Stephanie A. Limoncelli (2020) There’s an App for That?

Limoncelli, Stephanie A. 2020. “There’s an App for That? Ethical Consumption in the Fight against Trafficking for Labour Exploitation.” Anti-Trafficking Review 14: 33-46.

Abstract

Among the market-based strategies being used to fight trafficking for labour exploitation are apps aimed at encouraging ethical consumption. Such apps have surfaced in tandem with the increased involvement of businesses in anti-trafficking efforts and the promotion of social entrepreneurism. In this article, I describe and critically analyse three apps aimed at individual consumers, arguing that they do little to actually address labour exploitation. They rest on questionable assumptions about consumption, employ problematic assessment methodologies, and rely on business models that do more to provide opportunities for social entrepreneurs in the burgeoning anti-trafficking field than solutions for labour exploitation in the global economy.

Keywords: anti-trafficking strategies, consumer activism, ethical consumption, forced labour, labour exploitation, mobile apps

Andreas Bieler and Jokubas Salyga (2020) Baltic Labour in the Crucible of Capitalist Exploitation

 

Bieler, Andreas and Jokubas Salyga. 2020. “Baltic Labour in the Crucible of Capitalist Exploitation: Reassessing ‘Post-Communist’ Transformation.” The Economic and Labour Relations Review 31(2): 191–210.

 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1035304620911122

Abstract Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this article re-assesses ‘post-communist’ transformation in the Baltic countries from the perspective of labour. The argument is based on a historical materialist approach focusing on the social relations of production as a starting point. It is contended that the uneven and combined unfolding of ‘post-communist’ transformation has subjected Baltic labour to doubly constituted exploitation processes. First, workers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have suffered from extreme neoliberal restructuring of economic and employment relations at home. Second, migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe in general, trying to escape exploitation at home, have faced another set of exploitative dynamics in host countries in Western Europe such as the UK. Nevertheless, workers have continued to challenge exploitation in Central and Eastern Europe and also in Western Europe, and have been active in extending networks of transnational solidarity across the continent. JEL Codes: E11, E24, J61 Keywords Baltic states, capitalist expansion, Central and Eastern Europe, class struggle, exploitation, historical materialism, labour, migration, post-communist, transformation