacy for the rights of domestic workers and network building are recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the impact of governance index and gross fixed capital formation on the economic growth of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) using annual data from 2002 to 2019. This study employs Fixed Effect Model, Driscoll and Kraay standard error with fixed effect, Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square, Dynamic Ordinary Least Square (DOLS) and Panel Dumitrescu Hurlin Causality test. The study has divided the variables into two models where model I includes the impact of governance index (jointly) on economic growth while model II examines the impact of governance index on economic growth individually. The findings demonstrate that the governance index, gross fixed capital formation, population, control of corruption, and governance effectiveness have a positive and significant impact on economic growth, whereas regulatory quality showed a significant and negative impact on economic growth. Furthermore, regarding the Panel test, we notice the presence of unidirectional causality among the constituent variables. Therefore, this study suggests that the government should encourage economic development in the BRICS countries and move away from outdated ideas and poor institutional quality in favor of a new comprehensive reform to achieve excellent governance, population growth control, labor law changes, and corruption control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour markets in sub‐Saharan Africa are characterized by a gendered division between formal and informal sectors. This article argues that this division originates from a rationality introduced by racist and gendered colonial legal segmentation, produced by a variety of legal regimes in and beyond employment law. Labour market segmentation in postcolonial settings cannot be understood or overcome without analysing the specific colonial institutional origins of the commodification of labour. In sub‐Saharan Africa, the "colonial exploitative legal employment standard" that commodified labour focused on black African male employees for European employers, excluding or marginalizing women and domestic labour relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines legal segmentation in five Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay) by drawing on the employment regulation typology developed by Dingeldey et al. (2022), based on three functions – standard‐setting, privileging and equalizing. The author distinguishes between three factors of inequality and precarity: lack of coverage (namely of self‐employed workers), discrimination and the circumvention of standards. Lack of enforcement, together with an unfavourable economic environment, results in informality. The analysis identifies different forms and levels of protection under standard and non‐standard employment, as well as compensatory rules and other regulations seeking to eliminate inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue aims to enrich the discussion on individual employment re‐regulation by introducing the concept of legal segmentation from a global perspective and distinguishing between the standard‐setting, privileging and equalizing functions of employment law. This introductory article draws on a new database created by the authors that allows countries worldwide to be clustered into types of legal segmentation. It presents the authors' methodology and initial findings, which are contrasted with the regional and thematic studies in this Special Issue. Together, these contributions provide policy proposals to support the creation and enforcement of inclusive rules protecting all working people worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the impact of employment law on de facto labour market segmentation for 22 European countries from 1991 to 2014. Applying the concept of legal segmentation, the authors distinguish between the standard‐setting (protective), privileging and equalizing functions of employment law and use descriptive and multivariate statistics to indicate their effects on overall employment, and male and female standard and non‐standard employment. High privileging, in combination with high standard‐setting, is found to favour male standard employment and female non‐standard employment, while the equalizing function, aimed at improving the protection of women and other marginalized groups, actually increases male non‐standard employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how the regulative functions of labour law have been developed within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region and seeks to identify instances of legal segmentation. The authors provide an overview of the demographic nature of the informal economies in SADC Member States, drawing the conclusion that the labour law mechanisms employed in the region substantially contribute to the legal segmentation of the regional economies. This has occurred despite the constitutionalization of labour law in the SADC region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article captures the shared understanding in the literature of labour law's interaction with gender, distinguishing between law's different functions – constituting labour market institutions, sustaining them, addressing unwarranted outcomes and transforming the institutions. Constituted, in part, by law, the standard employment relationship and the institutions of formal employment have segmenting gendered effects. While legal norms designed to correct these effects are important, they also sustain them. The authors argue for a transformative alternative that would follow two general principles in designing new labour standards, namely, universalization of scope and adaptive content in the interests of differently situated women and men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether a workweek reduction impacts job turnover behavior of workers, with a particular focus on female worker's turnover. To assess the causal relationship, I exploit the introduction of South Korea's workweek reduction policy as a natural experiment. Using individual longitudinal data, I estimate a job turnover model that distinguishes job‐to‐job transition from job‐to‐nonemployment transition. The estimates reveal that, for women, mandating a 40‐h workweek significantly decreases the probability of making a job‐to‐nonemployment transition and thus raises the probability of staying in the job. The impacts of a work‐hour reduction are salient among married women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the narrow framing of the Supreme Court's decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, that employers cannot fire someone simply for being gay or transgender, numerous questions persist as to whether and to what extent LGBTQ Americans are protected against employment discrimination. Resolving these issues is likely to require years, if not decades, of litigation, leaving LGBTQ workers and their employers without meaningful guidance in the interim. This article contends that the most efficient means of clarifying these uncertainties is for Congress to enact a new employment statute known as the Title VII Amendments Act. As proposed, the Act would resolve each of Bostock's ambiguities in favor of affording greater protections to workers generally and LGBTQ persons specifically while avoiding the controversies that have derailed LGBTQ civil rights legislation in the past. Thus, the Title VII Amendments Act represents LGBTQ persons' best hope of attaining immediate, comprehensive employment protections and employers' best prospect of securing definitive, timely legal guidance post‐Bostock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though it is widely accepted that United Kingdom (UK) surrogacy laws are in need of reform, how they should be reformed remains a matter of considerable disagreement. This article explores a new regulatory suggestion: labour law. Building on the extensive sociological and anthropological literature that has conceptualized contract pregnancy as a form of work, it considers whether and how this might translate into a new regulatory framework, drawing on the Sex Work Is Work movement for inspiration. Though recognizing that this would require substantial changes to some of the present features of UK surrogacy law, it shows that there may be significant potential in this pre‐existing set of protections, improving the position of surrogates without dramatically changing the culture of the practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous literature argues that labour employment protection influences corporate investment through three mechanisms. Using the Labour Contract Law (LCL) in China as an exogeneous shock, we analyse publicly listed companies with regression discontinuity design, and we find that production flexibility plays a mediating role among these mechanisms. On one hand, LCL increases the labour cost of labour‐intensive firms (LIFs); on the other hand, LCL increases capital spending of non‐labour‐intensive firms (NLIFs). These findings are not ascribed to industry differences, are not driven by the boom of the housing market or other contemporary shocks, and are robust to alternative measures and placebo tests. We conjecture that NLIFs can flexibly replace labour with physical capital. As for LIFs, labour and capital must be maintained at a fixed ratio and thus neither labour nor capital can be readily adjusted. Cross‐sectional analyses confirm our conjecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resumen: El derrumbe del Rana Plaza en 2013 puso de relieve la deficiente regulación laboral en las cadenas mundiales de valor del sector de la confección. Ocho años después, en plena pandemia por COVID‐19, los autores se plantean, utilizando el concepto de sistema de gobernanza del trabajo (SGT), qué ha cambiado y con qué consecuencias para los trabajadores. Con datos de entrevistas, observan mejoras en la seguridad de los edificios, pero no en salarios, horas de trabajo y derechos procedimentales. La pandemia ha exacerbado las deficiencias, pero podría convertirse en un nuevo evento focalizador para mejorar el sistema, para lo cual se formulan propuestas de políticas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authoritarian states face a fundamental tension in managing labor conflict. Too much repression can be read as a violation of workers' human rights, but too little undermines their structures of control. In this article, we shift focus from the overt repression of workers and unions to consider how states manage labor dissent through governance reform. Using Cambodia as our case, we examine the government's use of a series of "authoritarian innovations" to reassert control over labor governance mechanisms once dominated by international actors. Through an analysis of the shifting terrain of reform in the areas of labor legislation, minimum wage‐setting, and disputes resolution, we show how institutional pacification has contained labor in ways that have served to defend state legitimacy and protect accumulation. We conclude by discussing the implications of these novel tactics—which signal the state is neither static nor predictable—for our understanding of labor governance under authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]