"A Special Kind of Exclusion": Race, Gender and Self-Employment

There is little exchange between those writing on "ethnic economies" and those writing on "women's entreprenueurship," symptomatic of the separation which is assumed to exist between issues of race and those of gender. Drawing on feminist anti-racist theory, 1 argue that women's experiences can be better understood by studying the ways in which self-employment is embedded within the physical context of the home, and the ways in which race, gender and class are continuously and inseparably connected.Il y a peu d'echange entre les ecrits sur les "economies ethniques" et les ecrits sur "l'esprit d'entreprise des femmes" qui est symptomatique a la separation presumee existante entre les questions de races et celle entre les sexes. Je prouve que Ton peut comprendre les experiences vecues par les femmes en etudiant les facons par lesquelles travailler a son compte est ancre dans le contexte physique du foyer et les facons dont la race le sexe et la classe sont continuellement et inseparablement relies

Race, Gender and Networks in Portfolio Work: Difficult Knowledge

This paper reports findings of our qualitative research exploring the multiple Ways in which race, gender and class processes impact on portfolio work, with particular attention to networking processe

Immigrant Women and Labour Flexibility: Resisting Training through Learning

This research roundtable focuses on the lives and experiences of immigrant women in the context of the casualisation of labour and job deskilling. The presenters document the failure of training programs to challenge the ghettoisation of immigrant women in contingent and peripheral jobs and focus on the ways in which women learn to resist racialized and gendered exclusion in state approaches to training

Marginalization through Mobilizing the Discourse of Skill

This roundtable discusses the deployment of the skill discourse at four different sites. Across sites, the discourse of skill is closely linked to the marginalization of workers

Improving Employment Standards and their Enforcement in Ontario: A Research Brief Addressing Options Identified in the Interim Report of the Changing Workplaces Review

The quality of employment available to Ontarians is a growing concern among legislators, policymakers, and the general public alike. There is widespread recognition that precarious employment and the challenges posed by the associated realignment of risks, costs and power relations between employees and employers require improvements to employees’ legislative protection. Ontario’s Changing Workplaces Review (CWR) affords us an opportunity to take stock of important changes taking place the province’s labour market. As the Terms of Reference introduced at the outset of the CWR note, “far too many workers are experiencing greater precariousness” in employment in Ontario today than in the recent past. Accordingly, with the aim of “creating decent work in Ontario, particularly [for] those who have been made vulnerable by changes in our economy and workplaces,” such terms directed the Special Advisors to investigate the dynamics underlying the magnitude of precariousness in the province’s labour market and to pose options for mitigating this fundamental social and economic problem through reforms to Ontario’s Labour Relations Act (LRA) and Employment Standards Act (ESA)

Phone Clones: Authenticity Work in the Transnational Service Economy

The abstract, table of contents, and first twenty-five pages are published with permission from the Cornell University Press. For ordering information, please visit the Cornell University Press at http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/.[Excerpt] What happens when you need to be yourself and like someone else at the same time? This is the central demand placed on transnational service workers, who form a large and growing part of the global economy. In response, workers perform an elaborate set of largely invisible activities, which I term authenticity work. Based on interviews with one hundred transnational call center workers in India this book describes their authenticity work as they refashion themselves into ideal Indian workers who can expertly provide synchronous, voice-to-voice customer service for clients in the West. The experiences of Indian call center workers sheds light on a wide range of service-related activities that cross national borders. Filipino nannies refashion themselves to clone faraway employers' visions of ideal caregivers. Health workers in Mexico servicing American medical tourists strive to package the quality of their services in terms of Western professional practice. The exchange of labor and capital occurs in the context of national histories and power inequities that make the negotiation of authenticity a central part of transnational service work.Mirchandani_Phone_Clones.pdf: 690 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020