A Fair or a Minimum Wage? Women Workers, the State, and the Origins of Wage Regulation in Western Canada

1991 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob Russell
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch

This chapter revisits Adkins and considers the feud over protective laws that arose in the women's movement in the 1920s. The clash between friends and foes of the Equal Rights Amendment—and over the protective laws for women workers that it would surely invalidate—fueled women's politics in the 1920s. Both sides claimed precedent-setting accomplishments. In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed the historic ERA, which incurred conflict that lasted for decades. The social feminist contingent—larger and more powerful—gained favor briefly among congressional lawmakers, expanded the number and strength of state laws, saw the minimum wage gain a foothold, and promoted protection through the federal Women's Bureau. Neither faction, however, achieved the advances it sought. Instead, a fight between factions underscored competing contentions about single-sex protective laws and their effect on women workers.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146394912110101
Author(s):  
Geraldine Mooney Simmie ◽  
Dawn Murphy

The last decade has revealed a global (re)configuring of the relationships between the state, society and educational settings in the direction of systems of performance management. In this article, the authors conduct a critical feminist inquiry into this changing relationship in relation to the professionalisation of early childhood education and care practitioners in Ireland, with a focus on dilemmatic contradictions between the policy reform ensemble and practitioners’ reported working conditions in a doctoral study. The critique draws from the politics of power and education, and gendered and classed subjectivities, and allows the authors to theorise early childhood education and care professionalisation in alternative emancipatory ways for democratic pedagogy rather than a limited performativity. The findings reveal the state (re)configured as a central command centre with an over-reliance on surveillance, alongside deficits of responsibility for public interest values in relation to the working conditions of early childhood education and care workers, who are mostly part-time ‘pink-collar’ women workers in precarious roles. The study has implications that go beyond Ireland for the professionalisation of early childhood education and care workers and meeting the early developmental needs of young children.


2016 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-236
Author(s):  
Stephan Seiwerth

AbstractSocial partners have played a privileged role in German social security administration since Bismarckian times. In 2014, a new legislation empowered the social partners to set the level of the statutory minimum wage and to demand the extension of collective agreements. This article examines the interdependence of the trade unions’ and employer organisations’ membership numbers and their involvement in state regulation of labour and social security law. In case the interest in autonomous regulations is not going to increase, the state will have to step in with more heteronomous regulation. This would incrementally lead to a system change.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimíra Žofčinová ◽  
Zuzana Horváthová ◽  
Andrea Čajková

Tax sovereignty is now an expression of the phenomenon of state power. In general, there is a widespread but also accepted view that a citizen is dependent on the state and the state is dependent on tax resources. The social status of a citizen in the state is of great importance; it affects the development of personality and, last but not least, reflects the degree of democracy acquired in a particular state. Various tax law measures for the benefit of the citizen are important for the identification of social behavior and are an attempt to improve certain ways of life. The aim and ambition of this article is to emphasize the tools of social policy (e.g., minimum wage, subsistence minimum, social right to work) that are related to the social function of taxing income. In this context, the authors deal with a social function of tax collection and imposing of taxes, justice in taxation, and point out social aspects of the system of taxes in the Slovak Republic. In this article, the authors present the attitudes of both critics and proponents. It also deals with tax justice, which is often a category subjective to the evaluator. The benchmarking attribute of tax collection should be that citizens will have the certainty of social justice in the state and will therefore pay attention to the minimum wage and subsistence minimum as an integral part of tax policy under the legal conditions of the Slovak Republic. All tax legislation, especially tax reform, is perceived with a certain sensitivity regarding tax subjects.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-47
Author(s):  
Megha Sharma

The complexities of studying informal sector labour can be dealt with bringing a wide range of identities and ideas used by the workers, which encompass beyond the socio-economic and political identities. 2 2   This article is based on my MPhil dissertation, ‘Conditions of Informality: Beedi Industry in Colonial and Post 1947 Central India’, submitted to the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2015. This article attempts to capture the diversified identities among the home-based beedi-making women workers and their settlement in Madhya Pradesh based on their oral interviews. Further, it captures how the division of work is sustained and perpetuated through the gendered allocation of work over the years. It also recounts how the state has perpetuated this division as the natural allocation of work in official discourse. Precisely, the article argues that how the worker’s narratives are an essential source to question the way work is explained in official language and the inequalities justified by the state.


2018 ◽  
pp. 238-246
Author(s):  
Tricia Starks

The onset of World War I brought prohibition to alcohol but an explosion of tobacco use on the front lines, with even government sponsored tobacco collection drives, yet the Bolshevik Revolution, carried the downfall of the tobacco queens and ushered into power a new state with its own conflicted relationship to tobacco. The participation of the tobacco workers in the Kronstadt rebellion spurred attacks on women workers as backward and erased them from the record. The triumph of public health as a major policy point of the revolution closed one chapter on tobacco’s relationship to state and citizen and brought a new era for anti-tobacco advocacy although the continued situation of tobacco use within the disease cluster of neurasthenia did little to change opinions on therapy. Despite the avowed interest of the state, the anti-tobacco drive floundered as smoking became more popular, ubiquitous, and profitable.


2020 ◽  
pp. 191-231
Author(s):  
Zoe Adams

This chapter explores the modern minimum wage framework in detail. The first section begins by exploring the background to the National Minimum Wage Act through the lens of the relationship between minimum wages and wage supplementation. The second section then explores the conceptual structure of the Act in more detail. In particular, it explores how an individual’s minimum wage entitlement is assessed; the types of ‘work’ that are either implicitly or expressly, excluded from the Act; and the content of the concept of the ‘wage’. It concludes with some remarks about what the Act’s structure implies about the legal system’s understanding of the role of minimum ‘wage’ regulation today.


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