Employmentweb_low

EmpLoymEnT, work, And HEALTH inEquALiTiES - a global perspective
"The government must understand that
immigrants do all the jobs that people
here don't want to do, so they are not
useless and they contribute enormously to
the economy."
source : Joseph rowntree Foundation.
people in low-paid infromal work. need
not greed. Kagezy, 30, hospital porter, works
on “borrowed papers” waiting for asylum.
workers from joining the unions. Several countries, moreover,
prohibit strike action in EPZs.
In the last few decades, capitalist globalisation has expanded economic
migration, transforming the lives of hundreds of millions of people around
the globe. In many countries, economic migrants meet the demand for
flexible labour. Often labour markets are unable to provide workers who are
either flexible or mobile enough and prepared to accept precarious
employment conditions with long hours for low pay. Fleeing poverty, war, or
unemployment, workers migrate away from their families and
neighbourhoods to serve as a labour force in rich countries and send capital
in the form of remittances back to impoverished communities around the
world (see Case study 13). neoliberal economic policies (and agencies like
the World Trade Organization, WTO) are also trying to create a new
international guest worker system, guiding the flow of migrants on a global
basis in order to fulfill corporate labour needs (Quinlan, Mayhew, & Bohle,
2001; Toh & Quinlan, 2009). The General agreement on Trade in Services
(GaTS) has identified four modes of trade in services. The Mode 4 proposal
made by the WTO in Hong Kong in 2005 dealt with the temporary movement
of persons, i.e., when independent service providers or employees of a
multinational firm temporarily move to another country. Mode 4 refers to
persons working abroad, but only to a very restricted category of migrants.
It only covers suppliers of services and the temporary movement of workers,
as GaTS excludes "natural persons seeking access to the employment
market" and "measures regarding citizenship, residence or employment on
a permanent basis".
Case Study 10. How does a production sector make social inequalities in health worse - laurent vogel
the growing internationalisation of production sectors has become more apparent in recent decades. not many of the things
we consume are produced entirely in one country nowadays. the organisation of production is creating wide health inequality gaps.
this is fairly common knowledge where agricultural commodities and raw materials exported to industrialised countries are
concerned. sugar has always left a bitter taste in the mouths of the generations of slaves who worked the plantations and the farm
labourers who came after them. asbestos production is a well-publicised health disaster, but its calamitous effects have differed widely
by social class. it has left the well-to-do relatively unscathed and slain hundreds of thousands of miners, workers in the building trades,
textiles and other sectors of the manufacturing industry. these wide class differences are even more striking when looked at on a world
scale. asbestos is now mostly used in countries where workplace health and safety standards are very low. it is currently used mostly
in asia and, to a lesser extent, latin america and africa, while it has almost entirely vanished from europe, north america and oceania.
the electronics industry has contributed significantly to the trend towards worsening global social inequalities in health. computers
and mobile phones are everywhere; what daily activities get done without the use of some electronic device yet the familiarity of
technology that is all around us shrouds the physical reality of the production process in even greater obscurity. the devices seem so
light, toylike, outside the realm of hard matter, that we perceive the work embodied in them as pure intellect or information. this illusion
of dematerialised technologies masks the exploitation of the workers that produce them and the widespread health damage that results.
a network of activist researchers, trade unionists, and environmental groups has gradually coalesced since the late 1970s.
From california's silicon valley to scottish semiconductor circuit assembly workers, from the maquiladoras that assemble tv sets
in mexico to the taiwan labourers suffering chemical pollution diseases, the network links together dozens of groups and
movements who have not resigned themselves to "paying the price of progress." the pooled research of these groups is showing
us how the international division of labour in the electronics production sector is converted into mass inequalities. not all those
involved in the production process are exposed to the same risks, any more than they have the same access to preventive health
and health protection provision. an entire production cycle can be tracked and seen to have unequal effects between genders and
countries depending on the political and social conditions and the intensity of workers' resistance.
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