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...Analysis of Child Labor: Comparative Study (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999)
Hugh D. Hindman, Child Labor: An American History (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe 2002)
Jackie Krasas Rogers, Temps: The Many Faces of the Changing Workplace (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2000)
Bernard Schlemmer, ed., The Exploited Child (London: Zed Books 2000) Guy Standing, Global Labour Flexibility. Seeking Distributive Justice (New York: St. Martin Press 1999)
THE PRECARIOUSNESS, LACK OF BENEFITS, low wages, and irregular hours of employment at the beginning of the 21st century recall the conditions of labour that marked the dawn of the 20th century. Since the mid-1970s a transition from one distinct phase of capitalism to another has disrupted the organization of labour and structures of the workplace that emerged out of the struggles of working people over the last 100 years. In the United States, the New Deal order has collapsed, and with it security of employment, living wages, and access to consumption. This was hardly a perfect system. Only in its waning phase did it include more than the white male workers in the core industrial sectors of the economy (and their families) whose actions in the 1930s did so much to forge its industrial relations regime. Just as the labour law extended to include white women as workers and men and women of colour, its validity came under assault. What counts as work and who counts as a worker has become an open question again as more and more jobs fall outside of the law.
If political factors, especially the union-busting Reagan Revolution, did much to undermine standard employment in the us, leading to a stagnation of the minimum wage and the erosion of collective bargaining, the emergence of its definitional opposite, nonstandard employment, remains rooted in global economic transformations. From the mid-1960s the share of corporate profit in gross domestic product began to fall sharply across the developed world. The costs of commodities rose steeply, while in all industrialized countries the level of wages climbed. Meanwhile, the international monetary system began to crumble. Since the 1973 oil crisis, the world has experienced three decades of de-industrialization, a shakeout of vulnerable competitors, and a restructuring of all sorts of financial and business institutions. (1) Workers began to lose contracting power, and, aggravated by slow economic growth, this created conditions for high unemployment. Technological advances, especially the microchip, have helped to compress time and space; such developments have allowed companies to move physical and financial capital ever more rapidly from one place to another, establishing production in previously less developed areas of the world. The new, faster nature of economic competition has transformed the organization of work under the mantra of "flexibility." A major characteristic of this new global economic order, however, is its relational unevenness. In some places in the world, child and family labour have persisted, reconstituted from the customary into the exploitative.
The books under review address this transformation in two main ways: they compare non-standard with "standard" employment and standard with "non-standard" workers, with special emphasis on children. Written mostly by social scientists, these studies usually lack historical perspective. Empirical and positivist in methodology, the collections among them reinterpret data sets, relying on government-generated statistics. Some essays do engage in more qualitative research, conducting surveys and interviews, constructing ethnographies, or partaking in participant observation, as does the monograph by Rogers. Only Hindman claims to be "history." Taken together, these books illuminate the demise and re-establishment of work regimes, which historians have long recognized as having grown out of specific conditions. What economists and sociologists name "standard" employment, existed for no more than a half-century or so and then only among certain privileged--usually white male--workers. Child labour, in contrast, persists not as a relic from the past but rather as a category whose form and very meaning shift with cultural and economic context.
Non-Standard Employment
"[F]lexible, market-mediated, nontraditional, alternative, atypical, contingent, just-in-time, marginal, precarious, disposable, and secondary" (Carre et al., 3)--when it comes to "non-standard" employment, the editors of Nonstandard Work: The Nature and Challenges of Changing Employment Arrangements contend, the standpoint of the scholar not merely shapes evaluations of the phenomenon but also the very language deployed. Researchers disagree on the extent of shifts in working conditions as well as their impact on workers, employers, institutions, and the economy. Neoclassical economists argue that the current transformations allow for a better match between the increased desire for flexibility from workers and the new requirements of firms, while trade unionists and their defenders insist that such flexibility has negative effects on workers. Rather than present definitive answers, this collection of sixteen articles on the US (commissioned by the Industrial Relations Research Association), offers a panoramic, albeit descriptive rather than explanatory, view of the problem in the us. Generalization proves elusive since there are substantial differences among various kinds of non-standard employment, which range from self-employment and independent contracting to temporary and day labour. The line between employer and employee often blurs through the decentralization of responsibilities, making the labour law with its strict definitions of the bargaining unit out of sync. From a historical perspective, we are witnessing a "feminization of the employment relationship" (Carre et al., 292), as Dorothy Sue Cobble and Leah H. Vosko explain, in which conditions associated with marginalized workers constitute a new norm.
The book divides into four sections. The first offers an overview of the degree and...
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