Essential but not empowered (Simon Black)

Essential but not empowered: reflections on the working class in Canada under COVID-19

Simon Black

Pages 130-152 | Published online: 06 Sep 2022

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• https://doi.org/10.1080/07078552.2022.2096781

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07078552.2022.2096781

Abstract

This paper focuses on the political economy of work and labour under COVID-19 in the Canadian context. It reviews the impact of the COVID crisis on employment and workers, highlighting gendered and racialized inequalities in waged and unwaged work, analyzes state responses to the crisis, and explores how organized labour has navigated COVID capitalism. It argues that, while unions have engaged in necessary defensive struggles, the labour movement has not prioritized and won class-wide demands.

Poverty and Pacification: A Conversation with Dorothy J. Solinger

Written On 12 September 2022

Dorothy J. Solinger

with Jenny Chan

Made in China Journal

https://madeinchinajournal.com/2022/09/12/poverty-and-pacification-a-conversation-with-dorothy-j-solinger/ 

Dorothy J. Solinger’s latest book, Poverty and Pacification: The Chinese State Abandons the Old Working Class (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), is dedicated to ‘all of those whose lives were wrenched’ in globalising China. Solinger is passionate about working people, including rural migrants and laid-off urban workers, as reflected in her decades-long commitment to activism and scholarship. As Chinese workers—to this day hailed as masters of the nation—were laid off during successive waves of economic restructuring in the 1990s and 2000s, they often found themselves depending on minimum livelihood allowances (最低生活保障, or dibao 低保 for short), desperate to make a decent living in a pitiless job market. With an eye on the new urban poor, Solinger offers a reassessment of China’s quest for wealth and power at the turn of the new millennium.

Goods and Ellem (2022) Employer Associations

Goods, Caleb and Bradon Ellem. 2022. “Employer Associations: Climate Change, Power and Politics.” Economic and Industrial Democracy. First Published 11 March, pp. 1-23.

Abstract

How employer associations deploy their power resources to frame and pursue members’ interests in the making of public policy is of marked importance in many economies. This is strikingly so in Australia where employer associations have, over a 30-year period, shaped a critically important industrial relations policy space – climate change. In exploring this issue, in this article the authors combine studies from industrial relations and political science to show that, despite suggestions of employer association decline, these organisations exert influence over policymaking in both ‘noisy’ and ‘quiet’ ways. These forms of influence can be understood as linked to specific sources of power – structural, associational, institutional, societal – as employer associations define and pursue members’ interests.

Keywords 

Climate change, employer associations, policymaking, power

Goods, Herod, Ellem and Rainnie (2021) Warring Brothers

Goods, Caleb, Andrew Herod, Bradon Ellem and Al Rainnie. 2021. “Irmãos em guerra: construindo as redes globais de produção da Komatsu e da Caterpillar”/”Warring Brothers: Constructing Komatsu’s and Caterpillar’s Globalization.” Tempo Social 33(2): 123-42.

ABSTRACT

We detail how the world’s two largest engineering machinery firms, Japan’s Komatsu and the US’s Caterpillar, actively managed geographical concerns to become global actors. We argue that their globalization was not a teleological given but had to be proactively made. Both the state and organized labor played significant roles in shaping their geographical evolutions, as did their efforts to outmaneuver each other spatially. Their globalization, then, was part of a broader spatial politics under capitalism.

Keywords: Geography; Global production networks; Global scale; Komatsu; Caterpillar

RESUMO

O artigo compara os caminhos percorridos pelas duas maiores empresas de máquinas de engenharia do mundo, a japonesa Komatsu e a americana Caterpillar para se tornarem “atores globais”. É investigada a forma como ambas as empresas gerenciavam ativamente as questões geográficas à medida que cresciam. Como “irmãos em guerra”, elas não apenas competiam entre si, mas, ao longo do processo, acabaram por moldar a forma organizacional uma da outra enquanto construíam ativamente a escala global de sua própria existência - sua globalização, em outras palavras, não era um dado, mas teve de ser construída proativamente. Tanto o Estado quanto o trabalho organizado desempenharam papéis significativos no desenho das evoluções geográficas de ambas as empresas.

Palavras-chave: Globalização; Geografia; Redes globais de produção; Escala global; Komatsu; Caterpillar

Leapfrog Logistics (Nowak, Rolf and Wei 2022)

Nowak, Jörg, Steven Rolf and Wei Wei. 2022. “Leapfrog Logistics: Digital Platforms, Infrastructure, and Labor in Brazil and China.” Phenomenal World. June. 

In Spring 2018, two significant labor disputes broke out at opposite ends of the earth. The first, in Brazil, was an 11 day mass strike of 400,000 truckers in response to successive price increases unleashed by the state oil company, Petrobras, liberalizing diesel prices. The second, in China, was a large strike which spread across the nation in response to low fees paid by digital trucking platforms, which account for a growing share of China’s road freight market. 

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New Global Studies Editor’s Forum (2022): Workers’ Movements and the Global Supply Chain

New Global Studies Editor’s Forum: Workers’ Movements and the Global Supply Chain

Vol. 16, Issue 1 (2022): April

Guest-editors: Robert Ovetz and Jake Alimahomed-Wilson

Contributors: Andrew Waterman, Ben Norman, Andrea Bottalico, Nantina Vgontzas, Carlotta Benvegnù, David Gaborieau, Lucas Tranchant, Ercüment Çelik, Simon Norbert Schmid

Reportage: Gifford Hartman

Book Reviews: Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins, Brett Bowden, Sarp Kurgan, Steven E. Harris

Volume 16 Issue 1 - Editors’ Forum: Workers’ Movements and the Global Supply Chain; Guest-editors: Robert Ovetz and Jake Alimahomed-Wilson

April 2022

Issue of New Global Studies

Global Labour Journal (May 2022) on African Trade Unions

Global Labor Journal Special Issue: African Trade Unions

Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022): May

An Update on Editorial Changes at the GLJ: Maria Lorena Cook, Alexander Gallas, Neethi P, Ben Scully

Guest-editor: Mark McQuinn

Contributors: Mark McQuinn, Samuel Andreas Admasie, F.M.K. Sallah, Lone Riisgaard, Mihaela Cojocaru

Global Issues: Mihaela Cojocaru, Mark McQuinn; Steve Crowley

Book Reviews: Andrea Muehlebach; Carlos Mejia; Maurizio Atzeni; Jörg Nowak

CURRENT ISSUE

Vol. 13 No. 2 (2022): May 2022 (Special Issue)

African Trade Unions (guest edited by Mark McQuinn)

PUBLISHED: 2022-05-31