South Africa to India

This article focuses on the repatriation of Indians from South Africa, first under indentured labour contracts, and then under modified schemes between 1914 and 1975 applicable to all Indians. While the historiography of Indian South Africans prioritises movement of Indians to South Africa, this article is about reverse movement to India. It analyses narratives of repatriation that emerge from official sources in India and South Africa such as statistics, reports of officials in India, petitions and letters from repatriates and observations of public figures. It then shifts focus to a Cape-based immigration archive that focuses on Cape Town repatriates, thus drawing Cape Town more closely into the scholarly field of Indian Ocean mobilities but also firmly into the historiography of Indian South Africans, hitherto predominantly focussed on the former provinces, Natal and the Transvaal. By bringing Cape Town repatriates into the fuller story, an alternative narrative to the dominant one of coercion and suffering is offered.

Major Provisions of Labour Contracts and their Theoretical Coherence

Major Provisions of Labour Contracts and their Theoretical Coherence

O fim do descanso semanal obrigatório ao sétimo dia?

The monologue that is reproduced has in its genesis two sentences related to the imperfect problem of the enjoyment of weekly rest at shift work: the judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union, of 9-11-2017 (Maio Marques da Rosa, case C - 306/16), and the Supreme Court of Justice, of 14-11-2018 (case 1181/15.4T8MTS.P1.S1). The fact that the issue in question was decided on the basis of rules of general scope (respectively, Article 5, first part, of the Directive 2003/88, concerning certain aspects of the organisation of working time, and Article 232, paragraph 1, of the Labour Code) has given to give these decisions an innovative dimension, potentially disruptive in the social and legal sphere, if it is under-stood that the normativity of the first sentence is directly extendable to the com-mon of labour contracts. The final conclusion is that the Portuguese labour system enshrines the weekly rest rule on the seventh day, allowing for the possibility of derogations for a limited set of activities; however, in relation to these, the application of this regime depends on provision in terms of collective labour regulation instruments.

Freedom, exit and basic income

According to a ‘republican’ argument, universal basic income increases workers' power to exit employment and so allegedly reduces workers’ vulnerability to domination from this source. However, critics argue that a basic income will have limited impact on exit power, especially if set at a modest level, and that employer domination is anyway built into standard labour contracts independently of workers’ exit power. This chapter acknowledges these criticisms, but argues that we can rescue a republican argument for basic income if we refine it so that it attends to some important but neglected distinctions: between mitigating, reducing and eliminating domination; between a basic income helping, being necessary to, or sufficient for, one or more of these effects; and by recalling that the potential impact of basic income on domination applies not just in the workplace but in other contexts such as the family and in relation to welfare bureaucracy.

Klauzule autonomiczne umów o pracę — zagadnienia pojęciowe

AUTONOMOUS CLAUSES OF LABOUR CONTRACTS — CONCEPTUAL ISSUESThe starting point of this article is the notion of an autonomous clause which was introduced into the theory of Polish labour law by Marcin Święcicki. The author of the text maintains that an employer and an employee have the freedom to agree upon autonomous clauses of a labour contract. The above-mentioned clauses are separate contracts which are amended and terminated according to rules which are different from those relating to the main contract contract of labour. The autonomous clauses form rights and obligations of the parties of the labour contract as opposed to other individual labour-law contracts and civil-law contracts. The limitations of the subject-matter of autonomous clauses should be deduced from the legal nature of the discussed clauses and the main labour contract.

The Worker’s Employment Contract—the Legal Regulations of Interwar Poland

In independent Poland, the foundations for a new area of law, that is, labour law were laid, abandoning the previously crucial principle of freedom of contract underlying the contractual relationship between an employee and the employer. On March 16, 1928, the President of the Republic of Poland issued an ordinance on labour contracts, defining mutual obligations of employees and their employers under an employment contract based on which the employee undertook to perform work for the employer against remuneration. The legislator permitted the conclusion of employment contracts in writing, orally or in any other customary form accepted in a given workplace. In exchange for the work performed, the employer was obliged to pay appropriate contractual remuneration, as specified in the employment agreement. Importantly, this ordinance contained a number of protective regulations that were designed to protect the worker and make his position towards the employer more equal. They included regulations concerning remuneration protection or the employer’s obligation to specify work rules. Most importantly, however, the ordinance protected the worker from immediate and unjustified dismissal.

Making Sharing Work: Migrant Community Groups and Informal/Formal Work

Migrant and refugee communities are at the forefront of highly feminised and precarious community sector work. Facing insecure labour contracts and contingent, competitive funding for activities, these communities routinely move between paid and unpaid work. Drawing on multi-sited and participatory ethnographic research and 30 semi-structured interviews with women of different African backgrounds living and working in western Sydney, this article explores the relationship between collective sharing practices and life as precarious workers. The sharing of material resources, information and support takes place beyond designated ‘workplaces’ and on a continuum of activity that moves between the formal and informal, public and private, productive and socially reproductive. This article uses a practice-based approach to foreground the social world of working migrant women. In doing so, it sheds light on the hidden, precarious work of an increasingly marketised community sector and the everyday and emergent ways that marginalised communities respond to precarious work under neoliberalism.