Homeworkers in Global Perspective documents the lives of homeworkers, exploring state policies towards them, and describing the innovative ways in which homeworkers organize. Moving away from well-known, already explored cases, the essays focus on less-known but equally compelling examples organize, and covers the major geographic regions of the world and illustrates the diversity of home-based work and homeworker organizing.
Proposing an innovative conception of global politics by de-emphasizing state actors and instead analyzing competing transnational discourses, The Global Construction of Gender focuses specifically on people who work at home for pay. Prugl explores the debates and rhetoric surrounding home-based workers that have taken place in global movements and multilateral organizations since the early 1900s in order to trace changing conceptions of gender over the course of this century.
This volume considers how women are shaping the global economic landscape through their labor, activism, and multiple discourses about work. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of international scholars, the book offers a gendered examination of work in the global economy and analyses the effects of the 2008 downturn on women’s labor force participation and workplace activism. The book addresses three key themes: exploitation versus opportunity; women’s agency within the context of changing economic options; and women’s negotiations and renegotiations of unpaid social reproductive labor. This uniquely interdisciplinary and comparative analysis will be crucial reading for anyone with an interest in gender and the post-crisis world.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the home as a workplace became a widely discussed topic. However, for almost 300 million workers around the world, paid work from home was not news. Home-Based Work and Home-Based Workers (1800-2021) includes contributions from scholars, activists and artists addressing the past and present conditions of home-based work. They discuss the institutional and legal histories of regulations for these workers, their modes of organization and resistance, as well as providing new insights on contemporary home-based work in both traditional and developing sectors. Contributors are: Jane Barrett, Janine Berg, Eloisa Betti, Chris Bonner, Eileen Boris, Patricia Coñoman Carrilo, Janhavi Dave, Saniye Dedeoğlu, Laura K Ekholm, Jenna Harvey, Frida Hållander, K. Kalpana, Srabani Maitra, Indrani Mazumdar, Gabriela Mitidieri, Silke Neunsinger, Malin Nilsson, Narumol Nirathron, Åsa Norman, Leda Papastefanaki, Archana Prasad, Maria Tamboukou, Nina Trige Andersen, and Marlese von Broembsen.
Platform work – the matching of the supply of and demand for paid labour through an online platform – often depends on workers who operate in a “grey area” between the archetype of an employee and a self-employed worker. This important book explores the utility of the International Labour Organization’s existing standards in governing this phenomenon. It indicates that despite their relevance, many standards have little or no impact. The standards apply to the issue but they fail to connect with it. The author shows how three ILO conventions – the Home Work Convention, 1996 (No. 177), the Private Employment Agencies Convention, 1997 (No. 181), and the Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) – can be revitalised to have an impact on the platform work debate. In the course of the analysis he responds in depth to such questions as the following: What are digital labour platforms? What does decent work mean? Did the ILO centenary fundamentally change anything? What is the link between private employment services and platform work? How do crowdworkers relate to homeworkers and teleworkers? Are platform workers engaged in domestic work? What form could a future ILO standard on platform work take? Given that the ILO plans to start discussions on a potential future standard for platform work in 2022, this book will prove very useful in highlighting the issues and standards that such discussions should consider. Research has shown that the techniques and tools of the platform economy have spread far beyond gig work, resulting in widespread “gigification” and restructuring of workplace behaviours and relationships, jobs, and communities across the world. For this and other reasons, including the book’s detailed analysis of issues not addressed elsewhere, labour lawyers, in-house counsel, researchers, and policymakers will gain valuable insight into what decent work in the platform economy would require, thus greatly broadening the discussion on this difficult-to-regulate phenomenon.
This book rewrites global political economy by bringing disparate features of globalization into relation, and providing an accessible narrative of 'how we got here, ' 'what's going on, ' and 'what it means' from a critical vantage poin
How does working at home change people’s activity patterns, social networks, and their living and working spaces? Will telecommuting solve many of society’s ills, or create new ghettos? Penny Gurstein combines a background in planning, sociology of work, and feminist theory with qualitative and quantitative data from ten years of original research, including in-depth interviews and surveys, to understand the impact of home-based work on daily life patterns. She analyzes the experiences of employees, independent contractors, and self-employed entrepreneurs, and presents significant findings regarding the workload, mobility, differences according to work status and gender, and the tensions in trying to combine work and domestic activities in the same setting.
Homework; work that is categorised as informal employment, performed in the home, mainly for subcontractors and mostly undertaken by women. The inequities and injustices inherent in homework conditions maintain women’s weak bargaining position, preventing them from making any improvements to their lives via their work. The best way to tackle these issues is not to abolish, but to bring equality and justice to homework. This book contributes a gender justice framework to analyse and confront the issues and problems of homework. The authors propose four justice dimensions – recognition, representation, rights and redistribution – to examine and analyse homework. This framework also takes into account the structures and processes of capitalism and the patriarchy, and the relations of domination that are widely held to be the major factors that determine homework injustice. The authors discuss strategies and approaches that have worked for homeworkers, highlighting why they worked and the features that were beneficial for them. Homeworking Women will be of interest to individuals and organisations working with or for the collective benefit of homeworkers, academics and students interested in feminism, labour regulation, informal work, supply chains and social and political justice.
This collection contributes to key theoretical debates about women workers in Asia and breaks new ground by focussing on issues that have been little documented in other studies in the area. It provides new information and insights into labour systems associated with labour intensive export manufactures and state-labour relations in a comparative context. The contributors present a range of unique and varied perspectives from which they consider aspects of the increasing integration of Asian economies, exploring implications for their labour markets.
More and more people are choosing to earn a living at home. In Work, At Home explores the meaning and experience of this type of employment by covering a wide range of issues including: * social relationships * current research methodologies * statistical analyses of global labour markets * the emotional and psychological processes of self-management * home relations. Presenting statistical analyses of labour markets in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, In Work, At Home provides a valuable introduction to the issues and debates surrounding homeworking and will appeal to students across a range of disciplines, including sociology, business studies and women's studies.
