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Migrant workers around the world are subject to exploitative labor practices that give employers extraordinary bargaining power. This book brings together researchers, practitioners, and advocates who explore the many ways that contracted migrant workers are rendered vulnerable in the workplace. In this book, the term ‘21st-century coolie’ is deployed as a heuristic device that foregrounds the deeply unequal structures shaping the transnational flows of short-term, migrant workers. The term ‘coolie’ harkens back to the labor arrangements of earlier centuries that involved conscripted labor, indentured servitude, and contract labor across national borders. Like those of past centuries, today’s ‘coolies’ are subject to legal constraints inside and outside the employment relationship that force them into subjugated positions within the workplace.
This timely book provides a comprehensive overview of European pension law with a dual purpose: both to introduce the legal aspects of different forms of pension at the European level, as well as to explore the main legal policy issues.
Providing a comprehensive, interdisciplinary overview of the gig economy from both a labour and employment perspective, this Research Agenda goes beyond the question of the employment status of platform workers. It investigates how the gig economy is changing the way people work, how the platforms’ business models are spreading in our economies, and what labour and social institutions are needed to respond to the challenges that platform work raises.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY 3.0 IGO License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Organizing Matters demonstrates the interplay between two distinct logics of labour’s collective action: on the one hand, workers coming together, usually at their place of work, entrusting the union to represent their interests and, on the other hand, social bargaining in which the trade union constructs labour’s interests from the top down. The book investigates the tensions and potential complementarities between the two logics through the combination of a strong theoretical framework and an extensive qualitative case study of trade union organizing and recruitment in four countries – Austria, Germany, Israel and the Netherlands. These countries still utilize social-wide bargaining but find it necessary to draw and develop strategies transposed from Anglo-American countries in response to continuously declining membership.
