BOOK OF ABSTRACTS 37th International Labour Process Conference ILPC 2019, 24 – 26 April 2019 Campus of the University of Vienna Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Vienna Austria 1 Abstracts Keynotes ILPC Conference 2019 Wednesday 24 April 2019, 11:30, Venue C1 Keynote: Prof. Florence Palpacuer, Université de Montpellier Fragmented production and global solidarities: activist strategies, challenges and perspectives in global value chains Prompted by massive subcontracting and offshoring since the 1980s, Global Value Chains (GVCs) have become prominent forms of organization in today’s world economy. So have the global fragmentation and instability of production, and their correlate of deteriorating work conditions across workplaces offering highly unequal workers’ rights and protection. In turn, such trends have triggered an ‘upscaling’ of previously local social struggles, whereby various activist groups from the North and the South have developed new forms of contestation and workplace militancy. Building on solidarities between places of production and marketing in GVCs, they have sought to establish a ‘chain of responsibility’ between lead firms operating at the market end, and workers involved at the production end of these chains. What have been the key dynamics and outcomes of these GVC-based activist strategies? What are their prominent challenges and most promising perspectives? I will adopt a neo- Gramscian perspective to critically assess these questions, drawing on cumulated research at the intersection of the global value chains and transnational activist networks literatures. Friday 26 April 2019, 12:30-13:30, Venue C1 Public Keynote: Prof. Virginia Doellgast, ILR School, Cornell University From dualization to solidarity: Collective action and precarious work Labour unions have long relied on traditions of solidarity to build and sustain strong social protections. The expansion of precarious jobs – short-term, unpredictable, and low paid – introduces new divisions in the workforce that weaken solidarity. As employers take advantage of growing options for escaping collective agreements and legislated minimum standards, unions struggle to organize workers across increasingly fissured workplaces. Under what conditions does collective action by unions and other worker organizations succeed in overcoming these challenges? Drawing on research in the US and Europe, I argue that unions are best able to contest the expansion of precarity where they build new inclusive forms of solidarity, based on bridging divisions across groups of workers and in the labour movement. 2 Abstracts General Conference and Special Streams ILPC Conference 2019, Vienna In alphabetical order, sorted by surname of first author 3 International students work experience in irregular works in London Author: Emine Canan Acar Economic growth in the developing world has created a new middle class (Brooks and Waters, 2013) for whom it is a source of pride to send children overseas to study. However, while new middle class families are able to provide the necessary funds for the successful processing of visa application requests, and while they can often pay for the first term fee and the first few months of expenses to support establishing life in the host country, international students often need to look for work to survive in their new environment (Baas, 2010a). According to UKCISA reports on university and college level international students published in 2004 and 2006, nearly a quarter of the students confirmed that they did not have enough money because UK living costs were high and exchange rates were unfavorable (Forbes- Mewett et al. 2009). According to UK student visa migration rules, international student permission to work while studying is only offered to those studying in higher education institutions (HEIs) and publicly funded further education colleges. These groups of students are allowed part time work during term time (max 20 hours a week) and full time during holidays (Home Office, 2014). However, international students who cannot find legal work or who wish to work more than what the legal limit allows tend to turn to irregular work to deal with the country’s high cost of living, such as, in petrol stations, restaurants and as taxi drivers during their study (Baas, 2006, 2007, Neilson, 2009). Forbes-Mewett et al. (2009) reported that some students end up working on a full-time basis even when their visa conditions do not allow it. Consequently, international students often get exposed to low-skilled irregular work without any guarantee of representation, are often compelled to perform menial tasks and need to fulfil employer demands for long hours work with no paid holiday entitlement as well as work performed during unsociable hours. In some cases, international students who engage in irregular work may be unfairly dismissed and yet are not able to enjoy any legal redress. The result is that students who operate in irregular work contexts often become vulnerable and at the mercy of employers who utilize their cheaply supplied labour to the maximum extent for saving costs (Forbes-Mewett et al., 2009). This paper asks to what extent financial factor plays part behind working in irregular work and remain within the border between legal and illegal. Furthermore, this paper is an attempt to understand why international students remain in irregular work status although they have 20 hours work permit legally, what are the factors that shape their decision. Semi-structured interviews conducted with twenty five South Asian international students who hold/held jobs in irregular work contexts. Data collected through the use of personal networks and the snowball sampling method. 4 Mobility power and migrant workers: Some evidence from the construction sector in Saudi Arabia Authors: Ayman Adham, Anita Hammer The double indeterminacy of labour power i.e. effort powerand mobility power, is a key conceptual development in the labour process theory that was first proposed by Smith (2006). While wage-effort bargaining is related to how labour power is used and valued in terms of money, mobility power mainly concerns dynamics that arise from workers’ ability to change employers. This mobility-effort bargaining configures aspects of the labour process, such as the length of stay in the firm, the intensity of the work and the nature of tasks. While the bulk of labour process research has focussed on indeterminacy around work-effort bargaining in various contexts, for example Turkey (Yücesan, 1998), Australia (Barnes, 2007), Poland (Bancarzewski, 2015) and China (Smith and Liu, 2016), there is lack of research on mobility- effort bargaining in the Arab Gulf countries. This paper addresses this gap by examining mobility power in Saudi Arabia. The Kafala system in the Arab Gulf countries is a mechanism of the state mainly to control the mobility of migrants (e.g. Alsadiq and Wu, 2015; Hanieh, 2015; Rahman, 2018). Under this sponsorship system, migrants cannot change their employers but the latter can lay off migrants (by deportation) after paying a very modest compensation. Little is known about the role of the Kafala system as a mobility control mechanism and the dynamics that arise from it, such as labour escaping and concealed businesses known by tasattur. Through a detailed case study of a firm in the construction sector undertaken in 2016-17, the paper shows the contradictions and the tensions that exist in the Kafala system. The argument focuses on the contradictions that arise from mobility-effort bargaining between capital and labour and how it is shaped by the state policies of Kafala. The research sheds light on two key aspects. First, it is crucial to distinguish between two levels of Kafala control: state control and employer control. Second, the control of migrant labour mobility is not total since migrants are able to avoid the Kafala system through obtaining a free visa and seeking recourse to concealed businesses. It shows that mobility- effort bargaining is at the core of understanding labour-capital relations in Saudi Arabia.It can be argued that the dialectics of control and resistance between the state, firms and migrant labour have resulted in the emergence of informal forms of employment contracting (i.e. the free visa), which reduces both state and capital controls over migrants’ mobility. 5 Power imbalances, labor policy continuity, and collective labor rights in Latin America: Chile in comparative perspective Author: Pablo Pérez Ahumada In the recent decades, debates on labor policy and reform in Latin America have been frequent (Cook, 2007; Carnes, 2014). In Chile, these debates have revolved around the persistence of the collective labor regulations established by the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), articulated in the 1979 Labor Plan. Since its establishment, the Labor Plan regulations restricts collective bargaining to the firm level and undermine the right to strike by allowing employers to replace striking workers. It also imposes strong restrictions on unions’ bargaining power by promoting the coexistence of multiple unions within the same firm and the formation of semi-regulated “bargaining groups” that can be formed regardless of whether the firm already has a union (Feres, 2009). Since the return to democracy in 1990, workers have demanded the repealing of the 1979 regulations, and different center-left governments tried, without success, to dismantle them (e.g. reforms of 1990 – 1993 and 2000 – 2001) (Haagh,