Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

Precarious Work: Domination and Resistance in the US, China, and the World
2016-08-19 08:15 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Today precarious work presents perhaps the greatest global challenge to worker well-being, and has become a major rallying point for worker mobilization around the world. This conference focuses on analyzing the growth of precarious employment and informal labor, its consequences for workers and their families, the challenges it poses to worker organizing and collective mobilization, and how workers and other social actors are responding to precariousness. We seek to understand the patterns of social and economic domination of labor shaped by the state, capital, gender, class, age, ethnicity, skills, and citizenship, and examine the manifestations of labor resistance and acquiescence in their specific contexts.
The conference is initiated by the American Sociological Association (ASA)’s Labor and Labor Movements Section, the International Sociological Association (ISA)’s Research Committee on Labor Movements (RC44), and the Chinese Sociological Association’s China Association of Work and Labor (CAWL). It builds in part on an ongoing scholarly exchange between the ASA Labor Section and the CAWL. The conference program will focus on the United States and China, but will include a range of global cases and perspectives. Interdisciplinary approaches and innovative research methods are welcomed.

Does Innovation Go with Social Inclusion? Multinational Corporation in Mexico
2016-05-25 12:30 - 14:00
Recent research has revealed that contrary to the expectations generated by globalization, there is no automatic correlation linking world trade expansion and multinational companies, product innovation, and more generally, economic progress (measured in terms of growth) with social progress. On the contrary, there is evidence showing that even when there has been a significant job transfer to developing countries, there has been deterioration in its quality.
This research stems from the need to understand and document the variety of paths experienced when adapting working relations to the requirements arising from the economic innovation processes in the case of Mexico, considering there is a wide selection of multinational companies from various sectors installed in the country. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the relationship between innovation and social-labor progress, through the analysis multinational firms established in Mexico.
It is worth mentioning that this paper is derived from an study in nine countries coordinated by the Intrepid, an academic international network. In Mexico’s case, the survey represents 922 multinational firms in the manufacturing and service sectors. The purpose of the survey was to determine their performance in terms of innovation, employment practices and outsourcing. After the analysis of the data, a typology of innovation-social inclusion was designed, and based on these results, a second stage of the study was conducted through qualitative analysis with 16 companies from different productive sectors. Companies from different country of origin were taken into account, including Americans, Europeans, Chinese and Mexicans.
All selected companies have significant national and international economic relevance, and all of them follow practices of innovation. The research question in this case was whether innovation is associated with socio-labor progress in multinational companies.
The main results confirm the general perception of literature on the topic: innovation giving economic and competitive results to multinational companies is not associated to the results of social-labor progress, and the overall balance of globalization is not the reduction of inequality. In most companies, innovations (product and process) were observed and changes in the business model were also perceived; however, these improvements did not go alongside the socio-labor progress. Only a small proportion of companies follow the “high road”. Finally, this paper offers some results on the associated variables, which allow observing the positive articulation between innovation and social-labor progress.

Black Feminism, The Carceral State, and Abolition
2016-05-19 16:00 - 18:00
Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley’s No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity illuminates black women’s experiences of imprisonment in the South to uncover how gendered regimes of incarceration were crucial to the making of Jim Crow modernity. No Mercy Here examines the brutalization of imprisoned women in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also situating them within the black radical tradition by illuminating practices of resistance, refusal, and sabotage that challenged ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy, offering alternative conceptions of social and political life and envisioning a world beyond prisons.

Racializing Normative Markets: Whiteness, Masculinity, and the "Efficiency" of Networks
2016-05-12 12:00 - 13:30
While critical scholarship has made important contributions to the understandings of markets and difference, many of these approaches have focused on how dominant markets have actively depended upon, as well as excluded groups based on, hierarchies of raced, gendered, classed, sexualized, and national differences. That we better understand how capitalism depended on enslavement, how US real estate markets segregated and excluded African Americans, and how productive labor cannot be jettisoned from reproductive labor are due to this crucial research. However, we need to go further. Even as dominant, capitalist markets are depicted as exclusionary and exploitative of differences, they themselves are often held stable, and not directly analyzed as composed of particular bodies, assumptions, actions, and values. This presentation, inspired by critical race theory, cultural histories of risk and the construction of the risk-bearing individual, as well as ethnographic accounts of financial markets, examines both the underbelly of what makes financial markets possible as well as the whiteness and classed masculinity of financial markets themselves. I will explore how the very underpinnings of what makes markets and market exchange possible are arrangements of exchangeability, commensurability, and liquidity made possible, in part, through the instruments and assumptions of racial fraternity and exclusion.

Community Bank and Banking Structure Effects on Local Economies, Unemployment and Recovery: An Economic Sociology Perspective
2016-05-04 12:30 - 14:00
With good reason, scholars and policy makers have focused on the profound industry-wide transformations American banking and finance experienced over the last three decades, emphasizing deregulation, concentration within a handful of giant global banking corporations, their abandonment of the “real economy” for market-based banking grounded in securitization and derivative transactions, and the devastating effects these changes have had on the broader economy. Less clear is the extent to which decentralized systems of smaller, locally owned and operating community banks and credit unions withstood transformations in American finance, providing local economies with alternatives to banking corporations like Citigroup or JP Morgan Chase. Less clear also are whether and how localism, organizational diversity and the persistence of alternatives to “too-big-too-fail” institutions in local economies may have helped them weather the recent storm of a combined financial and economic crisis, whether by sustaining small business, fostering new enterprise formation or dampening employment shocks. Analyzing banking organization and markets at the county and metropolitan area levels, this research documents substantial variation in banking structure across local economies in the US up to and including the current period, confounding a simple narrative of dominance, displacement and homogenization under the aegis of too-big-to-fail banking corporations. It also presents preliminary analyses of whether and how differences in banking structure and the persistence of “Jeffersonian” alternatives to too-big-to-fail bank corporations in local economies affected levels and changes there in the relative size of the small business sector, new establishment formation and unemployment during and “after” the great recession.

Low-wage Workers and Public Policy: Marginalization, Coercion, and Alternatives
2016-04-28 14:00 - 15:30
This research forum takes a broad look at emerging issues of immigrant integration, incarceration, and low-wage work. Six very different researchers from four UC campuses will present their cutting-edge research, looking at the destructive effects of many policies currently in place, but also at alternatives to move toward economic and social justice.

Uber Drivers: Independent Contractors, Employees, or Something Else?
2016-04-18 17:00 - 18:30
Are Uber Drivers and others who provide service in the On-Demand economy entitled to the employment rights, benefits, and protections that other employees enjoy? Or, are the “gig workers” actually independent contractors, entitled to no protection at all? If they are employees, they would get benefit of minimum wage and overtime laws, protection against discrimination, health and safety standards, workers compensation for on-the-job injury, and many other rights under state and federal employment laws. Moreover, if they are considered “employees,” then they are entitled to the protection of the labor laws when they try to organize unions. Some have advocated that the law create a new category for these worker, such as “dependent contractor,” or “independent worker?” Others have advocated that we improve the statutory rights and protections for independent contractors. This panel will consider these issues from a number of perspectives.

Occupiers and Dreamers: Insiders and Outsiders in a New Political Generation
2016-04-06 12:30 - 14:00
Young adults have long been overrepresented among political activists, and their generationally specific experiences and worldviews often shape social movement agendas. Although these phenomena have received limited scholarly attention in recent years, they are highly salient features of the new cycle of protest that has emerged in the 21st century United States. This talk analyzes two key components of that cycle, the 2011 Occupy Wall Street uprising and the movement of undocumented immigrant “Dreamers.” Both were led by U.S. “Millennials” (born between 1980 and 2000). I argue that Millennials comprise a new political generation, with a worldview that sets it apart from previous generations of U.S. activists. I compare the Occupiers’ and Dreamers’ political strategies and organizational forms and argue that, despite a shared worldview, this new political generation is heterogeneous in regard to modes of mobilization. The Occupiers were a relatively privileged group of young people whose aspirations were frustrated, especially in the context of the Great Recession, threatening them with exclusion from the economic stratum they had long expected to enter; by contrast the Dreamers were already marginalized because of their undocumented status and sought inclusion within the economic mainstream. Their different social locations, in turn, contributed to Occupiers’ and Dreamers’ distinctly different political strategies and organizational forms.

Apple, Foxconn and China's New Working Class: Political Economy of Global Production
2016-03-30 12:30
This is a worker-centered analysis of Apple, the world’s most profitable corporation, and its primary supplier, with more than one million workers in China alone, the world’s largest industrial employer, Foxconn. Apple’s commercial triumph rests not only on its design and marketing supremacy but on the reversal of its original business model from producing computers to outsourcing its entire consumer electronics production to Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at multiple sites from coastal to inland, we examine the interface of Apple, Foxconn, the Chinese state, and the unions. The power dynamics of the buyer-driven supply chain are analysed as these play out for Chinese workers in an epoch of fundamental class transformation from the predominance of state owned enterprises to a workforce that is overwhelmingly comprised of rural migrant workers. The analysis of incomplete proletarianization and the emergence of a new form of precarious labor is central to the story. Power asymmetries, including technological control and global marketing, assure the dominance of Apple in price setting and the timing of product delivery, resulting in intense pressures and illegal overtime for workers. In the wake of a wave of suicides at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen in 2010, we studied labor practice, living conditions and patterns of resistance at Foxconn and other factories, centering on two generations of rural migrant workers in a period in which contentious social protest has grown exponentially: in a system that is fully unionized (company union), in which strikes and autonomous unions are illegal, and in which the state actively seeks to redirect conflict from worker protest to the courts. We consider the paradox of worker power and powerlessness at the interface of a system in transition from predominantly state owned enterprise with lifetime employment for urban workers to one in which large areas of the state sector have been privatized and in which a partially proletarianized rural migrant workforce, whose numbers are approaching 300 million but who lack fundamental labor and citizenship rights, constitute the core of the contemporary working class and its most volatile segment.

2015-16 Benjamin Aaron Labor Law Lecture
2016-02-23 18:00 - 20:30
Please join us for an informative evening as our special guest Dr. David Weil, Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division at the Department of Labor, discusses his priorities and initiatives at the Hour and Wage Division, including the Wage and Hour Division’s strategic enforcement and opportunities for stakeholder engagement with the agency to raise compliance behavior. He will also discuss his much acclaimed book The Fissured Workplace. Dr. Weil is an internationally recognized expert in public and labor market policy; regulatory performance; industrial and labor relations; transparency policy; and supply-chain restructuring and its effects.

Bonded for Flexibility: Migrant Workers in Qatar's Construction Industry anbd Beyond
2016-02-12 12:00 - 13:30
Qatar, the host of the 2022 World Cup, has been called out for its labor practices. Human rights and labor organizations have condemned the treatment of migrant workers and have called the small gulf nation a modern slave state. While Qatar has been singled out for its labor practices, forced labor arrangements, whether formally sanctioned or informally implemented, are widespread internationally and are profoundly compatible with modern capitalist production. This paper draws on a qualitative examine of the construction industry in Qatar to examine the ways in which compulsion is used in global production systems to meet production challenges. While critiques of the labor system in Qatar have emphasized working conditions and wages, this paper focuses instead on worker skill, an aspect of production that is often represented as a neutral input in the form of human capital. I argue that labor arrangements based on compulsion enable firms to erase the skill contribution of workers even as they rely on their skill to meet technical challenges and highly variable production targets. This systemic skill erasure forecloses all negotiations between labor and management over how skill is used and compensated, thus preserving maximum production and price flexibility for firms. The paper concludes with a call for a renewed exploration of the politics and power relations of production systems, and of the specific ways in which compulsion is deployed as a deliberate production strategy.

Protecting Immigrant Workers: New Strategies for Strengthening Labor Standards Enforcement
2016-01-29 12:00 - 13:30
Professor Janice Fine will present some of her research on the evolution of the worker center movement as well as recent work building a theoretical argument and set of case studies on the role of unions and worker centers in enforcing labor standards in low wage sectors in partnership with government agencies.

Precarious Lives: Gendered Engagement with Neoliberal Development and the Contemporary Academy - CANCELED
2016-01-21 12:30 - 14:00
This talk is an engagement with the conditions of precarity that characterize the current moment. Navarro links her ethnographic research on offshore banking in the US-owned Virgin Islands to scholarship detailing the troubling neoliberal turn made by the American academy, this lecture is an engagement with neoliberalism and its effects. Building on black feminist scholarship, Navarro will take up the notion of intersectionality and consider its continued salience vis-à-vis contemporary operations of capital. She does this in order to demonstrate the ways in which neoliberal logic builds upon, and deepens, existing hierarchies—divisions that are most often named in relation to class, but are equally significant along lines of gender, race, and color.
Taking seriously the notion that the American academy is in crisis (with institutions relying increasingly on nonsecure, poorly-paid adjunct teaching, offering ever-fewer tenure track positions for the steady stream of newly-minted Ph.D’s that are produced each year), Navarro will examine the effects of this precarity on teaching, faculty/staff research agendas, and student advising. She will pay particular attention to the ways female faculty members and scholars of color are positioned in this financial-academic environment. Linking these concerns to her own research agenda on economic development in the US Virgin Islands, her work provides a gendered analysis of the neoliberal project, as she examines the Economic Development Commission (EDC) initiative, a tax holiday program that has attracted a number of primarily American bankers to the island of St. Croix. In this talk, Navarro will explore the issue of gender vis-à-vis the EDC program, as she works through the gendered expectations governing the local women working in the EDC sector, a group known locally as ‘EDC girls.’ These workers, a group of local women who have contributed to the creation of a new social category on St. Croix, are expected to dress, act, and dispose of their generous salaries both conspicuously and in ways that benefit the broader community of St. Croix. Navarro argues that far from serving as unwitting participants in these processes, these women perform a mediating role in neoliberal globalization, actively participating in the creating of new social and economic realities.

The Hand That Feeds
2015-10-28 12:30 - 14:00
At a popular bakery café, residents of New York’s Upper East Side get bagels and coffee served with a smile 24 hours a day. But behind the scenes, undocumented immigrant workers face sub-legal wages, dangerous machinery, and abusive managers who will fire them for calling in sick. Mild-mannered sandwich maker Mahoma López has never been interested in politics, but in January 2012, he convinces a small group of his co-workers to fight back.
Risking deportation and the loss of their livelihood, the workers team up with a diverse crew of innovative young organizers and take the unusual step of forming their own independent union, launching themselves on a journey that will test the limits of their resolve. In one roller-coaster year, they must overcome a shocking betrayal and a two-month lockout. Lawyers will battle in back rooms, Occupy Wall Street protesters will take over the restaurant, and a picket line will divide the neighborhood. If they can win a contract, it will set a historic precedent for low-wage workers across the country. But whatever happens, Mahoma and his coworkers will never be exploited again.

IRLE Dialogue Southern California Port Truck Drivers: Exploitation and Resistance
2015-05-27 13:00 - 14:30
Join three engaged legal experts and a historian to discuss this history-making worker struggle within the broader context of the push to improve low-wage jobs in the Los Angeles area!

After Marikana: The State, the ANC, and the Future of the Labor Movement in South Africa
2015-05-18 14:00 - 17:00
The colloquium will be devoted to the crises and conflicts that have wracked the labor movement in South Africa in recent years and the implications of these struggles for the future of South African politics. In 2012, police from the African National Congress (ANC) government gunned down 44 striking platinum workers in what has come to be known as the Marikana massacre, a watershed moment for South Africa’s politics and its trade unions.
The speakers will consider the historic strike by 70,000 Association of Mineworkers and Construction Workers (AMCU) that ensued, the internecine battles that have been taking place among the different sections of COSATU trade union federation, and the intense factional strife between the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) and other sections of the trade union movement that has issued in NUMSA’s expulsion from COSATU.
NUMSA has now initiated a call for what it terms a united front, not only to build a new workers party to stand in national elections, but also to forge links between the struggles of productive and reproductive struggles that would better connect organized labor with the “service delivery protests” of poor, heavily immigrant workers. No less than the future of the South African workers movement and the nature the South African state are at stake.

Authors-Meet-Critics on Skills of the "Unskilled": Work and Mobility Among Mexican Migrants
2015-05-15 12:30 - 13:30
Most labor and migration studies classify migrants with limited formal education or credentials as “unskilled.” Despite the value of migrants’ work experiences and the substantial technical and interpersonal skills developed throughout their lives, the labor-market contributions of these migrants are often overlooked and their mobility pathways poorly understood. Skills of the “Unskilled” reports the findings of a five-year study that draws on research including interviews with 320 Mexican migrants and return migrants in North Carolina and Guanajuato, Mexico. The authors uncover these migrants’ lifelong human capital and identify mobility pathways associated with the acquisition and transfer of skills across the migratory circuit, including reskilling, occupational mobility, job jumping, and entrepreneurship.

New Strategies for Youth Employment: Rebuilding Community Jobs in the Face of Globalization
2015-05-14 12:30 - 14:00
Hard hit by economic restructuring have been young people of color, who face high under/unemployment rates resulting in conditions of increasing and persistent inequality, likely to affect generations to come. After assessing an array of policies that affect employment conditions among youth, Córdova will present neighborhood scale strategies that (re)build communities while increasing opportunities for youth (self)employment.

Organizing Latino Immigrants in the Informal Economy: The Successful Care of the Association of Latin American Gardeners of Los Angeles
2015-05-13 15:00 - 17:00
Panelists will discuss the successful organizing campaign of a small group of Latino gardeners in conjunction with a few Chicana/o activists against the City of Los Angeles’s draconian leaf blower ban, charging jardineros or gardeners with a misdemeanor, a $1,000 fine, and up to 6 months in jail. To read in advance on this historic grassroots movement of a disenfranchised ethnic niche, see Alvaro Huerta and Alfonso Morales’s essay “The Formation of a Grassroots Movement: The Association of Latin American Gardeners of Los Angeles Challenges City Hall” in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies (Fall 2014)

University of Richmond, Law Commencement 2015
2015-05-09 00:00
Commencement speech presented by Victor Narro, Project Director at the UCLA Downtown Labor Center

2015 IRLE Annual Conference
2015-04-17 07:30 - 2015-04-18 16:50
Join us as we present the UCLA Institute for Research and Employment’s 2015 conference on Labor, Entertainment, & Sports: An Intersectional and Interdisciplinary Inquiry. The conference will take place at Crowne Plaza Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, CA on Friday and Saturday, April 17-18, 2015.
The objective of the conference is to help build intellectual bridges between scholars taking critical and intersectional approaches to labor, organized labor, and industry professionals and practitioners. Panelists will discuss current labor and employment issues in the fields of sports and entertainment, and highlight the importance of racial/ethnic, gender/sexual orientation, and class/labor analyses of labor and employment issues in these industries. Panels will address gender, racial, and sexual orientation representation and equity; the labor of student athletes; global and transnational issues; unions, collective bargaining and labor disputes; health and safety issues; economic security and working conditions; innovative entrepreneurship; artist/athlete rights and representation; and current labor and employment issues in the industries.
The conference will culminate with an actors’ roundtable, featuring actors/filmmakers-workers discussing: the relationship between race/intersectional identity, labor, and the entertainment industry; the inclusion of diverse groups in the industry’s workforce, including lead roles, writing, directing, producing, and talent representation; worker/actor experiences in the workplace/labor market; the identification of best practices for increasing opportunities for underrepresented groups in industry’s workforce; and the broader implications of a diverse workforce in the industry.

Building China: The Rise of Informal Work and Spatial Politics
2015-02-25 12:30 - 14:00
Urbanization has been a cornerstone of China’s modernization project and an important driver of economic growth. As a result, over 50 percent of China’s billion people are now living in urban areas, concentrated in the 160 cities with a population over one million. Based on extensive ethnographic field research, this paper examines the lives and work of informal migrant construction workers as they are spatially, socially, and economically integrated into China’s cities. The study makes three main contributions concerning urban informal work in China. First, it documents the different forms of informal work and helps us make sense of the diversity of informal precarious work more generally. Second, it expands our understanding of China’s emerging labor regime that is central to labor control, intimately related to the urbanization process, and ultimately linked to China’s overall economic success. Finally, it shows how these migrants struggle against the disciplining process, contest exploitation and protest in unique ways.

Living and Laboring off the Grid: Black Women Prisoners and the Making of the “Modern” South, 1865-1920
2015-02-12 16:00 - 18:00
In this talk, LeFlouria will provide an in-depth examination of the lived and laboring experiences of imprisoned African-American women in the post-Civil War South, and describe how black female convict labor was used to help construct “New South” modernity. Using Georgia—the “industrial capital” of the region—as a case study, LeFlouria will analyze how African-American women’s presence within the convict lease and chain gang systems of the “empire state” helped modernize the “New South,” by creating a new and dynamic set of occupational burdens and competencies for black women that were untested in the free labor market. In addition to discussing how the parameters of southern black women’s working lives were redrawn by the carceral state, I will also account for the hidden and explicit modes of resistance female prisoners used to counter work-related abuses, as well as physical and sexualized violence.

Book Talk: "Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana's World War II Home Front"
2015-01-28 12:30 - 14:00
“I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun.” So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II.
In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived—on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white racial ethnic identity. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity, working class identity, and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era.

2014-15 Benjamin Aaron Labor Law Lecture
2015-01-22 00:00

Book Talk: "Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream"
2014-12-05 12:00 - 13:30
The steady immigration of black populations from Africa and the Caribbean over the past few decades has fundamentally changed the racial, ethnic, and political landscape in the United States. But how will these “new blacks” behave politically in America? Using an original survey of New York City workers and multiple national data sources, Christina M. Greer explores the political significance of ethnicity for new immigrant and native-born blacks. In an age where racial and ethnic identities intersect, intertwine, and interact in increasingly complex ways, Black Ethnics offers a rigorous analysis of black politics and coalitions in the post-Civil Rights era.

"Labor Women" and Reflecting on API Women in Labor Today
2014-11-12 12:30 - 14:00
Labor Women is a portrait of three immigrant daughters who are part of a new generation transforming the U.S. labor movement. Quynh Nguyen is a trilingual organizer mobilizing meatpackers in their demands for a union contract. Karla Zombro is a lead organizer for the Respect at LAX Living Wage campaign. Jun Chong represents the most marginalized of workers – welfare recipients who are being forced into workfare programs. Contrary to images of the Asian American “model minority,” they are passionate advocates for social change and the labor movement as it is becoming in the 21st century.

"After Labor Law? Reframing Labor Law as the Law of Economic Subordination"
2014-11-05 12:30 - 14:00
“Labour” is a term that is ceasing to have salience as the descriptor of a class, movement, scholarly or professional domain or field of public policy. Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult to mobilize working people for political or industrial action or even to defend their legal rights and claim their legal entitlements. Perhaps, then, the future of labour law is to become what in an historical counterfactual it might always have been: “the law of economic subordination and resistance”. Such a reframing of labour law might have many advantages.

Book Talk: "Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India"
2014-05-07 12:30 - 14:00
Since the 1980s, the world’s governments have decreased state welfare and thus increased the number of unprotected “informal” or “precarious” workers. As a result, more and more workers do not receive secure wages or benefits from either employers or the state. What are these workers doing to improve their livelihoods? Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India offers a fresh and provocative look into the alternative social movements informal workers in India are launching. It also offers a unique analysis of the conditions under which these movements succeed or fail. Drawing from 300 interviews with informal workers, government officials, and union leaders, Rina Agarwala argues that Indian informal workers are using their power as voters to demand welfare benefits (such as education, housing, and healthcare) from the state, rather than demanding traditional work benefits (such as minimum wages and job security) from employers. In addition, they are organizing at the neighborhood level, rather than the shop floor, and appealing to “citizenship,” rather than labor rights. Agarwala concludes that movements are most successful when operating under parties that compete for mass votes and support economic liberalization (even populist parties), and are least successful when operating under non-competitive electoral contexts (even those tied to communist parties).

“Mexico as an aerospace competitor? Lessons from the aerospace cluster in Querétaro”
2014-04-30 10:30 - 12:30
For many years Mexico has been looking for a strategy to create economic growth and industrial development. The results have been less than positive, however, and at times the public policy in regards to industrial development seems directionless. The Maquiladora Model is an example of a model of industrialization that did not create development and, on the contrary, generated important social problems, especially in the north border area of the country. These facts lead to questioning if Mexico is destined to offer only competitive advantages related to low labor costs and governmental benefits, such as special tax regimens or the construction of productive infrastructure with almost no cost for firms. Given this context, it is necessary to analyze whether or not the current Aerospace Industry is only taking advantage of the same competitive advantages that the Maquiladora Model did in the 90’s, or whether this represents a real opportunity to create economic and social development. This talk is oriented to show the structure of the aerospace industry in Mexico and the performance of the aerospace cluster located in the State of Querétaro.
