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The current globalized economy is able to produce diverse commodities and distribute these across vast distances. However, the workforce which underpins these networks experiences vast inequalities in income and working conditions. As an academic field, global labour studies seeks to understand how different forms of employment sustain uneven patterns of consumption at a global scale, and how the inequalities in working conditions are created and maintained.
This lively and accessible book explores these structures and forces that shape lives across the world. Maintaining a consistent focus on questions of power, networks, space and livelihoods, this book opens up key issues and concepts such as global production networks, changing labour market dynamics, forced labour, contemporary migration trends and new labour organizations. This approach provides an integrated framework to further analyse the social contexts of work on a global scale.
With suggested readings at the end of each chapter, Global Labour Studies is an essential text for undergraduate courses on global labour issues in the fields of geography, politics, sociology, labour studies and international development.
List of contents
* Chapter 1: Thinking Global Labour Studies
* Chapter 2: The Toolkit of Global Labour Studies
* Chapter 3: Labour Regimes
* Chapter 4: Global Production Networks
* Chapter 5: Formal Work in Transition
* Chapter 6: Labour in the Informal Economy
* Chapter 7: Agrarian Labour
* Chapter 8: Migrant Labour
* Chapter 9: Forced Labour
* Chapter 10: The Nature of Labour
* Chapter 11: Corporate Social Responsibility
* Chapter 12: Organizing Global Labour
* Conclusion: The Futures of Global Labour
About the author
Marcus Taylor is Associate Professor of Global Development Studies at Queen's University, Canada
Sébastien Rioux is Assistant Professor of Geography at the Université de Montréal
Summary
The current globalized economy is able to produce diverse commodities and distribute these across vast distances. However, the workforce which underpins these networks experiences vast inequalities in income and working conditions.
Report
"Marcus Taylor and Sébastien Rioux have opened the horizon to a truly global labour studies. Grounded in heterodox political economy, and animated by critical development studies, feminism, economic sociology, human geography, and more, Global Labour Studies is interdisciplinary in both spirit and practice. It is also a model of lucid, dynamic, and socially engaged exposition, shining light on lived experiences, deep connections, and structural conditions together across the rapidly changing worlds of labour."
Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia
"A most engaging text for readers who want to understand key labor issues in a rapidly changing global economy. Taylor and Rioux ably help us navigate the complex institutions, processes and relations that shape contemporary work, as well as their implications for politics, inequality and justice."
Ching Kwan Lee, University of California, Los Angeles
