Current Issues in Labor & Work: Precarity, Automation, and Inclusion

Session Submission Type: Created Panel

Session Description

The media is awash with stories warning of the current threats facing workers from increased precarity to the increase in automation to discriminatory practices. Are these the threats that they appear to be? What have been responses by organized labor and workers more generally? Have particular policies impacted these issues for workers? This panel pulls together a diverse sample of the scholarship studying these issues. Hiroaki Watanabe's paper explores the effects of Japanese policies and unions themselves on work precarity in Japan. Also discussing precarity, Paul C. Apostolidis’s work argues that there is a benefit for analysts and activists to conceptualizing class in association with precarity, focusing on the case of migrant day laborers in the United States. Eric Stein's paper discusses the seemingly-paradoxical relationship between automation and immigration. Does automation reduce demand for labor and, correspondingly, immigration? Or, can automation actually increase such demand? Similarly, Claire Ma's paper discusses the 2018 Google Walkout as a case where more informal networks provided an avenue for workers to come together, yet they also diluted the ability of workers to effectively target their claims. Taken together, these papers offer compelling and cutting-edge research on some of the most hotly discussed issues affecting workers, organized labor, and policymakers today.

Sub Unit

• Related Groups / Labor Politics

Cosponsor

• Division 42: New Political Science

Individual Presentations

• Labor Market Reform, Work Precarity, and Union Response in Japan - Hiroaki Richard Watanabe, Ritsumeikan University

• Precarity, Class and the Politics of Time - Paul C. Apostolidis, London School of Economics

• Office Politics: The Role of Diversity Networks in Tech Worker Organizing - Claire Ma, University of Pennsylvania

• Is Automation Reducing Demand for Immigration? - Eric Stein, University of California, Santa Barbara

Chair

• Katie Rader Christopher Newport University

Discussants

• Janice R Fine Rutgers University-New Brunswick

• Isabel Maria Perera Cornell