Dear all, 

See below for a call for papers for the Research Committee on Labor Movements at
the upcoming International Sociological Association World Congress, to
be held July 13-19, 2014 in Yokohama, Japan. The deadline for
submissions is September 30, 2013. 

More information is available here:
http://www.isa-sociology.org/congress2014/rc/rc.php?n=RC44


Research Committee on Labor Movements, RC44

Program Coordinators

Peter EVANS, University of California-Berkeley, USA pevans@berkeley.edu
Jennifer Jihye CHUN, University of Toronto, Canada, jj.chun@utoronto.ca

Number of allocated sessions including Business Meeting: 18.


On-line abstracts submission
June 3, 2013, 11:00 GMT - September 30, 2013 24:00 GMT.

If you have questions about any specific session, please feel free to
contact the Session Organizer for more information.


Proposed sessions in alphabetical order:

Asian Labor Insurgency
Session Organizer
Eli FRIEDMAN, Cornell University, USA, edf48@cornell.edu

Session in English

Since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, Asia’s relative
weight in the global economy has expanded dramatically. As this region
captures an increasing share of the world’s growth, there has been a
corresponding increasing in the dynamism and global import of labor as
a political actor. But the contours of worker struggles look quite
different in contemporary Asia than was the case in earlier developers
in Europe and the Americas, both because of deeper global integration
and distinct internal politics.

This session will seek to explore how labor politics in Asia are
distinct from countries that industrialized in an earlier period as
well as to assess the differences and similarities between countries
within Asia. Not only does labor insurgency in East Asia manifest
itself in different configurations than it does in other regions, but
there are also distinctive challenges and responses in each East Asian
country. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, and Vietnam have all witnessed
labor militancy, but it has peaked in different time periods and had
different organizational and ideological characteristics in each case.

Finally, we will pay special attention to how labor politics in Asia
have changed since the onset of the crisis and attempt to draw some
implications for the future of globalization.


Authors Meet their Critics
Three New Perspectives in Global Labour Studies. Session with Rina
Agarwala, Ruy Braga and Jamie McCallum
Session Organizers
Jennifer Jihye CHUN, University of Toronto, Canada, jj.chun@utoronto.ca
Peter B. EVANS, University of California-Berkeley, USA, pevans@berkeley.edu

Session in English

Not open for submission of abstracts
This session brings three important new books in the field of global
labour studies in dialogue with each other:

Rina Agarwala’s Informal Labor, Formal Politics and Dignifying
Discontent in India (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Ruy Braga’s A Política do Precariado (Boitempo, 2012)
Jamie McCallum’s Global Unions, Local Power (Cornell University Press, 2013)

Each book focuses on a new agent of capitalist transformation – from
informal and precarious workers to global unions – and examines how
they attempt to reconfigure the balance of power between labour,
capital and the state in particular local and national contexts. Each
book also provides critical theoretical and empirical insight into
kinds of economic and political challenges facing workers and labour
unions in the new global order, paving the way for the development of
new areas of research inquiry.

This session will not only bring the authors together with its
critics, but it will also bring authors in dialogue with each other in
an innovative panel format.


Building Global Worker Communities among Migrant Worker Diasporas
Session Organizers
Chris TILLY, UCLA, USA, ctilly@irle.ucla.edu
Elizabeth TANG, International Domestic Workers Network, China,
elizabeth.tang@idwn.info

Session in English

Transnational migrant diasporas have created new global communities of
workers. Increasingly, these communities are learning how to act
collectively across borders and within a variety of national contexts
to defend labor rights, often times where states and conventional
labour organizations have failed to do so, but at other times in
collaboration with unions or other labour organizations. This kind of
organizing can take different forms. In some cases, political
organizations have developed nodes in a variety regional and national
contexts to form complex transnational organizational networks that
demand that sending and receiving governments provide better working
conditions and rights protections for migrant workers.

In other cases, unions and community organizations have innovated
their organizational practices and membership boundaries to support
new global communities of workers. Even in cases when transnational
communities are much more fragmented, home countries experiences and
transnational communities make a crucial contribution to the ability
of migrant workers to organize.

This session will bring together papers that analyze the role of
diasporas in organizing workers around the world, enabling a
comparative discussion of their dynamics and effectiveness in
different sectors and different national contexts.


Chinese Workers in the Global Economy: Structural Conditions and
Agency of Resistance
Session Organizers
Andreas BIELER, Nottingham University, United Kingdom,
Andreas.Bieler@nottingham.ac.uk
Ngai PUN, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China, ssnpun@inet.polyu.edu.hk

Session in English

Chinese development is widely considered to be an example of
successful developmental catch-up with double-digit growth rates year
on year. Some even talk of an emerging power, which may in time
replace the US as the global economy`s hegemon. And yet, there is a
dark underside to this miracle in the form of workers` long hours and
widespread super exploitative working conditions. This has resulted in
rising levels of industrial conflict across China.

The purpose of this session is twofold:

to assess the way China has been integrated into the global
economy to understand better the basis of these economic growth rates,
but also to investigate how the exploitative working conditions are
linked into global production structures
to analyse new forms of resistance be it through the state trade
union All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), be it through
informal labour NGOs.

Hence, we are interested in three different types of contributions to
this session:

papers that concentrate on the structural dynamics of Chinese
production in the global economy
papers that focus on resistance to the exploitative working
conditions in China
papers that investigate the connections between structural
conditions and agency of resistance


Closing the Enforcement Gap: Improving Employment Standards for
Workers in Industrialized Market Economies and Beyond
Session Organizer
Leah VOSKO, York University, Canada, lvosko@yorku.ca

Session in English

This panel/workshop will explore the nature and dimensions of the
employment standards (ES) enforcement gap and workers’ organizing
efforts to close this gap. It will explore developments, on the one
hand, in industrialized market economies (e.g., Canada, the United
States, Australia, the UK and Ireland) where, in response to the
decline of the standard employment relationship (SER), there is a
growing body of research investigating the problems of workers in
precarious jobs and, on the other hand, in Asian and Latin American
contexts, where the SER never operated as a normative model of
employment.

We seek papers that discuss the nature and scope of ES violations as
well as the evasion, erosion and abandonment of minimum standards;
survey alternative models of enforcement; explore employers` responses
to changes in ES enforcement.


Confronting the Challenge of Global Corporate Empires
Session Organizers
Bridget KENNY, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa,
Bridget.Kenny@wits.ac.za
Carolina BANK MUNOZ, CUNY Brooklyn College, USA, Cbmunoz@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Session in English

From Wal-Mart to G4S to Foxconn, workers confront global corporate
empires whose operations and economic power extend around the world.
Global corporate actors restructure local economies and connection
them to global economic networks in new ways. They empires present new
challenges to worker solidarity, within and between countries, but
they also create opportunities for new forms of resistance.

This panel will compare differences and similarities across a range of
national settings in the effects of global corporate strategies on
industrial organization, labor relations and state regulatory
contexts. It will examine union and worker responses, with the aim of
generating more nuanced and systematic analyses that can facilitate
global labour solidarity. Papers dealing with country specific
examples in retailing, wholesaling, supply chains, service provision
are encouraged.


Geopolitical Turmoil and the Fate of the Labor Movement in the 21st
Century: 10 years after Forces of Labor
Session Organizer
Peter EVANS, University of California-Berkeley, USA, pevans@berkeley.edu

Session in English

Not open for submission of abstracts
World Wars and the dissolution of colonial empires were fundamental to
shaping the trajectory of the labor movement in the 20th century.
World Wars sparked both labor unrest and concessions by capital to
secure the loyalty of workers. The anti-colonial upheavals that
followed the second World War were fundamental to the growth of labor
movements in the Global South. But what, if anything do these 20th
century trajectories tell us about the fate of labor in the 21st
century.

In this session, Beverly Silver, one of the premier analysts of
historical trends in labor unrest will present her vision of what the
geopolitical context created by declining U.S. hegemony, China’s rise,
and the increasingly destructive power of global finance capital mean
for the future of the labor movement.


Mobilizing at the Margins: Comparing Informal Worker Organizing Around the World
Session Organizer
Sarah MOSOETSA, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa,
Sarah.Mosoetsa@wits.ac.za

Session in English

Informal workers (those not receiving standard labor protections and
work-connected social benefits) make up an estimated half to
three-quarters of the non-agricultural workforce in the global South.
Estimates for richer countries run about one-fifth of the nonfarm
workforce. Just as important, the proportion of precarious informal
workers is growing across a broad spectrum of countries, from the US,
Europe, to Latin America and Asia, contradicting expectations that
informality was a vestige of past forms of production that would be
left behind in a process of modernization.

Thus, it is not an exaggeration to say that the greatest challenge
facing those concerned with decent work and job quality around the
world is finding ways to bolster the quality of informal work.
Solidarities build around community membership, gender or ethnic
identities almost always play a role in creating the capacity for
organized collective action among precarious informal workers, but
nation-specific economic, political, and social factors give rise to
particular organizing and alliance strategies and condition their odds
of success.

This session will place informal worker organizing in a broad
comparative context by bringing together studies from Asia, Africa and
Latin America as well as the global North.


New Organizing Strategies for Confronting Gender Bias and
Discrimination for Women Workers
Session Organizer
Akira SUZUKI, Hosei University, Japan, insmove@hosei.ac.jp

Session in English

New strategies and institutional channels are being used to challenge
on-going gender disparities in wages, working conditions, and
employment relations and job security.

This session seeks papers that examine how various organizations,
including unions, community organizations and women’s organizations,
are using innovative strategies to support the struggles of women
workers against gender-based discrimination, especially discrimination
against women in lower-paid, non-standard forms of employment.

Gender discrimination is a particularly acute problem in East where
the gender pay gap is the highest among all OECD countries, normative
gender roles restrict women’s labour force participation and career
mobility, and male-dominated unions tend to neglect and sometimes
actively perpetuate gender-based employment discrimination.

Therefore, papers dealing with Japan, Korea and other countries in the
East Asian region are particularly encouraged, although focusing on
other regions and national contexts are welcomed.


No Borders, No Boundaries: Organizational Changes, Strategic
Innovations and Prospects for a Global Labour Movement
Session Organizers
Michele FORD, University of Sydney, Australia, michele.ford@sydney.edu.au
Michael GILLAN, University of Western Australia, Australia,
michael.gillan@uwa.edu.au
Jamie MCCALLUM, Middelbury University, USA, mccallum@middlebury.edu

Session in English

The contours of the global labour movement are being reshaped by a
surge of global campaigns, renovations of the organizational
structures of global union organizations and the emergence of new
organizational forms. Unions and non-traditional labour organizations
are collaborating on long-term campaigns to organize within some of
the largest corporations on earth. This has included efforts to win
global framework agreements, codes of conduct, and social clause
provisions.

This panel seeks to assess the divergent strategies currently employed
to unite workers across national boundaries ,focusing on both the
opportunities and the constraints for the emergence of effective
transnational labour networks, with special attention to the
relationship between domestic context (inclusive of institutional
settings and trade union forms and repertoires) and global labour
actors, both traditional and non-traditional. The organisers
particularly invite contributions from researchers investigating
multi-scalar campaigns and organising initiatives and relations
between labour organisations and other actors in global civil society.


Organizing East Asia`s Precarious Workers
Session Organizers
Xin TONG, Peking University, China, tx_pku@yahoo.com.cn
Nobuyuki YAMADA, Komazawa University, Japan, jogoaya@ruby.plala.or.jp

Session in English

The expansion of precarious work is an endemic problem for workers
across East Asia, but the challenge and the efforts to organize
responses to it take different forms in different countries. In China,
informal employment, outside of the reach and/or grasp of existing
labor laws such as 2008’s Contract Labor Law, has exploded and the All
China Federation of Trade Unions, the state-and-party-affiliated lone
labor federation in China not offered an effective response, but on
the margins, a lively set of labor NGOs serving, advocating for, and
organizing informal workers has arisen.

Japan’s stagnating economy has also pushed workers, especially young
workers, into precarious employment relations, and these workers have
also shown remarkable resilience in creating new organizations, such
as “individually-affiliated unions” to improve their lot. Korea and
other smaller East Asian countries have also witnessed creative
responses to the challenges of precarity.

This panel aims to bring together analyses of experiences in
organizing precarious informal workers in East Asia to explore both
distinctive national patterns and commonalities.


Precarious Employment Regimes: Divergent Trajectories of Regulation
and Union Mobilization
Session Organizers
Bridget KENNY, Witwatersrand University, South Africa, Bridget.Kenny@wits.ac.za
Iain CAMPBELL, RMIT University, Australia, Iain.Campbell@rmit.edu.au

Session in English

Precarious employment has come to characterize a significant trend in
diverse labour markets. Categories of work that fall short of the
rights and entitlements in a ‘standard employment relation’ are
growing in importance in many countries, and scholars such as Guy
Standing argue that these categories underpin the emergence of a new
global precariat. Yet amongst the common trends are significant
differences, especially at a national and sub-national level, where
differences reflect the continued legacy of distinct historical
trajectories of regulation and worker mobilization. These differences
have substantial implications for the way in which workers and their
organizations can pursue policies and politics in the present day to
combat precarious work.

This panel seeks to gather together scholarship linking regulatory
processes to the emergence of particular regimes of precarious
employment. It aims to provoke discussion that can tease out
differences and similarities in the distinct configurations of casual,
contract, temporary, part-time and irregular work found in different
places. It is particularly interested in exploring contexts where new
forms of precarious work such as ‘casual’, ‘temporary’ work or
‘irregular’ work are becoming dominant.

We encourage papers that are sensitive to the different realities
lurking under common labels such as ‘casual’ work and that examine the
trajectories of regulation as well as trade union mobilization and
negotiation and worker politics. Ultimately we aim to provide a
platform for renewed debate around contemporary politics of labour
market reform.


Precarious Labor and Working Class Resistance in Comparative Perspective
Session Organizer
Marcel PARET, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, marcelparet@gmail.com

Session in English

The growth of the power of capital to shape politics and economic
policy has made employment and working class livelihoods increasingly
precarious. Traditional forms of worker organization built around
accountable employers and employment as a social contract are
threatened, but the precarious working class has also begun to develop
new organizational forms, and is playing an important role in social
movements and uprisings from the Arab Spring to the indignados in
Spain to the Occupy Movement in the United States.

This session aims to place capital’s contemporary assault and working
class resistance in comparative perspective, examining variation both
within and between the Global North and Global South. "How are attacks
on workers and their responses constituted differently in Asia,
Africa, Latin America and the Global North? How do relations between
the state, political parties, trade unions, social movement
organizations and communities impact responses to growing precarity?
How do social divisions and solidarities based on gender, race, and
citizenship hinder or strengthen resistance?


Precarious Work and Employment Risks in East Asia
Integrative Session: RC02 Economy and Society, RC44 Labor Movements
and RC30 Sociology of Work
Not open for submission of abstracts.


RC44 Business Meeting



RC44 Roundtable IA: Labor Sociology in Capitalist Peripheries
Session Organizer
Adam MROZOWICKI, University of Wroclaw, Poland, mrozowicki@gmail.com

Session in English

This panel aims at comparing experiences and developing support
networks among labor sociologists in central, peripheral and
semi-peripheral countries across the globe. We particularly focus on
capitalist peripheries and invite scholars/activists who undertake
attempts to labor sociology under hostile conditions of authoritarian
and post-authoritarian and new neoliberal regimes.

We hope that discussion during the panel will provide insights into
mechanisms of rebirth of labor sociology in the countries in which it
was repressed in the past (e.g. as a result of authoritarian socialism
or military dictatorships) and thereafter became a subject of
neoliberal attacks. Our goal will be to document similarities and
differences across the countries in the centre and peripheries of
capitalist system with respect to the situation of labor sociology and
to discuss the possibilities of its revitalization in cooperation with
labor activists, community groups and social movements.

The socio-historical analyses of local and transnational cooperation
between sociologists and labor activists and the case studies of good
practices of such cooperation at the present moment in peripheral and
semi-peripheral regions of world capitalist system are particularly
welcome.


RC44 Roundtable IB: Structural and Associational Power in the New Global Order
Session Organizer
Jamie MCCALLUM, University of Middelbury, USA, mccallum@middlebury.edu

Session in English

How have shifts in the global political economy reshaped the power
resources of workers and their organizations? The common answer is
that globalization has undermined labor’s prospects at the local
level, and successfully guarded against cooperation at the global
level. Indeed, even the leading global and national unions are still
declining in density and grappling with how to successfully respond to
conditions commonly associated with neoliberal globalization. But,
recent scholarship suggests that other dynamics are at play as well.
Certain types of global industrial developments, including the
“logistics revolution” may enable workers to exploit the
vulnerabilities of a globalizing capitalist order and exercise
structural power. At the same time, workers in certain locations,
especially the service sector, have found new ways to use symbolic
power to make new claims on employers and states.

This roundtable seeks to evaluate the different sources of power that
workers can access depending on their location in the global political
economy. Factors to be considered might include regional/national
location, industrial/sectoral settings, existing union structures,
legal and political structures and local labor histories.


RC44 Roundtable IC: Global Capitalism, Uneven Development, and Local
Labor Regimes in Comparative and World-Historical Perspective
Session Organizers
Lu ZHANG, University of Temple, USA, lu.zhang1@temple.edu
Phillip HOUGH, University of Florida Atlantic, USA, phourgh2@fau.edu

Session in English

This session will bring together research and analysis that explores
the ways in which the spatial-temporal uneven development of global
capitalism are transforming the nature of work and employment and
producing divergent forms of labor oppression and resistance in Asia,
Africa and Latin America as well as in the Global North.

Contributors are particularly encouraged to put the present economic
crisis and restructuring and its impact on workers and their movements
in comparative and world-historical perspective, with the ultimate
goal of rethinking the relationship between capital and labor, the
waged and unwaged, the employed and jobless, and the linkage between
land, labor, and livelihood.


RC44 Roundtable ID: Promoting Worker Organizing and Social and
Economic Justice through Activist-Scholar Research Collaborations
Session Organizer
Jenny CHAN, University of London Royal Holloway, United Kingdom,
wlchan_cuhk@yahoo.com

Session in English

How does research promote worker organizing and social and economic
justice? This roundtable will discuss collaborative efforts by
scholars and activists to develop action-oriented research projects.
We invite participants with a range of research experience with
workers and worker organizations, including but not limited to
hands-on, community-based research, strategic campaign research,
policy-oriented research, popular education, and participatory action
research. We will discuss best practices models for how academics and
practioners can work together to achieve common goals and the use of
diverse media outlets (e.g. social media, more traditional news media,
etc.) to disseminate research findings.

We will also discuss how power dynamics in the research relationship
and organizational structures influence scholar-activist research
collaborations.


RC44 Roundtable IE: Does Economic Growth Mean Ecological Catastrophe?
Challenges for Labour?
Session Organizers
Nora RATHZEL, Umea University, Sweden, Nora.Rathzel@soc.umu.se
Jacklyn COCK, Wits University, South Africa, Jacklyn.Cock@wits.ac.za
David UZZELL, University of Surrey, United Kingdom, d.uzzell@surrey.ac.uk

Session in English

The proposed session would be structured around one question: How is
the labour movement responding to the crisis in nature? Labour
movements all over the world are responding very differently to the
crisis in nature. This crisis is deepening and one aspect – climate
change – is having devastating consequences on the working class in
the form of rising food prices, crop failures, water shortages and
displacement from extreme weather events such as droughts and floods.

At the same time the increasing marketisation of nature in the name of
`the green economy` is providing new sources of accumulation for
capital.The global impact of these events raises important questions
about attempts to conceptualise differences between the global North
and South, notions such as `the environmentalism of the poor` and
`Southern Theory`. The central question is open enough to allow for a
variety of very different theoretically informed and empirically based
papers.


The Global Migration of Gendered Care Work
Integrative Session: RC02 Economy and Society, RC32 Women in Society
and RC44 Labour Movements
Not open for submission of abstracts.


Workers’ Livelihood Struggles and New Collectivities in the Global South
Session Organizers
Shruti TAMBE, University of Pune, India, stambe@unipune.ac.in
Sanjukta MUKHERJEE, DePaul University, USA, smukher8@depaul.edu
Kiran MIRCHANDANI, University of Toronto, Canada, Kiran.mirchandani@utoronto.ca

Session in English

This panel explores newly emerging patterns of labour struggle and
mobilization which have manifested in the newly industrializing
countries of the global south including Latin America, Africa and
South, East and South-East Asia. As neoliberalism makes inroads in new
sectors, the survival-livelihood issues have become more pertinent.
Basic livelihoods are challenged and labour politics takes new forms.
It is important to flesh out the details of these processes in
particular contexts, so that some broad trends of labour mobilisation
can be discerned.

The papers in this session explore questions like: How has
neoliberalism impacted the labor and livelihoods of people in
different sectors and regions? What are the various forms of labor
struggles in response to neoliberalism? What is the scope of
collective action around particular labor issues? What kinds of new
collectivities with common political attributes emerge in these
contexts? What are the cultural particularities of these
collectivities in different regions of the global south?


Joint Sessions
Click on the session title to read its description.

Intimate Labor in Asia
Joint session of RC32 Women in Society and RC44 Labor Movements [host committee]


Labor and Environmental Movements
Joint session of RC44 Labor Movements and RC48 Social Movements,
Collective Action and Social Change [host committee]


Land and Labor in the Global Political Economy
Joint session of RC02 Economy and Society and RC44 Labor Movements
[host committee]


Organizing the Production of Alternative Visions to Support Social and
Eco-Justice
Joint session of RC02 Economy and Society [host committee] and RC44
Labor Movements


The Global Migration of Gendered Care Work
Joint session of RC02 Economy and Society , RC19 Poverty, Social
Welfare and Social Policy [host committee] and RC44 Labor Movements


Unionism and the Critique of the Work Organization. Syndicalisme et
critique de l`organisation du travail
Joint session of RC30 Sociology of Work [host committee] and RC44
Labor Movements