Documents Mexico 116 results

"It has been widely reported that when the COVID-19 pandemic began, governments and employers were ill-informed, ill-prepared and in many cases willing to risk the lives of workers for profits-leading to occupational health and safety failures globally. This issue brief focuses on the fights by workers to ensure safe and healthy working conditions during the pandemic and how they were able to use the law to do so. This includes 11 case studies from Argentina, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States and a global essay about seafarers. "

"Decades have passed since science established that climate change is real and due to human activities. Some big fossil fuel companies received the first scientific reports about the negative effects on the climate of producing and burning fossil fuels already in the late 1970s. The first UN climate change conference, Conference of the Parties 1 (COP 1) took place in 1995 in Berlin, Germany. The first agreement on emission reduction, the Kyoto Protocol, was signed at the COP3 in Japan in 1997. Many more agreements followed. In 2006 the famous Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (Stern 2006) was released for the UK government. The report, although heavily focussed on the economy, was alarming. Meanwhile COP 27 took place in 2022 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. The results of all that are more than meagre. According to the latest report by the IPCC global net anthropogenic GHG emissions1 in 2019, were about 12 percent higher than in 2010 and 54 percent higher than in 1990. The highest rate of growth of the emissions was 2000-2009 with an annual increase of 2.1 percent it slowed down in the period 2010-2019 to an average annual rate of growth of 1.3 percent. 42 percent of historical cumulative net CO2 emissions since 1850 occurred between 1990 and 2019, while climate change and measures against it were broadly discussed. 17 percent of historical cumulative net CO2 emissions since 1850 occurred even between 2010 and 2019, when several agreements were in place to stop or mitigate climate change. (IPCC 2022, 6). The debate on sustainability has also been ongoing for more than 30 years without leading to ecologically and socially sustainable societies. On the contrary. The use of non-renewable resources is increasing faster than sustainable production and consumption; inequality has increased in almost all countries, as well as the gap between the global North and the global South.

In January 2016 almost all states signed the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), with 17 goals to be achieved by 2030, including the goal of decent and developmentpromoting, sustainable work (UN 2015). Sustainable work was supposed to be included globally in national policy agendas. Nevertheless, the topic is hardly ever explicitly addressed in government policies or public debates. Jobs and employment are a main subject in debates and policy proposals regarding the transition to socially and ecologically sustainable low or zero carbon societies, but rarely the social organization of work, other forms of work or value orientations. Technologies or their usage, on the other hand, play a central role. The policies promoted by governments and the private sector focus almost entirely on a “technological fix”. Trade unions tend to privilege the aspect of social sustainability and to neglect the ecological sustainability, aspects of the transformation of the meaning and organization of work and (especially in the Northern hemisphere) the issue of global just transition. Ecologically-oriented sustainability discourses in exchange, tend to pay little attention to the social sustainability of work, and rarely address work in general. They focus on consumers and companies as main actors. The influence on the work-oriented societies of developments such as demographic shifts (aging societies), migration, digitalization, flexibilization, and globalization is broadly discussed. But the ecological aspects of certain types of work and what they mean for labour and the labour market are widely neglected.

Why focus on work when human life on our planet is threatened by climate change and mass extinction? The radical transformation of production and consumption patterns alone (which does not happen anyway) will not lead to the required social and ecological transition. Employment and the labor markets are changing and we have to make sure that work itself becomes sustainable in all its aspects. It can also be reasonably questioned if the transformation of production and consumption is even possible without the transformation of the work-oriented society (and vice versa). The work-oriented society as such has to be transformed. Some alliances between trade unions, and social and environmental movements (see this report), as well as discourses in academia (see Jochum et al. 2019; Littig 2018; Räthzel, Stevis, and Uzzell 2021) aim at making work the focus of sustainable development. We live in work-oriented societies and work is considered the medium for satisfying individual and social needs (Jochum et al. 2020). The reconceptualization, reorganisation and revalorization of work as sustainable work is therefore a decisive tool from below to push for and guarantee a just transition.
Let us first introduce three terms central to our debate: Sustainable Work and just transition as concepts for a transition to socially and ecologically sustainable societies, and green jobs as most common term in politics, administration, private sector and media regarding work for and in an ecological transition."

"Social movement theory, with its Euro-American focus, struggles to capture the radically divergent imaginaries and claims that accompany current waves of protest. The Special Feature titled “The Many Faces of Protest: Rethinking Collective Action in a World of Dissent” examines select progressive protests and their transformative potential in times of deep uncertainty. In so doing, it helps sociologists and others make sense of how the repertoires, domains of action, and prefigurative capacities of collective action are changing around the world today."

"Mexico experienced the twentieth century's first social revolution, a decade of struggle from which emerged a new political regime – a post-revolutionary authoritarian or single-party state one – with President Lázaro Cárdenas as leader by 1934. This post-revolutionary creation included organized labor and peasants, a strong interventionist state and a hegemonic party. Cárdenas' U.S. counterpart, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, too, was leading dramatic ‘New Deal' institutional and political revolution in the 1930s and 1940s that spawned a new order of expanded federal government, a renovated Democratic Party, and new movements and interest groups, notably, labor. Both nations featured the same major actors: the state, political parties, and organized labor. Both presidents calculated that preserving labor alliances was crucial for formation and legitimization of a new political order, for maintaining conditions conducive to private-sector investment and economic growth, and for political and economic crisis management. Labor's growing role reshuffled corporatist alliances within and between international neighbors. This study places Mexico and the United States in comparative context in the early twentieth century and analyzes elite control and inclusion of organized labor in transformation of political landscapes in two different political regimes – a democratic one couched in an established constitution and a post-revolutionary authoritarian one born of a bloody upheaval."

"Over the last 20 years, manufacturing of a wide variety of consumer goods in the global economy has shifted from relatively well-regulated, highwage and often unionized factories in the developed world to basically unregulated, low-wage and rarely unionized factories in the developing world. The prevailing supply chain approach for occupational health and safety (OHS) protections for workers is to incorporate them into the international brands' corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes in the hope that there will be a “trickle-down” effect of corporate- level OHS protections to the factory floors of the brands' suppliers. This approach has resulted in only marginal improvements of working conditions in global supply chains. A different approach – exemplified by the work of the Maquiladora Health and Safety Support Network (MHSSN) – is a worker-centred approach where the goal is to create knowledgeable, informed and active workers in factories at all tiers of the global supply chains who are familiar with OHS concepts, hazards and controls, as well as their rights under the law. The article highlights case studies of OHS capacity-building activities by the MHSSN and partner organizations with workers in five countries: Mexico, Indonesia, China, the Dominican Republic and Bangladesh."

"This paper has three principal aims. It firstly provides some theoretical background on the key current research issues and challenges in regard to industrial relations in multinational companies. It then presents a concise review of scholarship to date on industrial relations in multinational companies using INTREPID (Investigation of Transnationals' Employment Practices: an International Database) data. Finally, the paper identifies some of the main industrial relations issues that remain to be addressed, in effect charting a form of research agenda for future work using the INTREPID data, with particular focus on the potential contribution from ‘late joiners' to the INTREPID project. "

"Networks of Outrage and Hope is an exploration of the new forms of social movements and protests that are erupting in the world today, from the Arab uprisings to the indignadas movement in Spain, from the Occupy Wall Street movement to the social protests in Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere. While these and similar social movements differ in many important ways, there is one thing they share in common: they are all interwoven inextricably with the creation of autonomous communication networks supported by the Internet and wireless communication.



In this new edition of his timely and important book, Manuel Castells examines the social, cultural and political roots of these new social movements, studies their innovative forms of self–organization, assesses the precise role of technology in the dynamics of the movements, suggests the reasons for the support they have found in large segments of society, and probes their capacity to induce political change by influencing people s minds. Two new chapters bring the analysis up–to–date and draw out the implications of these social movements and protests for understanding the new forms of social change and political democracy in the global network society."