For the sake of the children: coping strategies of women in Swaziland's domestic service sector

This article examines the coping strategies of domestic workers in the city of Manzini. The Swaziland government has made many efforts to improve the social and economic conditions of the Swazi people after independence in 1968. Yet a failure to recognise domestic work as paid employment has minimised the effect of government policy in improving the lives of women who dominate this sector. The anomalies that it raises as paid housework has meant that conditions in the domestic service sector have changed little since the colonial era. Domestic workers are in practical terms, not protected by legal systems of labour relations. Coupled with other barriers that prohibit their access to land and shelter and dismally low wages, they have adopted many coping strategies in the city to maintain their families and their dignity.     

Employment in Cape Town’s lodging sector: opportunities, skills requirements, employee aspirations and transformation

Since the attainment of democracy in 1994 one of the major concerns of the South African government has been to address the social and economic injustices that characterised the apartheid regime. With tourism on the rise in South Africa and international arrivals growing at a rate almost triple the global rate, the tourism industry has been identified as one of the important industries to drive the transformation agenda. This study sought to assess the employment situation in Cape Town’s lodging sector, identify the existing types of jobs and skills requirements of the sector, determine career aspirations of and skills development needs for lodging sector employees as well as asses the state of transformation. Study findings showed that the lodging sector is labour intensive, requires low academic skill, and offers low paying employment following the findings that about a quarter of the respondents indicated that their jobs didn’t require any formal qualification, the average working day was 9.2 h and 52% earned below R3,500 a month. The study showed significant differences in income based on race. White employees earned significantly more than their black and coloured counterparts. However, white employees working as general labour were also significantly more qualified than their black and coloured counterparts. There was a significant positive relationship between income and length of service for white employees, but the same wasn’t true for black and coloured employees. There was a significant negative relationship between length of service and academic qualifications for black employees implying that black people’s length of service for one employer decreases as they become more academically qualified. Also significant was skills development opportunities based on gender. Significantly more females than males had attended on-the-job training programs.     

Emotional labour/body work: The caring labours of migrants in the UK’s National Health Service

The provision of care is an increasingly pressing issue in the Global North. With an ageing population and policies encouraging women into the labour market, there is a growing need for workers to undertake paid caring. This poses important and urgent questions about the social organisation of labour markets. Care work typically is low paid and undertaken in precarious, informal, or temporary situations. Many posts are filled by economic migrants, raising concerns about a care deficit in sending countries. In this paper we examine the ‘caring work’ undertaken by migrant workers in a West London Hospital. We employ a twofold characterisation of caring work. Like other bottom-end service sector work, this work is characterised by the face-to-face ‘emotional labour’. However, it also requires ‘body work’: close and often intimate physical contact between carers and those they care for. We argue that both of these aspects are important in understanding how caring work is constructed as poorly regarded and low paid. We show how these features play out in particular ways for migrant workers employed in such caring work.     

Deregulation of the New Zealand labour market

The neo-classical rationale for deregulation of the labour market argues that capital and labour should have greater choice in their relationship with each other, in particular employers should have greater flexibility to affect wages and conditions in accord with specific product markets and local conditions. Decentralised decision making, it is argued, will lead to greater market efficiency than a centrally controlled system of employment relations and wage setting. Such was the rationale for the Employment Contracts Act (ECA) in 1991. Although it did even out the relative power granted to capital and labour the Employment Relations Act (ERA) introduced a decade later preserved the general thrust of the 1991 legislation. The ECA completed the dismantling of centralised regulation of employment relationships in New Zealand. But over ten years later there is still no clear consensus on its labour market impact. The immediate effects of the legislation on unionisation and levels of work stoppages are relatively easy to document. However, outcomes related to the functioning of the labour market as a whole – unemployment rates, labour force participation rates, wage levels, labour productivity and on-the-job-training – have proved far more difficult to tie directly or even indirectly to the ECA. It is argued here that the impact of the ECA on efficiency and growth has been extremely modest and that any net improvement in conventional labour market measures has been negligible. Rather the Act has been more influential in redistributing available paid work, including the redistribution of a greater share of the surplus from labour to capital itself. Any categorical conclusions on the impacts of the ECA and the ERA require a far more carefully specified research design than has been applied to date. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

High and low wages: Some experiments with the geography of wage rates in the New Zealand economy

One way to analyse the geographical pattern of wages is to consider the component in this which is independent of variations from place to place in economic structure. A number of possible explanations can be offered for spatial variations in wages that result in this way. Bearing in mind data availability, the New Zealand case considers these under the headings of labour demand-supply variations (linked to the urban-rural structure of the space economy), unemployment levels, patterns of corporate headquarters, cost of living, and local labour market dominance by a small number of large industries and firms. The empirical results suggest the first of these is particularly important, with some of the others cast in supporting roles.     

Local labour market analysis: It's importance and a possible approach

This paper, written from a British perspective, presents a case for more local, as opposed to regional, economic research and argues for the central importance of the local labour market. Such research should direct its attention to the employment decision making of employers and employees. Alternative definitions of the local labour market are discussed, favouring that of M.W. Smart as the most appropriate. The importance of corporate spatial structure, and the labour force adjustment methods available to individual firms faced with declining product demand are discussed. Finally, a possible approach to local labour market analysis is outlined, based on the use of company personnel records.     

No longer working for the state: residual state sector versus private sector

The paper is concerned with decreasing state ownership in post-communist Eastern Europe and a concomitant decline in the proportion employed in the state sector. Many individuals have shifted into private sector employment, self-employment or unemployment. The literature on sectoral shifts in employment in Eastern Europe is summarised, and from this it is argued that there will be a growing differentiation between private sector employees and state sector employees in economic, social and political terms. Data is then analysed based on a survey in 1995 of around 1000 households in each of four cities – Budapest, Prague, Warsaw and Krakow. Similar patterns emerged in the four cities. Consistent differences in working conditions and rewards are already evident between the self-employed, private sector and state sector. These conflicting economic interests are reflected in contrasting attitudes to the economy and polity amongst those employed in different sectors. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

‘That’s where my perception of it all was shattered’: Oral histories and moral geographies of food sector workers in an English city region

Geographers and oral historians continue to have much to learn from each other. The subfield of labour geography in particular can enrich its understanding of workers’ lived experiences, both in employment and beyond the workplace, through greater use of interpretative, collaborative oral history methodologies. Attentive to the temporal specificity and inter-subjectivity of people’s narratives, oral history reveals how workers’ moral geographies emerge and change. This article documents the spatio-temporalities and institutions of food sector employment in Peterborough, England, a city-region from which urban-based workers are bussed out daily to rural jobs. The analysis draws on four extended case studies of people who migrated to the UK and worked in the sector in the 2000s, building on recent research that has highlighted harsh employment conditions in the food production, packing and processing sector. It complements this work by viewing narrative itself as an agentic act and listening to how research participants crafted their life stories. These stories revealed diverse, complex and context-specific moral geographies, with participants variously placing value on small acts of rebellion or refusal, dignity and the time to speak with others at work. The article advocates greater engagement by labour geographers with the subjective experiences of workers, and with individual as well as collective agency.     

The changing spatial distribution of socio-economic groups employed in manufacturing in Great Britain, 1971–1981

In this paper an attempt is made to study the spatial division of labour in Britain, through an investigation of the changing structure of employment in the manufacturing sector between 1971 and 1981. The separate impacts of loss in the volume of manufacturing employment, change in the balance between production and non-production activities in the occupational structure and the spatial shift of the population employed in manufacturing upon spatial variations in manufacturing employment change are tentatively identified. Data on the socio-economic composition of the population employed in manufacturing from the Small Area Statistics of the Censuses of Population for 1971 and 1981 are used to measure the impact of these processes at the local labour market area (LLMA) scale and to draw conclusions for the future employment prospects of different parts of Britain.     

Gender and urban poverty: Single mothers in Amsterdam

Urban poverty in Western countries is usually defined in terms of social exclusion and integration. Welfare states can be characterized according to three modes of integration, namely market exchange, redistribution and reciprocity. This paper compares the mechanisms of the social integration of unemployed single mothers with those of unemployed men. In two deprived neighbourhoods in Amsterdam, unemployed single mothers and unemployed native-born men were interviewed about their coping strategies with respect to the labour market, social security institutions and social networks. Although the single mothers have serious financial problems, they are better integrated into society at large than the unemployed men are. The single mothers are strongly oriented towards the labour market, successful in getting support from the social security institutions, have strong and supportive social networks, and are integrated into their neighbourhoods. In the conclusion we challenge the idea of vulnerable single mothers and demonstrate the relatively successful integration of this category of women. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Service sector employment in Merseyside

This paper reports the results of an analysis of service sector employment trends in Merseyside. The main data source was the Census of Employment covering the period 1971–1975; comparisons are made between Merseyside and national trends. The paper contains analyses of changes in industrial and male and female employment, tertiary and quaternary sector services, growth and declining industries, public and private sector employment, office employment and the components of employment change. Particular attention is paid to differences between the Inner City and Outer Areas of Merseyside. Employment decline was widespread in the service sector, as was also the case in manufacturing. Employment decline is likely to continue because of a number of adverse factors affecting the local economy. The paper concludes by describing a number of initiatives the public sector could take in association with private sector interests to promote the further development of service industries which are already established in Merseyside.     

Part-time farming in Spain — a review

This paper is a review of statistical data and existing research on the part-time farming in Spain. The available data show an important level of development of the phenomenon: in 1965, 37.7 % of the earnings obtained by farm families are from jobs off the farm; in 1972, 48 % of the agrarian operators had main jobs off the farm. Most of the part-time farms are of small size although the phenomenon is also important on groups of farms of the largest size. The regional studies show a greater development of part-time farming in the Cantabrian coast, where the part-time farmer working in industry prevails, and in the E and S regions, where the jobs off the farm but within the agrarian sector (wage labour) are very important. Some studies on the stability of part-time farming show that this stability depends on the type of farming, the market of agricultural land in the area and the conditions of the jobs off the farm. In the present economic crisis the interest in part-time farming has been increased.Translated by Isabel Carbonell. Comments on earlier versions of this paper were provided by Prof. Josep Caries Genoves.     

Agriculture in Eastern Europe: Communism, the transition and the future

The paper summarises the East European experience with socialist agriculture and notes that while production often failed to meet plan targets (thereby giving the impression of a sector in crisis), there was steady growth based on substantial investments in buildings, machinery, fertilisers and irrigation systems which provided food for the population at affordable prices. The increased spending power of higher salaries during the 1970s and 1980s also drew a positive response from agriculture in the context of significant reforms which, unintentionally, contributed to the demise of the communist system in 1988–1990. Transition to a market economy has cast agriculture into a state of great uncertainty through restitution and the end of price controls, combined with the disruption of trade contacts with the Former Soviet Union. Falling real wages have reduced demand while the overtures being made to the European Union (with its substantial food surpluses) suggest that reduced agricultural output may be a permanent reality. In this case the thrust of rural development will have to give more attention to the quality of the environment and the provision of alternative employments for country dwellers. It remains to be seen how far small family holdings can be maintained in the context of farm diversification and pluriactivity.     

Industry-academe linkages in the Philippines: Embedding foreign investors,capturing institutions?

The global sourcing of services from developing countries has made human capital a key local asset for attracting foreign direct investment. This paper analyses to what extent individual companies engage in linkages and collaborations with universities and how the education sector responds to the new demands of the knowledge economy. Offshore services are generally recognised as ‘footloose’ investments with limited local linkages. A case study of industry-academe linkages in the growing business process outsourcing sector in the Philippines finds that foreign investors engage in active embedding and develop linkages with human resource providers, leading to increased territorial embeddedness. This paper investigates the kind of linkages created, which actors engage in them and their motivations, to understand the resulting implications for local economic development. Interviews with foreign investors and higher education institutions reveal that most collaboration is initiated by large call centre companies and focuses on entry-level skills development for their operations. I argue that multinational corporations have been able to capture local institutions and introduce changes in the education system to supply mainly lower-end skills. While increasing the available talent pool and raising the competitiveness for further investments, this presents challenges for upgrading into higher value-added services and potentially transforms the country into a dependent market economy.     

A global model or a scaled-down version?: geographies of convergence and divergence in the Australian retail banking sector

Via the spread of financial liberalisation and deregulation across advanced industrialised societies over the past two decades, national banking sectors have come under increased competitive pressure. In Australia, this pressure has manifested itself in two main forms: an almost self-imposed nervousness over the growing scale and rapidity of bank mergers occurring at an international level; and the growth of new cut-price competitors in the domestic retail market. There is now growing evidence of convergence between national banking sectors in key areas. This paper employs four criteria to examine the degree of convergence between the Australian retail banking sector and its international counterparts: centralisation of services and operations; application of the `user pays' philosophy to services; a `flight to quality' in lending and service provision; and industrial relations practices. While considerable similarities can be found between the Australian retail banking sector and its international comparators at the macro-level of analysis, there is also substantial diversity evident at regional and local scales as new public- and private-sector agencies and institutions seek to meet the financial needs of those individuals and communities effectively disenfranchised from the banking system via the major banks' `world's best practice' management strategies. The paper argues that a critical and reflexive concept of scale is imperative in apprehending the increasingly complex ways in which financial service provision is being reconfigured by the strategies of reaction and resistance employed by financial consumers, urban and rural local governments, national and state media, financial consumer agencies and State and Federal Governments.     

Effect of information and communication technology on energy consumption in China

Widespread controversy and a lack of empirical research exist with regard to the relationship between information communication technology (ICT) and energy consumption, especially in developing countries. This paper adopts a partial least square (PLS) method to explore the impact of ICT on energy consumption in China. Its main conclusions indicate that the impact can be represented by a U-shaped curve and the turning-point for ICT capital service is 10.93 units at 1990 constant prices. The negative effect of ICT was dominant until 2014. Moreover, the ARDL-ECM results also reveal a negative association between ICT and energy consumption in the short run. In addition, the influence of population, income, industrialization level, service sector development, energy price, energy consumption structure and non-ICT capital service on energy consumption is examined. Finally, policy recommendations are given.     

Growth and decline in the Canadian urban system: the impact of emerging economic,policy and demographic trends

The Canadian urban system was first shaped by exogenous demand for staples and, subsequently, by the dichotomy between an industrial heartland and a resource based hinterland. Presently, transformations affecting the economy, policy-making and demography herald profound changes in the future configuration of the Canadian urban system. One possible scenario is a revival of the staples economy as economic globalization raises demand for commodities. Another scenario would entail a concentration of growth in large urban centres, by virtue of their attractiveness to specialized and high-order service occupations, two rapidly expanding economic sectors, and their strong pull on immigrants. In the case of either scenario, we can expect further polarization between growing and shrinking portions of the urban system (parts of the heartland in the first case and small urban areas in the second) in a neo-liberal policy context that is unfavourable to regional economic development interventions. The evolution of the Canadian urban system between 1971 and 2006 and present distributions of factors of growth and decline point to the second scenario, a growing large city-small city dichotomy. The article closes by discussing likely consequences of the resulting urban system configuration on labour market adjustments and public sector expenditure.     

Gendered labour arrangements in Switzerland: Structures, cultures, meanings: statistical evidence and biographical narratives

In this paper we explore the role of culture in the reproduction of gendered labour arrangements. Using Switzerland as an example, we first analyse statistical data on paid and unpaid labour. We look at differences between women and men, but also between different types of regions. Patterns emerge to support our hypothesis that beyond structures of economic opportunity, economic cycles and welfare state provisions, local (gender) culture might explain some of the particularities of gendered labour arrangements. The argument is reinforced by data on regional voting patterns in a recent referendum on the issue of maternity leave. In the second part, we further explore these issues by looking at a particular place and re-telling work-life-stories that show how two women navigate between different working culture environments in accordance with their life-cycle needs and individual ideas and values. Finally, we discuss issues of scale and methodology and reflect on the significance of varying local working environments. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Migrant worker centers: contending with downgrading in the low-wage labor market

Mass migration to major USA cities is reworking patterns of ethnic jobholding and labor market segmentation. Employers in a variety of industries have turned to recent migrants, many of whom are not authorized to work in the USA, as a stable labor supply for low-wage jobs. As a result, many migrant workers enter urban economies through precarious jobs in low-wage industries and the informal economy where they often endure routine violations of labor and employment laws. This paper examines the activities of a “migrant worker center” in improving wages and working conditions in migrant labor markets. Through a case study of a worker center located in a port-of-entry immigrant neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side, we examine the geographies of the low-wage labor market and the problems that have arisen for workers who hold jobs that effectively exist beyond the reach of government regulation. We argue that migrant worker centers will likely emerge as a key resource for workers who are drawn to global cities by the promise of economic opportunity yet confront harsh conditions in the local labor markets in which they are employed.