Labor Organizing and Worker's Rights

This article attributes the crisis in Zimbabwe and the privation of the Zimbabwean people to two malignant factors; the political authoritarianism of the Mugabe regime and the neoliberalism evident in the structural adjustment programme of the 1990s and punitive economic actions against Zimbabwe in the 2000s. The Mugabe regime's shift towards anti-imperialism and land reform in 2000 has engendered political polarisation, creating the perception of two competing political blocs and divergent perspectives on what constitutes a truly 'emancipatory' struggle in Zimbabwe. In an attempt to transcend this polarising narrative, an 'emancipatory' struggle is here understood as one which avoids undermining either political or socioeconomic rights by offering an effective challenge to both political authoritarianism and neoliberalism. A strong opposition movement centred upon the labour movement has offered such a struggle, particularly through the radical agenda and activism of the rank-and-file workers as part of a broader labour multitude at the grassroots of civil society. Labour's struggle has not been unproblematic; internal tensions, difficulties engaging with rural land redistribution struggles and the nascent neoliberalism of the MDC have created notable problems. However, by navigating the polarised realities of Zimbabwe and the continued challenges posed by political authoritarianism and neoliberalism, the labour movement has retained its potential as an emancipatory and de-polarising force in Zimbabwe.

On 24 April 2013, the Rana plaza, a factory building housing five garment factories, collapsed in Savar, Bangladesh and claimed lives of at least 1134 people, most of whom were women garment workers (Akhter). Many volunteers updated their Facebook statuses to disseminate information about what is needed by emergency responders at the site of collapse. Social media celebrities, whom Zeynap Tufekci would call “microcelebrities” (Tufekci, 2013), played a phenomenon role in disseminating information about what kind of rescue and relief support was needed on the ground. In this paper, I propose a cultural geographic understanding of the space of social media and explore placemaking processes through which microcelebrities got engaged in neoliberal conformist voluntarism. Being inspired by a middle class urban civic consciousness, microcelebrities produced homogenous cultural and ideological composition of women garment workers, which was disconnected from their material lives and collective histories. I juxtapose two cases of virtual activism around the Rana plaza collapse and the Shahbag protest with each other with a view to examining how gender, class, neoliberalism, and nationalism determine the politics of exclusion and inclusion in the space of social media. I further examine some oppositional practices that challenge microphysics of power and politics of representation in these spaces.

In this chapter I engage with a number of critical case studies written by scholars and advocates regarding efforts to improve human rights outcomes in global supply chains through private regulatory initiatives (PRIs).  More particularly, I suggest that situating these PRIs in the political economy of corporate power that I and others term “supply chain capitalism” helps to explain many of the difficulties PRIs have had in achieving their justice objectives.  My argument proceeds in three parts. First, I give more context to the political economy of supply chain capitalism and suggest why it is significant for development policy, inequality, and human rights outcomes in global supply structures. Next, I argue that the power imbalances and competitive conditions that predominate in supply chain capitalism are a significant factor contributing to the limited justice impact of the PRIs. I conclude with some suggestions for ways in which PRIs might increase their impact by using their unique knowledge, organizational capacity, and relationships in particular supply chains to challenge the concentrations of corporate power that are shaping the unjust distributional and human rights outcomes of supply chain capitalism.

O presente trabalho versa sobre a tendência legislativa flexibilizatória legal da jornada de trabalho no Brasil como fator de precarização das relações trabalhistas, pois, apesar de vista como propulsora do estabelecimento de condições de trabalho supostamente melhor adaptadas aos interesses de empregados e empregadores, tem autorizado o elastecimento da jornada laboral, razão pela qual se revela oportuno discutir a utilidade e eficácia dessas novas medidas, debatendo-se as premissas adotadas como fundamento para sua legitimação. A limitação da duração diária do trabalho foi uma das primeiras reivindicações do operariado, de modo que a regulação da jornada se constituiu, historicamente, no marco inicial do Direito do Trabalho, disciplina originada da necessidade de se equalizar o desequilíbrio contratual existente na relação entre empregado e empregador. Foi assim que se iniciou a luta humana pela diminuição da jornada de trabalho, considerada como reivindicação chave dos trabalhadores. Logo, verifica-se sintomático o avanço dessa tendência legislativa flexibilizatória.

This chapter seeks to explain the prevalence of forced labor in the construction industry and illustrate the phenomenon through a few case studies, including the casino-builders in Saipan. Readers will be introduced to some features of the con­struction industry that make workers vulnerable to labor exploitation more gener­ally and factors that make workers susceptible to various tools of force and coercion. Methods of control that employers often use include physically restraining workers, exploiting worker indebtedness, withholding wages, and fostering the workers' dependence on the employer. Such mechanisms were crucial in the use of forced labor to construct railroads in the 1800s and the more recent Saipan case mentioned above. The chapter then traces how strategies of coercion in the construction indus­try have remained surprisingly consistent over time and explores the extent of the problem in the United States. Finally, the chapter authors offer several recommen­dations for preventing and stopping forced labor in the construction sector.

Made in L.A. offers a rare and poignant glimpse into this “other” California, where immigrants in many industries toil long hours for sub-minimum wages, fighting for an opportunity in a new country. As an engagement tool, it offers viewers a powerful springboard for dialogue about the challenges facing low-wage immigrant workers, the great hardships and benefits of organizing, the impact of individual consumer purchasing choices, and the complex effects of public policy related to immigration and labor.

FILM SYNOPSIS: Follow the remarkable journey of three Latina immigrants working in L.A.'s garment factories and their long battle to bring a major clothing retailer to the negotiating table.

​*Served as one of the guide producers.

This chapter discusses the global supply chain system and analyzes it as a
symbol of exploitation and capital accumulation in the era of the “global factory.” It describes the impact of the global supply chain system. In particular, the chapter describes uneven development and unequal relationships between countries in Asia, and elaborates on how the supply chains model of growth has impacted upon working populations and the environment. It argues that global supply chains cannot be reformed by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), since CSR is a form of charity rather than representing any meaningful structural change. The chapter concludes with a proposed agenda for labor movements.

Questa è un’indagine sul malessere dei lavoratori nel mondo d’oggi. Uno studio del disagio contemporaneo dentro e fuori i luo- ghi di lavoro. Ci si sofferma in modo particolare sul crescente ricor- so dei lavoratori alle sostanze psicotrope, quale risposta illusoria alle difficoltà e alle sofferenze che la vita quotidiana dei lavoratori com- porta. E si tenta di rispondere, in fondo, a queste domande: perché la produzione di merci e di “benessere” è connessa in modo così inestricabile con la produzione di malessere? Che relazione c’è tra l’attuale organizzazione del lavoro e l’organizzazione del tempo “li- bero” dei salariati? Qual è la connessione tra la produzione di merci e il consumo di massa di sedativi, eccitanti e “pillole della felicità” da parte dei produttori di merci? E infine: come possono i lavorato- ri uscire dal circolo vizioso che si sta creando tra i loro bisogni uma- ni insoddisfatti e la “soddisfazione” del tutto artificiale di essi? Questo testo non aspira a dare una risposta “completa” a tali grandi proble- matiche. Esso intende essere principalmente uno stimolo, un invito a moltiplicare e ad intensificare gli studi sul lavoro, sui lavoratori e sulle lavoratrici. Ce n’è bisogno.

A twenty-hectare swath of Old Kingdom 4th Dynasty settlement that central authorities laid out at the low, southeastern base of the Giza Plateau as housing and infrastructure for building pyramids shows distinct components that reflect how they mobilized labor into collective action for building on a colossal scale through already existing social bonds and home-based fellowships from districts, villages and neighborhoods. Correlation between this architectural footprint, builders' graffiti, and recently discovered papyrus day logs with district signs suggests links to larger national networks. Ensconced alongside the major Nile port of its time, community members served in both ships' crews and work gangs with links to broader interregional networks. It is possible that immigrants from source countries who specialized in procurement and transport of exotic products contributed to ethnic diversity in the distinct components of "downtown Egypt." Brought together in a central settlement much larger and denser than any at home, each occupant experienced an exponential increase in social interactions. But we see hints that, as authorities multiplied social clusters for collective action and established procurement networks of broad spatial range, they preserved home-based fellowships. It may have been true for downtown Egypt at the pyramids that, regardless of a city's size, everyone lived in villages and neighborhoods.

Advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have facilitated growth in the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector, and the Republic of the Philippines ranks among the world’s major BPO destinations. The sector’s economic influence in the country has tripled in the last ten years. Low labour costs, a highly skilled workforce and competitive ICT infrastructure have provided the major drivers of this growth. While contact centres represent the most important subsector in terms of revenue and employment, higher value added subsectors are also growing. BPO is expected to expand rapidly in the coming years, further strengthening the country’s participation in global supply chains (GSCs). At the same time, it faces numerous challenges related to decent work.

This report reviews the gendered impact of COVID-19—and the need for a transformational approach to prevent and end GBVH using guidance from C190—in the context of Asian fast fashion supply chains which produce primarily consumer apparel and footwear. The report highlights the persistent risk factors for violence that both predate and are exacerbated by COVID-19. It provides detailed guidance for fast fashion lead firms on steps they can take to uphold C190 obligations to address violence on garment supply chains in context of the global public health crisis and the economic shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. While this report focuses on fast fashion supply chains, the guidance for corporate accountability to achieve violence free workplaces provides an important roadmap across global supply chain sectors.

My dissertation examines the different ways that Mexican-origin farm worker households are racialized and integrated into the U.S. capitalist economy and rural society. There has been an exponential increase of Mexican-origin farm worker households in Washington State since 1976, Mexican populations in rural Washington have doubled and sometimes even tripled between the 1980 and 2010 U.S. Census. This demographic change in the make up of rural society has come with varying effects upon race consciousness for Mexican-origin farm worker households. My findings supported my hypothesis that early generations of Tejano or northern Mexico migrants had a different experience of racialization than migrant workers from central Mexico after the end of the Bracero program, and that these experiences differed from the experiences of indigenous, Triqui and Mixteco-speaking migrant workers from southern Mexico beginning in the 1990s after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The settlement of immigrant communities in rural areas in each of these waves of migration has had a profound influence upon each segment of agricultural worker’s experience of race consciousness, racialization, and xenophobic violence as they faced white supremacy of both the U.S. and Latin American varieties. The different degrees of integration of this diaspora into a new racial state has served to maintain a tiered wage system via renewed experiences of racial profiling, hyper-criminalization, surveillance and segregation in particular along the northern border.

Basing my dissertation project upon studies that addressed Mexican farm labor in U.S. capitalist agriculture, primarily in California. I conducted a long-term in situ ethnography, collected oral histories and used archival research methods to systematically document two strategies used by Sakuma Bros. Farms and Broetje Orchards to deal with the increased demand for labor in Washington State: a transnational system used in Berry picking and a company town system used in Apple production. My investigation paid close attention to whether or not these large vertically integrated agricultural firms were able to stabilize their respective labor force, whether they have been successful in reproducing a future labor force, and whether or not each strategy of organization was sustainable for both the growers and the farm worker households. I observed the everyday lived experience of Mexican-origin farm worker households articulated and/or integrated into each of these systems. I was able to document the everyday struggles, losses and triumphs of Mexican-origin labor-power at its conjuncture with capitalist agricultural modes of production in Washington State. One group of workers engaged a series of strikes and a launched a consumer boycott. The second set of workers engaged in more subtle negotiations of power with their employer. For the sake of making farmworker agency more visible I conclude my project with a historical context of farmworker struggles in the region.

Los derechos laborales de actores y actrices en México, a pesar de estar regulados por la Ley Federal del Trabajo, son derechos de difícil acceso, que no coinciden con la realidad del gremio.  The labor rights of actors and actresses in Mexico, despite being regulated by the Federal Labor Law, are rights of difficult access that do not coincide with the reality of the guild.

For more than three years, including well over 100 strike days, the employees at Amazon continue to fight for a collective agreement. Although the labour dispute has still not been won, it exemplifies the struggle of employees in the low-wage sector against a global corporation.

The conflict at Amazon has become a ‘laboratory of resistance’. Important lessons have been learned, not only with respect to resistance against low wages and precarious employment in Germany, but also in terms of the conflict with the corporation at its other sites in Europe. Amazon takes an extremely anti-union stance at those sites too, but trade union resistance is likewise forming there. Transnational networking of the employees – which, as the first step, should be Europewide at the minimum – and dialogue about experiences in the various countries are a vital precondition for a successful, cross-border fight.

This study is the result of intensive research by the journalists Jörn Boewe and Johannes Schulten on the structures of the Amazon corporate group and about both the experiences of trade union resistance in Germany and the prospects for cross-border industrial action by the Amazon employees. That research is based, among other things, on a series of interviews with Amazon strike activists and participation in a number of trade union meetings as well as the Amazon event held by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung in
March 2016. Since then, more than 6,000 copies of the German-language, first edition of the "The
Long Struggle of the Amazon Employees" ["Der lange Kampf der AmazonBeschäftigten"] pamphlet, which was published in December 2015, have been distributed. The publication has been discussed at various events accompanying the strike action at the Amazon sites in Germany and its findings have been discussed with the employees.

With this revised and updated English-language version, we hope to make these findings accessible to trade unionists in other European countries and to contribute to the development of transnational trade union perspectives. Corporations like Amazon may be ‘global players’, but the employees and their trade unions are seeking to counter the power of transnational companies through international solidarity movements and by not allowing themselves to be played off against each other. The movement is still young, but it is gaining in strength across Europe. From their concrete experiences, much can be learned about transnational trade union organisation.

Political theorists have recently sought to replace the liberal, contractual theory of the firm with a political view that models the authority relation of employee to firm, and its appropriate regulation, on that of subject to state. This view is liable to serious difficulties, however, given the extant discontinuities between corporate and civil authority as to their coerciveness, entry and exit conditions, scope, legal standing, and efficiency constraints. I here inspect these, and argue that, albeit in some cases significant, such discontinuities fail to undermine the firm/state analogy, either because they are not significant enough to do so or because the particular trait on which they hinge is not decisive for how authority, in the state and in the firm, should be regulated to be legitimate. A pro tanto requirement exists, I thus argue, that corporate authority be held to regulatory norms comparable to those legitimate states abide by, including civil liberties, rule-of-law constraints, and accountability to subjects.

The article examines the role of social media groups for online freelance workers in the Philippines—digital workers obtaining “gigs” from online labor platforms such as Upwork and Onlinejobs.ph—for social facilitation and collective organizing. The article first problematizes labor marginality in the context of online freelance platform workers situated in the middle of competing narratives of precarity and opportunity. We then examine unique forms of solidarity emerging from social media groups formed by these geographically spread digital workers. Drawing from participant observation in online freelance Facebook groups, as well as interviews and focus groups with 31 online freelance workers located in the cities of Manila, Cebu, and Davao, we found that online Filipino freelancers maintain active social interaction and exchange that can be construed as “entrepreneurial solidarities.” These solidarities are characterized by competing discourses of ambiguity, precarity, opportunity, and adaptation that are articulated and visualized through ambient socialities. While we argue that these entrepreneurial solidarities do not reflect a passive and simplistic acceptance of neoliberal discourses about digital labor by digital workers, the solidarities forged in these groups also work to undermine their resistive potential such that these tend to reinforce rather than impose pressure toward critical structural changes that can improve the viability of digital labor conditions.

As in many other countries, Spanish society also underwent its own ’68. In response, the Franco regime increased repression: it became much harsher, and much broader. After that, opposition to state brutality became the anti-Franco movement's main cause and a unifying element for its many different actors. This is the process addressed by this article. Specifically, it aims to explore how repression facilitated the encounters between activists coming from different social movements and political organisations. At the same time, it tries to show the importance of diversifying the analyses on the long ’68 – focusing on different countries, regions and cities – in order to grasp its transnational nature.

Industrial revolution dramatically changed the dynamics of human kind in terms of social, economical and cultural aspects. The transition of the manufacturing process with the industrial revolution changed our perception on labor. With the industrial revolution manufacturing process shifted from labor intensive to machine based which enabled to produce the product more fast, cheap and easy. The great leap forward in the manufacturing process provided the opportunity for middle and upper classes to access healthier diets, cheaper goods and better living conditions. For the working class it took more time to achieve the advantages of industrial revolution.

By most accounts, forced labour, human trafficking, and modern slavery are thriving in the global economy. Recent media reports — including the discovery of widespread trafficking in Thailand's shrimp industry, forced labour in global tea and cocoa supply chains, and the devastating deaths of workers constructing stadiums for Qatar's World Cup— have brought once hidden exploitation into the mainstream spotlight. As public concern about forced labour has escalated, governments around the world have begun to enact legislation to combat it in global production.

Yet, in spite of soaring media and policy attention, reliable research on the business of forced labour remains difficult to come by. Forced labour is notoriously challenging to investigate, given that it is illegal, and powerful corporations and governments are reluctant to grant academics access to their workers and supply chains. Given the risk associated with researching the business of forced labour, until very recently, few scholars even attempted to collect hard or systematic data. Instead, academics have often had little choice but to rely on poor quality second-hand data, frequently generated by activists and businesses with vested interests in portraying the problem in a certain light. As a result, the evidence base on contemporary forced labour is both dangerously thin and riddled with bias.

Researching Forced Labour in the Global Economy gathers an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars to tackle this problem. It provides the first, comprehensive, scholarly account of forced labour's role in the contemporary global economy and reflections on the methodologies used to generate this research.

How the degradation of work in the oil-rich Niger Delta jeopardizes the livelihoods and well-being of workers and their families.  The growth of insecure and increasingly informal job opportunities results in fewer opportunities for Nigerians to improve working and living conditions, especially in local communities that have seen little benefit from the profitable sector.

This paper articulates a functionalist account of intra-party democracy (IPD). Like realist critics, we insist that IPD practices be evaluated on the basis of whether they facilitate resistance to domination and capture at the level of the polity as a whole, and therefore accept certain realist worries about IPD. Yet realists neglect the possibility that wealthy interests could control the political agenda by capturing all viable parties simultaneously-and that mass-facing IPD could counter this threat of oligarchic agenda capture. Taking this as the key function of IPD within broader democratic systems, we conclude that inclusionary party reform is less urgent in more flexible party systems, where dissenters are better able to resist this threat from within the framework of inter-party competition. Regardless of the context, meanwhile, we also conclude that mass-facing IPD practices should aim at enabling ordinary members and supporters of a party to resist agenda capture by oligarchic interests. Though we stop short of defending any particular set of reforms, we reject the emphasis of recent IPD advocates on individualized forms of deliberative participation, in favor of a more oppositional and collectively-oriented approach-on the grounds that the latter is more likely to encourage the development of effective institutions of countervailing power.

I have painfully learned that a defining feature of white women’s daily racism is their refusal to name the power they exercise over others. As a former organizer and board president, I have experienced how racist violence has been reproduced within a workers’ rights organization. Recently there has been a major internal struggle against this racism. While these efforts are now bearing fruit, the problems it is attempting to fix are all too common within nonprofit organizations.

White women's racism undercuts worker power. Within the nonprofit, racism manifests as founder's syndrome, racialized divisions of labor, and a political culture rooted in urgency and conflict avoidance.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) remains one of the best examples of a labor union that traces its origins to radical anti-racist principles. Today, very few mainstream unions remain that were founded on militant, radical, and “anti-racist” principles. The ILWU remains the strongest port union in the United States, and its members are among the highest paid blue-collar union workers in the world. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival oral histories research, and ethnographic observation, Solidarity Forever? highlights the struggle of a key group of Black and women leaders who fought for racial and gender equality in the ports of Southern California.

The book argues that institutional and cultural forms of racial and gender inequality are embedded within US trade union locals leading to the following deleterious consequences for unions: (1) a proliferation of internal discrimination lawsuits within unions, which can cost the union International, or union local, potentially millions of dollars in legal fees and financial settlements thereby redistributing precious financial resources that could be spent on key activities related to making unions stronger from outside attacks; (2) an erosion of trust and solidarity among workers, the key values of any successful union, which ultimately undermines the radical democratic potential of unions and rank-and-file participation in union politics; and (3) the undermining of workers of color and women workers as full and equal participants in the labor movement. The future of organized labor in the United States could very well be determined by the ability of the labor movement, and labor unions in particular, to listen to those workers who have been relegated to the margins of the global economy—workers of color, immigrant workers, women workers, and all workers in the Global South.

Ideas about the social responsibility of business are in flux. The foundations of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ have been transformed in recent years by normative developments in the field of business and human rights. The latter norms are a direct response to the evolution of transnational modes of production, such as global value chains coordinated by multinational corporations. This special issue explores these attempts to advance respect for human rights in the context of business activity in global value chains. The special issue consists of an introduction and four articles which describe and interrogate some of the principle changes currently taking place in global value chain governance as these relate to human rights: the impact on worker power of the rise of larger emerging-market multinationals in value chains traditionally dominated by global brands; the limits of monitoring and transparency mechanisms as effective regulators of human rights in supply chains; the role of contracts in ensuring respect for human rights; and the possibility to use the courts to enforce respect for rights across fragmented production networks.

Catholic moral theology possesses a number of tools that can be employed to promote worker justice. Some of these tools, such as Catholic social teaching on solidarity and workers’ rights, have been used to this end before. However, advocates of workers’ rights have seldom utilized other concepts, such as cooperation in evil, scandal, and evangelization. This essay provides a theoretical introduction to several tools in the “toolkit” of Catholic ethicists, engaging contemporary scholarship on them. It then applies the concepts to two cases in order to demonstrate their usefulness in the struggle for worker justice. Both cases involve Catholic universities, which means the ethical concepts introduced from the Catholic moral tradition should have normative status for these institutions. The first case entails a divestment campaign at the University of Notre Dame. The second case confronts the unjust treatment of adjunct faculty members at Catholic colleges and universities.

This paper presents findings from the Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest, a database of platform worker protest events around the world which gathers data from online news media reports and other online
sources. For the period January 2017 to July 2020, we identified 1,271 instances of worker protest in four platform sectors: ride-hailing, food delivery, courier services and grocery delivery. Our results show that the
single most important cause of platform worker protest is pay, with other protested issues including employment status, and health and safety. In most global regions, strikes, log-offs and demonstrations predominated as a form of protest. Furthermore, platform worker protests showed a strong tendency to be driven from below by worker self-organization, although trade unions also had an important presence in some parts of the world. From the four platform sectors examined, ride-hailing and food delivery accounted for most protest events. Although the growth of platform worker organization is remarkable, formal collective bargaining is uncommon, as is formal employment, with ad hoc self-organized groups of workers dominating labour protest across the different sectors, particularly in the global South.

Abstract: This 2018 report reviews the organizing model of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center (PVWC), an organization based in Western Massachusetts that builds the collective power of immigrants and workers. It illustrates how the PVWC practices participatory democracy and solidarity. The report also discusses the challenges facing its organizational structures and campaigns, including its Worker Committees, a decision-making body composed mainly of immigrant workers; Sanctuary in the Streets, a rapid response network against workplace abuse, the deportation apparatus, and hate crimes; and an ongoing campaign in solidarity with Lucio Peréz, an undocumented Guatemalan man who defied deportation and took sanctuary at a local congregation.

Through examining the experiences of Burmese migrant workers in Malaysia this paper analyses the complicated relationship between legal status and protection from violence and abuse. While legal status has often been promoted as a means to protect migrants, we suggest that legal status is actually pursued only at particular moments and on the basis of particular cost/ benefit calculations made by migrants. Even as legal status offers some protection from state authorities, the linkage between legal status and employer sponsorship means that it also binds migrants to specific employers. Crucial to these calculations too is the cost of legal status for both migrants and employers, imbuing the relationship with financial risk on both sides and turning legal status into an expensive "commodity". Therefore, while migrant labour is often constructed as being "cheap", our study reveals that a key factor in the exploitation of migrants is that they are in fact so expensive to hire. Thus, as we argue here, it is important to look beyond a narrow focus on legal status and consider the basis on which such status is extended-especially as such status is increasingly predicated on a sponsoring employer and significant financial investments.

El artículo hace un recorrido por las principales producciones bibliográficas, así como por los principales archivos al respecto del movimiento sindical y los trabajadores durante el gobierno del general Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989). Se presenta de manera sucinta la producción acerca del movimiento obrero paraguayo de cada década y sus características a partir de 1980 en adelante. Además, se ofrece una descripción general de los fondos documentales con material relevante sobre el mundo del trabajo en Paraguay.

La lettura del fenomeno dell’uberizazzione della prestazione lavorativa rappresenta l’esempio emblematico per approfondire le considerazioni di diritto sulla fenomenologia del lavoro on demand.

L’archetipo del lavoro digitale tramite la piattaforma Uber si è distinto per una pianificazione inedita dell’organizzazione di tradizionali prestazioni lavorative. A ben vedere, il decentramento produttivo, tecnologizzato e informatizzato e la ‘smaterializzazione’ del datore di lavoro hanno prospettato visuali inedite sull’assoggettamento ai poteri datoriali. Nei rapporti di lavoro così instauratisi si è reso possibile cogliere un sostanziale rapporto di subordinazione alla stregua del parametro normativo ex art. 2094 c.c. Gli indizi valorizzabili e apprezzabili dal legislatore e dal giudice italiano al fine di qualificare correttamente la prestazione di lavoro in questione si ricavano dalla conformazione del ruolo della società, dall’esercizio di un potere di ‘comando’ che si estrinseca in dettagliate indicazioni da seguire, dal meccanismo tramite il quale sono effettuare le recensioni, ossia nell’esercizio del potere di controllo e dalle sanzioni disciplinari irrogate agli autisti che disattendano le direttive imposte dall’app.

This paper engages the literature on the legal geographies of labour and postdemocracy in order to examine the role of law in limiting the labour rights of non-standard workers. To do so, it analyses the effects of civil suits for obstruction of business against workers and trade union activists in South Korea. First embraced by liberal administrations as an alternative to authoritarian forms of labour control, civil suits for obstruction of business have become a common feature of labour struggles since 2002 and have led to millions of dollars in damage claims and provisional seizure of assets being applied against workers for engaging in collective action. We argue that by treating many ordinary trade union practices as 'threats of force' that obstruct business and are thus liable for compensation, the law has been an essential component in the creation of a postdemocratic mode of labour control: one in which many fundamental labour rights are officially recognised, unlike under authoritarian regimes, but undermined in practice by narrowly limiting workers' ability to pursue lawful collective action.

The Global Care Policy Index (GCPI) is a composite index that provides a numerical assessment of a country’s support for and protection of unpaid family caregivers and paid domestic workers who do the important but often invisible work of caring for the young, old, disabled and infirm within the home. It is comprised of two sub-indices: Sub-Index A assesses policy protections for workers with family responsibilities, while Sub-Index B assess policy protections for paid domestic workers. Bangladesh scored very poorly in the GCPI, with its overall score of 0.96 placing it in the ‘Weak’ band. A key reason for this poor performance is the extremely limited legal framework to protect caregivers. Domestic work is also considered informal employment in Bangladesh, and as such is not covered by labor laws. They consequently lack any legislation that guarantees their labor rights, or access to fair employment processes, or decent working and living conditions.

A szakszervezeti mozgalom komoly átalakulásokon ment keresztül az elmúlt évtizedekben és a szakszervezeti tagok száma is jelentősen csökkent, ám ezzel együtt is a világ legnagyobb létszámú szervezett társadalmi mozgalmát képviselik még mindig. Emiatt fontos kérdés, hogy a szakszervezetek milyen álláspontot képviselnek a klímaváltozás körüli vitákban és küzdelmekben. Az alábbi cikk a klímaváltozásra vonatkozó szakszervezeti stratégiák két nagy típusát veszi szemügyre: a kisebb reformokra törekvő társadalmi párbeszéd, illetve a széleskörű társadalmi átalakulásért küzdő társadalmi erő stratégiáját különböztetjük meg egymástól. Az utóbbi kapcsán bővebben írunk a mozgalmi szakszervezetiség lehetőségeiről, melynek keretén belül a szakszervezetek a munkahelyi érdekkonfliktusok mellett a tagok mindennapi problémáira (lakhatás, gondoskodás stb.) megpróbálnak választ adni. Végül röviden kitérünk arra, hogy mindennek milyen jelentősége lehet a magyar szakszervezetek számára.