UNESCO-MOST konferens 2012. Arbete och mänskliga rättigheter. Migration, arbetsmarknadens omstrukturering och det civila samhället roll i globaliseringen

Abstract

To be updated

Keywords:

Description

The obverse side of flexibility and a globalised 'network economy' is informalisation and precarisation of work through offshoring, outsourcing, sub-contracting, and renewed sweatshop production. Labour market flexibilisation is re-enforced and perpetuates ethnic, racial and gender segmentations. While workers everywhere are caught up in these changes, migrants often experience a particular deterioration of working conditions and social rights. This is the compelling context for including protection of labour standards for migrant workers in initiatives for reshaping global governance with the aim to balance the power of financial and economic institutions with a universal floor of established social rights. On this background major international organisations have sought to establish global normative frameworks concerned with human and labour rights and fair rules for cross-border movement. At the same time, EU, NAFTA, SACD and other major bodies for regional integration have acquired incremental authority over the governance of migration, adding new regulations with sometimes unclear, problematic and dubious consequences seen from a perspective of human rights, labour rights and migrant rights.

This global scenario of structural-institutional change was the wider context for the Labour Rights as Human Rights? conference in Norrköping, Sweden, between May 30th to June 1st, 2012 under the auspices of UNESCO-MOST. The conference was be organised by REMESO (Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity, and Society) at Linköping University in collaboration with the INMD (International Network for Migration and Development). It was set up according to the overall principles of the
MOST (Management of Social Transformation) UNESCO programme that fosters and promotes social science research and aims to build efficient bridges between research, policy and practice. In accordance with this the conference Labour Rights as Human Rights? was organised as a forum for dialogue between leading social scientists and stakeholders, locating areas for intervention and alternative avenues for policy formation and governance.

As an aid to the discussions during the conference a number of position papers were commissioned with leading scholars to serve as an inspirational platform and frame of reference for the opening keynote panel, subsequent workshops and a concluding panel discussion. Whereas a few of these papers were included in a major scientific publication published in 2015 shorter inputs from both participating scientists and activists representing migrant organisations, trade unions and migrant advocacy NGO:s were compiled in a web-based proceedings distributed to a range of relevant stakeholders..

Publications

Schierup C.-U., et al. (eds. 2015) Migration, Precarity and Global Governance. Challenges for Labour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(with edited versions of some of the keynote papers presented at the conference)

Other Academic Output

https://www.isv.liu.se/remeso/konferenser-och-workshops/labour-rights-as-human-rights?l=en (link to papers and other interventions)

Webb based proceedings (position papers, key-note lectures, workshop interventions):
https://www.isv.liu.se/remeso/konferenser-och-workshops/labour-rights-as-human-rights/proceedings?l=en

A PDF version of the conference proceedings is downloadable from this page.