Social responsibility is addressed to corporations, but can also be applied to other powerful organizations. This study tests the impact of labor union social responsibility on key measures of labor union attachment. After developing a scale of labor union social responsibility, craft union apprentice workers were surveyed and their responses analyzed with structural equation modeling. Labor union social responsibility was directly and positively related to union commitment and job satisfaction. (...) class='Hi'>Union commitment and job satisfaction fully mediated the negative relationship between labor union social responsibility and propensity to withdraw from the union, and the positive relationship between labor union social responsibility and union participation. The results suggest that labor union social responsibility can enhance union attachment and inform union strategy. (shrink)

Globally, labor unions have been criticized for being highly gendered, patriarchal organizations that struggle to engage with, and represent, women. In Cambodia, the disparity between women’s activism and organizational power is particularly acute. Women workers are the face of the labor movement, yet they remain excluded from union leadership despite some movement toward more progressive gender policies within unions. Using data from semi-structured interviews with workers and union leaders in the construction and garment (...) sectors, I illustrate how gendered narratives and practices of control are mobilized through gender regimes that operate in the household, the workplace, and unions. I propose an analytical framework that incorporates these three interlocking gender regimes to draw attention to the contradictory role of unions in advocating for worker rights while depoliticizing women’s activism and sustaining gender inequity. I argue that it is the contradictory relationship between these regimes that entrenches women’s subordination within unions despite their numerical strength. (shrink)

Based on an ethnography of a Latina/latino immigrant union, the author examines changes in gender inequality along five dimensions. Union renewal weakened the structural division of union labor, allowing women on staff to realize feminist values of leadership development in concrete goals. These changes made space for women members to engage in new leadership practices that undermined gender inequalities in interactions with men and empowered and politicized women at the individual level. Feminist (...) values of caring for children, however, were not realized in specific goals thus limiting the leadership practices and politicization of women with children. The ethnography shows the need to move from the study of women and unions to an analysis of how gendered transformations intersect with economic restructuring and immigration within social movement organizations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:104 Feminist Studies 44, no. 1. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Estelle Carol The Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective: A Memoir In 1973, the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective worked in an old run-down second-floor office on Belmont Avenue, which we shared with the main offices of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU).1 They call it New Town now, but in 1973, there wasn’t much new (...) about it. We weren’t the only artists in the building though; downstairs was a tattoo parlor. Still, it was better than having the studio located in my apartment on Newport Street, where there were silkscreen tables in the dining room and a bathroom that doubled as a darkroom. My bedroom door opened directly into the dining room and usually reeked of the foul chemicals we used to make the posters. Just one OSHA inspection would have shut us down forever, but it was not until later that we learned about the dangers of long-term exposure. On Newport Street, the apartment was right next to the Ravenswood Branch of the “L,” and it shook like the aftershock of a California earthquake each time a train passed. But we were in the midst of a women’s revolution, and our priorities were clear. 1. The Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective (WGC) was a “workgroup” of the CWLU from the very start. There were about 25 workgroups and other groups within the CWLU. CWLU outreach to recruit new members got a lot of new women into WGC. WGC, Women’s Liberation Rock Band, and Womankind Newspaper were the cultural arms of the CWLU. Cultural outreach to attract new CWLU members and new feminists to the movement in general was critical to the CWLU’s success. In Celebration of Amazons, 194. All posters designed and silkscreened collectively by the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, www.cwluherstory.org. Courtesy of CWLU Herstory Project. All posters are on silkscreen. Turning Through Time, Workwoven, 195. Sisterhood Is Blooming, Springtime Will Never Be the Same, 190. Chicago Women’s Labor History, 194. International Women’s Day (reprinted from a Cuban poster). ABOVE Healthcare Is for People, Not for Profit, 195. OPPOSITE Abortion Is a Personal Decision, Not a Legal Debate, 190. ABOVE Healthcare Is for People, Not for Profit, 195. OPPOSITE Abortion Is a Personal Decision, Not a Legal Debate, 190. OPPOSITE Chicago Maternity Center, 192. ABOVE Lesbian Pride, 192. Mountain-Moving Day, 192. ABOVE Detail from Mountain-Moving Day, 192. OPPOSITE Women Unite, Take Back the Night, 199. Lipstick and Blood (reprinted from a Cuban design). Women Are Not Chicks, 191. Liberation School for Women, 192. Boycott Red Coach Lettuce, 192. Working Women Unite, 195. International Women’s Day, Many Waves But One Ocean, 192. Estelle Carol 121 If you look at Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective posters, you’ll rarely see a person’s name on them, because we decided early on that art had been done all wrong by men. It was based on egotism and the cult of the individual—the great-men-of-art syndrome. So we decided to throw all that out, and art now had to be a collective experience. So every poster that we created had to be done by committee. Every one. We had a system in which any one of the collective could get an idea or a phrase or an image and decide to do a poster. They would ask two or three other members to be their assistants and to help develop the idea. And then in little teams they would physically create the poster in silk screen. It had to be a collective process. There’s no way that one single woman could really do it because we were using very primitive reproduction methods, and we needed at least three people to run the silk screen. The silk screens were all hand printed. No machines. If a poster was more than one color, it had to be hand printed, one color at a time, so it was very, very labor intensive. And... (shrink)

In the majority of European Union countries, women are far better represented in the European Parliament than in the lower house of their respective national parliaments. This article examines the political signicance of this imbalance through a case study of French women members of the European Parliament. The marginality of the European Parliament in French politics has meant that women have succeeded in getting elected there and that they have had access to power positions in (...) the European Parliament. Some of these women have occupied positions in traditionally male areas like economics and nance. The European Parliament has been for many women politicians a secondary point of entry into national electoral politics. In French politics, the European Parliament provides a forum for the partial overturning of nationally determined political values, especially those that determine the sexual division of political labour. The European Parliament also creates pressures for changes in the gender composition of other sectors in the French political field. (shrink)

“Work–life balance” is a relatively modern expression. However, there is no novelty in the core concept, as resistance to excessive incompatibility between work roles and personal roles has a history that predates contemporary struggles for a decline in unnecessary work–life conflict. The authors of this manuscript aim to convey a portion of this history by instilling, from an ethics perspective, an awareness of the efforts of early labor organizations, including labor unions, and a social organization that addressed (...) class='Hi'>labor issues. They will also communicate the resolve of key individuals, especially women, including labor leaders and activists, who contributed to labor reform and served as early proponents for WLB. In addition, implications and suggestions for practice and future inquiry will be provided. (shrink)

This article discusses the hitherto little-studied question of women workers’ empowerment through access to labor rights in the east African export horticultural sector. It is based on the work carried out by Women Working Worldwide and its east African partners, drawing on primary research on cut-flower farms in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda. The focus in discussions of women’s empowerment has tended to be on individual actors rather than collective strategies. We argue that strategies such as action (...) research, education, organization and advocacy focusing on labor rights are effective in gendered empowerment and can bring positive change to women’s working lives on African farms, and beyond. (shrink)

This article focuses on service provision for women who are involuntarily referred under the UK Mental Health Act (1983) into medium and high security care in England and Wales. We explore how physical and procedural security in such settings is prioritized over relational care (see also Fallon Report, Department of Health, 1999a and NHS Executive, 2000 – Tilt Report). We are not arguing against the importance of protecting the public from the acts of dangerous members of our society. (...) However, we are arguing that many of the women in our secure services are inappropriately placed and receive inappropriate forms of treatment and care. Rather than physical security, it is high relational care, which the women require. Further, we argue that current service provision often re-produces forms of violence and violation which have marked many of women's lives prior to their entry into the secure system. (shrink)

In 2009, a small group of domestic workers joined FNV Bondgenoten, the largest Dutch trade union in the private sector and affiliated with the Dutch trade union confederation FNV. The group that joined consisted mainly of women immigrant workers, many of whom did not have a residence permit. FNV’s policy is that we organize workers and do not ask for passports. Still, a group like this brought to light several problems for FNV, both practical and fundamental. The (...) Article identifies three types of problems. The first set of problems concerns the invisibility of domestic workers. Domestic workers work in private houses and are leery of talking to strangers if they don’t have residence permits. This demanded new organizing tactics from the sector, like asking women to bring a friend to a meeting and joining churches. A cash payment of membership fees system was devised, its administration done by handwriting. At the same time, the public debate on immigration toughened; immigrants without residence permits in particular were depicted as somewhere between a profiteer and the devil. This debate also took place within FNV. The second set of problems is defined by the traditional views in Dutch society on domestic work. The group chose to become union members, since they wanted to better their position in the labor market. Dutch law on domestic work excludes them from full protection of labor and social security law. The inclusion of domestic work in labor and social security law is contrary to cultural and historical traditions and views and therefore contentious. The third set of problems is caused by the connectedness of labor and social security law and immigration law. Domestic workers in the Netherlands work in the shadows in two ways: by not having a residence permit, and by not being protected by labor and social security law. The result of our campaign is that a group of publicly financed care workers will be better protected, but the group of domestic workers that fought for ILO Convention 189 will still be excluded from our labor and social security law and not be able to qualify for a residence permit. (shrink)

Drawing from a long history of feminist writing grounded in personal reflection and informal dialogue between feminist thinkers, Cobb and Godden-Rasul present an email-based conversation with Jess Lishak, the outgoing Women’s Officer at the University of Manchester Students’ Union. The conversation draws on Cobb and Godden-Rasul’s experience as feminist academics engaged in critical institutional practice through such initiatives as editing the Inherently Human blog, organising the Inspirational Women of Law exhibition, and participating in university working groups on (...) campus-based harassment and violence. In asking Lishak to reflect on her journey to feminism and her experiences of activism, the conversation ranges over such issues as personal influences and experiences, strategies for securing institutional support, encouraging student engagement with feminism, and campaigning tactics. The conversation developed out of a “Campus Feminisms” event in March 2016, which explored the rise of exciting new grassroots single-issue campaigns and political mobilisations by students in higher education, and was organised by Cobb and Godden-Rasul at Newcastle University, UK. Undergraduate and postgraduate students shared their personal struggles and achievements in bringing feminist ideas and campaigns to their university campuses. Lucy Morgan, the Gender Equality Officer at Newcastle University Students’ Union, offered inspiring reflections on her efforts to reinvigorate the ‘F’ word, in the face of simultaneous student apathy and backlash. Many of these campus-based mobilisations have demanded better institutional responses to sexual violence against women. At around the same time, Cobb was beginning a new role as the co-chair of the University of Manchester’s first Task & Finish Group on Sexual Violence and Harassment on Campus. This followed Universities UK’s decision to create a taskforce to consider options for improving institutional responses to student safety. In the process, Cobb crossed paths with Lishak, who had been appointed a member of the UUK Taskforce in light of her path-breaking students’ union work addressing violence against women. Since Lishak was an exemplar of this new feminist wave in higher education, one that was still inadequately understood by feminist academics despite often working side-by-side within the same institutions, the authors embarked on this conversation in order to better understand the relationship between academic and student feminist activism on campus. As Lishak makes clear in her own reflections, there is nothing inevitable about the synergies between these movements, but there is potentially a great deal that could be achieved through their closer engagement. (shrink)

The New South Wales union movement embraced the principles of heritage and conservationism in the 1970s through the imposing of “green bans” – a strategy wherein union members refused to work on construction projects that were a threat to the state’s natural or built environment. Led by radicals like Builders Labourers’ Federation leader Jack Mundey, the green bans were seen in several sectors as a departure from the traditional “Old Left” priorities of securing workers’ wages and conditions. (...) Rather than a hard shift towards radicalism, this article proposes that the green bans were instead reflective of an already existing conservationist tradition in the New South Wales union movement. This reinterpretation is predicated on a content analysis of extant historical material such as contemporaneous news articles, personal memoirs, transcripts of political speeches and archival documents related to the policing of left-wing activism in the 1960s and 1970s. The results show that an existing tradition of engagement with a broad spectrum of social issues in the New South Wales union movement predates the emergence of the New Left, including the commitment to environmental justice principles that underpinned the green bans. (shrink)

There is a long-standing and growing interest in democratizing labor unions. Union democracy is important for many reasons, including fostering greater member voice in the workplace and society, improving the internal effectiveness of unions, building members’ capacities to engage in democracy in other contexts, and helping foster union renewal. Despite these benefits, democracy in unions as practiced today is characterized by several problems. In this paper, I analyze several of the remedies to increase union democracy (...) proposed to date by scholars and practitioners, finding that despite their potential positive impacts, many of them may have inherent limitations. I then argue that sortition—the use of lotteries in selecting leaders—shows potential in helping address many of the problems facing union democracy and overcoming the limitations of recent remedies. An important democratic tool in Ancient Athens and other city-states, sortition has a long history in political theory and practice, yet application to unions is in its infancy. I conclude by developing and evaluating several ways in which sortition could be used as a tool in union governance structures, and by discussing the implications of my theorizing for ongoing work on union democracy and union renewal. (shrink)

Temporary labor migration constitutes a significant trend of migration movements within the European Union, especially after the 2004 and 2007 EU enlargements. However, compared to other forms of TLM, intra-EU TLM has received scant attention from normative theorists. By drawing on Iris Marion Young's conception of structural injustice, this article analyzes the injustice of TLM within the EU. It argues that purely rights-based approaches are deficient and that a structural injustice approach is needed. The latter sheds light on (...) the formal and informal processes that place EU temporary migrants in a condition of vulnerability and reveals the multiple individual and collective agents participating in such processes. Moreover, such an approach offers important insights into the agency of migrants by showing how they themselves reinforce structural processes that put not only individual temporary migrants but also similarly positioned migrants and other members of the sending and receiving countries in a vulnerable position. A structural injustice approach does not deny that intra-EU temporary labor migrants should enjoy the rights and entitlements that they currently have in the host country as European citizens. Nor does it dispute that reducing the vulnerability of temporary migrants may require “special rights” accommodating the specific nature of their life plans. Instead, though such rights may be necessary, a structural injustice approach demonstrates how they are insufficient to tackle the injustice of intra-EU TLM and other forms of temporary labor migration more broadly. (shrink)

Trade union leaders serve dual, seemingly contradictory roles. They must command militant organizations in conflicts with employers. Simultaneously, they must be accountable and democratically responsive to their members. Few unions possess the institutions or leadership to accomplish both. This article analyzes the practices of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, in which effective contract negotiation and an informed, active rank-and-file democracy are mutually supportive. We offer an alternative to standard accounts of union democracy. While the claims (...) are based on a detailed case study, the theoretical model and its insights hold for labor unions and organizations more broadly. (shrink)

As has often been observed, neither the thinkers of antiquity nor those of the Middle Ages exhibited a great theoretical interest in the social value or even the ethical significance of labour. Throughout this long period of history, the labour an individual had to carry out to make a living, and thus under compulsion, was understood more or less solely as a heavy burden. It signified daily toil and the state of personal dependency attaching to a lowly social rank. Consequently, (...) there was no cause to subject it to any kind of moral consideration. Indeed, as Moses Finley reports ‘[n]either in Greek nor Latin was there a word with which to express the general notion of ‘labour’ or the concept of labour as a general social function’. Famously, with the advent of modernity, the very opposite begins to become the case. In this period, in the wake of various intersecting processes of cultural revaluation and economic transformation, labour developed into a positive credential of free existence and a presupposition of social integrity: the Protestant ethic led to a gradual upgrading of the value of labour, because it was interpreted as a sign that one possessed a capacity for inner-worldly asceticism. In the course of the establishment of capitalist economic practices, the liberation of labour from personal dependency in legal terms gave rise to the idea that gainful work could henceforth be proof of a free decision, and it thus provided the precondition of individual independence. And over time, the more the intellectual union between these two revolutions was strengthened, the more it would go on to influence the cultural self-understanding of modern societies in the capitalist west: what was previously the sheer necessity of earning a daily crust was now understood as proof of social emancipation and freedom. Nobody provided a better conceptualisation of this transformed self-conception than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who devoted an entire chapter of his ‘Philosophy of Right’ of 1821 to the emancipatory value of labour; here, he tells us that every member of civil society ‘is somebody’ through ‘his competence’ and his ‘regular income and means of support’, i.e. possesses the social status of a full-fledged citizen, and will find ‘his honour’ in this recognised existence as a professional. (shrink)

American leaders in four realms were studied to assess their views on the helpfulness to workers with family obligations of employers' policies and services. The realms were corporate management, labor unions, the pro-family movement, and the feminist movement. The data were analyzed by leadership realm and gender in relation to policies of two types: scheduling and work arrangements and services and benefits. Gender accounted for the respondents' views better than class or social movement did. Except for feminist men, the (...) men held similar views regardless of leadership realm. The pro-family women differed from the other women in failing to view most services and benefits as particularly helpful to employees. Union and corporate women's favorable views on services and benefits suggest that fundamental change in workplace supports for workers' family obligations could develop if more women became leaders in unions and corporations. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the effects of time spent in household labor on the gender gap in earnings. We identify that part of the gender gap in earnings directly attributable to women's greater household labor time. After controlling for years of work experience, hours worked per week, occupation, industry, union membership, and education, we find that household labor time can directly account for 8.2 percent of the gender gap in earnings. In addition to the (...) direct effect of women's household responsibilities on earnings, they also may affect occupational location, work experience, and number of hours worked per week, and through these variables, their earnings. These findings indicate that we cannot truly understand women's earnings relative to those of men without considering the impact of their unpaid labor on their paid work. (shrink)

France’s agreements on the joint management of migration flows figure centrally within studies of bilateral migration agreements. With their origins in friendship and navigation treaties of the late 19th century, the AJMs are successors to the postcolonial, circular mobility conventions of the 1960s, and are uniquely positioned for periodizing the evolution of bilaterally negotiated labor mobilities. Nonetheless, due to the European Union’s reluctance to embrace mass regularization and the EU Member States’ legislative powers over labor markets, they (...) have time and again scotched France’s ambition to leverage preferential labor market entries in exchange for more cooperation over irregular migration. Through documents and statistical data analysis, this Article studies the case of Senegal’s negotiation of additional pathways to France for its lower-skilled workers. At the center is France’s administrative court of appeals, which has confirmed the broad margin of discretion over Art. 42 in the AJM between France and Senegal. This jurisprudence has decoupled the automatic linkage between a job listed under duress in France under the Annex to the AJM and the entitlement to exceptional admission. We argue that France’s courts have removed a privilege of Senegalese workers, which has re-politicized France’s migration diplomacy with Senegal. At the same time, retention of the prefectorial discretionary power has levelled the playing field among West and North African countries that have concluded similar bilateral agreements with France. This Article adds to the research on bilateral migration agreements by proposing a multilevel legal analysis, which studies AJMs in the context of France’s common law, EU labor and return directives, and the multilateral of WTO/gats liberalization. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that the concepts of work and labor have been shaped by political and feminist philosophers in ways that are more revealing of their specific visions of society than the character and significance of various socially necessary activities. Hegel, Marx, and Arendt each have particular understandings of work that illuminate other elements of society that are considered important, detrimental, or dysfunctional. Their normative understandings stem from the idiosyncratic visions of the public and private spheres that (...) are embedded in their writings and the specific moral and political characteristics that they ascribe to the concepts of labor and work. For feminist theorists such as Eva Kittay, the notion of labor as housework, childcare or carework stems from the project of offering an alternative social or political framework that accommodates women and recognizes their role in the overall functioning of society. However, feminist accounts of labor in the domestic realm also suffer from a tendency to highlight certain important dimensions and elements of society, such as care, moral labor, or the invisible conditions of capitalist production. This focus distracts us from understanding the role of work as a universal practice engaged in subjectively, idiosyncratically, by each member of society. The latter vision of work requires not a concrete definition but a broad contour of the boundaries of work activities. ;My purpose in exploring the role of work in these writings is twofold: the first is to show the normative role and meanings of work in these philosophers. The second is to clear the way for a new understanding of work. Since the recognition of one's membership in a polity is partially dependent on one's contributions to society, and one's contributions are often evaluated in terms of the concept of "work," there is a need for a more expansive vision of work. The concept and meaning of work must be reformulated in order to acknowledge the social obligations and commitments that individuals express through the performance of a broad variety of work activities. If we can arrive at a new formulation of the concept of work, then we can implement it to acknowledge the social character of various activities, and the individuals who perform them, whether or not they are wage-earners , as crucial to society, i.e. as contributing citizens. (shrink)

This work is a survey of the efforts through which women have changed their place in American society from the nation's founding to the present. Examining the historical struggle for suffrage, legal and property rights, and rights in the work place, the authors show how these experiences have shaped a contemporary movement for economic, political, and social equality that has become increasingly independent and less and less likely to place women's issues second to other national concerns. The authors (...) recount a history of women activists who repeatedly set aside their own issues in favor of others that seemed more pressing--from abolition and preserving the Union, to labor solidarity in the 1920s, and civil rights and the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. Male domination of these movements and a lack of support for women's issues have been major factors in creating the contemporary feminist philosophy of going it alone. The book is divided into three topical sections, each of which offers a historical analysis and draws on a variety of sources such as legal statutes and judicial decisions, demographic information, public opinion polls, and biographies and other narrative accounts. It is a richly documented resource for courses and research in women's studies, sociology, politics, and U.S. legal and political history. (shrink)

Thesis: The exclusion of organized labor/management issues from the principal arenas for business ethics study and discussions needs to be remedied. The paper develops this thesis in three steps: 1) Exclusion: A careful examination of select textbooks, journals, and conferences provides evidence as to the virtual absence of unions and such crucial organized labor/management issues as labor organizing and collective bargaining; 2) Inclusion: A series of brief arguments favoring inclusion of these issues in business ethics based on (...) the notion of privileged institutions, adversarial posturing, the societal benefits, and globalization; 3) Suggestions: Some practical, cooperative initiatives involving the academy, management and labor, such as, labor officials as guest speakers and members of business school committees, internships in labor organizations, training workshops in business ethics for labor leaders, fora for joint management/labor discussions of issues each group faces in the economy and the legislatures. (shrink)

This paper critically examines how senior figures in the UK Labour Party and wider labour movement discussed the topic of immigration in the immediate aftermath of the UK's vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Influenced by the Discourse Historical Approach, the paper is based on an analysis of 86 public interventions by Labour figures, over a 6-month period, delivered in speeches, articles and essays. The paper examines argumentative strategies adopted by Labour figures – including Members of (...) Parliament, advisors and trade union leaders – who called for stronger immigration controls from an avowedly ‘left-wing’ perspective. Foregrounding their commitment to progressive politics, Labour politicians argued that restricting the number of migrants entering Britain was democratic, anti-racist and an expression of the Labour Party's commitment to the interests of working-class people. Nevertheless, it is the contention of this paper that the Labour Party's rhetoric tapped into right-wing populist discourses which constructed immigration as a threat to the racialised privileges of a ‘white’ working class. (shrink)

This article examines the ways that managers in a rapidly globalizing industry use gendered discourses of skill to justify and frame their search for inexperienced workers in low-wage regions, using a case of a U.S.-based apparel firm that relocated and subcontracted its sewing operations in the 1990s. It uses feminist theory to examine managers' claims that women's sewing skills in the United States were disappearing and that they needed to seek out these skills in parts of the world where (...) women were not yet active participants in labor markets. Feminist researchers have long understood the ways that naturalization of skill cheapens women's labor. The case presented here highlights the way in which the portrayal of certain skills as naturally occurring resources justifies the movement of capital in search of new pools of workers without labor market experience or union representation. (shrink)

In this chapter, Rosa Luxemburg examines the basic structure of wage labor. For Luxemburg, wage labor is a condition for the systemic, economical exploitation of one free human being by another. Luxemburg analyzes the capitalists’ thinking about wages, their interest in extending the workday and in lowering the pay, and the conflict of interest between the worker and the owner of capital. She also discusses the role of trade unions in keeping not only the real wages but also (...) the social wages above the level of mere sustenance for the individual worker. (shrink)

The Eurozone crisis has triggered profound political and economic changes across the debtor member states. This article shows how the crisis and the imposition of austerity policies by the Troika have forced Spain to pursue internal devaluation as a means of economic adjustment through the reduction of real wages, increased pressure for liberalizing labor market institutions, and given Spain’s conservative government the opportunity and cover to pursue radical neoliberal labor law reforms. Spain’s 2012 labor law reforms went (...) well beyond external demands. The crisis and the Troika’s policy demands generated mass unemployment, devastated Spain’s Socialist Party, and created the enabling conditions for economic reforms. But domestic partisan considerations led the conservative People’s Party to commandeer the crisis to weaken unions as the electoral and organizational base of the center-left opposition. The PP channeled reform into an attack on labor that decisively shifted power to employers. As organized labor relations were reduced to concession bargaining, real wages have plummeted for the vast majority of Spaniards, even as mass unemployment and economic stagnation persist. Analysis suggests the emergence of a winner-take-all economy that will have lasting consequences for the Eurozone and the European Union. (shrink)

Children may be viewed as public goods whereby both parents receive equal genetic benefits yet one parent often invests more heavily than the other. We introduce a microeconomic framework for understanding household investment decisions to address questions concerning conflicts of interest over types and amount of work effort among married men and women. Although gains and costs of marriage may not be spread equally among marriage partners, marriage is still a favorable, efficient outcome under a wide range of conditions. (...) This bioeconomic framework subsumes both cooperative and conflictive views on the sexual division of labor. We test hypotheses concerning marriage markets, assortative mating, and men’s labor motivations among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Bolivia and find that: (1) men and women both value work effort in marital partners, (2) marital labor contributions are complementary, (3) work effort is correlated between spouses, (4) total production is correlated with total reproduction, and (5) better hunters have higher fitness gains within marital unions. (shrink)

This article aims to make a contribution to the conceptualization of mainstreaming gender equality promoted by the European Union. It starts by exploring the historical periodization of equal opportunities delivery strategies and challenging the compartmentalization of these developments. It suggests that equality policies can better be conceptualized in terms of a `three-legged equality stool', which recognizes the interconnectiveness of three perspectives — the equal treatment perspective, the women's perspective and the gender perspective. The article argues that the gender (...) perspective has been closely associated with strategies for mainstreaming gender equality, but that this association is misleading. As a result mainstreaming has remained a `fuzzy' concept, which in turn has led to many different styles and forms of practical implementation in European member states. (shrink)

Since the Accession 8 (A8) of the European Union in 2004 the United Kingdom has experienced a significant influx of European Union Member State migrants. Although the A8 migration has been studied widely, gender and gender roles are still in need of further research in particular in relation to older Polish women migrants. The focus of this paper is to provide an insight into the experiences of mobility as reflected by older women migrants from Poland. The (...) findings are crafted into a multivocal account composed around the theme of ‘the embodied experience of migration – age, invisibility, social and economic exclusion’ by drawing on reflections from a life-story interview as well as literary accounts interwoven with ‘authorial stiches’ and connected to the wider migration discourse. The different women’s voices presented in this article point to the fact that the experience of migration can have an empowering and emancipatory effect in relation to gender subjectivity. In contrast to previous studies on female migration with a focus on economic factors, this paper demonstrates that the experience of mobility could be understood as an opportunity to redefine gender subjectivity and offer a route to escape undesirable gender ideology in Poland. (shrink)

Since the collapse of the Berlin wall, women and girls have been trafficked from central and eastern Europe to work as prostitutes in the European Union. This paper looks at the response of the international community to the problem of sex trafficking as it impacts on the EU. The focus is on criminal justice intervention with respect to protection of and assistance to ‘victims’, and a specially witness protection, in the light of the following: the tensions and promises (...) between treatment of trafficked women as ‘victims’ of crime and criminal justice informants; and the need to re-focus on a ‘woman-centred’ approach to criminal justice intervention for trafficked women. Given the diverse nature of law and criminal justice practice between EU Member States, the paper necessarily presents a generic critique of current EU and international ‘best practice’ recommendations, with some commentary on practice based on the author's research, with respect to what ‘gold standards’ of practice offer in theory and what is delivered in reality. The question of ‘victim-centred’ justice and/or ‘woman-centred’ justice is raised in an effort to promote effective policy recommendations. (shrink)

The high-tech health service work done by amateur family caregivers in U.S. homes challenges the conventional division of the social world into public and private. Under new federal reimbursement systems, the diagnosis-related groups, patients are being discharged sicker than before from hospitals and nursing homes, or after treatments in outpatient clinics. Health care facilities depend on a work transfer, shifting their earlier responsibilities for the sick to the family. There, women family members do for free the work once (...) done by paid health service workers in health care facilities, caring for family members who need their nursing and housekeeping services. Women's unpaid work knits together “public” and “private,” demonstrating how capitalism reorganizes the labor process to make use of free service labor. (shrink)

A growing number of people are relying on technologies like Google Maps not only to navigate and locate themselves in cartographic space but also to search, discover and evaluate urban places. While the spatial data that underlies such technology frequently appears as a combination of Google-created maps and locational information passively collected from mobile (GPS-enabled) devices, in this article we argue that for such systems to function as both useful tools for exploration for users and sources of revenue, users must (...) actively produce massive quantities of granular spatial data that would otherwise be significantly more difficult and expensive to collect. The production of this qualitative information about places constitutes significant unremunerated affective labour. In this article, we build on the tradition of feminist geographies, especially feminist and critical Geographic Information Systems (GIS), to examine how the labour done by gendered, raced and often classed members of a local community is alienated by Google (i.e. Alphabet, Inc.) to produce commodified spatial data/media in the Local Guides platform. We analyse how Google’s presentation of the platform hails women as care labourers—sharing their thoughts, feelings and knowledge of place for free in the name of supporting and caring for a community, however vaguely it may be constituted. At the same time, we argue that digital labour that produces the Local Guides platform draws from and reproduces specific gendering of spaces. We draw on a case study of a commercial corridor in the US city of Worcester, Massachusetts to show how the dialectic between affective digital labour and urban space has material effects on the production of raced, classed and gendered spaces and places. The article concludes with a call to maintain critical, feminist engagements with these types of platforms in order to further develop forms of digital praxis towards more just cities. (shrink)

This article borrows from the intersectionality literature to investigate how legal status, labor market position, and family characteristics structure the labor supply of immigrant Latinas in Durham, North Carolina, a new immigrant destination. The analysis takes a broad view of labor force participation, analyzing the predictors of whether or not women work, whether and how the barriers to work vary across occupations, and variation in hours and weeks worked among the employed. I also explicitly investigate the (...) extent to which family constraints interact with other social characteristics, especially legal status, in shaping women’s labor market position. Results highlight that immigrant Latinas experience multiple, interrelated constraints on employment owing to their position as low-skill workers in a labor market highly segregated by gender and nativity, as members of a largely undocumented population, and as wives and mothers in an environment characterized by significant work–family conflict. (shrink)

Gender imbalances persist throughout the world, particularly at leadership level, and equally also visible in the case of trade unions. This article focuses on CGTP-IN, the largest Portuguese trade union confederation, and sets out analysis incorporating both figures from this organisation and accounts by female members of CGTP-IN unions. Results confirm the existence of gender asymmetries, especially at the highest leadership levels. Analysis of the discourses of these women leaders reveals some awareness of the influence of gender (...) on professional relations, placing women at a disadvantage, especially where leadership is concerned. Furthermore, four reasons driving the persistence of these gender asymmetries in trade union leadership/decision-making roles were identified: family responsibilities, gendered professional segregation, masculine trade union cultures and traditional gender stereotypes. Nevertheless, the interviewees resist to means of affirmative action such as gender quotas, and instead prefer to prioritise education and raising awareness around gender equality. (shrink)

The freedom and right to associate carries distinct meanings in different systems of industrial relations, giving rise to distinct institutions. Where bargaining is based on grassroots association, rates of membership in trade unions and coverage of collective agreements are low. Where bargaining is actively endorsed by the state, high rates of membership are matched by considerable coverage. Over the last two decades, some countries, four of which are studied here, have gone through a process that I designate as hybridization, in (...) which a gap emerges between a rapidly declining rate of membership and persistent relatively high level of coverage. The Article accounts for the growing gap between coverage and membership and its implications. On the basis of extensive interviews with trade union officials, organizers, works councils’ members, Labor Chamber representatives, academics and journalists in the four countries, the Article further seeks to document and explain new organizing practices at two levels. First, why do unions seek to organize, despite persistent power accorded to collective agreements by the state? Second, which strategies are used for current recruitment and organizing practices? The discussion highlights the ongoing tension that is folded in the meeting of institutions that are aimed at sustaining the centralized system of bargaining and social partnership, with the dynamics that are characteristic of raising membership levels. Some best practices that seek to address this tension are identified, but are also characterized as difficult to emulate and extend as a general practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This issue of Feminist Studies includes a cluster of essays that demonstrates new approaches to life writing, with special attention to unconventional women’s autobiographies. Lara Vapnek describes the historical inhibitions that shaped the self-presentation of pioneering American labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in the early twentieth century such that she omitted her sexual relationships with both women and men from her autobiographical writings. Overlapping with (...) Vapnek’s historical focus, Nora Doyle’s essay takes a new look at Gertrude Stein’s bestknown and most accessible work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, seeing it as Stein’s clever reworking of the women’s genre of domestic fiction in its pairing of a domesticated wife with a “genius” husband. In her examination of Kamala Das’s Balyakala Smaranakal (Memories of childhood), Sharmila Sreekumar discusses how the memoir’s depiction of self-deferral rather than self-realization unsettles autobiographical conventions through its troubling of the relationship between “self,” “life,” and “writing” that is constitutive of the genre. In Olga Zilberbourg’s short story, two women are baffled as they contemplate a friend’s suicide: what does it say about their own accomplishments and losses? Attention to the visual aspects of women’s lives and to their embodiment is highlighted in Estelle Carol’s memoir about her time spent as a member of the Graphic Collective of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union in the 1970s. Corey Hickner-Johnson’s lyrical essay describes the first-person I of the poem as pushing herself to a physical extreme. Her autobiographical crisis-moment, depicted in acutely visceral and visual terms, wills into relief life’s underlying colors against a backdrop of otherwise drab monotony and disappointment. Feminist graphic artwork is discussed in Hillary Chute’s review essay on the newly popular genre of graphic novels by women. Alexandra Ketchum’s “‘The Place We’ve Always Wanted to Go But Never Could Find’: Finding Woman Space in Feminist Restaurants and Cafés in Ontario 1974–1982” and Samantha Pergadia’s “Geologies of 8 Sex and Gender: Excavating the Materialism of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler” shift our attention away from individual life trajectories to broader sweeps of space and time. Ketchum’s history of feminist restaurants and cafes in Ontario, Canada, in the mid 1970s to early 1980s encourages us to consider the importance of space to the formation of feminist solidarities and political organizing, while Pergadia’s analysis of the geological understandings that undergird the work of both Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler invites us to rethink the temporalities through which gendered and sexed subjects, as well as academic disciplines, are formed. In closing, Ashwini Tambe reflects on the #MeToo movement and how we might fashion a more responsive public reckoning with sexual coercion. The issue leads off with Vapnek’s essay, “The Rebel Girl Revisited: Rereading Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s Life Story.” As Vapnek details, Flynn, an activist in the Industrial Workers of the World, chronicled her life only as far as 1926. Although she envisioned women’s emancipation as an integral component of the socialist revolution, her self-censorship reveals “how communism as well as anticommunism has limited our knowledge of the feminist past.” Flynn remained committed to socialism and women’s rights and continued to agitate for social change, but her efforts to narrate her later life were stymied by internal inhibitions and external forces. For a decade she lived with another woman at a time when leftists were not open about same-sex relationships. Nor did she wish to reveal her sexual relationships with a number of men or the psychological breakdown she suffered in 1926. Joining the US Communist Party in 1936 re-energized her career as a labor organizer and resulted in her being sent to prison from 1955 to 1957 during the period of the Red Scare in the United States. By her middle age, she had experienced not only nonconventional personal relationships but also a dramatic change in her appearance: rather than the slim girl pictured on the cover of songs designed to encourage the labor movement, she was a stout, matronly woman. Inhibited from revising her autobiography to account for her later life... (shrink)

This essay explores the meaning of diasporic practice as it has been applied within the contemporary Black Atlantic context. The general focus of this topic has been visible or performative practices that have broad audiences, ranging from diasporic members to the sociopolitically included or the privileged citizen. Moreover, the objects or products of diasporic practice are largely understood to be aesthetic; the literature has highlighted music, dance, art, and religion, for instance. In this essay I argue that a taken-for-granted (...) prerequisite of a hierarchized viewing audience misses passing moments of negotiation that occur in silence or within disciplined exchanges among persons who we identify as diasporic. These practices build community in very powerful ways but may not leave lasting traces or archives; they have to do with fleeting displays of affect such as rage, shame, joy, etc. The ethnographic focus is African immigrant women's constrained work schedules in Lisbon and the ways their labour-time textures the types of community – building practices in which they engage on a daily basis. I address how gendered configurations of migrant labour-time -a condition for governmentality – influence the diasporic process by which a form of racial identification is assumed in the context of Portugal. (shrink)

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) is one of the nation's oldest and most influential voices for equality in education, the professions, and public life. Tracing the history of the AAUW, Susan Levine provides a new perspective on the meaning of feminism for women in mainstream liberal organizations. In so doing, she explores the problems that women confront and the strategies they have developed to achieve equal rights. Established in 1921 with the merging of two regional (...) groups of women college graduates, the AAUW has grown to become a vital resource center for educational policy and women's concerns. While not always favoring the label "feminist," AAUW has sought to end discrimination against women, providing fellowships for women to pursue higher education, lobbying for changes in public policy, and conducting groundbreaking research. From the beginning, however, both achievement and controversy have marked the organizations' efforts. The AAUW, self-identified as the voice of moderation and mainstream women, has also been bound by social convention of class and race. One result, a bitter conflict in the late 1940s over racial integration, forced AAUW to change its national policies. Yet the organization emerged stronger than ever and at present boasts over 135,000 members. By examining the experience of groups like AAUW, Levine suggests that feminism was not so much "reborn" in the 1970s as it was adopted by a rapidly growing constituency of college educated women demanding the realization of their goals. Author note: Susan Levine is Assistant Professor of History at East Carolina University and the author of Labor's True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Temple). (shrink)

This paper aims to take stock of the emerging international literature on the role of labor unions in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Where unions are discussed in the North American CSR literature at all, authors see them as foregrounding membership benefits over wider societal interests and hence contributing to systematic environmental degradation. In Europe, the managerialdiscretion of CSR clashes with the more regulated frameworks for employees and labor unions to influence corporate decision-making. Hence many European unions express a (...) considerable degree of skepticism of CSR. On the international scene, companies have become increasingly sensitive to how their labor management activities are perceived by the wider society, yet they may nevertheless continue with even highly controversial labor policies if they do not see a business case for changing these. In other words, CSR commitments by themselves would not seem to be sufficiently powerful to bring about systematic change in the management of labor. (shrink)

In the mid-1990s, fairtrade-organic registration data showed that only 9 % of Oaxaca, Mexico’s organic coffee ‘farm operators’ were women; by 2013 the female farmer rate had increased to 42 %. Our research investigates the impact of this significant increase in women’s coffee association participation among 210 members of two coffee producer associations in Oaxaca, Mexico. We find that female coffee organization members report high levels of household decision-making power and they are more likely than their (...) male counterparts to report control over their coffee income. These significant advances in women’s agency within the household are offset by the fact that the women experience significant time poverty as they engage in coffee production while bearing a disproportionate share of domestic labor obligations. The women coffee producers view organizational labor as a third burden on their time, after their reproductive and productive labor. The time poverty they experience limits their ability to fully participate in coffee organizational governance and consequently there are few women leaders at all levels of the coffee producer businesses. This is problematic because it limits women’s ability to fully benefit from organizational membership: when women fully participate in governance they gain valuable business and leadership skills and producer associations with active female members may also be more likely to develop and maintain programs and policies that enhance gender equity. Our findings indicate that targeted agricultural development programs to improve gender equity among agricultural smallholders should involve creative ways to ease women’s labor burdens and reduce their time poverty in order to facilitate full organizational participation. The research findings fill a gap in existing studies of agricultural global value chains by demonstrating how the certified coffee GVC depends on women’s under and un-paid labor not only within the household but also within producer organizations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:230 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nneka D. Dennie The State and Future of Black Women’s Studies: The Black Women’s Studies Association and the National Women’s Studies Association in Conversation On February 25, 2021, the Black Women’s Studies Association (BWSA) and National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) partnered for one of NWSA’s Kitchen Table Talks—a new initiative spearheaded by (...) NWSA President Kaye Wise Whitehead to foster dialogue between NWSA and other organizations. The event, titled “Space Making: State/Future of Black Women’s Studies,” featured three panelists and was moderated by Whitehead. The featured speakers were Stephanie Andrea Allen (BWSA conference chair), Jacinta R. Saffold (BWSA co-founder and treasurer), and Erica L. Williams (member of the NWSA Governing Council). Allen is a Black lesbian writer and publisher whose scholarship examines how lesbian literature and film responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that invisibilize Black lesbians; she is a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor of gender studies at Indiana University. Saffold is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Orleans who researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, hip hop studies, and digital humanities. Williams is an associate professor of anthropology at Spelman College, whose work has examined sex tourism and Black feminist activism in Brazil. Together, Whitehead, Allen, Saffold, and Williams explored their hopes for Black Women’s Studies and illuminated the challenges and joys of advancing the field. News and Views 231 The collaboration between BWSA and NWSA is a testament to how far Black Women’s Studies has come over the past fifty years and a promise of where it may continue to go in the future. NWSA was founded in 1977 and has since served as a hub for researchers, educators, and practitioners who interrogate questions of women and gender in their work. For decades, NWSA has been central to the nationwide US institutionalization of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. By contrast, BWSA is a young organization that is continuing to grow. In 2018, Saffold and I co-founded BWSA in order to provide a community for scholars working in the field of Black Women’s Studies. BWSA is the only professional association specifically designed to bring scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation about research that centers Black women. We launched BWSA with the goal of ensuring that future generations of scholars can readily access networks and mentorship from researchers who encounter a common question: when your work is simultaneously “too Black” and “too woman” for your field, department, or institution, what do you do? Drawing inspiration from well-established organizations in which we frequently participated, such as NWSA, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), and the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), Saffold and I sought to build a space that cultivated a Black feminist ethic of care for both the research and the researchers. In that spirit, BWSA provides resources to help scholars do their best work, including a mentorship program, a virtual writing community, a calls-for-papers list for publications, and article as well as graduate student paper prizes. It was an honor to join an organization as trusted and respected as NWSA for a dialogue about our shared visions for Black Women’s Studies. Three key themes emerged from the panelists’ conversation with each other. They repeatedly returned to the importance of making financial commitments to Black Women’s Studies, creating conditions to support Black women’s intellectual labor, and practicing self-care. Speakers explored the interplay between the responsibilities that institutions, communities, and individuals have to Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist scholars. They observed that in order for departments and universities to foster interdisciplinary work on Black women, they need to move beyond paying lip service to the idea that diversity, equity, and inclusion matter; there needs to be permanent funding for work on race, 232 News and Views gender, class, and sexuality. Panelists also emphasized that Black women being in community with each other and supporting one another have always been central to... (shrink)

The largest group of migrants in Germany is the Turkish people, many of whom have low skills levels, are Muslim, and are slow to integrate themselves into their host communities. German immigration policy has been significantly revised since the early 1990s, and a new Immigration Act came into force in 2005, containing more inclusive stances on citizenship and integration of migrants. There is a strong rhetoric of acceptance and open doors, within certain parameters, but the gap between the rhetoric and (...) practice is still wide enough to allow many migrants, particularly women, to fall through it. Turkish-Muslim women bear the brunt of the difficulties faced once they have arrived in Germany, and many of them are subject to domestic abuse, joblessness and poverty because of their invisibility to the German state, which is the case largely because German immigration policy does not fully realise a role and place for women migrants. The policy also does not sufficiently account for ethnic and cultural identification, or limitations faced by migrants in that while it speaks to integration, it does not fully enable this process to take place effectively. Even though it has made many advances in recent years towards a more open and inclusive immigration policy, Germany is still a 'reluctant' country of immigration, and this reluctance stops it from making any real strides towards integrating migrants fully into German society at large. The German government needs to take a much firmer stance on the roles of migrant women in its society, and the nature of the ethnic and religious identities of Muslim immigrants, in order to both create and implement immigration policy that truly allows immigrants to become full and contributing members to German social and economic life, and to bring it in line with the European Union's common directives on immigration. (shrink)

Faced with high levels of unemployment and discrimination in Poland, Polish women have made up a very large proportion of those leaving the former Communist states of central Europe, to work in EU member states. They have constituted a large undocumented migrant workforce in Europe, usually working as domestic workers and carers in the informal economy. Poland’s membership of the EU is starting to regulate Polish women’s work abroad and to increase their access to better paid and skilled (...) work in the formal labour market. New market-led immigration policies in Europe are still selective and restricted however. What Polish women really need from the EU is help in securing a new framework of gender equality and equal treatment in Poland that offers hope for an improvement in their rights at home. (shrink)

Many employers assess their workforces with gendered and racialized imagery that can put groups of workers and applicants at a disadvantage in the labor market. Based on 78 interviews with white employers in Atlanta, the author reveals that some employers use a complex but widely shared stereo-type of Black working-class women as single mothers to typify members of this group. These employers use this single-mother image to explain why they think Black women are poor workers, why (...) they think Black women are reliable workers, and why they think Blacks are poorly prepared for the labor market. In focusing on these white employers' claims, the author concentrates not on the well-documented out-comes of labor market discrimination, such as differential rates of pay and promotion, but on how employers construct and use the images that may from the basis of it. This is especially relevant amid current attacks on affirmative action programs. (shrink)

Collective bargaining is the main vehicle for labour worldwide to negotiate wages, benefits, retirement policies, training and other terms of working with management in both the public and private sectors. Labour economists have long been active in modelling the relations between collective bargaining agreements, labour markets and social welfare conditions. This book presents a theoretical model of unions which offers a unified treatment of the centralisation of bargaining, the credibility of labour contracts, the unionisation of labour markets and the relative (...) bargaining power of the union. Tapio Palokangas develops the microfoundations of bargaining and examines collective bargaining interacting with public policy, investment and growth, and international trade and specialisation. In conclusion Professor Palokangas challenges the commonly held view that collective bargaining has a negative impact on economics welfare, and argues that with the existence of market failure, collective bargaining can be welfare enhancing. (shrink)

In December 1984 Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, two founding members of Feminist Review, published an article assessing contemporary British feminism and its relationship to the left and to class struggle. They suggested that the women's movement in general, and socialist-feminism in particular, had lost its former political sharpness. The academic focus of socialist-feminism has proved more interested in theorizing the ideological basis of sexual difference than the economic contradictions of capitalism. Meanwhile the conditions of working-class and black (...) women have been deteriorating. In this situation, they argue, feminists can only serve the general interests of women through alliance with working-class movements and class struggle. Weir and Wilson represent a minority position within the British Communist Party (the CP), which argues that ‘feminism’ is now being used by sections of the left, in particular the dominant ‘Eurocommunist’ left in the CP, to justify their moves to the right, with an accompanying attack on traditional forms of trade union militancy. Beatrix Campbell, who is aligned to the dominant position within the CP, has been one target of Weir and Wilson's criticisms. In several articles from 1978 onwards, and in her book Wigan Pier Revisited, Beatrix Campbell has presented a very different analysis of women and the labour movement. She has criticized the trade union movement as a ‘men's movement’, in the sense that it has always represented the interests of men at the expense of women. And she has described the current split within the CP as one extending throughout the left between the politics of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’: traditional labour movement politics as against the politics of those who have rethought their socialism to take into account the analysis and importance of popular social movements – in particular feminism, the peace and anti-racist movements. In reply to this debate, Anne Phillips has argued that while women's position today must be analysed in the context of the capitalist crisis, it is not reducible to the dichotomy ‘class politics’ versus ‘popular alliance’. Michèle Barrett, in another reply to Weir and Wilson, has argued that they have presented a reductionist and economistic approach to women's oppression, which caricatures rather than clarifies much of the work in which socialist-feminists have been engaged. To air these differences between socialist-feminists over the question of feminism and class politics, and to see their implications for the women's movement and the left, Feminist Review has decided to bring together the main protagonists of this debate for a fuller, more open discussion. For this discussion Feminist Review drew up a number of questions which were put to the participants by Clara Connolly and Lynne Segal. (Michèle Barrett was present in a personal capacity.) They cover the recent background to socialist-feminist politics, the relationship of feminism to Marxism, the role of feminists in le ft political parties and the labour movement, the issue of racism and the prospects for the immediate future. The discussion was lengthy and what follows is an edited version of the transcript. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Globalization has brought increased attention to the notion that labor rights such asfreedom of association—the right of workers to organize a union—are fundamental human rights. However, the vigorous opposition to freedom of association by US firms is largely ignored in the business ethics literature and exacerbated by compensatory corporate citizenship rating mechanisms that tend to mask labor rights deficiencies. I argue that because freedom of association is a hypernorm, instrumental to fully realizing basic human rights, labor (...) rights and human rights are largely inseparable. Thus, respect for labor rights is a non-substitutable requisite of corporate citizenship. I conclude by providing examples of corporate labor relations strategies that respect freedom of association and business firms that are leading the way. (shrink)

The variety and complexity of the eight papers in this Symposium issue are evidence that immigration is a tough nut to crack both as a matter of policy and application. There is no way that any short summary can do justice to these papers, which take a variety of moral, economic, historical, and empirical approaches to some of the recurrent issues in the field, so it is best in this short issue to try to situate the problem in a general (...) classical liberal context, to show where the pressure points are most likely to appear.The initial way to approach this problem is to start with the simple proposition that the world today is divided into national territories where the practical norm is well-nigh universal: That each sovereign state has exclusive control over its own territory, which, among other things, allows it to decide which individuals are members of that state. These citizens have privileges that may be exercised, no questions asked, on such key matters as entering labor markets, owning property, voting, and otherwise participating in political affairs. All these activities may be denied or granted, at will, to any and all outsiders by the territorial sovereign.No one doubts the need for having some form of territorial control. The need to have some monopoly of force could not be achieved if the entire world, with its infinite diversity of locations and populations, were under a single sovereign. Indeed, in many cases, the divisions within a given country may be so pronounced that separation rather than aggregation is the norm. Thus, at the end of the British Raj, India split into India and Pakistan, and later Pakistan split into Pakistan and Bangladesh. Less dramatically, Czechoslovakia split into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, while the former Yugoslavia split into five nations, starting from the northwest: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Macedonia. Clearly, these ethic differences, be they large or small, are a major obstacle to the expansion of the size of the state. And today, the territorial instinct reasserts itself as the member states of the European Union impose more restrictions on immigration.Yet at the same time, the normative foundations of this system seem elusive. There is the following deep skepticism about the importance of these borders, expressed in these essays by Jeremy Waldron and Ilya Somin, that these national boundary lines should have such a pronounced role in political economy. Michael Blake pursues this theme further by asking the extent to which classical liberals can justify exclusion through the use of violence—or is it force? The inquiry into the dominant role of territoriality can then be expanded, as by Peter Margulies, to examine all sorts of negative externalities that could be created both by easy and strict rules of admission.Taken as a whole, there is no doubt that these national barriers are a serious obstacle to the free trade in goods and services between two individuals, one inside the boundary and one outside. The general view is that these barriers block the gains from trade, which is what drives economic progress, so that ideally all tariffs and quantitative restrictions should give way to a system of free trade in which petty objections by domestic competitors of foreign firms should not dictate local policies.It should, of course, be evident that powerful conflicting forces on free trade and protectionism ebb and flow over time. It should therefore come as no surprise that the stakes are even higher where what is at stake is the movement of people across national boundaries. The loss to any given country from keeping out potential citizens can be enormous, and we see powerful political forces clamp down on open immigration, so many of these gains from trade are lost. The situation can be even more heartbreaking when the ability to leave a country exposes innocent people to imprisonment or death.So what is the explanation for so many nations closing their borders? Much of the explanation comes from old-fashioned protectionism. Your computer programmers will take the jobs of our specialists. There is all sorts of occupational licensing and other barriers to entry within a domestic economy, so there is no reason to expect that these forces will not exert even greater influence against outsiders who do not, after all, have a voice in the local economy and who, therefore, as Alex Nowrasteh, Michael Howard, and Andrew Forrester observe, have little ability to influence domestic policy even after they enter a country. In addition, as Gabriel Chin discusses, strong racial prejudices also lead to exclusions from the domestic economy. Not only are there objections in, say, the United States and much of Western Europe, of exclusion on straight racial grounds, as exemplified by Chinese exclusion acts. The force of these exclusions are also subject to political change. Thus, the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) was part of a white supremacist program, which gave way two decades later to a very different legal regime with the Immigration Act of 1965, which put an end to the venerable system of national-origin quotas.Yet two other reasons for exclusion are constantly at issue. Immigrants not only bring in their labor but also their families, cultures, and traditions that, in public spaces, may clash with local norms and cultures on such elementary and critical matters as to whether women should dress modestly and wear head coverings. Will freewheeling Danes and Swedes feel comfortable if large numbers of Muslims continue their traditional practices with strong barriers between men and women? There are no obvious market mechanisms that will mitigate these issues, and the situation becomes even more fraught if there are large welfare or educational costs that fall, at least in the short run, on local citizens. These are compounded by the fact that immigrants will typically gain political rights that could easily skew the balance of political power between established and newly arrived ethnic groups by altering the outcome of national and local elections. And letting people in is not just done on a simple open-borders policy. Thus, in many countries, as Lance Pritchett discusses, there is the controversial option of letting foreigners in on short-term labor visas that require them to leave after a certain period. And there are further questions about whether people should be deported if they lied on their entry applications or committed some crime while in the new country, as has occurred in the United States. The numbers of cases can be high and their complexity great, so it is fair to ask, along with Jill Family, whether some self-conscious exceptions to the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, analogous statutes elsewhere, should be regarded as part of the new normal.It is therefore necessary to deal with the thrust and counterthrust on all these issues. It is also fair to ask whether classical liberalism has a distinctive view on these issues, or whether the combination of private gains and multidirectional externalities gives rise to empirical questions that, as always, require further reflection, even when certain situations—the major influx of illegal immigrants on the US southern border—will generate such powerful emotions that detached intellectual inquiry is ever more difficult. We cannot answer these questions, and thus offer to you a set of essays that take a stab at these difficult topics. (shrink)