Slash youth in China: From precarious strugglers to successful exemplars

Slash has become a new phenomenon and practice as a growing number of youth, no longer in long-term employment with clear future security, create a contingent combination of careers. Its recent prevalence in China marks a visible consequence of the national restructuring policy of labor flexibilization over the past decades. Dismantling of the historical norm of full employment, encouragement of flexible digital economy, short-life expectancy of new businesses, and generalized insecurity due to intense competition at individual level, are the major factors contributing to the emergence and expansion of slash youth. Based on empirical and ethnographic evidences, this article identifies the complexity, diversity, and creativity embodied in individual slash experiences, suggesting that slash youth are stratified and they demonstrate differentiated ability to translate uncertainties into opportunities under the condition of individualization. This article is part of the special issue Creative Labour in East Asia.

Laboring under Chávez

In contrast to cases such as Chile and Mexico, which have undergone substantial economic liberalization and labor flexibilization, labor reform under the Chávez regime’s twenty-first-century socialism promised greater protection for workers from market forces and the development of a strong, autonomous labor movement capable of advocating effectively for workers’ rights and interests. However, this chapter argues that such potential was not realized under Chávez and will not likely be realized under his chosen successor, Nicolás Maduro. Indeed, while in rhetoric the regime vehemently rejected neoliberalism, in practice it promoted de facto flexibilized labor relations through the creation of worker cooperatives, which serve as sources of subcontracted labor, particularly for state-owned industries. In addition to exploiting vulnerable workers in cooperatives, the Chávez regime’s “rentier populism” employed divisive institutional practices that encouraged the fragmentation and weakening of organized labor, impeded the labor movement’s autonomy, contravened essential labor rights such as free union elections, collective bargaining, and the right to strike and engaged in reprisals against unions and workers it perceived as threats. These key features of labor organization in contemporary Venezuela indicate a pronounced contradiction between the Chávez regime’s avowed commitment to socialist principles of worker solidarity and equality and its political economy in practice.

Introduction

This chapter situates Labor Politics in Latin America within the existing literature on labor markets and organization, presents its goals and methodology, justifies the selection of case studies, and outlines the analytical focus of subsequent chapters and their findings. The chapter offers a summary of the book’s principal findings and theoretical contributions to the study of labor market reform within Latin America. In this regard, the study’s comparative analysis provides little support for claims regarding the purported benefits of flexibilization, particularly with respect to its promise of employment generation and the reduction of inequality. Examination of the case studies also reveals that there exist multiple ways in which labor flexibilization can be imposed. Beyond de jure reforms of collective labor rights, the analysis reveals that flexibilization has often been achieved in ways other than legal reform of the labor code, for instance through negotiations of collective agreements at the plant level. Finally, the authors find that the imposition of flexibilization, whether de facto or de jure, has had a significant impact on labor organization and party-labor ties.

Precariousness as Growth: Meritocracy, Human Capital Formation, and Workplace Regulation in Brazil, China and India

The place of labor regulation in contemporary development discourse revolves around the validity of the neoclassical assertion that any interference with market wage-setting mechanisms leads to a cruel twist–workers left unemployed in a less productive economy. The push for reducing individual and collective labor rights across the globe, commonly termed labor flexibilization, has been justified on the grounds that not only do “rigidities” arising from ostensibly pro-worker regulations hurt workers, they are also key and central impediment to growth. While the empirical grounds of the neoclassical assertion have become ever murkier over time, the appeal of this pro-growth assertion has been recurrent in economies of diverse incomes. For lower-income countries this has been doubly true, with pro-worker legacies cast as urgently necessary targets for reform. However, no true sustained example has emerged of a country that has unleashed employment growth through workplace deregulation. Instead, most attempts at such reform have ultimately led to political backlash when this promise has not materialized and populations have suffered the dislocations of ever-more precarious work. In this context, this paper looks at the recent discourses on workplace deregulation as applied to three of the largest global economies: Brazil, India and China. Each currently is at a different stage of what will be called “the flexibilization cycle.” In China, the Chinese Communist Party is grappling with a fundamental challenge to its legitimacy stemming from the accumulated dissatisfaction with weak workplace regulation and has rejected the flexibilization agenda. In India, workplace regulation has been promised by a new administration, but has been frustrated in attempts to combat significant backlash. And in Brazil, a new political administration has made the promise of flexibilization as foundational to reinvigorated growth after a pause in a decade of inclusive growth. Examining these case examples will expose why the cruel neoclassical twist never materializes and then leads to popular unrest. The twist’s assumptions about wage setting, especially in lower-income nations, ignores but is ultimately undermined by inherently unequal power dynamics in workplace institutions and the primacy of enforcement mechanisms. Further, general levels of human capital formation are far more central to actual economic development, which are in turn eroded by precarious work. The common emergence of labor flexibilization discourses during periods of economic recession is driven instead by opportunistic attempts to re-entrench elite status by diverting attention away from meritocratic reforms. By refocusing the debate on human capital development, the truly elusive growth potential of genuine meritocracy, rather then flexibilization, becomes clear as a driver of developmental success and as an explanatory factor in politics of labor regulation debates.

Labor flexibilization and deregulation for nursing workers in Brazil: the profae case

This study analyzed the flexibilization process of labor relations in the PROFAE Professionalization Project of Nursing Workers (Projeto de Profissionalização dos Trabalhadores da Área de Enfermagem - PROFAE) in Brazil. This qualitative study used dialectical and historical materialism as the theoretical-methodological framework. Data were collected through directed interviews with open-ended questions, and answers were submitted to discourse analysis. The obtained results evidence the flexibilization and deregulation process of labor relations in the health area in Brazil, characterized by the following elements: payment by production; fragmented labor division; criteria for variable wage payment; qualified and versatile professionals; perceived professional freedom; reduced governability and power to make decisions; multiple jobs; activity planning as a substitute for planning models, and the massive systematic operationalization of actions.