Jobs and Labour (HRACS) Flashcards
The impact of globalisation on labour markets.
Herod 2000
As the economy becomes globalised and increasingly connected, firms and workers are forced to compete globally for market shares and jobs.
Shift it trade
Herod 2000
Shift away from an international system made up of discrete and strongly regulated national economies trading with and investing in each other.
Towards a highly integrated cross-border networks that could very well escape many national and international regulatory powers.
Places are fundamentally important to understanding the nature of work in the contemporary world
(Jones 2007).
Even in our shrinking global world, the reality of paid work is that different groups of workers live and labour in ‘local worlds’.
Work is changing but so is the workplace…
Discrete physical spaces like factories or offices
to temporary offices, third spaces like coffee shops, the home and a range of virtual spaces.
Former CEO of General Electric
Economist 2013
“the ideal strategy for a global company would be to put every factory it owned on a barge and float it around the world, taking advantage of short-term changes in economies and exchange rates.”
India and offshoring service work
Bryson (2007)
IT idea is to not only find cheaper workers but to try to convince customers that they are local.
Large English- speaking population and a well-developed IT sector.
Every year India produces two million graduates who are mostly taught in English.
By 2004 there were over 1500 call centres in India, employing over 92,000 workers, and the industry is said to be growing by 70% a year.
Indian call centre training
Bryson (2007)
Attend pronunciation classes for to erase accents and then listen to CDs and other audiovisual material to acquire a British or American accent.
They are also trained in British history.
‘good afternoon’ even when it is evening in India and all the computer screens in the centre tell workers what time it is in the UK and show them details about current British weather conditions.
‘Reshoring’
The most important reason is that the cheap labour in developing countries is not as cheap as it used to be and the savings from relocating factories is getting smaller by the month.
The Economist (2013)
Wages in America and Europe have been steady over the past decade and were even depressed by the recent financial crisis, wages in China and India have been going up by 10 to 20% every year for the last decade.
The cost of shipping heavy goods halfway around the world by sea has been rising sharply.
Manufacturing jobs in London
Economist (2015),
Between September 2011 and September 2014 the number of manufacturing jobs in London rose by 15% which is actually the fastest growth rate in Britain. And the article notes that modern manufacturing is not about factories crammed with workers but rather a small number of educated individuals who use advanced machinery.
The ideal of the standard employment relationship
Vosko (2000)
The ideal of the standard employment relationship cultivated a conception of the normal job pivoting around full-time, full-year work with a single employer at a single work site, and it tied a host of benefits and entitlements to this model.
Insecurity produced by employment being chopped up into shifts and contracts.
(Leslie 2002)
Study at workers at GAP…
Workers are constantly worried about getting enough paid work.
The difficulty in resisting changes in their employment.
Allen and Henry (1997)
No longer big factories of lots of people who could go on strike.
Contract workers work ‘in someone else’s work place, under a different employer from that of the majority of people around them. And cleaning and catering work often occurs outside regular working hours and is spatially isolated or invisible.
How do contract workers feel
Vosko (2000)
Temporary workers often feel powerless and disposable. There is a fear that if you complain about the poor conditions you will simply be fired or have your hours reduced.
As the economy becomes globalised and increasingly connected, firms and workers are forced to compete globally for market shares and jobs.
The impact of globalisation on labour markets.
Herod 2000
Shift away from an international system made up of discrete and strongly regulated national economies trading with and investing in each other.
Towards a highly integrated cross-border networks that could very well escape many national and international regulatory powers.
Shift it trade
Herod 2000
