El Instituto Internacional de Agricultura: España y la «cuestión social», 1905-1923

In the agrarian context of the early 20th century, networks of experts and interest groups were created. These formed institutions across state borders to achieve prestige derived from their supranational character and ostensible technical and scientific capacity. The objective of this article is to analyse the impact in Spain of the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA), from the year of its creation until the advent of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, through the lens of the “social question”: a concept that popularized the proposals and disagreements surrounding labour regulation. The research draws from the latest contributions in transnational history and internationalism, recent secondary sources about the IIA and primary sources that reflect how transnational IIA networks worked in and with Spain to address agricultural labour issues. The article concludes that the intensely transnational connections between agrarian elites, owners and technicians in the early 20th century transformed social relations in agriculture and agrarian public policies in Spain.

Elements of Precarious Employment in the Work of Scientifc and Pedagogical Workers

The paper highlights the problem of the growth of the segment of precarious employment in the work of researchers and the faculty, who work mainly in scientific and educational institutions (scientific and pedagogical workers). Besides the elements of precarious employment characteristic of the category of workers under consideration, the author considers the fixed-term nature of labor relations and the low level of the conditionally constant part of wages in the general structure of wages of scientific and pedagogical workers, which can be attributed to the legal prerequisites for the deterioration (precarization) of their labour regulation. In addition to the acts of federal legislation regulating the labor of scientific and pedagogical workers, the author analyzes the provisions of the relevant acts of social partnership for the period from 2015 untill 2023. The author highlights the problem of increasing the types of work included by the employer in the employment of the “second half of the day” of scientific and pedagogical workers without paying additional wages. The lack of legal regulation of the distribution of types of work performed by a scientific and pedagogical worker within a 36-hour working week is also noted by the author among the legal preconditions that, with appropriate law enforcement, worsen the conditions of employment of such workers due to the significantly increasing proportion of time that workers spend on achieving performance indicators and efficiency determined by the employer. In the conclusion of the paper, the author justifies amendments to the legislation in terms of regulating a fixed-term employment contract, establishing the share of guaranteed wages in the overall structure of wages, regulating the types of work included in the working hours of scientific and pedagogical workers at the level of a by-law, which cumulatively will promote sustainability of employment conditions for employees and improve their legal status.

Precarising Formality: Understanding Current Labour Developments in Chile

More than forty years ago, the Chilean economy led the way in a process of flexibilising and privatising a wide range of areas: finance, pensions, education, work and so on. In 1990, with the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Chile continued to pursue neo-liberal economic policies and maintained the liberal conception of collective labour rights (imposed in 1979). By 2017, labour informality in Chile was among the lowest in South America. Taking these two factors into account (labour regulation that benefited business spending cuts and only “moderate” informality), this article explores the following questions: What are the features of current forms of labour formality in a paradigmatic neo-liberal context like Chile’s, and what space does informality occupy? Is labour formality far removed from the kind of vulnerability usually associated with informality? How have formality and informality related to each other in Chile in recent years? We address these questions with mixed methods: a literature review, development of a conceptual proposal, processing of statistical data and case studies. We conclude that a particular kind of labour formality currently prevails in Chile, which we call precarising formality. This concept disputes the traditional idea of labour formality, both because labour regulations lack substance and because they are ineffective, which is, of course, politically produced. We consider it precarising based on an analysis of multiple dimensions of precarity in contexts of theoretical labour formality. The article also describes forms of struggle and resistance by workers’ organisations that protest against capitalist action from within this new configuration of labour. KEYWORDS: formality; informality; labour precarity; Chile

The Dynamics of Labour Informality in Brazil, 2003-2019

This article examines the evolution of labour informality in Brazil between 2003 and 2019, a period marked by strong political, economic and social inflections. In the first section, we offer a brief reflection on the terms of the historical debate on informality and its relation to the transformations of the Brazilian economy. In section two we describe the remarkable process of labour formalisation that took place in the country between 2003 and 2014, pointing out its exceptionality and principal determinants. In section three, we note the reversal of this formalisation trend. With the recession of 2015–2016, informal and precarious work increased sharply, exacerbated by newly flexible labour laws and the emergence of new precarious labour relations. We conclude that the Brazilian experience in this new century shows that the formalisation of labour relations is strongly related to more general conditions of economic development and the solidity of public institutions. Furthermore, and in contrast to the views held in mainstream economics, initiatives to simplify and ease the regulatory framework appear to coexist with increasing levels of precariousness and informal work. KEYWORDS: labour informality; Brazilian labour market; public policy; labour regulation; gig economy

Between entrepreneurs and workers: Cleavages and compromises in rationales and policy solutions regarding ‘dependent contractors’

The emergence of dependent contractors challenges the existing institutions regarding social protection and labour regulation. This article aims at identifying the political narratives that explain the emergence of New Forms of Employment (NFE) and dependent contracting along with the policy solutions proposed by the social partners at the EU and international level. By analysing policy documents from the social partners through the lens of a qualitative version of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), the authors indentify two distinct narratives – ‘devaluation of work’ and ‘entrepreneurship and flexibility’. The authors show how these rationales lead to various policy solutions and identify oppositions and possible compromise.

Engaging Contract Labour: Learnings from Landmark Judgements

Despite debates on its hiring, contract labour is a growing form of employment in India. Establishments usually maintain a workforce composition of both regular workers and contract labour for optimizing their available resources and ensuring financial prudence. However, in the process, they often get embroiled in compliance issues related to regularization and ‘equal pay for equal work’ in the context of contract labour. In this article, we have explored the different judicial interpretations of the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, on contract labour. For this, we have referred to the landmark judgements passed by the Supreme Court of India on the deployment and regularization of contract labour, and also their entitlement to equal pay for equal work. A scrutiny of these judgements directs us to advise establishments to avoid engaging contract labour in their core and perennial activities. Considering the statutory provisions and the possible legal complications, we have recommended some measures to establishments to mitigate the underlying risks in deploying contract labour alongside regular workforce in similar kinds of jobs or activities. We propose that the legislative framework grants flexibility to industries to generate employment to contract labour, without compromising on the rights of these workers.

Gender, Regulation Efficiency and Informal Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa

Regulation efficiency is essential in addressing the growing informal sector in developing countries because informality thrives with an inefficient legal and regulatory framework of an economy. This paper, therefore, seeks to explore the effect of regulations on informal employment across a panel of 36 sub-Saharan Africa from 2005 to 2018. The study includes both the business and labour aspects of regulation to analyse the effect. The fixed effect and GMM method of panel regression analysis was adopted to achieve the objective of the study. The result suggests that an increase in labour regulation efficiency is associated with a reduction in informal employment while there exists no significant relationship between efficient business regulation and informal employment. The study further investigates how the outcomes affect both genders and the output. The study suggests that efficient labour regulation is gender-specific, as the result is only consistent for the male. It is therefore imperative to incorporate more female gender-specific incentives in the social and labour regulations to compensate for the imbalance of social roles of women that may affect their choice to work in the formal or informal sector.

Enforcement of Labour Regulation and the Labour Market Effects of Trade: Evidence from Brazil

How does enforcement of labour regulations shape the labour market effects of trade? We combine local economic shocks generated by the unilateral trade liberalisation in Brazil and enforcement variation across regions to show that regions with stricter enforcement observed: (i) lower informality; (ii) larger losses in overall employment; (iii) greater reductions in the number of formal plants. Regions with weaker enforcement experienced opposite effects. All these effects are concentrated on low-skill workers. Our results indicate that greater flexibility introduced by informality allows both formal firms and low-skill workers to cope better with adverse labour market shocks.

International investment law and labour rights protection: A standard of fair and equitable treatment and indirect expropriation in the light of changes in host country labour law

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question whether investors may challenge domestic labour legislation by invoking breach of international investment agreements, in particular violations of fair and equitable treatment standard, as well as illegal expropriation of investments. The answer to this question is especially relevant for developing countries, such as the Republic of Serbia, which seek to harmonize their legal systems with international principles of labour rights protection. Therefore, the paper will explore the interpretations of the fair and equitable treatment standard and indirect expropriation given by arbitration tribunals and accepted among scholars, as well as their application with respect to the labour regulation changes. Particularly analysed is the relevant case law before arbitration tribunals dealing with the question whether host states may violate these standards by amending their domestic labour legislation. Research has shown that domestic labour regulation amendments may rarely be interpreted as indirect expropriation, while the fair and equitable treatment standard may be breached in case of unpredictable labour legislation changes which would significantly violate guarantees given by the state to attract foreign investments but cannot protect investors from the introduction of bona fide labour regulations.