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Faculty Publications - International and Comparative Labor

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    Corporate Codes of Conduct and Labour Turnover in Global Apparel Supply Chains
    Li, Chunyun; Kuruvilla, Sarosh (Wiley, 2023-07-23)
    Research on private regulation of labour issues in global supply chains has focused extensively on whether supplier factories comply with the codes of conduct of global companies. Less is known about how such compliance relates to the preferences and behaviours of workers at export factories. This study analyses a unique dataset of factory audits matched with a survey of worker turnover rates from 622 factories in 28 countries supplying a large global apparel retailer. The results show that violations of the retailer's codes of conduct for suppliers are generally related to turnover, but that workers 'vote with their feet' primarily for violations of wages and benefits, relative to violations of other code provisions such as environment protection and safety standards. This 'means-ends' decoupling between factory practices and worker preferences implies that global firms need to incorporate the livelihood logic that underlies workers' turnover decisions while implementing their private regulation programmes.
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    Choosing Rights: Nissan in Canton, Mississippi, and Workers’ Freedom of Association under International Human Rights Standards
    Johnson, Derrick; Compa, Lance (2013-10)
    [Excerpt] This Report chronicles Nissan’s aggressive anti-union tactics. These include mandatory “captive audience” meetings, individual sessions with supervisors, closed-circuit television presentations, surveillance, and interrogations. Nissan management has relentlessly and repeatedly implied to its workforce that the plant faces the risk of closing down if the workers decide to have a union. Instead of allowing workers to decide freely whether or not to participate in a union, the company chooses to create a climate of fear and uncertainty. Such fear-mongering is inconsistent with freedom of choice.
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    Book Review: L’organisation international du travail et le BIT
    Compa, Lance (University of Illinois College of Law, 2022)
    [Excerpt] The re-issuance of Georges Scelle’s seminal L’organisation international du travail et le BIT (The International Labor Organization and the International Labor Office) nearly a century after its initial publication provides a new and timely look at early work on the challenge of creating global labor standards.
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    Teachers’ Work in China’s Migrant Schools
    Friedman, Eli (SAGE, 2017-11)
    In recent years, scholars have begun to document the emergence of private migrant schools in urban China. However, neither education nor labor scholars have empirically investigated teachers’ work. Because it is precisely those with the fewest economic resources that have been restricted to privatized education in the city, migrant schools are dependent on a highly exploitative form of employment. Based on a study of Guangzhou and Beijing, we see that there is diversity in working conditions. In Beijing, teachers are subject to extralegal precarity in which basic legal enforcement is tenuous to nonexistent. In Guangzhou, there is greater legal compliance, but management has employed market discipline to shift risk onto teachers. In general, teachers’ work in migrant schools is similar to other forms of migrant labor in China, characterized by low pay, long hours, high work intensity, and lack of job security. The article concludes by assessing the divergent politics of migration in each city while considering the implications for socioeconomic inequality.
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    Just-in-Time Urbanization? Managing Migration, Citizenship, and Schooling in the Chinese City
    Friedman, Eli (SAGE, 2018-05)
    In this article I argue that the Chinese state is responding to tensions wrought by high-speed growth by attempting to develop a form of technocratic biopolitics I refer to as ‘just-in-time (JIT) urbanization’. Mirroring techniques of the Toyota Production System (of which JIT is a constituent element), large Chinese cities have sought to avoid the costs associated with the production and warehousing of surplus populations. Under this system, migrants are granted access to local citizenship and public education for their children if they fulfill a specific, state-determined, need in the labor market. The hope is to be able to precisely deploy specific kinds of labor power as needed, at as low a cost as possible, while avoiding waste, overpopulation, and (presumed) attendant political chaos. The social consequence of this approach is that nominally public resources such as education have been funneled to elites in what I term an ‘inverted means test’.
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    Regimes, Resistance and Reforms: Comparing Workers' Politics in the Automobile Industry in China and India
    Nair, Manjusha; Friedman, Eli (McMaster University Library Press, 2021-01)
    The automobile industry in China was shaken by an unprecedented upsurge of labour unrest in 2010, beginning with the much-discussed wildcat strike at the Nanhai Honda transmission plant in Guangdong province. While worker activism in auto plants in India was not as concentrated as in China’s 2010 strike wave, the period 2009–2017 witnessed twenty-seven strikes nationwide, indicating a significant uptick after the global recession. The optimism that regarded the escalation of labour unrest as indicative of a global labour movement emerging from the Global South has died down. This is an appropriate moment to ask the question: Why did these protests not materialise into something more? Existing explanations in China tend to focus on the regime characteristics. In this article, we undertake a much-needed comparative analysis to explore the failure of these protests. We argue that their failure to sustain their momentum, let alone become a global movement, must be understood in the context of the structures and temporality of capitalism. While we show that there were regime-based divergences and national characteristics in each case, we also show the striking global convergence both in the ways that the protests materialised and how the states responded.
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    Faltering Standardization: Conflict and Labour Relations in China's Taxi and Sanitation Industries
    Zhang, Hao; Friedman, Eli (Wiley & Sons, 2021-09)
    The marketization of municipal services in China's cities from the 1990s triggered a wave of strikes beginning in the 2000s that provided an impetus towards standardization and the re-regulation of employment conditions. On the basis of a study of the sanitation and taxi industries in the cities of Wenzhou and Guangzhou, the authors find that local governments have utilized three strategies in promoting standardization: unionization, public policy implementation and business consolidation. Although outcomes vary across the cases considered, institutionalization remains weak at best and conflicts persist. The article concludes by presenting a schema for comparing the different strategies identified in these cases and those historically institutionalized in the West.
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    Who Will Help? Willingness to Work for the Union
    Kuruvilla, Sarosh; Fiorito, Jack (Départment des Relations Industrielles, Université Laval, 1994)
    This paper proposes and tests a model of a critical union commitment dimension: "Willingness to work" for the union. Organization and social psychological theories, along with previous empirical research, are used to develop the conceptual model, measures, and predictions. These predictions are tested via a two-stage regression model, using data from a large sample of Swedish professional union members. As predicted, both attitudinal commitment and subjective norms are critical influences on the individual's willingness to work on behalf of the union.
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    India’s Outsourcing Industry and the Offshoring of Skilled Services Work: A Review Essay
    Norlander, Peter; Erickson, Christopher; Kuruvilla, Sarosh; Kannan-Narasimhan, Rangapriya (ADAPT University Press, 2015-01-29)
    The present paper proposes a framework for understanding the type of work and processes involved in offshoring that treats skills and wages as separate dimensions, and seeks to understand the transformation of work through offshoring. To address the question of the limits of outsourcing, we use our interview data to consider the nature of knowledge transfer and functional collaboration across distances and cultures, as well as the strategic, practical, and regulatory constraints. We see fundamental questions here regarding the existence and maintenance of a non-offshorable corporate strategic “core” and whether the movement of offshoring up the value chain ultimately gravely threatens that “core.” This essay is organized as follows: after defining our terms within a discourse which is famously confused, we address each question in sequence, incorporating relevant literature and interviews. We conclude with a discussion of our findings, and raise some fundamental questions for future research.
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    Introduction to a Special Issue on Improving Private Regulation of Labor in Global Supply Chains: Theory and Evidence
    Amengual, Matthew; Kuruvilla, Sarosh (Cornell University, 2020-08)
    [Excerpt] As we write this introductory essay on private regulation in global supply chains, we are in the midst of a pandemic caused by COVID-19. Beyond the health care crisis, the economic disruption is devastating. Millions of workers in global supply chains are losing their jobs as companies cut production in response to declining demand. This trend is especially true of the apparel supply chain, which is the key focus of the articles in this special issue. As Mark Anner’s timely survey in March 2020 suggests, more than 70% of apparel workers furloughed or laid off in Bangladesh were sent home without pay, and less than 20% were paid their severance pay—a violation of the basic private regulation principles laid down in the codes of conduct of most apparel retailers (Anner 2020). Similar stories emanate from other apparel exporting countries, such as Cambodia, Indonesia, and Ethiopia. Around the globe, economic shocks transmitted through global supply chains are wreaking havoc on vulnerable workers who lack basic protections.