Transnational labor regulation, reification and commodification: A critical review

Why does scholarship on transnational labor regulation (TLR) consistently fails to search for improvements in working conditions, and instead devotes itself to relentless efforts for identifying administrative processes, semantics, and amalgamations of stakeholders? This article critiques TLR from a pro-worker perspective, through the philosophical work of Georg Lukács, and the concepts of reification and commodification. A set of theoretically grounded criteria is developed and these are applied against selected contemporary cases of TLR. In the totality that is capitalism, reification of social relations of production conceals completely the experiences of workers. In TLR, managerialist and process-oriented scholarship is dominant, verifiable outcomes and positive improvements in conditions of employment are not sought, and worse, meaningless procedures are celebrated as positive achievements

'Going private': a qualitative comparison of medical specialists' job satisfaction in the public and private sectors of South Africa

BACKGROUND: There is a highly inequitable distribution of health workers between public and private sectors in South Africa, partly due to within-country migration trends. This article elaborates what South African medical specialists find satisfying about working in the public and private sectors, at present, and how to better incentivize retention in the public sector. METHODS: Seventy-four qualitative interviews were conducted - among specialists and key informants - based in one public and one private urban hospital in South Africa. Interviews were coded to determine common job satisfaction factors, both financial and non-financial in nature. This served as background to a broader study on the impacts of specialist 'dual practice', that is, moonlighting. All qualitative specialist respondents were engaged in dual practice, generally working in both public and private sectors. Respondents were thus able to compare what was satisfying about these sectors, having experience of both. RESULTS: Results demonstrate that although there are strong financial incentives for specialists to migrate from the public to the private sector, public work can be attractive in some ways. For example, the public hospital sector generally provides more of a team environment, more academic opportunities, and greater opportunities to feel 'needed' and 'relevant'. However, public specialists suffer under poor resource availability, lack of trust for the Department of Health, and poor perceived career opportunities. These non-financial issues of public sector dissatisfaction appeared just as important, if not more important, than wage disparities. CONCLUSIONS: The results are useful for understanding both what brings specialists to migrate to the private sector, and what keeps some working in the public sector. Policy recommendations center around boosting public sector resources and building trust of the public sector through including health workers more in decision-making, inter alia. These interventions may be more cost-effective for retention than wage increases, and imply that it is not necessarily just a matter of putting more money into the public sector to increase retention

East Asian Languages

Welcome to the IJCNLP Workshop on Named Entity Recognition for South and South East Asian Languages, a meeting held in conjunction with the Third International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing at Hyderabad, India. The goal of this workshop is to ascertain the state of the ar

What happens when unions run firms

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Lending Division - LD:3597.1215(217) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Toward a Transaction Cost Economics of Rural Development

It has long been recognized that voluntary organizations contribute to the economic development of rural areas in all parts of the world. This paper argues that the developmental role of voluntary organizations in rural areas can be explained in terms of a rurality-specific transaction cost that lowers the profit obtainable by ordinary profit-maximizing firms in rural areas. As voluntary organizations pursue non-profit objectives, their operation is not hindered by the rurality-specific transaction cost. The paper provides preliminary evidence and calls for empirical research on the relationship between rurality and the rural voluntary sector.

The wage effects of schooling under socialism and in transition: Evidence from Romania, 1950–2000

We estimate the impact of schooling on monthly earnings from 1950 to 2000 in Romania. Nearly constant at about 3-4 % during the socialist period, the coefficient on schooling in a conventional earnings regression rises steadily during the 1990s, reaching 8.5 % by 2000. Our analysis finds little evidence for either the standard explanations of such an increase in the West (labor supply movements, product demand shifts, technical change) or the transition-specific accounts sometimes offered (wage liberalization, border opening, increased quality of education). But we find some support for institutional and organizational explanations, particularly the high productivity of education in restructuring and entrepreneurial activities in a disequilibrium environment