The Global Governance of Precarity
The Global Governance of Precarity

Author: Nick Bernards

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-05

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1351398547

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‘Standard’ employment relationships, with permanent contracts, regular hours, and decent pay, are under assault. Precarious work and unemployment are increasingly common, and concern is also growing about the expansion of informal work and the rise of ‘modern slavery’. However, precarity and violence are in fact longstanding features of work for most of the world’s population. Lamenting the ‘loss’ of secure, stable jobs often reflects a strikingly Eurocentric and historically myopic perspective. This book argues that standard employment relations have always co-existed with a plethora of different labour regimes. Highlighting the importance of the governance of irregular forms of labour the author draws together empirical, historical analyses of International Labour Organisation (ILO) policy towards forced labour, unemployment, and social protection for informal workers in sub-Saharan Africa. Archival research, extensive documentary research and interviews with key ILO staff are utilised to explore the critical role the organization’s activities have often played in the development of mechanisms for governing irregular labour. Addressing the increasingly widespread and pressing practical debates about the politics of precarious labour in the world economy this book speaks to key debates in several disciplines, especially IPE, global governance, and labour studies. It will also be of interest to scholars working in development studies and critical political economy.

Migration, Precarity, and Global Governance
Migration, Precarity, and Global Governance

Author: Carl-Ulrik Schierup

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2015-02-05

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0191044660

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Migration, Precarity, & Global Governance explores an understudied, but central, area within contemporary studies of globalisation and precarisation. It relates to the interface between migration, global governance and the role of civil society, with particular focus on the dilemmas and options of trade unions, too often left off the agenda. The volume suggests that the trade union movement is undergoing a fundamental debate about revitalisation, which could play an important role in terms of the economic, political and social integration of migrant workers, with implications for the transformation of contemporary societies in general. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, emphasizing the complexity of historically grounded social relations. It examines international migration as it is impacted by, and impacts on, globalization, social and political struggles, and the recurring crisis of capitalism. The first part of the book presents five complementary perspectives on the political economy of migration, labour, and citizenship. Part Two offers analyses of the relationship between labour unions and migrant workers. Part Three explores the way trade unions, migrant organisations, and other civil society groupings interact with an incipient global governance regime relating to migration. It also examines issues of state and non-state actors' accountability in relation to human rights claims as well as the impact of the norm of corporate social responsibility.

Rethinking Global Governance
Rethinking Global Governance

Author: Mark Beeson

Publisher: Red Globe Press

Published: 2019-03-05

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1137588608

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The world currently faces a number of challenges that no single country can solve. Whether it is managing a crisis-prone global economy, maintaining peace and stability, or trying to do something about climate change, there are some problems that necessitate collective action on the part of states and other actors. Global governance would seem functionally necessary and normatively desirable, but it is proving increasingly difficult to provide. This accessible introduction to, and analysis of, contemporary global governance explains what it is and the obstacles to its realization. Paying particular attention to the possible decline of American influence and the rise of China and a number of other actors, Mark Beeson explains why cooperation is proving difficult, despite its obvious need and desirability. This is an essential text for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying global governance or international organizations, and is also important reading for those working on political economy, international development and globalization.

The Politics of Precarity
The Politics of Precarity

Author: Gediminas Lesutis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-30

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1000521109

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Based on critical theory and ethnographic research, this book explores how intensifying geographies of extractive capitalism shape human lives and transformative politics in marginal areas of the global economy. Engaging the work of Judith Butler, Henri Lefebvre, and Jacques Rancière with ethnographic research on social and political effects of mining-induced dispossession in Mozambique, in the book, Lesutis theorises how precarity unfolds as a spatially constituted condition of everyday life given over to the violence of capital. Going beyond labour relations, or governance of life in liberal democracies, that are typically explored in the literature on precarity, the book shows how dispossessed people are subjected to structural, symbolic, and direct modalities of violence; this simultaneously constitutes their suffering and ceaseless desire, however implausible, to be included into abstract space of extractivism. As a result, despite the multifarious violence that it engenders, extractive capital accumulation is sustained even in the margins, historically excluded from contingently lived imaginaries of a "good life" promised by capitalism. Presenting this theorisation of precarity as a framework on, and a critique of, the contemporary politics of (un)liveability, the book speaks to key debates about precarity, dispossession, resistance, extractivism, and development in several disciplines, especially political geography, IPE, global politics, and critical theory. It will also be of interest to scholars in development studies, critical political economy, and African politics.

Governing Globalization
Governing Globalization

Author: Anthony McGrew

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2002-12-20

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9780745627342

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Since the UN's creation in 1945 a vast nexus of global and regional institutions has evolved, surrounded by a proliferation of non-governmental agencies and advocacy networks seeking to influence the agenda and direction of international public policy. Although world government remains a fanciful idea, there does exist an evolving global governance complex - embracing states, international institutions, transnational networks and agencies (both public and private) - which functions, with variable effect, to promote, regulate or intervene in the common affairs of humanity. This book provides an accessible introduction to the current debate about the changing form and political significance of global governance. It brings together original contributions from many of the best-known theorists and analysts of global politics to explore the relevance of the concept of global governance to understanding how global activity is currently regulated. Furthermore, it combines an elucidation of substantive theories with a systematic analysis of the politics and limits of governance in key issue areas - from humanitarian intervention to the regulation of global finance. Thus, the volume provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical assessment of the shift from national government to multilayered global governance. Governing Globalization is the third book in the internationally acclaimed series on global transformations. The other two volumes are Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture and The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate.

Workers without Borders
Workers without Borders

Author: Ines Wagner

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-11-15

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 1501729160

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How the European Union handles posted workers is a growing issue for a region with borders that really are just lines on a map. A 2008 story, dissected in Ines Wagner’s Workers without Borders, about the troubling working conditions of migrant meat and construction workers, exposed a distressing dichotomy: how could a country with such strong employers’ associations and trade unions allow for the establishment and maintenance of such a precarious labor market segment? Wagner introduces an overlooked piece of the puzzle: re-regulatory politics at the workplace level. She interrogates the position of the posted worker in contemporary European labour markets and the implications of and regulations for this position in industrial relations, social policy and justice in Europe. Workers without Borders concentrates on how local actors implement European rules and opportunities to analyze the balance of power induced by the EU around policy issues. Wagner examines the particularities of posted worker dynamics at the workplace level, in German meatpacking facilities and on construction sites, to reveal the problems and promises of European Union governance as regulating social justice. Using a bottom-up approach through in-depth interviews with posted migrant workers and administrators involved in the posting process, Workers without Borders shows that strong labor-market regulation via independent collective bargaining institutions at the workplace level is crucial to effective labor rights in marginal workplaces. Wagner identifies structures of access and denial to labor rights for temporary intra-EU migrant workers and the problems contained within this system for the EU more broadly.

Precarity and International Relations
Precarity and International Relations

Author: Ritu Vij

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-05

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 3030510964

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This book addresses the implications of current thinking on precarity, precariousness and the precariat for the study of International Relations and International Political Economy. Drawing on a broad range of critical theoretical resources including literatures on aesthetics and psychoanalysis as well as feminist, Foucauldian, Marxian and postcolonial social theory, it explores the implications of precarity thought for three concepts: Sovereignty, Solidarities and Work in International Relations. Does precarity re-inscribe or undermine the logic and practices of sovereignty? As a common condition and point of mobilization, does precarity represent a new labor activism or does it find ethical grounds for solidarities that destabilize identities? How is precarity located, practiced and occluded in work relations? Running counter to the contemporary impulse to grasp precarity and processes of its proliferation in homogenized terms as either being ensconced in national imaginaries, or as ushering in a condition of global precarity and a global precariat class, the book also underscores the entanglements of the global, national and local in the discursive and material production of precarity and precariousness in the present conjuncture.

Reluctant Reception
Reluctant Reception

Author: Kelsey P. Norman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1108842364

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An original, comparative analysis of the politics of asylum seeking and migration in the Middle East and North Africa, using Egypt, Morocco and Turkey to explore why, and for what gain, host states treat migrants and refugees with indifference.

The Fight for Time
The Fight for Time

Author: Paul Apostolidis

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0190459336

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In today's precarious world, working people's experiences are strangely becoming more alike even as their disparities sharpen. The Fight for Time explores the logic behind this paradox by listening to what Latino day laborers say about work and society. The book shows how migrant laborers are both exception and synecdoche in relation to the precarious conditions of contemporary work life. As unauthorized migrants, these workers are subjected to extraordinarily harsh treatment - yet in startling ways, they also epitomize struggles that apply throughout the economy. Juxtaposing day laborers' descriptions of their desperate circumstances and dangerous work with theoretical accounts of the forces fueling insecurity, The Fight for Time illuminates the temporal contradictions that define precarity today. The book taps the core intellectual current among day labor groups - Paulo Freire's popular-education theory - to craft an original "critical-popular" approach for understanding the points of connection between the ways that day laborers view their lives and scholarly analysis of precarious work-life writ large. The result is a temporally attuned and politically bracing perspective on neoliberal crises, the work ethic in the era of affective and digital labor, the intensifying racial governance of public spaces, the burgeoning deportation regime, and the growth of occupational safety and health hazards. The accounts of the day laborers in this book are rich with potential to catalyze social critique among migrant workers - and clarify the terms on which mass-scale opposition to precarity can occur. Such opposition would demand restoration of workers' stolen time, engage in a fight for the city, challenge the conditions under which aversion to financial risk puts workers into physical danger, and foment the refusal of work. We can look to the urban worker centers where this radically democratic politics of precarity is taking root to understand what types of organizations have the potential to wage the fight for time and enable broad mobilization in the face of precarity: worker centers for all working people.