Precarious Asia Kalleberg, Arne L; Hewison, Kevin; Shin, Kwang-Yeong
12/2021
eBook
Precarious Asia assesses the role of global and
domestic factors in shaping precarious work and its outcomes in
Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia as they represent a range of
Asian political ...democracies and capitalist economies: Japan and
South Korea are now developed and mature economies, while Indonesia
remains a lower-middle income country.
With their established backgrounds in Asian studies, comparative
political economy, social stratification and inequality, and the
sociology of work, the authors yield compelling insights into the
extent and consequences of precarious work, examining the dynamics
underlying its rise. By linking macrostructural policies to both
the mesostructure of labor relations and the microstructure of
outcomes experienced by individual workers, they reveal the
interplay of forces that generate precarious work, and in doing so,
synthesize historical and institutional analyses with the political
economy of capitalism and class relations. This book reveals how
precarious work ultimately contributes to increasingly high levels
of inequality and condemns segments of the population to chronic
poverty and many more to livelihood and income vulnerability.
How do precarious workers employed in call-centres, universities, the fashion industry and many other labour markets organise, struggle and communicate to become recognised, influential political ...subjects? &dquoteMedia Practices and Protest Politics; How Precarious Workers Mobilise&dquote reveals the process by which individuals at the margins of the labour market and excluded from the welfare state communicate and struggle outside the realm of institutional politics to gain recognition in the political sphere. In this important and thought provoking work Alice Mattoni suggests an all-encompassing approach to understanding grassroots political communication in contemporary societies. Using original examples from precarious workers mobilizations in Italy she explores a range of activist media practices and compares different categories of media technologies, organizations and outlets from the printed press to web application and from mainstream to alternative media. Explaining how activists perceive and understand the media environment in which they are embedded the book discusses how they must interact with a diverse range of media professionals and technologies and considers how mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media represent protests. Media Practices and Protest Politics offers important insights for understanding mechanisms and patterns of visibility in struggles for recognition and redistribution in post-democratic societies and provides a valuable contribution to the field of political communication and social movement studies.
Why do some European welfare states protect unemployed and inadequately employed workers ("outsiders") from economic uncertainty better than others? Philip Rathgeb's study of labor market policy ...change in three somewhat-similar small states-Austria, Denmark, and Sweden-explores this fundamental question. He does so by examining the distribution of power between trade unions and political parties, attempting to bridge these two lines of research-trade unions and party politics-that, with few exceptions, have advanced without a mutual exchange.
Inclusive trade unions have high political stakes in the protection of outsiders, because they incorporate workers at risk of unemployment into their representational outlook. Yet, the impact of union preferences has declined over time, with a shift in the balance of class power from labor to capital across the Western world. National governments have accordingly prioritized flexibility for employers over the social protection of outsiders. As a result, organized labor can only protect outsiders when governments are reliant on union consent for successful consensus mobilization. When governments have a united majority of seats, on the other hand, they are strong enough to exclude unions.Strong Governments, Precarious Workerscalls into question the electoral responsiveness of national governments-and thus political parties-to the social needs of an increasingly numerous group of precarious workers. In the end, Rathgeb concludes that the weaker the government, the stronger the capacity of organized labor to enhance the social protection of precarious workers.
Contesting Precarity in Japan details the new forms of workers' protest and opposition that have developed as Japan's economy has transformed over the past three decades and highlights their impact ...upon the country's policymaking process. Drawing on a new dataset charting protest events from the 1980s to the present, Saori Shibata produces the first systematic study of Japan's new precarious labour movement. It details the movement's rise during Japan's post-bubble economic transformation and highlights the different and innovative forms of dissent that mark the end of the country's famously non- confrontational industrial relations. In doing so, moreover, she shows how this new pattern of industrial and social tension is reflected within the country's macroeconomic policymaking, resulting in a new policy dissensus that has consistently failed to offer policy reforms that would produce a return to economic growth. As a result, Shibata argues that the Japanese model of capitalism has therefore become increasingly disorganized.
Despotism on Demand draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, argues Alex J. Wood, we see ...how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace. Wood believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffers a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world he uncovers how control in the contemporary "flexible firm" is achieved through the insidious combination of "flexible discipline" and "schedule gifts." Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive "schedule gifts": more or better hours. Wood concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.
This article presents an overview of the recent work on precarious employment and employment quality in relation to workers’ health and well-being. More specifically, the article mainly reviews the ...work performed in the E.U. 7th Framework project, SOPHIE. First, we present our overarching conceptual framework. Then, we provide a compiled overview of the evidence on the sociodemographic and European crosscountry distribution of employment quality and employment precariousness. Subsequently, we provide the current evidence regarding the relations with health and broader worker well-being indicators. A final section summarizes current insights on the pathways relating precarious employment and health and well-being. The article concludes with a plea for further data collection and research into the longitudinal effects of employment precariousness among emerging groups of workers. Based on the evidence compiled in this article, policymakers should be convinced of the harmful health and well-being effects of employment precariousness and (further) labor market flexibilization.
Through a series of studies, the overarching aim of this book is to investigate if and how the digitalization/digital transformation process causes (or may cause) the autonomy of various labor ...functions, and its impact in creating (or stymieing) various job opportunities on the labor market. This book also seeks to illuminate what actors/groups are mostly benefited by the digitalization/digital transformation and which actors/groups that are put at risk by it.This book takes its point of departure from a 2016 OECD report that contends that the impact digitalization has on the future of labor is ambiguous, as on the one hand it is suggested that technological change is labor-saving, but on the other hand, it is suggested that digital technologies have not created new jobs on a scale that it replaces old jobs. Another 2018 OECD report indicated that digitalization and automation as such does not pose a real risk of destroying any significant number of jobs for the foreseeable future, although tasks would by and large change significantly. This would affects welfare, as most of its revenue stems from taxation, and particularly so from the taxation on labor (directly or indirectly). For this reason, this book will set out to explore how the future technological and societal advancements impact labor conditions.The book seeks to provide an innovative, enriching and controversial take on how various aspects of the labor market can be (and are) affected the ongoing digitalization trend in a way that is not covered by extant literature. As such, this book intends to cater to a wider readership, from a general audience and students, to specialized professionals and academics wanting to gain a deeper understanding of the possible future developments of the labor market in light of an accelerating digitalization/digital transformation of society at large.
Current understanding of what constitutes work in the growing gig economy is heavily conflated, ranging from conceptualisations of independent contracting to other forms of contingent labour. This ...article calls for a move away from problematic aggregations by proposing a classification of gig work into three variants, all based strongly upon key technological features: app‐work, crowdwork, and capital platform work. Focusing specifically on the app‐work variant, this article's more delineated focus on the textured dimensions of this work proposes new lines of enquiry into employment relationships and human resource management. Examining the crucial role of algorithmic management, we critically discuss the impact of this novel mediation tool used by gig organisations for the nature of employment relations within app‐work, work assignment processes, and performance management. In so doing, we propose a series of research questions that can serve as a guide for future research in this increasingly important field.
The recent vast upsurge in social science scholarship on job precarity has generally little to say about earlier forms of this phenomenon. Eloisa Betti's monograph convincingly demonstrates on the ...example of Italy that even in the post-war phase of Keynesian stability and welfare state, precarious labor was an underlying feature of economic development. She examines how in this short period exceptional politics of labor stability prevailed. The volume then presents the processes whereby labor precarity regained momentum- under the name of flexibility- in the post-Fordist phase from the early 1980s, taking on new forms in the Craxi and Berlusconi eras. Multiple actors are addressed in the analysis. The book gives voice to intellectuals, scholars, politicians and trade unionists as they have framed the concept and debates on precarious work from the 1950s onwards. Views of labor law experts, politicians and public servants are investigated in regard to labor regulations. Positions of the very precarians are explored, ranging from rural women, industrial homeworkers and blue-collar workers to physicians, university researchers and trainees, unveiling the emergence of anti-precarity social movements. The continuous role of women's associations and feminist groups in opposing labor precarity since the 1950s is prominently exposed.
Border Capitalism, Disruptedpresents an insightful ethnography of migrant labor regulation at the Mae Sot Special Border Economic Zone on the Myanmar border in northwest Thailand. By bringing a new ...deployment of workerist and autonomist theory to bear on his fieldwork, Stephen Campbell highlights the ways in which workers' struggles have catalyzed transformations in labor regulation at the frontiers of capital in the global south.
Looking outwards from Mae Sot, Campbell engages extant scholarship on flexibilization and precarious labor, which, typically, is based on the development experiences of the global north. Campbell emphasizes the everyday practices of migrants, the police, employers, NGOs, and private passport brokers to understand the "politics of precarity" and the new forms of worker organization and resistance that are emerging in Asian industrial zones.
Focusing, in particular, on the uses and effects of borders as technologies of rule, Campbell argues that geographies of labor regulation can be read as the contested and fragile outcomes of prior and ongoing working-class struggles.Border Capitalism, Disruptedconcludes that with the weakened influence of formal unions, understanding the role of these alternative forms of working-class organizations in labor-capital relations becomes critical.
With a broad data set gleaned from almost two years of fieldwork,Border Capitalism, Disruptedwill appeal directly to those in anthropology, labor studies, political economy, and geography, as well as Southeast Asian studies.
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