Precariousness, gender, resistance and consent in the face of global production network’s ‘Reforms’ of Pakistan’s garment manufacturing industry

This case study of the restructuring of Pakistan’s garment manufacturing industry explores how attempts to increase capital’s control over the labour process intersect with local patriarchal structures and trigger workers’ reflexivity and agency causing unanticipated consequences. Using Archer’s notion of agency, the article examines the theoretical space where capitalism meets patriarchy, and both are reproduced. The focus on reflexivity, anchored between objective contexts and agents’ personal concerns, helps theorize capital–labour–gender relations in global supply chains and explains workers’ impactful resistance to protect a supposedly precarious work regime. Our findings challenge the notion that globalization reduces workers’ agency and their potential for impactful resistance

Risk, responsibilities and rights: reassessing the ‘economic causes of crime’ thesis in a recession

This paper explores competing accounts of an apparent inversion of the previously-prevailing relationship between young people's unemployment and the incidence of youth offending at a time of economic recession. It begins by highlighting the faltering association between unemployment and offending, and considers the paradoxical implications for risk-based methodologies in youth justice practice. The paper then assesses explanations for the changing relationship that suggest that youth justice policies have successfully broken the unemployment-offending link; and alternatively that delayed effects of recession have yet to materialise, by reference to the work of four Inter-governmental organisations and to youth protests beyond the UK. In place of ever more intensive risk analyses, the paper then focusses on the adverse effects of unemployment on social cohesion, and proposes a rights-based approach to youth justice that recognises the growing disjuncture between the rights afforded to young people and the responsibilities expected of them

Adopting the International Standard 'Becoming a human-centred organization (ISO 27500)' supports a strategic approach to internationalisation.

Educational development is increasingly focussed on quality assurance and enhancement. Individual states/countries have their own mechanisms for assuring the student experience, and this has been accompanied by development of tools (including the UK’s National Student Survey) for capturing student opinion of our efforts. Areas where more work is needed include equity and diversity and it is perhaps time for a fresh approach. In other sectors, International Standards ensure safety, reliability and quality of products and services. Such standards also represent a stakeholder-negotiated (and therefore shared) understanding of ‘good quality’, supporting organisations in accessing new markets and permitting a fair global trade, an approach relevant to higher education. Recent publication of ISO (The International Organization for Standardization) Standard 27500 (the International Standard describing the principles and rationales behind becoming a humancentred organization) seems timely. Encouraging educational institutions to adopt this Standard may offer a strategy for addressing several issues, including internationalisation

Monitoring and evaluation of human resources for health: an international perspective

BACKGROUND: Despite the undoubted importance of human resources to the functions of health systems, there is little consistency between countries in how human resource strategies are monitored and evaluated. This paper presents an integrated approach for developing an evidence base on human resources for health (HRH) to support decision-making, drawing on a framework for health systems performance assessment. METHODS: Conceptual and methodological issues for selecting indicators for HRH monitoring and evaluation are discussed, and a range of primary and secondary data sources that might be used to generate indicators are reviewed. Descriptive analyses are conducted drawing primarily on one type of source, namely routinely reported data on the numbers of health personnel and medical schools as covered by national reporting systems and compiled by the World Health Organization. Regression techniques are used to triangulate a given HRH indicator calculated from different data sources across multiple countries. RESULTS: Major variations in the supply of health personnel and training opportunities are found to occur by region. However, certain discrepancies are also observed in measuring the same indicator from different sources, possibly related to the occupational classification or to the sources' representation. CONCLUSION: Evidence-based information is needed to better understand trends in HRH. Although a range of sources exist that can potentially be used for HRH assessment, the information that can be derived from many of these individual sources precludes refined analysis. A variety of data sources and analytical approaches, each with its own strengths and limitations, is required to reflect the complexity of HRH issues. In order to enhance cross-national comparability, data collection efforts should be processed through the use of internationally standardized classifications (in particular, for occupation, industry and education) at the greatest level of detail possible

Transnational regulation of temporary agency work compromised partnership between Private Employment Agencies and Global Union Federations

This article critically assesses the potential for the international regulation of temporary agency work (TAW) through building partnership between the Global Union Federations (GUFs) and major Private Employment Agencies (PrEAs). Given the limits of existing national and international regulation of TAW, particularly in developing countries, and the current deadlock in dialogue through the International Labour Organization, the argument of this article is that Transnational Private Labour Regulation (TPLR) offers a unique opportunity to establish a basis for minimum standards for temporary agency workers. This article goes on to propose three potential TPLR frameworks that, although compromised, are transparent, fair and sufficiently elastic to accommodate the distributive and political risks associated with partnership. They also offer important gains, namely increasing the competitive advantage of the PrEAs involved, minimum standards for agency workers and ‘field enlarging’ strategies for the GUFs and their affiliates

States and the political economy of unfree labour

A growing body of academic and policy research seeks to understand and address the problem of contemporary unfree labour. In this article, we argue that this literature could be strengthened by a stronger conceptualization of, and more systematic attention towards, the role of national states. In particular, we argue that there is a need to move beyond simplistic conceptualisations of states as simple agents of regulation and criminal justice enforcement who respond to the problem of unfree labour, and to recognize the causal and multifaceted role that national states play in creating the conditions in which unfree labour can flourish. We propose a framework to understand and compare the ways in which national states shape the political economy of unfree labour. Focusing on the United States, we outline three arenas of governance in which national states have been particularly central to enabling the conditions for unfree labour: the regulation of labour mobility, labour market regulation, and business regulation. We conclude by reflecting on the comparative political economy research that will be required to understand the role of different states in shaping the conditions in which unfree labour thrives or is eliminated

Higher education and unemployment in Europe : an analysis of the academic subject and national effects

This paper examines the impact of an academic degree and field of study on short and long-term unemployment across Europe (EU15). Labour Force Survey (LFS) data on over half a million individuals are utilised for that purpose. The harmonized LFS classification of level of education and field of study overcomes past problems of comparability across Europe. The study analyses (i) the effect of an academic degree at a European level, (ii) the specific effect of 14 academic subjects and (iii) country specific effects. The results indicate that an academic degree is more effective on reducing the likelihood of short-term than long-term unemployment. This general pattern even though it is observed for most of the academic subjects its levels show significant variation across disciplines and countries

Just compensation? The price of death and injury after the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse

The 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh was the most deadly disaster in garment manufacturing history, with at least 1,134 people killed and hundreds injured. In 2015, injured workers and the families of those killed received compensation from global apparel brands through a $30 million voluntary initiative known as the Rana Plaza Arrangement. Overseen by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Rana Plaza Arrangement awarded payments to survivors using a pricing formula developed by a diverse team of ‘stakeholders’ that included labour groups, multinational apparel companies, representatives of the Bangladesh government and local employers, and ILO actuaries. This article draws from anthropological scholarship on the ‘just price’ to explore how a formula for pricing death and injury became both the means and form of a fragile political settlement in the wake of a shocking and widely publicised industrial disaster. By unpacking the complicated ‘ethics of a formula’ (Ballestero 2015), I demonstrate how the project of creating a just price involves not two sets of values (ethical and financial) but rather multiple, competing values. This article argues for recognition of the persistence and power of these competing values, showing how they variously strengthen and undermine the claim that justice was served by the Rana Plaza Arrangement. This analysis reveals the deficiencies of counterposing ‘morality’ and ‘economy’ in the study of price by reflecting upon all elements of price as situated within political economy and history

The interface between health sector reform and human resources in health

The relationship between health sector reform and the human resources issues raised in that process has been highlighted in several studies. These studies have focused on how the new processes have modified the ways in which health workers interact with their workplace, but few of them have paid enough attention to the ways in which the workers have influenced the reforms. The impact of health sector reform has modified critical aspects of the health workforce, including labor conditions, degree of decentralization of management, required skills and the entire system of wages and incentives. Human resources in health, crucial as they are in implementing changes in the delivery system, have had their voice heard in many subtle and open ways – reacting to transformations, supporting, blocking and distorting the proposed ways of action. This work intends to review the evidence on how the individual or collective actions of human resources are shaping the reforms, by spotlighting the reform process, the workforce reactions and the factors determining successful human resources participation. It attempts to provide a more powerful way of predicting the effects and interactions in which different "technical designs" operate when they interact with the human resources they affect. The article describes the dialectic nature of the relationship between the objectives and strategies of the reforms and the objectives and strategies of those who must implement them