Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: It is widely thought that there is an inherent mismatch between flexible services and economic security for the workers providing those services. However, the conflict between flexibility and security may be due to the conflation of flexible service-work and flexible employment. Part of a larger, qualitative study comparing public and private home care models in different locations, this paper examines the conflict between flexibility and security in the private home care market in the Greater Los Angeles Area. Using in-depth interviews with 20 owners and managers of home care companies, flexibility in service-work – that is, what, where, when, and how services are provided -- are analyzed alongside flexibility in employment relations -- namely the status of the workers as contractors or contractors and the temporary form of employment. The findings suggest that the conflict between flexibility and security stems from owners’ and managers’ use of flexible employment to secure their profit in a highly competitive market, rather than an inherent incompatibility between flexibility for clients and security for workers.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: With the expansion of the neoliberal economic order, the flexible labor market paradigm has questioned the efficiency of the welfare state labor market institutions. Furthermore, the flexible labor market policy has been recommended as a universal solution to unemployment issues in developing countries. This essay poses a challenge to such a free-market orthodox view that a more flexible labor market system contributes to improving unemployment conditions in developing countries. To this end, this study utilizes the Panel Corrected Standard Error(PCSE) regression model and Generalized Least Square (GLS) Random Effect model with the time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) dataset of ten OECD countries. Contrary to the orthodox view, the empirical findings of this research suggest that in developing countries flexible labor market policy can result in higher unemployment rates.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper will address the relative absence of concern for unprotected labour in contemporary theorizing of citizenship and nationalism. Contemporary studies of nationalism and citizenship have developed along several key axes. At the normative level, they have questioned the issue of the co-existence between collective rights, minority rights and individual rights. At the empirical level, they have questioned how socio-cultural and socio-political processes have imprint nationalist movements and nationalist traditions with specific mechanisms of exclusion. This literature often situates its analysis at a purely political level as if the formation of meaningful citizenship could be detached from the analysis of the labour process. I argue that the exclusion from the recognition of citizenship in the everyday life is informed by a relational dynamic where the labour process and the recognition of citizenship are intertwined. In order to theorized the ways in which globalization creates new forms of exclusion, studies of citizenship must developed tools of analysis to question systematically the relation between the unprotected workers and the creation of zones of second class abject citizens.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In recent years a “unified theory” has emerged out of labor economics, which argues that a combination of “macroeconomic shocks” and flexible labor market institutions in the U.S. has produced strong upward trends in wage inequality, while these same shocks have produced high unemployment and low employment growth in Europe as a side effect of the wage stability preserved by that continent’s rigid labor market institutions. This paper argues instead that European institutions in fact have evolved their own form of flexibility, which, in combination with the macroeconomic shocks described in the unified theory, have also led to rising inequality in Europe, but of a different form. Inequality of employment security has risen faster in France than in the U.S. Furthermore, trends in the French labor market have led to increased concentration of low-skill workers in these insecure job statues. These results challenge the view that unemployment is the main mechanisms through which European labor markets absorbed asymmetric shocks to their demand for labor. They also challenge the view that Europeans have intolerance for inequality, but instead suggest that the main difference between the two sides of the Atlantic concerns the nature of the inequalities that each society is willing to tolerate.