This chapter explains the process that determines wages paid to sweatshop workers. It explains the consequences of imposing minimum wage laws and boycotting sweatshops. The chapter articulates the basic economic reasoning that leads many of the demands of anti-sweatshop activists to harm worker welfare. It then considers objections made to this basically economic case that include the necessity of competitive markets; efficiency wages; passing costs on to consumers; cost cutting in other areas; accepting a lower rate of return; and how elasticity impacts overall worker welfare. An appendix to the chapter considers philosophical aspects of how to think about worker welfare. This core chapter outlines the main lesson of the book.

This chapter reviews the various organizations that comprise the anti-sweatshop movement and what policies they advocate. It provides a history of the origins and growth of the anti-sweatshop movement.

Offering two case studies – the economic transformations of Sohar and Duqm – this chapter grounds the book’s argument about Oman’s global labour market in material cases of spatial transformation and the integration into global value chains through which both commodities and labour circulate. The chapter argues that millennial citizen expectations take shape in these developments, from the interaction of ostensible outcomes of economic globalisation, neoliberalism, and government responsibilities of governing hydrocarbon windfalls. Citizen reactions emerge from their perceived right to, or exclusion from, these returns. The chapter further substantiates two points through these cases. First, both neoliberal reform and oil wealth explicitly or implicitly make promises to populations about an improved economic life, which, when unrealised, results in disenfranchisement and discontent. Second, capital needs labour and pursues supplies from the global labour market not only because it is cost effective but deliberately because it is both flexible and controllable. It seeks to avert potential labour disruption and secure seamless operations. Together, these findings show the ways Omani labour organises and the power of labour through the threat of its resistance.

This chapter explores how taxes shape the meaning of other payments and money flows in highland Bolivia. The concept ‘ecology of payments’ is introduced to describe the world of payments amongst the so-called informally employed in the city of Cochabamba. It explores how, for instance, receipts for commercial licence taxes and property taxes paid provide people with the right to make other kinds of payments, such as fees to local neighbourhood associations and unions. An ‘ecology of payments’ pays attention to the multiple links and dependencies between payments and the way they transform each other. This approach encourages a focus on the local impact of taxes paid, as opposed to the effect of taxes on long-term state–society relations. To ascertain the role of taxes within this ecology, the chapter also aims to understand how the concept of formality informs the power and character of different payments.

At mid-century, the north bank companies faced two main problems: wharf competition and the failure of earnings to keep pace with an increase in the shipping and cargoes handled. Adding to these challenges from the 1860s was accommodating steam shipping by investment in facilities, including new docks, and in the 1880s, a resurgence of fierce rivalry between themselves and a financial crisis created by the new Tilbury dock resulted in effective amalgamation. Their common response to diminishing profitability was the introduction of sub-contracting – to the detriment of the lives and livelihoods of a resistant workforce. Skilled port workers were unionised, unskilled generally not, but strikes by particular groups were not uncommon. Port-wide action by dock workers in the 1850s failed but stoppages in the early 1870s achieved wage rises, as also did the port-wide 1889 Great Dock Strike.

, During the 1980s and early 1990s, as the HIV/AIDS epidemic swept the country, thousands of gay men and lesbians perished from AIDS-related infections. Their same-sex partners quickly discovered that they had no rights because the law did not recognize their relationships. Advocates consequently pressed municipalities to adopt domestic partnership programs, a concept that originated in union efforts to secure benefits for unmarried partners. In the 1980s, cities, towns, and counties around the country began offering both health benefits to their employees as well as registries where all couples could record their commitment. The total number of these programs were small, and the rights they offered were limited. However, they helped produce new debates over the nature and meaning of family. They also inspired queer workers in the private sector to demand domestic partnership benefits from their employers. By the mid-1990s, domestic partnership benefits had become a mainstay of corporate America.

We give a discussion of some basic mathematical concepts and terminologies connected with sets, numbers, functions and graphs.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the recognition of the societal value of domestic service affected some aspects of domestic workers’ rights but not others. It analyzes debates around the 1926 law on domestic service and the effects it had on the domestic workers’ ability to resolve conflicts with employers in court or mediation. Domestic workers’ labor rights were limited by the new law to make their labor more accessible to employers: written labor agreements were no longer mandatory and there was no compensation for overtime work. Yet, the state was reluctant to limit domestic workers’ access to their employers housing after termination of contract because female homelessness was closely associated with prostitution. The new law put domestic workers at a disadvantage compared to other workers, which, together with continuing valorization of “productive” labor, made domestics seek employment opportunities outside domestic service. This chapter contributes to our understanding of the effects labor laws have on paid domestic labor and testifies to the importance of government regulations and protection.

The low status of domestic service in the Soviet hierarchy of labor undermined efforts to politicize domestic workers through union mobilization. The appeal of “productive” work inspired domestics to use their activism as springboard for careers outside of domestic service rather than for organizing their peers. Domestics’ reluctance to engage with the union only confirmed the long-standing suspicion that domestic service fostered “lackey’s souls” rather than conscious proletarian selves. This chapter provides insight into the problem of marginalized workers that have largely been excluded from organized labor. While the difficulty in organizing domestic workers is often negatively affected by their vulnerability and dependency on employers, the low status of housework in the gendered hierarchy of labor poses a different challenge as it conditions household workers to invest in changing careers rather than strengthening their labor organization.

Chapter 1 analyzes the shift in the understanding of domestic service from a problematic institution intrinsically connected to inequality and exploitation to an acceptable practice in the 1920s. These early conversations revealed the two main tensions in the understanding of paid domestic labor after the revolution. The first involved class. While quick to reimagine domestic servants as domestic workers, the Bolsheviks struggled to articulate a coherent position on the class affiliation of their employers. Even though employment of household workers did not constitute exploitation in the strictly Marxist sense, the practice had a distinctly petty-bourgeois character in the eyes of many Soviet citizens. The second tension had to do with gender. The Bolsheviks had no resources to fulfil their vision of socialized housework but still sought to mobilize urban women for work outside the home and for political life. Rather than encouraging redistribution of labor in the home, the state saw employment of female migrant peasants with no professional qualifications in Soviet homes as an acceptable solution to the problem of housework.

Rather than focusing on dramaturgical or thematic developments in the post-war era, this chapter traces the changes experienced by playwrights in their practical working conditions. It begins by disputing widespread arguments against the prominence of playwriting in British theatre (that it is literary, logocentric, and individualistic). It then explores changes in play publishing, which helped raise the cultural profile of the playwright while also forming a new kind of dramatic canon; the industrial conditions in which playwrights have worked, which were precarious for the first thirty years since 1945 but were decisively transformed in the late seventies by an effective campaign of unionisation and collective bargaining; and the growing culture of play development, which has had mixed results, but which, at its best, helps demystify playwriting as a cultural practice, making it more accessible and helping to shepherd new plays and playwrights into being.

In this chapter, we turn our attention to labor unions and their role in providing countervailing power. Congress recognized the consequences of individual employees having to negotiate with large employers. For the most part, individual employees have no bargaining power and face all-or-nothing offers that reflect monopsony power. Consequently, Congress passed legislation that would permit employees to unionize and thereby create a labor monopoly. The idea was to level the playing field so workers could not be abused. This chapter provides a brief review of the statutes and the scope of the labor exemption.

The formation of a union converts a monopsony into a bilateral monopoly. The economic effects of a bilateral monopoly are generally positive. Employment and output expand. Thus, both employees and consumers are better off. We explain this analysis and illustrate it with reference to professional sports. This chapter also explores the antitrust conundrum arising from bilateral monopoly.

This chapter examines the discourses of the perceived role of the university and how this relates to the constructions of knowledge and its implications for pedagogy, research, and academic freedom. Furthermore, it examines the role of the university transnationally going beyond the familiar democratic contexts, taking account of increased globalisation and its sociopolitical implications for academic freedom and the production of knowledge. University missions illustrate a range of framings in terms of the conceptions of ‘truth’, ‘public good’, and ‘knowledge economy’, and how these conceptions are translated into curricula objectives is explored in the different contexts of Lebanon, the UAE, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Access to Austrian employment law is dependent on whether an individual can be regarded as an ‘employee’. Essentially, the idiosyncratic protection provided by employment law is awarded based on a binary option: the subordinate ‘employee’ in contrast to the self-employed person. Intermediary categories – such as the ‘quasi-subordinate’ status – are mere exceptions, although with increasing importance.

Austrian law does not provide a given notion of the ‘employee’. The Austrian Civil Code came into force in 1812, when special protection for employees was not considered necessary.