Put together, these factors create a dilemma for these workers: dire need of cash income keeps propelling rural parents, who make a significant portion of the workforce, to come to work at Foxconn; the family’s demand for caring and emotional labor, on the other hand, is pulling workers, especially mothers, back to the family. In the end, many of the workers end up turning this job a seasonal gig.
The capitalist system has been utilizing the tactic of workplace fissuring to weaken the organizing power and bargaining position of US unions. This has led to a decline in worker's ability to negotiate fair wages and benefits. However, as an alternative strategy, unions have begun to adopt multi-employer bargaining [...]
Low wages and the necessity to work continue to undergird the Vietnamese economy. A web of international finance and corporations like Intel, Samsung, and Nike systematically transfer labor power and its value to their balance sheets and to shareholders. This is simply an old form of imperialism dressed up now in the guise of the free market.
Why don’t people always act in their own collective self-interest? This classic puzzle in sociological analysis led us to question why so many workers – even the most precarious among them – were so disinterested in unions as a means to achieve higher pay and better working conditions. If [...]
In March 2020, New York City became the U.S. epicenter of the emerging Covid-19 crisis. Yet neither city leaders, nor school district officials, nor teacher union leadership provided a meaningful response to a mounting public health crisis. Instead, the city’s fledgling social justice teachers’ union caucus, MORE, rose to [...]
On September 12th, 2022, approximately 15,000 nurses went on strike across Minnesota and Wisconsin in one of the largest private sector work stoppages by nurses in U.S. history. Workers demanded increased staffing and higher wages to retain nurses after working for over two years through a deadly pandemic. In [...]
There is neither a discernible overarching vision that unites all workers and aids in broad class solidarity nor an easy way of layering strategies so that they serve complementary ends. Whether this misalignment proves damning for labor remains to be seen.
How are the affluent classes' instruments of control and power becoming the means of resistance for the urban poor against those very affluent classes as their employers? The actions of domestic workers in India are tied to the processes of how Indian cities have developed over the last three decades. Elaborating on these actions, I do not intend to say that domestic workers disrupting GNs is a widespread phenomenon across Indian cities. Instead, I use the workers' experiences in these two Indian cities to hint at political futures which, if harnessed, can transform the social standing of some of the most marginalized workers in Indian society.
My article in Capital and Class extends Marxist feminist critiques of social reproduction to explain the ways global financialization processes affect social reproduction patterns in the era of neoliberalization (1997-present) in South Korea. I focus on the question of how financialization affects contingent workers' livability.
The communicative space, such as WeChat and TikTok is another arena for social reproduction, where female platform drivers organize cooperative child-care arrangements with other female drivers so that they can drive longer, or work at a particular time. Nonetheless, the communicative space also forges mutual support and creates a community of shared responsibilities in the absence of a shared workplace, thereby creating the potential for women workers to resist platform control, sexual exploitation and harassment, and gender-based violence in the workplace.
