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This article explores the spatialities associated with the recent emergence of a social movement of domestic workers in the United States. Domestic work is rendered invisible, not only as a form of ‘real work’, but also because it is hidden in other people’s homes. The article unpacks the home as a private space beyond government intervention, and as domestic worker activists argue, when homes are workplaces workers should be protected from exploitation. Domestic workers have become active and visible in campaigns to gain coverage under labour legislation at the state and federal government levels. An analysis of the success of their campaigns reveals a set of strategies and tactics that draw on feminist care ethics in a range of different locations, and that thinking spatially has been pivotal in the emergence and continued growth of their social movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2016, a small majority of voters called for Britain to leave the EU. In this article, we discuss the referendum itself and the form which Brexit may take. It has become clear that the current UK government is committed to a ‘hard’ Brexit which will rupture most existing ties with the EU. While much uncertainty remains, there are alarming indications that ‘regaining sovereignty’ – a key slogan of the Brexit campaign – will translate into abject subservience to the most erratic right-wing US administration in history. We examine the implications of Brexit for labour rights in general and for British trade union participation in European Works Councils in particular: there are many reasons for apprehension. We assess the economic and political fall-out, and end by exploring possible consequences for international trade union solidarity in Europe. In general, trade union policy-makers in Europe are committed to resisting ‘divide-and-rule’ strategies by employers, but there will undoubtedly be tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing concern over the human rights situation of North Korean migrant workers. Related to the labour system under North Korea's socialist planned economy, whereby the authorities have direct control over allocation of the labour force, the issue is also relevant to each host country's protection of the rights of migrant workers. This article examines the human rights conditions of North Korean migrant workers, and assesses whether their situation amounts to slavery and forced labour from the perspective of international law. Through analysis of North Korea's Socialist Labour Law and the country's regime, which frames its labour structure, this article seeks to determine the root causes of the situation-- and ultimately to invoke international cooperation for amelioration of the human rights of these workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution tracks the recent geographical and structural changes in the electronics contract manufacturing (ECM) industry in China’s Pearl River Delta (PRD) and the corresponding modifications in labour relations. We find that a diversified ECM industry in the PRD has been expanding in spite of rising production costs and that investments in other regions in China should therefore be seen as a complement, rather than a substitute, for production capacities in the PRD. Our investigation of working conditions at three major production sites in the PRD in May 2013 based on 167 worker interviews shows that substantial changes in employment regimes are absent and that wage rises remain modest. The industry continues to operate on the flexible employment of low-skilled and poorly paid migrant workers. We conclude that improvements of working conditions must rely on the associational power of workers and global efforts to regulate the highly competitive ECM industry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the moral and legal status of the right to strike from a contractualist perspective, broadly construed. I argue that rather than attempting to ground the right to strike in the principle of association, as is commonly done in the ongoing legal debate, it ought to be understood as the assertion of a second-order moral right to self-determination within economic life. The controversy surrounding the right to strike thus reflects and depends upon a more basic question of the legitimate scope of reason giving. I conclude that the right to strike, understood as an assertion of a right to self-determination, enjoys presumptive or pro tanto legitimacy apart from the merits or demerits of particular strike demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the influence of the EU's actions on labour standards in the Eastern neighbourhood. It conceptualizes the EU's actions as potential delta convergence mechanisms and models these mechanisms through a spatial econometric approach, using spatial lags. It then analyses the impact of these mechanisms on target countries' rate of alignment with the International Labour Organization's standards using spatial two-stage least squares regression analysis. The results indicate that the EU influences labour standards in the observed countries through a combination of coercion and example-setting, but more so through the former than through the latter. The study finds that participation in the European Neighbourhood Policy does not influence countries' labour standards, nor does being a Generalized System of Preferences beneficiary. The article concludes that the EU influences labour standards through the manipulation of target countries' cost-benefit calculations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expectations of retirement in this country are increasingly distant under the unusual reforms suffered by the pension system and make burdensome the opportunity to access the labor and social law respectively, for reasons including the lack of economic sustainability, does not guarantee any Colombian citizen through the state or private funds, may have during her old age a happy and peaceful experience. With so many legal and administrative ramblings to implement a real pension system in Colombia, after the reform of the ICSS, as a result of corruption, inefficient application of the law 100 of 1993 which created the General System of Integrated Social Security, suppression and liquidation of social security institutions and the systematic tramitomania difficult process, it is unattainable this right belongs to every worker, having worked for about 25 years. Worryingly, only one in ten Colombian citizens reach retirement, ie the remaining 90%, stay out of this opportunity. Also, concerned the knowledge that 83% of those receiving pension in this country from private funds fail to obtain two minimum wages, than the precarious Colombian pensioner lives is concluded. Enlarge repeatedly age and contribution period has been becoming a systematic mockery of the dependent worker and utopia achieving a pension after many years of work and saving. The celebrated philosopher, politician and visionary Greek teacher Plato, pose in their series of writings that "an ideal world in which all members were living happy and satisfied was only possible if the world was a just world, as a state is ideal if he reigns in righteousness. Unfortunately today in Colombia these principles became inoperative, because the notion of social justice was also lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent development of a Human Rights and Social Responsibility Policy for fishery improvement projects (FIPs) has accelerated industry and NGO-led initiatives to address human and labour rights violations in seafood supply chains through FIPs. However, this brief communication demonstrates that FIPs' social requirements, as currently constituted and reported, suffer from many of the same problems as other voluntary, market-based initiatives that fail to mitigate labour abuses. Examples of these shortcomings include the voluntarisation of what should be binding, international conventions and standards; moving benchmarks that lack meaning for workers; an absence of worker-defined remedy and recourse processes; and confusion around what actually constitutes a human rights due diligence process. In addition, social responsibility imperatives in FIPs present a new threat to the fight against labour abuses in supply chains in that they embrace and risk institutionalizing an ideology that moving towards, rather than complying with, fundamental human rights is acceptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of what trade unions can offer to reduce the vulnerability of migrant workers to forced labour and human trafficking in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) and Malaysia as a key destination for GMS migrant workers. The exploration of the potential for the engagement of trade union partners is a timely contribution to the forced labour and anti-trafficking debate, given the shift towards a more holistic labour rights approach, and the ensuing search for more actors and partnerships to combat these crimes, which led to adoption of the Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labour Convention, 1930, (Forced Labour Protocol) in June 2014. Examples from Malaysia and Thailand highlight the role that trade unions can play in policy development and service provision, and also some of the challenges associated with unionisation of a vulnerable, temporary, and often repressed, migrant workforce.

Over the last fifteen years the parameters of anti-trafficking have shifted considerably. This shift has not been immediate or seismic. It has been a gradual shift, and what was once advocated for as a specific practice of trafficking is now associated with, and at times used interchangeably with, slavery and forced labour.

Human rights, labour standards, and environmental protection standards are commonly linked to trade. Because these links come in different forms, the question arises: what accounts for such variation? An examination of the wide variety of non-trade issues (NTIs) in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) reveals that prominent explanations fall short of explaining this variation. I argue that domestic characteristics of trade partner countries trigger lobbying by interest groups and cause design changes. I hypothesize that strong import and wage pressure increases lobbying by social and environmental protection advocates. A large difference between member states regarding civil and political rights protection levels should trigger NGO activity, but only if at least one member complies at a very high level already. In order to test the argument, I rely on a novel dataset including newly coded data on NTIs design for 474 PTAs signed between 1990 and January 2016. The findings using multivariate regression analysis show that linking trade and social or environmental clauses is motivated by strategic and the inclusion of political rights by substantial interests. This study contributes to the literature on rational design of international institutions, legalization, and issue-linkage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1960 Ethiopian Civil Code regulates domestic working conditions, and it largely depends on employers' sense of fairness. The Code provides insufficient protection to domestic workers and has failed to facilitate stable domestic labour contracts to the disadvantage of employers. The 2003 labour law (as amended) excludes domestic workers from its sphere of application other than promising that a special regulation will be issued. But there is procrastination in the enactment of the regulation. This article examines the legal gaps in regulating domestic workers, its gender effects and the tenability of the reasons behind the procrastination. To this end, the article examines various sources, including laws, interviews, reports, ILO conventions, and comparative experience of some foreign states. The negative perception over domestic work, misconception about the prospective domestic workers regulation and the absence of interest groups that promote the causes of domestic workers are the major causes of the procrastination on the issuance of a regulatory framework for domestic work. In the common interest of domestic workers and employers, it is argued that a regulation must be issued based on a legally-defined relationship, as opposed to the existing status relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What effect do pro-market economic policies have on labour rights? Despite significant debate in policy and academic circles about the consequences of economic liberalisation, little is known about the labour rights effects of pro-market policies. Extant literature has focused only on the possible outcomes of market-liberalising policies, such as trade and investment flows, rather than directly assessing market-friendly policies and institutions. Moreover, this line of research has found mixed results on how these outcomes influence labour conditions. To provide a comprehensive assessment of this linkage, this article combines data on five distinct policy areas associated with economic liberalisation with data on labour rights for the period 1981-2012. The results indicate that pro-market policies - except the ones involving rule of law and secure property rights - undermine labour rights. Thus while there are some positive economic and political outcomes associated with market-supporting policies, economic liberalisation comes at the cost of respect for labour rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article illustrates how blacklisting can function as a modality of deportability among temporary migrant workers participating in a programme touted as a model of ordered migration internationally, with attention to sending state action. In 2010, Local 1518 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union applied successfully to British Columbia's Labour Relations Board to represent a group of circular migrants engaged under Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Programme. Yet less than a year later, the union complained of unfair labour practices on the part of not only the host state employer and certain employees but sending state officials who select and assign workers to Canadian employers, contending that they blocked the visa reapplications of union members eligible for recall and improperly interfered in a decertification application. On account of the unique empirics available through this case, its analysis offers a window into practices which are routinely obscured but nevertheless central to how deportability operates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Agricultural migrant workers, recruited to work in Canada under the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP), are disciplined to be compliant and productive. Based on ethnographic data, we draw attention to several ways in which Spanish-speaking migrants, employed in agriculture in a rural community in Southwestern Ontario, respond to this disciplinary power. Most migrants discipline themselves and others to be productive and compliant workers. We refer to these acts as "performances of self-discipline." At other times, some (albeit, few) migrants challenge this disciplinary power either individually or collectively. We refer to these performances of subjectivity as "performances of defiance." Another way migrants may respond to the disciplinary power is by attempting to escape from it. Coining these performances "performances of escape," we discuss how some agricultural migrant workers drop out of the program and remain in Canada without authorization. By turning attention to these performances of subjectivity, the article fills a gap in the literature on migration management and its disciplinary practices in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pearl River Delta (PRD) with its strong focus on international export production has a higher concentration of NGOs that support migrant workers than any other part of China. To better understand mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion affecting migrants in the city and their organisations, this paper takes up Martina Löw's (2008) space-theoretical concept and her critical reference to Anthony Giddens' structuration theory showing how space can be interpreted as a duality of structural ordering and action elements. It asks whether these migrant worker NGOs can be seen as agents of change influencing the process of urban restructuring in the PRD and producing new urban spaces while negotiating with numerous different institutions on behalf of the workers. Based on a critical review of the literature, long-term participatory observation and expert interviews with NGO leaders and staff, it uses four examples-NGO office space, factory space, litigation space and hospital space-to argue that these NGOs are producing transient urban spaces that not only advocate labour rights but also serve broader processes of creating and transforming the mega-urban landscape of the PRD. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study was part of a large research project on human rights. This paper focuses on attitudes towards labour rights of German adolescents (N = 2244) The labour rights under investigation are the right to work for everyone, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to working hour limitations, the right to paid holidays, and the right to support for the unemployed. Although human rights in general are considered as universal, egalitarian and indivisible, attitudes towards these rights can be positive, negative or ambivalent, and may depend on the context. The aim of this study is to investigate adolescents' attitudes towards labour rights, and to examine whether and which contextual factors are related to their attitudes towards labour rights. The contextual factors under examination were: human dignity, religious beliefs, the socio-political perception of society, and socio-demographic characteristics. The findings show that labour rights are very positively valued, except support for the unemployed. From all predictors the strongest is the understanding of human dignity as inherent to humans, followed by dignity through moral behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mainstream human rights discourse has largely privileged individual rights over collective rights and civil and political rights over economic, social and cultural rights. Furthermore, much scholarship on collective social movements posits a shift in recent decades towards mobilization around identity politics and away from the economic or class-based focus of trade unions. In contrast, this policy and practice note argues against drawing a sharp analytical dichotomy between new identity-based and old class-based social movements. Moreover, it posits that there is value added by considering trade unions as human rights organizations (of a particular kind). Indeed, it is argued that in order to overcome some of the shortcomings of mainstream human rights discourse and practice it is both desirable and necessary to engage with the praxis of trade unions from a human rights perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This paper aims to draw attention to the challenges modern slavery poses to supply chain management. Although many international supply chains are (most often unknowingly) connected to slave labour activities, supply chain managers and researchers have so far neglected the issue. This will most likely change as soon as civil society lobbying and new legislation impose increasing litigation and reputational risks on companies operating international supply chains. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a definition of slavery; explores potentials for knowledge exchange with other disciplines; discusses management tools for detecting slavery, as well as suitable company responses after its detection; and outlines avenues for future research. Findings – Due to a lack of effective indicators, new tools and indicator systems need to be developed that consider the specific social, cultural and geographical context of supply regions. After detection of slavery, multi-stakeholder partnerships, community-centred approaches and supplier development appear to be effective responses. Research limitations/implications – New theory development in supply chain management (SCM) is urgently needed to facilitate the understanding, avoidance and elimination of slavery in supply chains. As a starting point for future research, the challenges of slavery to SCM are conceptualised, focussing on capabilities and specific institutional context. Practical implications – The paper provides a starting point for the development of practices and tools for identifying and removing slave labour from supply chains. Originality/value – Although representing a substantial threat to current supply chain models, slavery has so far not been addressed in SCM research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an important aspect of the politicisation of contingent work: the evolution of grassroots organising strategies by immigrant day labourers, an allegedly ‘unorganisable’ class of contingent workers. The paper focuses on the ways in which repertoires of contestation – based in a philosophy of social transformation through radical democracy and Popular Education – have defused from mass-movement social struggles in Latin America in the 1980s to street-corner organising in US cities today. Through a series of in-depth interviews with day labour organisers, the paper: (1) follows the continental travels of Popular Education methodologies; and (2) explores how organising approaches from the global South have been adapted and recombined to meet the challenges presented by day labour markets in the US which are characterised by rampant violations of core labour standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strike as a confrontational form of expression of labour disputes has become an unavoidable phenomenon in China. However, knowledge about the politico-historical context of the right to strike in China remains patchy, despite growing interest in labour activism in the Chinese context. We aim to fill this gap by examining the Chinese jurisprudence of labour rights in general and the right to strike specifically. We do so by examining the policy and political stance adopted by the Chinese Communist Party on strikes; analysing the historical development of the legislation of the right to strike in Socialist China; highlighting the key features of labour disputes; and contemplating the legal foundation of, and implications for legislating for, the right to strike in China. This knowledge is essential to understanding the changing dynamics of industrial actions and workers’ activism, with wider implications for foreign direct investment and the management of labour relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on antenarrative research and writing techniques to analyse the long-running transnational campaign seeking to improve respect for human rights in the supply chains of Nike and other major sportswear companies. The antenarrative approach challenges scholars to look beyond pre-existing expectations, both in terms of which actors and processes are likely to be most influential and in terms of what is motivating participation in those processes which are significant. In this paper we construct antenarrative accounts of two aspects of the Nike campaign and counterpoint each of our antenarratives with an established scholarly account based on more traditional narrative approaches. We conclude antenarrative analysis can provide useful insights into interaction between global activist networks and global corporations, particularly by drawing attention to the generative possibilities of the complex combination of ordered and disordered processes which often characterise that interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Collected Papers of Zagreb Law Faculty / Zbornik Pravnog Fakulteta u Zagrebu is the property of Sveuciliste u Zagrebu, Pravni Fakultet and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Several scandals involving well-known electronics brands have highlighted the exploitative and unsafe conditions under which many workers operate in the industry's long and complex supply chains. As large-scale consumers of electronic goods, public buyers potentially hold significant leverage over the behaviour of their suppliers through their buying power. Consequently, public procurement has the potential to be a significant influence on these supply chains and ultimately the human rights of those working in them. This article critically assesses legal options for the promotion of social considerations in the supply chain, considering in particular the potential of the European Union legal regime for public procurement as a tool for improving working conditions and human rights in the electronics industry supply chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]