Guy Standing is among the most provocative and influential analysts of the rise of precarious work around the world. His writing is part of a wave of global labour studies that has documented the ...spread of precarious work throughout the Global North and South. However, this article argues that by treating precarity around the world as a single phenomenon, produced by globalisation, the work of Standing and others obscures the different and much longer history of precarious work in the Global South. This article shows how many of the features that Standing associates with the contemporary “precariat” have long been widespread among Southern workers. This longer history of precarity has important implications for contemporary debates about a new politics of labour, which is a central focus of Standing’s recent work.
An Update on Editorial Changes at the GLJ Cook, Maria Lorena; Gallas, Alexander; P, Neethi ...
Global labour journal,
05/2022, Letnik:
13, Številka:
2
Journal Article
A New Year Brings Change to the GLJ Cook, Maria Lorena; Dutta, Madhumita; Gallas, Alexander ...
Global labour journal,
01/2022, Letnik:
13, Številka:
1
Journal Article
The semi-proletarian thesis, formulated by Marxist scholars in the 1970s, posits that semi-proletarian conditions, in which rural households earn income from both farming and labor migration, are in ...the best interest of capital because the non-wage agricultural income subsidizes part of the costs of labor reproduction. The thesis has been applied to both South Africa and China. In light of the new developments in the two countries, this paper argues that the key issue of semi-proletarianization today is less about how rural economies subsidize capital and more about whether peasant and migrant families can hold onto land rights in an era of heightened precarity, widespread land grabbing and rampant capitalist expansion. As such, we propose to reorient the focus of the thesis from the subsidy function of rural land for capital to its importance in livelihood security for semi-proletarian workers.
This article presents a comparison of central debates in South African labor sociology in the 1970s and the contemporary era. I argue that scholars can break through impasses in current labor ...sociology debates by reviving attention to the land-labor-livelihood (LLL) connections that inspired theoretical advancements in the South African literature of the 1970s. After an introduction and definition of LLL connections, the paper analyzes an exemplary work of the labor literature of the 1970s, giving special attention to the way in which the LLL focus shaped the questions asked by the authors. The article proceeds to a review of central debates from the current labor literature, which focuses primarily on issues of the labor movement. It is argued that this focus on movements has limited the scope of labor scholarship, resulting in an impasse in South African labor debates. An emerging literature that renews attention to the LLL connections is proposed as a model for moving beyond this impasse. I close the article by discussing the implications for this review of South African literature for global labor scholarship. Adapted from the source document.
To grasp what might exist beyond neoliberalism, we need to rethink the history of development before neoliberalism. This article makes two arguments. First, for poorer countries, processes of ...commodification which are highlighted as evidence of neoliberalism often predate the neoliberal era. Third World development policies tended to make social and economic life more precarious as a corollary to capital accumulation before neoliberalism as an ideology took hold. Second, the intense theoretical and discursive focus on neoliberalism has obscured a tangible shift towards de-commodification in much of the global South. The most salient examples today are state-led social assistance programs that have been implemented across the former Third World. These emerged not out of technocratic fixes from above but often out of political and social struggles from below. The rise and spread of these programs are not only in stark contrast to popular conceptions of a neoliberal reinforcement, but are also specifically targeted at social strata whose precarity commonly originated in developmental policies before the neoliberal era. Utilizing a database of 183 active flagship social assistance programs in 84 developing countries, we present macro-level quantitative evidence of the rise and spread of social protection policies over the past two decades in the global South. We then detail these programs for four middle-income countries—China, Brazil, India, and South Africa. To those who lament that the 2008 crisis has produced no Polanyian double movement, we argue that these state-driven social assistance policies are such a mechanism.
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