Pablo Pérez Ahumada (2023) Building Power to Shape Labor Policy

Pérez Ahumada, Pablo. 2023. Building Power to Shape Labor Policy: Unions, Employer Associations, and Reform in Neoliberal Chile. Pittsburgh, PA: The University of Pittsburgh Press.

During Chile’s shift to neoliberalism, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet passed a swath of probusiness labor legislation. Subsequent labor reforms by democratically elected progressive administrations have sought to shift power back to workers, but this task has proven difficult. In Building Power to Shape Labor Policy, Pablo Pérez Ahumada explains why. Focusing on reforms to collective labor law, Pérez Ahumada argues that analyzing how both workers and employers mobilize power to influence government policies is crucial for understanding labor reform outcomes. He examines the relational character of power to explain how different types of power—structural, institutional, associational—interact with each other, and proposes a relational understanding of power and how it is balanced among competing social classes. While workers and employers both have a hand in shaping labor law, their influence is not equal. Analysis of recent events in Chile reveals how the balance of power and the lingering effects of neoliberalism manifest in labor reform.

Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian (2023) The Privatization of Everything

Cohen, Donald and Allen Mikaelian. 2023. The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back. New York: The New Press.

The book the American Prospect calls “an essential resource for future reformers on how not to govern,” by America’s leading defender of the public interest and a bestselling historian

“An essential read for those who want to fight the assault on public goods and the commons.” —Naomi Klein

A sweeping exposé of the ways in which private interests strip public goods of their power and diminish democracy, the hardcover edition of The Privatization of Everything elicited a wide spectrum of praise: Kirkus Reviews hailed it as “a strong, economics-based argument for restoring the boundaries between public goods and private gains,” Literary Hub featured the book on a Best Nonfiction list, calling it “a far-reaching, comprehensible, and necessary book,” and Publishers Weekly dubbed it a “persuasive takedown of the idea that the private sector knows best.”

From Diane Ravitch (“an important new book about the dangers of privatization”) to Heather McGhee (“a well-researched call to action”), the rave reviews mirror the expansive nature of the book itself, covering the impact of privatization on every aspect of our lives, from water and trash collection to the justice system and the military. Cohen and Mikaelian also demonstrate how citizens can—and are—wresting back what is ours: A Montana city took back its water infrastructure after finding that they could do it better and cheaper. Colorado towns fought back well-funded campaigns to preserve telecom monopolies and hamstring public broadband. A motivated lawyer fought all the way to the Supreme Court after the state of Georgia erected privatized paywalls around its legal code.

“Enlightening and sobering” (Rosanne Cash), The Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a wide range of issues and offers what Cash calls “a progressive voice with a firm eye on justice [that] can carefully parse out complex issues for those of us who take pride in citizenship.”

Topics:

• Current Affairs
• Economics/Globalization
• Political Science

A Questão Chinesa [The China Question] 2022 (São Paulo, Brazil: Contrabando Editorial)

Themed collection (translated into Portuguese)

A Questão Chinesa [The China Question].

2022. São Paulo, Brazil: Contrabando Editorial.

Authors (in alphabetical order): AU Loong-yu, Jenny CHAN, Sophia CHAN, JN CHIEN, Yige DONG, Eli FRIEDMAN, Irene Maestro GUIMARÃES, Ching Kwan LEE, Leo Vinicius LIBERATO, PUN Ngai, Ashley SMITH, Richard SMITH, Ellie TSE, ZHUANG Liehong

ISBN #978-65-997188-1-6

The China Question

Over the last century, China has been a place of recurrent social upheaval. From the combative anti-colonial general strikes of 1925-1927 to the mass mobilization of peasants in the 1930s and 1940s, including the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and the student and workers' democracy movements of the 1980s, the Chinese people have repeatedly engaged in struggles against material inequalities and political oppression. However, since the violent crackdown on the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989, many people in China, as well as internationally, have come to believe that decades of rapid economic growth have stifled social resistance. This could not be further from the truth: although the Communist Party was successful in extinguishing sustainable political opposition...

The chapters of this book bring enlightening and radical views about these movements. China is indeed a complex society, and connecting to its social struggles is quite difficult for foreigners. However, this volume highlights the commonality of struggles around the world against class exploitation, racial and ethnic hierarchy, and gender oppression. Although these movements take different forms in China and in the Americas or Europe, they are simultaneously linked by the global system of capitalism. The entire working class and oppressed peoples can and must be united in the struggle for an expansion of radical democracy and in opposition to capitalist expropriation and exploitation. In the chapters that follow, we'll look at the heroism, successes, as well as failures of China's experiments.

https://contrabando.xyz/product/a-questao-chinesa/

 

Contrabando Editorial

Rua Itapeva, 490, Conjunto 38
Bixiga, Bela Vista
São Paulo

BRAZIL

 

Nov 2022

https://www.facebook.com/contrabandoeditorial/

Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, Julie Greene and Joo-Cheong Tham, eds. (2023) Global Labor Migration

Boris, Eileen, Heidi Gottfried, Julie Greene and Joo-Cheong Tham, eds. 2023. Global Labor Migration: New Directions. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Eileen Boris (Editor, Contributor), Heidi Gottfried (Editor, Contributor), Julie Greene (Editor, Contributor), Joo-Cheong Tham (Editor, Contributor)

Bridget Anderson (Contributor), Rutvica Andrijasevic (Contributor), Katie Bales (Contributor), Jenny Chan (Contributor), Penelope Ciancanelli (Contributor), Felipe Barradas Correia Castro Bastos (Contributor), Charlie Fanning (Contributor), Judy Fudge (Contributor), Jorge L Giovannetti-Torres (Contributor), Justin Jackson (Contributor), Radhika Natarajan (Contributor), Pun Ngai (Contributor), Bastiaan Nugteren (Contributor), Nicola Piper (Contributor), Jessica R Pliley (Contributor), Devi Sacchetto (Contributor), Helen Sampson (Contributor), Yael Schacher (Contributor), Matt Withers (Contributor)

The Migration-Development Regime (Rina Agarwala)

The Migration-Development Regime

How Class Shapes Indian Emigration

Rina Agarwala

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-migration-development-regime-9780197586402?q=Agarwala&lang=en&cc=us 

Modern South Asia

• Offers a novel framework with which to analyze international migration, namely the "Migration Development Regime" or MDR
• Provides a sociological analysis that compares sending states' use of both poor and elite emigrants
• Compiles and draws on extremely unique unpublished data, including over 200 interviews, the first data base of over 600 Indian-American transnational organizations, and archives of Indian government documents from 1920-present

We the Elites (Robert Ovetz)

We the Elites

Why the US Constitution Serves the Few

by Robert Ovetz

https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745344720/we-the-elites/

A new, radical reading of the US constitution.

Written by 55 of the richest white men, and signed by only 39 of them, the US constitution is the sacred text of American nationalism. Popular perceptions of it are mired in idolatry, myth and misinformation - many Americans have opinions on the constitution but have little idea what it says.

This book examines the constitution for what it is – a rulebook for elites to protect capitalism from democracy. Social movements have misplaced faith in the constitution as a tool for achieving justice when it actually impedes social change through the many roadblocks and obstructions we call 'checks and balances'. This stymies urgent progress on issues like labour rights, poverty, public health and climate change, propelling the American people and rest of the world towards destruction.

Robert Ovetz's reading of the constitution shows that the system isn't broken. Far from it. It works as it was designed to.

Proletarian China (edited by Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace 2022)

Franceschini, Ivan and Christian Sorace, eds. 2022. Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour. New York: Verso Books. [download].

*Contributors: Corey Byrnes, Craig A. Smith, Xu Guoqi, Zhou Ruixue, Lin Chun, Elizabeth J. Perry, Tony Saich, Wang Kan, Gail Hershatter, Apo Leong, S.A. Smith, Alexander F. Day, Yige Dong, Seung-Joon Lee, Lu Yan, Joshua Howard, Bo Ærenlund Sørensen, Brian DeMare, Emily Honig, Po-chien Chen, Yi-hung Liu, Jake Werner, Malcolm Thompson, Robert Cliver, Mark W. Frazier, John Williams, Christian Sorace, Zhu Ruiyi, Ivan Franceschini, Chen Feng, Ben Kindler, Jane Hayward, Tim Wright, Koji Hirata, Jacob Eyferth, Aminda Smith, Fabio Lanza, Ralph Litzinger, J onathan Unger, Covell F. Meyskens, Maggie Clinton, Patricia M. Thornton, Ray Yep, Andrea Piazzaroli Longobardi, Joel Andreas, Matt Galway, Michel Bonnin, A.C. Baecker, Mary Ann O’Donnell, Tiantian Zheng, Jeanne L. Wilson, Ming-sho Ho, Yueran Zhang, Anita Chan, Sarah Biddulph, Jude Howell, William Hurst, Dorothy J. Solinger, Ching Kwan Lee, Chloé Froissart, Mary Gallagher, Eric Florence, Junxi Qian, Chris King-chi Chan, Elaine Sio-Ieng Hui, Jenny Chan, Eli Friedman, Aaron Halegua, Wanning Sun, Marc Blecher, Huang Yu, Manfred Elfstrom, Darren Byler, Carlos Rojas, Chen Qiufan.

https://madeinchinajournal.com/2021/12/01/proletarian-china/ 

Andreas Bieler and Jörg Nowak (2022) Labour Conflicts in the Global South

Bieler, Andreas and Jörg Nowak, eds. 2022. Labour Conflicts in the Global South. London: Routledge.

1st Edition

Labour Conflicts in the Global South

Edited By 

Andreas Bieler

, 

Jörg Nowak

Copyright Year 2022

---

ISBN 9781032211275

Published April 28, 2022 by Routledge

166 Pages

Book Description

Against the background of the global economic crisis since 2007/2008 and increasing inequality across the world, the Global South has experienced widespread, large-scale industrial action, including in countries such as China, Brazil, India and South Africa, which had been hailed as the new growth engines of the global political economy as part of the so-called BRICS.

This volume systematically evaluates how the new forms of labour mobilization witnessed in the past ten years responded to the predominance of the informality-precarity complex of industrial relations and what conclusions can be drawn for potentially successful strategies against exploitation in the future. Can we identify a convergence of new approaches across the Global South, or do we witness an ongoing fragmentation of actors, models and strategies? In addressing this question, consideration is given to issues of class as well as gender and race.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.

Precarious Asia (Arne Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison and Kwang-Yeong Shin 2022)

Kalleberg, Arne L., Kevin Hewison and Kwang-Yeong Shin. 2022. Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

 

Labor Contestation at Walmart Brazil

Martin, Scott B., João Paulo Cândia Veiga and Katiuscia Moreno Galhera. 2021. Labor Contestation at Walmart Brazil: Limits of Global Diffusion in Latin America. Switzerland: Springer Nature.

Nora Räthzel, Dimitris Stevis and David Uzzell, eds (2021) The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies

Räthzel, Nora, Dimitris Stevis and David Uzzell, eds. 2021. The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies. Palgrave Macmillan.

In this comprehensive Handbook, scholars from across the globe explore the relationships between workers and nature in the context of the environmental crises. They provide an invaluable overview of a fast-growing research field that bridges the social and natural sciences. Chapters provide detailed perspectives of environmental labour studies, environmental struggles of workers, indigenous peoples, farmers and commoners in the Global South and North. The relations within and between organisations that hinder or promote environmental strategies are analysed, including the relations between workers and environmental organisations, NGOs, feminist and community movements.

Nora Räthzel is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Umeå (Sweden). Her main research areas are environmental labour studies, transnational corporations and gender and ethnic relations in the everyday. Publications include:  Marxist-Feminists Theories and Struggles Today with Khayaat Fakier and Diana Mulinari (eds.); Transnational Corporations from the Standpoint of Workers with Diana Mulinari and Aina Tollefsen; Trade Unions in the Green Economy. Working for the Environment (with David Uzzell, eds.).

Dimitris Stevis is Professor of Politics at Colorado State University (USA). His research focuses on global labour and environmental politics, with particular attention to labour environmentalism and social and ecological justice. He is a founder of the Center for Environmental Justice and recently published (with Dunja Krause and Edouard Morena) Just Transitions: Social Justice in the Shift Towards a Low-Carbon World (Pluto Press 2020).

David Uzzell is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Psychology at the University of Surrey and Visiting Professor, Grupo de Investigación Persoa-Ambiente, University of A Coruna, Spain. His research interests include critical psychological approaches to changing consumption and production practices. He edited (with Nora Räthzel) Trade Unions in the Green Economy: Working for the Environment (Routledge, 2013).

Andreas Bieler 2021 Fighting for Water (Zed Books)

Bieler, Andreas. 2021. Fighting for Water: Resisting Privatization in Europe. London: Zed Books.

Chapter 1 – Resisting water privatisation: An introduction.
Chapter 2 – Capitalism's relentless thirst for accumulation
Chapter 3 – Mobilising from below: the victory in the Italian water referendum
Chapter 4 – Water is a Human Right: The first European Citizens' Initiative over public water
Chapter 5 – Contesting the Troika: resistance in Greece against imposed water privatisation
Chapter 6 – 'We will strike, we will fight, water is a human right': The Irish people rise up
Chapter 7 – Transforming capitalism towards the commons?

Ross Fergusson and Nicola Yeates (2021) Global Youth Unemployment History

Fergusson, Ross and Nicola Yeates. 2021. Global Youth Unemployment History, Governance and Policy. Cheltenham, Glos: Edward Elgar Publishing.

 

Global Youth Unemployment

History, Governance and Policy

Ross Fergusson, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Nicola Yeates, Professor of Social Policy, The Open University, UK

Publication Date: 2021 ISBN: 978 1 78990 041 5 Extent: 296 pp

This timely book introduces a fresh perspective on youth unemployment by analysing it as a global phenomenon. Ross Fergusson and Nicola Yeates argue that only by incorporating analysis of the dynamics of the global economy and global governance can we make convincing, comprehensive sense of these developments. The authors present substantial new evidence spanning a century pointing to the strong relationships between youth unemployment, globalisation, economic crises and consequent harms to young people’s social and economic welfare worldwide. The book notably encompasses data and analysis spanning the Global South as well as the Global North.

Social Problems in the Age of COVID-19, Vols 1 & 2 (ed Glenn W. Muschert, Kristen M. Budd, David C. Lane and Jason A. Smith)

Dolgon, Corey W. 2020. “President Welcome.” Pp. vii-x in Social Problems in the Age of COVID-19, Volume 1: US Perspectives, edited by Glenn W. Muschert, Kristen M. Budd, David C. Lane and Jason A. Smith. Bristol: Bristol University Press & Policy Press.

 

Dolgon, Corey W. 2020. “President Welcome.” Pp. vii-xi in Social Problems in the Age of COVID-19, Volume 2: Global Perspectives, edited by Glenn W. Muschert, Kristen M. Budd, David C. Lane and Jason A. Smith. Bristol: Bristol University Press & Policy Press.

Robert Ovetz, ed. (2021) Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives

Ovetz, Robert, ed. 2021. Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives. London: Pluto Press.

Rumours of the death of the global labour movement have been greatly exaggerated. Rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the old trade union movement, workers' struggle is being reborn from below by workers themselves.

By engaging in what Karl Marx called a workers' inquiry, workers and militant co-researchers are studying their working conditions, the technical composition of capital, and how to recompose their own power in order to devise new tactics, strategies, organisational forms and objectives. These workers' inquiries, from call centre workers to platform, trucking, cleaning, logistics, mining, auto factories, teachers, and adjunct professors, are re-energising unions, bypassing unions altogether or innovating new forms of workers' organisations.

In one of the first major studies to critically assess this new cycle of global working class struggle, Robert Ovetz collects together case studies from over a dozen contributors, looking at workers' movements in China, Mexico, the US, South Africa, Turkey, Argentina, Italy, India and the UK. The book reveals how these new forms of struggle are no longer limited to single sectors of the economy or contained by state borders, but are circulating internationally and disrupting the global capitalist system as they do.

Kim Scipes (2021) Building Global Labor Solidarity

 

Scipes, Kim. 2021. Building Global Labor Solidarity: Lessons from the Philippines, South Africa, Northwestern Europe, and the United States. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Dundon, Tony, Miguel Martinez Lucio, Emma Hughes, Debra Howcroft, Arjan Keizer and Roger Walden (2020)

Dundon, Tony, Miguel Martinez Lucio, Emma Hughes, Debra Howcroft, Arjan Keizer and Roger Walden. 2020. Power, Politics and Influence at Work. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Simon Black (2020) Social Reproduction and the City

 

Black, Simon. 2020. Social Reproduction and the City: Welfare Reform, Child Care, and Resistance in Neoliberal New York. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Social Reproduction and the City

Welfare Reform, Child Care, and Resistance in Neoliberal New York

Simon Black

• DESCRIPTION
• REVIEWS

The transformation of child care after welfare reform in New York City and the struggle against that transformation is a largely untold story. In the decade following welfare reform, despite increases in child care funding, there was little growth in New York's unionized, center-based child care system and no attempt to make this system more responsive to the needs of working mothers. As the city delivered child care services "on the cheap," relying on non-union home child care providers, welfare rights organizations, community legal clinics, child care advocates, low-income community groups, activist mothers, and labor unions organized to demand fair solutions to the child care crisis that addressed poor single mothers' need for quality, affordable child care as well as child care providers' need for decent work and pay. Social Reproduction and the City tells this story, linking welfare reform to feminist research and activism around the "crisis of care," social reproduction, and the neoliberal city.

At a theoretical level, Simon Black's history of this era presents a feminist political economy of the urban welfare regime, applying a social reproduction lens to processes of urban neoliberalization and an urban lens to feminist analyses of welfare state restructuring and resistance. Feminist political economy and feminist welfare state scholarship have not focused on the urban as a scale of analysis, and critical approaches to urban neoliberalism often fail to address questions of social reproduction. To address these unexplored areas, Black unpacks the urban as a contested site of welfare state restructuring and examines the escalating crisis in social reproduction. He lays bare the aftermath of the welfare-to-work agenda of the Giuliani administration in New York City on child care and the resistance to policies that deepened race, class, and gender inequities.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR/EDITOR

SIMON BLACK is an assistant professor in the Department of Labour Studies at Brock University.

Daya Kishan Thussu and Kaarle Nordenstreng, eds. (2021) BRICS Media

Thussu, Daya Kishan and Kaarle Nordenstreng, eds. 2021. BRICS Media: Reshaping the Global Communication Order? London: Routledge.

Book Description

Bringing together distinguished scholars from BRICS nations and those with a deep interest in and knowledge of these emerging powers, this collection makes a significant intervention in the ongoing debates about comparative communication research and thus contribute to the further internationalization of media and communication studies.

The unprecedented expansion of online media in the world’s major non-Western nations, exemplified by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) is transforming global communication. Despite their differences and divergences on key policy issues, what unites these five nations, representing more than 20 per cent of the global GDP, is the scale and scope of change in their communication environment, triggered by a multilingual, mobile Internet. The resulting networked and digitized communication ecology has reoriented international media and communication flows. Evaluating the implications of globalization of BRICS media on the reshaping of international communication, the book frames this within the contexts of theory-building on media and communication systems, soft power discourses and communication practices, including in cyberspace. Adopting a critical approach in analysing BRICS communication strategies and their effectiveness, the book assesses the role of the BRICS nations in reframing a global communication order for a ‘post-American world’.

This critical volume of essays is ideal for students, teachers and researchers in journalism, media, politics, sociology, international relations, area studies and cultural studies programmes.