Global Labour Journal

Larry Liu

Review of: Hein Marais (2022) In the Balance: The Case for a Universal Basic Income

评述：海因·马雷斯（2022）《在平衡中：全民基本收入之辩》

While the tech giants are using privatisation to present themselves as providers of solutions to global problems, digitalisation is creating new forms of transnational activism. Global unions are emerging as players in this contest, helping to build counter power at both the local and global level. Through a comparison of the use of digital technology in two case studies in Africa involving two different global unions the article demonstrates how global unions can, through their intermediary coordinating role at the supranational level, deepen worker power. KEYWORDS: Global unions; digital technology; informal work; power resources; union revitalisation

Edward Webster

Carmen Ludwig

Contesting Digital Technology through New Forms of Transnational Activism

通过新形式的跨国行动主义挑战数字技术

Maurizio Atzeni

Neethi P

Nicolas Pons-Vignon

Ben Scully

Editorial

社论

Domestic workers provide a variety of services and contribute significantly to the global economy. However, domestic work has long been undervalued in the labour market. In January 2013, Italy became the first country in Europe, and the first among the countries receiving migrant domestic workers, to ratify International Labour Organization Convention No. 189, the Domestic Workers Convention. In contrast to the unprecedented dedication to domestic workers’ labour rights specified in C189, the majority of domestic workers presently in Italy are migrant women and undeclared workers. This article draws on interviews to show how Italy’s ratification of C189 was accomplished through well-organised tripartism and top-down ratification processes, while perpetuating the undervaluation of the work status of migrant domestic workers. KEYWORDS: Domestic workers; ILO Convention No. 189; Italy; migrant workers; labour protection

Rie Miyazaki

Is There a Dualistic Protection System for Migrant Domestic Workers? The "Easy" and "Speedy" Ratification of the ILO Convention on Decent Work for Domestic Workers in Italy

移民家政工人是否存在双重保护制度？意大利对《国际劳工组织家政工人享有体面劳动公约》的“轻松”与“迅速”批准

When coined about half a century ago, employment in the informal economy was discussed by what it was not: formal. Addressed as a sector of the urban workforce, its definition was a summing up of descriptive traits which made manifest how people in the Global South, deprived of most or all means of production, earned their livelihood by selling their labour power. Investigating their predicament zoomed in on the restructuring of peasant economies and societies to post-peasant ones. The anticipated upward mobility, which was supposed to be boosted by the bargaining power of collective action, did not materialise. Rather than expanding formalisation of labour relations, the reverse took place. The small segment which had been promoted to and protected by regular and regulated employment was subjected to informalisation. In the onslaught of neo-liberal capitalism from the last quarter of the twentieth century onwards, labour flexibilisation and casualisation not only intensified in the Global South but also spread to the Global North. The new policies ended the brokerage which the nation–state once developed to mediate between the interests of capital and labour, leading to a worldwide shrinking of public institutions, space and representation. While the debate with regard to informality has remained firmly focused on labour and employment, I argue that corporate capital in collusion with étatist authority has not only effectuated the deregulation of paid work but also abandoned the legal code of formality ending in a state of lawlessness for the people at the bottom of the pile. In the reconfiguration, both politics and governance are next to big business as stakeholders in a regime of informality erosive of equality, democracy, civil rights, solidarity and shared well-being for humankind at large. KEYWORDS: Capitalism; trade unionism; public sector; welfarism; footloose; self-reliance

Jan Breman

A Short History of the Informal Economy

非正规经济简史

A growing number of climate activists and scholars argue that an effective climate movement needs the involvement of the trade union movement, to be able to push forward the radical social transformations required to address the global climate crisis. This article analyses the recent focus on climate adaptation in labour education and action by trade unions in the UK. Climate adaptation is inherently political, and this article analyses the agendas driving the turn to adaptation, the possibilities that adaptation strategies open up, and some of their risks and limitations. Climate adaptation strategies, the article argues, could represent an important step forward for developing effective labour education and action on the climate crisis, but only if these strategies enable unions to mobilize a focus on the root causes of the crisis, agitate for structural change, and attend to the global and not just local concerns of worker, social and climate justice.

Stuart Tannock

Adaptation Strategies: Labour Education, Climate Crisis and the UK Trade Union Movement

适应策略：劳工教育、气候危机与英国工会运动

The ever-increasing use of automation technologies in the manufacturing process has again raised concerns about the future of work. A considerable number of left-wing thinkers argue that, with the wave of automation, we see a dissolution of the foundations of a work-based capitalist society, and that a new society has emerged spontaneously. Marx’s studies have been referenced, more or less, in most of these analyses. Efforts to base this thesis that we are moving into a post-work society on Marx are highly speculative. In Marx’s analysis, automation and proletarianisation are two facets in the process of accumulation of capital that function together. A small number of workers and technology-intensive manufacturing in some sectors make labour-intensive production necessary in other sectors and countries. Today’s available data and trends also indicate that Marx’s analysis of automation in the context of accumulation of capital is still applicable.

Arif Kosar

Marx, Automation and the Future of Work

马克思、自动化与未来工作

There is perhaps no more paradigmatically settler-colonial activity than agriculture, especially in the Palestinian/Israeli context. Zionist strategists perceived the takeover of farmland from indigenous cultivators as a primary goal of their colonising project, pursuing it eagerly through purchase until the war of 1948, and primarily through violence since then. More than an economic sector, agriculture has served a strategic role in consolidating control over broad stretches of frontier, as well as the ideological purpose of emblematising the Jewish people’s return to its land (Shafir, 1989; Neumann, 2011). However, pace the emergent orthodoxy in settler-colonial studies – which has recently been subjected to strident critiques, not least in the Palestinian/Israeli context – Israeli agriculture has not, for the most part, been characterised by an “eliminationist” attitude towards indigenous labour or by a serious commitment to exclusively employing the labour of settlers.[1] In fact, Israeli agriculture, like other low-wage sectors of the economy, has nearly always depended on Palestinian labour. When the First Intifada of 1987 to 1991 convinced Israeli policymakers that this dependency was dangerous, their response was to replace it not with the more expensive labour of Israeli citizens, but with the similarly cheap and skilled labour of migrant workers. The farm sector would quickly come to recruit the bulk of its workforce from Thailand, while continuing to employ thousands of Palestinians.

Matan Kaminer

“No Foreign Workers, No Agriculture, No Region”: Thai Farmworkers in Israel in the Wake of War

“没有外籍劳工，就没有农业，就没有地区”：战争后在以色列的泰国农场工人

Professor Edward Webster, affectionately known as Eddie, breathed his last on 5 March 2024, twenty-four days before his eighty-second birthday. Eddie was healthy and had just participated in a run. The shocking untimely death has left a profound void. His impactful research work, integrating a consistent focus on work and labour, spanned decades, dating back to the early 1970s. Eddie went beyond just researching and publishing – activities in which he engaged extensively. He was an engaged intellectual, actively involved in the emancipatory working-class movement to change the world he researched. Writing with Lynford Dor, Webster defends the power resources approach which identifies the sources of workers' power and includes a focus on workers' resistance to exploitation in pursuit of their interests. Webster successfully challenges the “end of labour thesis” using evidence-based sectoral case studies from a selection of global South countries. He brought together contributions by other scholars in the edited book. The “end of labour thesis” can also be challenged from the standpoint of the labour theory of value. However, this is not part of the authors’ chosen approach, which suffices on its own merits.

Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo

Book Review Symposium 2

书评研讨会2

Work is at the centre of the social metabolism with nature. This means that industrial relations (IR) are always also environmental politics. This article reviews core contributions to IR literature, showing that they do not systematically address this role of nature and separate the politics of work from their ecological basis. Drawing on historical case studies of the processing of three core products of capitalist modernity (fossil fuels, meat and concrete), the article presents the heuristic of metabolic politics in which nonhuman nature is conceptualised as an autonomous force in IR rather than a mere context of it. This approach allows analysis to systematically take into account the effects of IR on nonhuman nature as well as nature’s own shaping of IR. Such an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to understand the entanglement of IR with climate change and the broader ecological crisis.

Simon Schaupp

Metabolic politics

代谢政治学

Abbreviation	Glob. Labour J.
Journal Impact	1.37
Quartiles(Global)	INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS & LABOR(Q3)

Publication Information	Publisher: McMaster University Library，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: Yes
Basic data	Year of publication: 2010，Proportion of original research papers: 100.00%，Self Citation Rate:15.40%， Gold OA Rate: 0.00%
Average review cycle	39 weeks

Global Labour Journal

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