Suchergebnisse

AbstractDay‐labor markets are characterized by chronic instability, low pay, and weak institutional protections against violations of labor standards. In the U.S., worker centers address these conditions through the operation of hiring halls that dispatch workers, set minimum wages, and redress wage theft. Surveys conducted in Seattle in 2012 and 2015 were used to evaluate wage rates, employment rates, and wage theft variables for workers at a worker center and those seeking employment at four informal hiring sites. Worker center members were found to have significantly higher wages, higher employment rates, and lower rates of wage theft than day laborers who search for employment in public spaces.

This article explores strategies for organizing workers in residential construction in light of the decades long restructuring of the industry. It begins by charting the course of this restructuring and the impacts it has had on employment conditions, including changes in union density, the deterioration of labor standards, and the rise of various labor market intermediaries that assist employers in managing contingent labor. The article then turns to day labor and the controversial topic of whether worker centers should operate hiring halls. It argues that, unlike temporary staffing agencies and other labor brokers, the operation of day labor worker centers is complementary to union organizing strategies. These hiring halls help monitor employer practices while also raising the floor on wages and working conditions. It concludes with a call for ongoing innovation in worker organizing.

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.

Day labour and other forms of temporary, casualised and precarious employment lie at the centre of an emergent employment regime that is rewriting labour market rules in major US cities. Flexibilisation of work, processes of regional industrial restructuring and uneven development at the urban scale interact to create the conditions for the spread of low-wage contingent employment. The spread of contingent work has pursued a path of least resistance, destabilising and undermining the already difficult conditions in low-wage labour markets. This has contributed to the reproduction and reinforcement of patterns of labour market segmentation, racial polarisation and social exclusion within urban labour markets. This paper examines the restructuring of urban employment regimes through the lens of low-wage, temporary employment and its attendant social division of labour at the urban scale. The aim is two-fold: first, to examine the ways in which a 'regime of precarious employment' has been embedded within a regional growth model; and, secondly, to describe emerging forms of labour market regulation that are associated with this employment regime.

We inhabit a perpetually accelerating and increasingly interconnected world, with new ideas, fads, and fashions moving at social-media speed. New policy ideas, especially "ideas that work," are now able to find not only a worldwide audience but also transnational salience in remarkably short order. Fast Policy is the first systematic treatment of this phenomenon, one that compares processes of policy development across two rapidly moving fields that emerged in the Global South and have quickly been adopted worldwide⎯conditional cash transfers (a social policy program that conditions payments o

Abstract
For nearly a half century, questions of why and how firms navigate the "make-buy" decision have animated fields as varied as industrial relations and economic geography. The idea of "core competencies" became the dominant explanation of corporate decision-making processes, where any activity deemed outside of the central specializations of the firm is a possible candidate for outsourcing. Coupled with the focus on short-term profit taking, corporate leaders have grown increasingly focused on shedding less-profitable activities and shifting supply-chain risk—leading to high levels of lead-firm influence over subcontracting markets and the cost-based competition that permeates them. This paper examines the role of third-party logistics companies (3pl s) in the warehousing sector. It argues that efforts to contain operational costs increasingly are focused on labor and that the ability to access and deploy low-cost labor is among the "core competencies" touted by many 3pl s in the warehousing sector.

L'informalité économique est généralement définie comme l'absence d'action étatique à cause de déficits institutionnels dans la capacité de l'État à réguler les activités économiques sur son territoire. Il existe un certain consensus sur l'importance de comprendre le rôle de l'État dans la suppression ou la croissance de l'informalité, afin de mieux expliquer l'étendue, la nature et l'évolution de l'économie informelle. Ce texte discute du rôle de l'État dans le double processus de désyndicalisation et d'informalisation dans le secteur de la construction résidentielle. L'un des effets prévisibles de ce double processus est la diminution des conditions de travail. Le travail précaire est de plus en plus important et les travailleurs immigrants (plusieurs sans statut légal dans le pays) sont devenus des « travailleurs de choix » pour les contracteurs qui se font la concurrence sur la base d'une diminution des coûts et la sueur des ouvriers.