China’s economic success has been founded partly on relatively cheap labour, especially in the export industries. In recent years, however, there has been growing concern about wages and labour ...standards in China. This book examines how wages are bargained, fought over and determined in China, by exploring how the pattern of labour conflict has changed over time since the 1970s. It focuses in particular on the city of Shenzhen where labour conflict and workers’ protests have been especially prevalent. This book includes a detailed account of the transformation of labour relations and labour policy in China more broadly during 2004 to 2009, a period when there have been significant changes in the labour market, labour regulation and labour relations. The author argues that these recent developments have brought to the fore the class basis of workers’ protest in China and have thoroughly undermined the post-Marxist analysis of identity politics. The book makes an invaluable contribution to studies on industry and labour, as well as Chinese studies.
"Chris King-Chi Chan’s book is a particularly well-informed work of scholarship on the process of working-class formation among rural migrant workers in Shenzhen... should prove invaluable both for scholars versed in the study of contemporary China and for those interested in labour politics and urban change in transitional societies." - Eric Florence, Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies, University of Liege, Belgium; Local Economy, 26(5)
"Why do workers go on strike? How are the strikes organized? How do the strikes affect employers, workers and the government? And what are the implications of the strikes for the future of workers and labour movement in China? In this highly original book, Chris King-Chi Chan answers these questions based on intensive field research in Shenzhen and reveals an emerging picture of ‘class struggle without class organization’ in China. This is a timely and welcome contribution to the field of China labour studies... Chan should be applauded for providing us with valuable insights into workers’ struggles in China. This excellent ethnography study is a must-read for anyone who is interested in Chinese labour issues." - Mingwei Liu, Rutgers University; British Journal of Industrial Relations, 50:1 March 2012
"Chris Chan provides an amazing variety of first-hand information giving detailed insights into the working conditions, discourses and struggles of migrant workers in China’s first Special Economic Zone, Shenzhen." - Günter Schucher, GIGA Institute of Asian Studies, Hamburg; THE CHINA JOURNAL, No. 67
"This book’s rich documentation of a transformative moment in labour relations makes it a valuable addition to the study of labour in China." - Mark W. Frazier; The China Quarterly, 207, September 2011
1. Introduction: Globalisation and Chinese Migrant Workers 2. Labour Conflict in Shen Zhen: a Historical Review 3. Community and Shop Floor Culture: a Prelude to Workers' Protests 4. Strikes and Changing Power Relations in the Workplace 5. Workplace Conflict, Legal Institution, and Labour Regime 6. International Civil Society, Chinese Trade Unionism, and Workplace Representation 7. Conclusion: Workers' Struggle and the Changing Regime in China
Chris King-Chi Chan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Social Science at the City University of Hong Kong, and is an active member of labour NGOs in Hong Kong and on mainland China. He gained his PhD at the University of Warwick, UK, and previously worked as a trade union organiser in Hong Kong.
This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution, first published in 2010. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and ...nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship and the duration of schooling. The classic era of industrialisation, 1790–1850, apparently saw an upsurge in child labour. While the memoirs implicate mechanisation and the division of labour in this increase, they also show that fatherlessness and large subsets, common in these turbulent, high-mortality and high-fertility times, often cast children as partners and supports for mothers struggling to hold families together. The book offers unprecedented insights into child labour, family life, careers and schooling. Its images of suffering, stoicism and occasional childish pleasures put the humanity back into economic history and the trauma back into the industrial revolution.
"One of the most dramatic economic transformations of the past century has been the entry of women into the labor force. While many theories explain why this change took place, we investigate the ...process of transition itself. We argue that local information transmission generates changes in participation that are geographically heterogeneous, locally correlated, and smooth in the aggregate, just like those observed in our data. In our model, women learn about the effects of maternal employment on children by observing nearby employed women. When few women participate in the labor force, data are scarce and participation rises slowly. As information accumulates in some regions, the effects of maternal employment become less uncertain and more women in that region participate. Learning accelerates, labor force participation rises faster, and regional participation rates diverge. Eventually, information diffuses throughout the economy, beliefs converge to the truth, participation flattens out, and regions become more similar again. To investigate the empirical relevance of our theory, we use a new county-level data set to compare our calibrated model to the time series and geographic patterns of participation." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Längsschnitt; historisch. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1940 bis 2005.
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We show that the effects of taxes on labor supply are shaped by interactions between adjustment costs for workers and hours constraints set by firms. We develop a model in which firms post job offers ...characterized by an hours requirement and workers pay search costs to find jobs. We present evidence supporting three predictions of this model by analyzing bunching at kinks using Danish tax records. First, larger kinks generate larger taxable income elasticities. Second, kinks that apply to a larger group of workers generate larger elasticities. Third, the distribution of job offers is tailored to match workers' aggregate tax preferences in equilibrium. Our results suggest that macro elasticities may be substantially larger than the estimates obtained using standard microeconometric methods.
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This book, the first in the new series Advances in Labour Studies, is an international and interdisciplinary response to the neoliberal ideologies that have shaped labour market regulation in recent ...decades. International in scope, it includes chapters on both advanced economies (Canada, Europe, United States) and the developing world (Brazil, China, Indonesia, Tanzania). Co-published with Palgrave Macmillan.
Historically, Canada has adopted immigration policies focused on admitting migrants who were expected to become citizens. A dramatic shift has occurred in recent years as the number of temporary ...labourers admitted to Canada has increased substantially. Legislated Inequality critically evaluates this radical development in Canadian immigration, arguing that it threatens to undermine Canada’s success as an immigrant nation. Assessing each of the four major temporary labour migration programs in Canada, contributors from a range of disciplines - including comparative political science, philosophy, and sociology - show how temporary migrants are posed to occupy a permanent yet marginal status in society and argue that Canada's temporary labour policy must undergo fundamental changes in order to support Canada's long held immigration goals. The difficult working conditions faced by migrant workers, as well as the economic and social dangers of relying on temporary migration to relieve labour shortages, are described in detail. Legislated Inequality provides an essential critical analysis of the failings of temporary labour migration programs in Canada and proposes tangible ways to improve the lives of labourers. Contributors include Abigail B. Bakan (Queen's University), Tom Carter (University of Manitoba), Sarah D'Aoust (University of Ottawa), Christina Gabriel (Carleton University), Jill Hanley (McGill University), Jenna Hennebry (Wilfrid Laurier University), Christine Hughes (Carleton University), Karen D. Hughes (University of Alberta), Jahhon Koo (McGill University), Patti Tamara Lenard (University of Ottawa), Laura Macdonald (Carleton University), Janet McLaughlin (Wilfrid Laurier University), Delphine Nakache (University of Ottawa), Jacqueline Oxman-Martinez (Université de Montréal), Kerry Priebisch (University of Guelph), André Rivard (University of Windsor), Nandita Sharma (University of Hawaii), Eric Shragge (Concordia University), Denise Spitzer (University of Ottawa), Daiva Stasuilus (Carleton University) Christine Straehle (University of Ottawa), Patricia Tomic (University of British Columbia, Okanagan), Sarah Torres (University of Ottawa), and Richard Trumper (University of British Columbia, Okanagan).
The Economics of Labor Coercion Acemoglu, Daron; Wolitzky, Alexander
Econometrica,
March 2011, Volume:
79, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are "coercive," in the sense that force or the threat ...of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms. We propose a tractable principal-agent model of coercion, based on the idea that coercive activities by employers, or "guns," affect the participation constraint of workers. We show that coercion and effort are complements, so that coercion increases effort, but coercion always reduces utilitarian social welfare. Better outside options for workers reduce coercion because of the complementarity between coercion and effort: workers with a better outside option exert lower effort in equilibrium and thus are coerced less. Greater demand for labor increases coercion because it increases equilibrium effort. We investigate the interaction between outside options, market prices, and other economic variables by embedding the (coercive) principal-agent relationship in a general equilibrium setup, and studying when and how labor scarcity encourages coercion. General (market) equilibrium interactions working through the price of output lead to a positive relationship between labor scarcity and coercion along the lines of ideas suggested by Domar, while interactions those working through the outside option lead to a negative relationship similar to ideas advanced in neo-Malthusian historical analyses of the decline of feudalism. In net, a decline in available labor increases coercion in general equilibrium if and only if its direct (partial equilibrium) effect is to increase the price of output by more than it increases outside options. Our model also suggests that markets in slaves make slaves worse off, conditional on enslavement, and that coercion is more viable in industries that do not require relationship-specific investment by workers.
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Globalisation, the shift from manufacturing to services as a source of employment, and the spread of information-based systems and technologies have given birth to a new economy, which emphasises ...flexibility in the labour market and in employment relations. These changes have led to the erosion of the standard (industrial) employment relationship and an increase in precarious work - work which is poorly paid and insecure. Women perform a disproportionate amount of precarious work. This collection of original essays by leading scholars on labour law and women's work explores the relationship between precarious work and gender, and evaluates the extent to which the growth and spread of precarious work challenges traditional norms of labour law and conventional forms of legal regulation.The book provides a comparative perspective by furnishing case studies from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Quebec, Sweden, the UK, and the US, as well as the international and supranational context through essays that focus on the IMF, the ILO, and the EU. Common themes and concepts thread throughout the essays, which grapple with the legal and public policy challenges posed by women's precarious work.
The increase in female employment and participation rates is one of the most dramatic changes to have taken place in the economy during the last century. However, while the employment rate of married ...women more than doubled during the last 50 years, that of unmarried women remained almost constant. To empirically analyze these trends, we estimate a female dynamic labor supply model using an extended version of Eckstein and Wolpin (1989) to compare the various explanations in the literature for the observed trends. This dynamic model provides a much better fit to the life-cycle employment pattern than a static version of the model and a standard static reduced form model (Heckman (1979)). The main finding using the dynamic model is that the rise in education levels accounts for about 33 percent of the increase in female employment, and the rise in wages and narrowing of the gender wage gap account for another 20 percent, while about 40 percent remains unexplained by observed household characteristics. We show that this unexplained portion can be empirically attributed to cohort-specific changes in preferences or the costs of child-rearing and household maintenance. Finally, the decline in fertility and the increase in divorce rates account for only a small share of the increase in female employment rates.
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