Child Labour in African Artisanal Mining Communities: Experiences from Northern Ghana

The issue of child labour in the artisanal and small‐scale mining (ASM) economy is attracting significant attention worldwide. This article critically examines this ‘problem’ in the context of sub‐Saharan Africa, where a lack of formal sector employment opportunities and/or the need to provide financial support to their impoverished families has led tens of thousands of children to take up work in this industry. The article begins by engaging with the main debates on child labour in an attempt to explain why young boys and girls elect to pursue arduous work in ASM camps across the region. The remainder of the article uses the Ghana experience to further articulate the challenges associated with eradicating child labour at ASM camps, drawing upon recent fieldwork undertaken in Talensi‐Nabdam District, Upper East Region. Overall, the issue of child labour in African ASM communities has been diagnosed far too superficially, and until donor agencies and host governments fully come to grips with the underlying causes of the poverty responsible for its existence, it will continue to burgeon.     

Double Displacement: Western Women's Return Home from Japanese Internment in the Second World War

This article examines the homecoming of Western women from Japanese internment camps at the end of the Second World War. It focuses on British women returning to the United Kingdom, but makes reference to women from other Allied nations such as the United States, Australia and the Netherlands. The paper argues that interned women posed contradictions to gendered understandings of wartime experience and that homecoming further exacerbated this ambiguity. Return from imprisonment exposed the dual meaning of home as the natural realm for women and a national space. Women internees had been away from both and were subjected to control by non‐white men; responses to their liberation reflected these tensions. Homecoming prompted questions about released women's femininity and sexual integrity, but they faced even more difficulty having their war experiences recognised as part of a national story about war.     

Space and Manpower in Roman Camps

Summary.   Certain aspects of space and manpower use in Roman camps were investigated using a previously published spreadsheet model. Over half the camp area was not needed for the men's tents and this was probably enough to cope with patches of unsuitable ground within the rampart. The relationship between the camp area and perimeter was such that the bigger the camp, the relatively fewer men were needed to make and defend it. Small camps, which required relatively greater effort from the men, could be made quickly. Data from the Polybian and Hyginian models suggested that the basic determinant of camp design and numerical structure of the army lay in the requirement for a man to labour upon and defend no more than five feet of perimeter. Compared with the Polybian model, the Hyginian model greatly reduced the area and perimeter length for any given force, thus enabling the army to adopt a more aggressive posture.     

Economic Globalization and Institutions of Global Governance: Comments and Debate (I)

Reading Keith Griffin is like listening to a Frenchman presenting his ideas in three parts and ten minutes. It is clear, brilliant, and a delight for the ear, but once it is over you scratch your head and wonder what exactly the meaning of it all was. In the recent article by Griffin published in this journal ( Griffin, 2003 ), there were two instances where I scratched my head. The first instance was when he pleaded in favour of mobility of the factor labour, not only of labour in general, but of unskilled labour in particular in order to reduce global income inequalities. The second instance occurred when he argued in favour of a compulsory tax and transfer mechanism in replacement of the old‐style foreign aid that is ‘nearly obsolete’.     

Mining Boom,Labour Market Segmentation and Social Inequality in the Congolese Copperbelt

The study of the impacts of new mining projects in Africa is generally set in a normative debate about their possible contribution to development, which leads to a representation of African societies as divided between beneficiaries and victims of foreign investments. Based on research in the Congolese copperbelt, this article aims to examine in more detail the inequalities generated by the recent mining boom by taking the processes of labour market segmentation as a starting point. It shows that the labour market in the mining sector has progressively been organized along three intersecting lines that divide it: the first is between employment in industrial and artisanal mining companies, the second is between jobs for mining or subcontracting companies and the third is between jobs for expatriates, Congolese skilled workers and local unskilled workers. Far from simply reflecting existing social inequalities, the labour market has been actively involved in their creation, and its control has caused growing tensions in the Congolese copperbelt region. Although largely neglected in the literature on extractive industries, processes of labour market segmentation are key to making sense of the impacts of mining investments on the shape of societies in the global South.     

"Brain Abuse", or the Devaluation of Immigrant Labour in Canada

Many professional and skilled Canadian immigrants suffer from de-skilling and the nonrecognition of their foreign credentials. Consequently, they are underrepresented in the upper segments of the Canadian labour market. Rather than accepting this devaluation of immigrant labour as a naturally occurring adjustment period, I suggest that regulatory institutions actively exclude immigrants from the upper segments of the labour market. In particular, professional associations and employers give preference to Canadian-born and educated workers and deny immigrants access to the most highly desired occupations.
Pierre Bourdieu's notion of institutionalised cultural capital and his views of the educational system as a site of social reproduction provide the entry point for my theoretical argument. I find that the nonrecognition of foreign credentials and dismissal of foreign work experience systematically excludes immigrant workers from the upper segments of the labour market. This finding is based on data from interviews with institutional administrators and employers in Greater Vancouver who service or employ immigrants from South Asia and the former Yugoslavia.     

After the landing: Moral control and surveillance in Italy's asylum seeker camps (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

Though the recent tragedies in the Strait of Sicily and the daily arrival of refugees on Italy's southern shores, have captured international media attention, institutional silence shrouds what happens after the landing, and the courses asylum seekers follow within the bureaucratic and assistance apparatuses are overshadowed by official data and state regulations. This article sheds light on some aspects of the protection and assistance system in Italy, documenting the experiences of asylum seekers who have reached Italy after crossing the Mediterranean, and now live in the camps run by the Italian government for the detention and control of undocumented migrants. Although these women and men experienced terrible abuses in their journey to Europe, once in Italy, and in particular within the camps, they are subjected to harsh forms of surveillance, as well as to moral and ethical regimes. By referring to research carried out in the reception centres for asylum seekers (CARA – Centri di Accoglienza per Richiedenti Asilo) in western Sicily where men, women and children are held after their arrival on Italy's southern coast, the author shows how the protection and assistance system does not limit itself to recognizing refugees as ‘victims’ or ‘bare life’. Rather, it pursues a more ambitious project in which moral and disciplinary regimes overlap in a systematic, long‐term process of subjection. The overlap of care, control and discipline emphasizes the close connection between the humanitarian apparatus and technologies of control. In particular, it is in the daily rules and practices performed by the personnel running the camp and aimed at governing the intimate and social life of women asylum seekers that the overlap between moral project and techniques of control becomes evident.     

Precarity and guest work in U.S. tourism: J-1 and H-2B visa programs

ABSTRACT

Over the past couple decades, hotels and resorts in the United States have come to rely on the influx of foreign guest workers to meet labor demand during peak tourism seasons. In particular, employers leverage two visas programs: J-1 and H-2B. While helping to solve seasonal workforce issues, these programs have come under scrutiny by worker advocacy groups and other stakeholders who have recognized that both programs at times feature unfavorable conditions for workers. This case study focuses on the precarities embedded in the lives of these foreign guest workers when they come to the United States. Particular attention is paid to the ways that policies crafted to facilitate the flexibilities required by employers have a hand in structuring the precarities associated with living and working in the United States. Results show that workers are at times vulnerable to inadequate housing, questionable employment practices, weak program sponsorship, and, in rare cases, human trafficking. Analysis suggests a general spatial unevenness in the ways that workers experience precarities, especially pertaining to the presence of effective community outreach programs aimed at assisting foreign workers. It is argued that the latter are particularly important for ensuring that guest worker programs can achieve the goals laid out by government agencies of providing employment and protection for workers. Research is based primarily on interviews with major stakeholder groups associated with tourism guest work, including guest workers, advocates, and program sponsors. It is suggested that despite recent reforms, more work is needed to ensure that guest workers' experiences in the United States are not fraught with vulnerability.     

Working women in the city and urban wage growth in the United States

Although the female labor force participation rate of women has been steadily rising in the United States, there is substantial variation across cities. Previous cross‐county studies find that gender inequality in employment reduces economic efficiency hindering growth. This result is examined in a regional context, across metropolitan areas in the United States. Throughout multiple model formulations including instrumental variables approaches, higher initial female labor force participation rates are positively related to subsequent wage growth in metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2010. Specifically, every 10 percent increase in female labor force participation rates is associated with an increase in real wages of nearly 5 percent.     

The house gun: White writing,white fears and black justice (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

One way of understanding the Pistorius case is through the powerful writings of white South African authors such as Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer's anticipatory post‐apartheid novel, The house gun, in which she imagined a scenario similar to the one played out in the Pistorius trial where white fears and black justice met in the courtroom. South Africa is not unique. The mobilization of white peoples' fear of black or brown ‘intruders’ has infected other divided nations, like the United States and Israel. Here the social and architectural construction of ‘white’ settler or settler‐like special enclosures fortified by the legal right to self‐defence with private weapons has reproduced a colonial ‘paranoid ethos’ and a dangerous denial of the violence that is nested like a coiled rattlesnake from within their own segregated and hypervigilant enclosures.     

Political change in the Arab oil monarchies: from liberalization to enfranchisement

The oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf region have typically been portrayed as patriarchal autocracies characterized by traditional tribal rule that have taken on the characteristics of a modern state. The historical debate on these rentier states has centred on how their substantial oil income since the 1970s has allowed them to pacify their citizenry from making demands for enfranchisement. Power was thus firmly able to rest with the elites. Since the end of the Cold War, winds of change flamed the desire for reform and the late 1990s saw significant political changes. The empirical data indicates that this pace has increased, albeit at differential speeds, within the context of the post‐9/11 war on terror. Interestingly, this has been the case despite turmoil in Iraq and a shift to the right in Iranian politics. The fundamental drivers of reform in the Arab oil monarchies continue to be the ruling elites themselves, however. The character of the reforms does appear to be mainly liberalizing rather than democratizing, but developments in some oil monarchies suggest that this process can be viewed as an early or intermediate stage of a wider enfranchisement of civil society.     

Immigrants in a segmented and often undeclared labour market

This article develops a systematic analysis of available data on foreign workers in the Italian economy. Their presence reflects the fragmented character of Italian labour markets and the particular importance in Italy of the ‘hidden economy’. These factors alone explain why Italy experiences simultaneously a shortage of labour and high labour costs, from which the demand for foreign labour has resulted. The study uses both official data and the findings of a number of secondary studies in the field to show how foreign workers participate in all the lower branches of employment and in some sectors have become the predominant group. However, the presence of foreign workers varies considerably by sector and by region, in turn reflecting certain structural features of the Italian economy. The study concludes by arguing that the presence of these foreign workers in the Italian labour market serves to perpetuate its flexibility, in some cases by complementing and in others by substituting for the indigenous labour force.     

Evolution of the Labor Market in a Regional City:The Changing Economic Performance of Emigrants from Mexico City*

Abstract. This paper draws on micro‐level data to fully inform the debate on decentralization and regional development. Using labor‐income trajectories of emigrants from Mexico City, the paper analyzes how the labor market in a regional city, Leon, evolves. Results from the econometric model suggest that migrants’ labor‐income trajectories differ between the large agglomeration and the regional city in an early stage of the evolution of the labor market, but converge in a later stage. Specifically, the slope of the earning function for recent migrants is steeper and statistically different from the slope for early migrants. The findings presented in this paper enrich the existing theory by providing microfoundations to a typically macroeconomic area of research and enable policy makers to better understand the processes underpinning the evolution of regional labor markets.     

Settlement Patterns of Logging Camps in the Great Lakes Region

Logging camps in the Great Lakes States experienced enormous changes between the 1840s and the 1940s. Research discloses an almost infinite variety in logging camp arrangements through time. The various buildings oj a camp sometimes stood side by side, other times they formed an “L” or “I” shape and still others were irregularly arranged. The camp buildings displayed increasing functional specialization through time. In the earliest camps a single building might serve for cooking, eating and sleeping. The later camps typically contained separate buildings to serve each of these functions besides a granary, blacksmith shop, van (store), saw filing shed, etc. Not surprisingly, the bunkhouse and the cookhouse or kitchen were always next to each other, as were the barn or stable and the blacksmith shop. Although the camps gradually increased in size during the pine-river drive era, the largest camps were associated with the hardwood-rail era. There was, however, great variation within any period. Whether a camp was that of a large company, small independent company or jobber largely determined the number of buildings it contained. The bunkhouse, kitchen-mess hall, stables or barns were always the largest structures of a camp. There is little chance that they would be confused with the office, blacksmith shop or any of the other structures commonly associated with logging camps. Structures at jobber camps were smaller than at corporate camps. The influence of different cultural groups, the increasing size of operations, the changing technology of logging and log transportation were among the factors that influenced settlement patterns at logging camps in the Great Lakes Stales.     

Ethnic return migration and the nation‐state: encouraging the diaspora to return ‘home’

ABSTRACT. Countries of immigration are generally faced with a dilemma: they wish to accept immigrants for economic purposes, but also to restrict immigration for ethnonational reasons. This is especially true in ethnic nation‐states, where immigration is seen as a threat to ethnonational unity more than in civic nation‐states. However, in recent decades, various ethnic nation‐states have adopted immigration policies that have encouraged their diasporic descendants born and raised abroad to return to their ethnic homeland. Ethnic return migration apparently solves the immigration dilemma by providing ethnic nation‐states with a much‐needed unskilled labour force without causing ethnonational disruption because the immigrants are co‐ethnic descendants. After comparing ethnic return migration policies in European and East Asian countries, this article analyses the development of such policies in Japan and their eventual failure to solve the country's immigration dilemma. As a result, Japan (and other ethnic nation‐states) have imposed restrictions on ethnic return migration.     

Indochine chic: Why is Vietnamese food so classy in Singapore? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

To someone from Sydney, Los Angeles, Paris or Vancouver there is something quite peculiar about the experience of eating Indochinese food in Singapore. In these former locations, it is largely present as an inexpensive ethnic cuisine whose high perceived authenticity and low cost are underwritten by communities of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao refugees and migrants. In Singapore, by contrast, Indochinese food is a chic, expensive, romantic, Frenchy, artsy, edgy haute‐cuisine. Given that the nation is Vietnam's second largest foreign investor, and that Ho Chi Minh City is a mere eighty minute budget flight away, why should it be that Vietnamese food is so rare and exotic a commodity in Singapore's multicultural culinary market? On the basis of participant observation, interviews conducted with restaurateurs and patrons, and electronic materials such as restaurant reviews and blogs, this paper will attempt to answer the question of just why Indochinese food signifies the way it does in Singapore.     

The Intersection of Citizenship Status,STEM Education,and Expected Labor Market Participation in Gulf Cooperation Council Countries

Citizenship status influences the impact of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education on the youth labor market participation in the Arabian Gulf. This research examines the relationship between citizenship status, STEM education, and expected labor market participation in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, and examines the intervening effects of information and communication technology (ICT) based instruction, specifically. The 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) provides both labor market expectations and STEM education data from all participating GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Results suggest that ICT‐enhanced STEM education differently influences the human capital development of Gulf national and expatriate youth. For example, GCC nationals do not emphasize STEM education as an avenue for employment, while expatriate youth do. In particular, as Gulf national youths' parents' education level increases, students are less likely to think they need to do well in science to get the job they want. This is indicative of a broader trend in the Gulf nations to rely more on non‐education‐related factors such as family influence or connections for social, economic, and political mobility. In contrast, results also suggest that while STEM education contributes to potential private sector labor market participation among Gulf national youth, expatriate youth are more likely to expect to need or use STEM in the labor market.     

Business dynamism,educational attainment,and residential location choice

Using individual-level, geocode data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth's 1997 cohort, I ask whether business dynamism in local labor markets, defined as the rates of job creation and establishment entry, affects the location decisions of labor force participants, and I examine how effects differ for highly and less educated labor force participants. I find that a one standard deviation increase in business dynamism is associated with a 2%–4% increase in the probability a college graduate chooses a metropolitan statistical area and an 8%–15% decrease for high school graduates with no college experience. These results support recent findings documenting a decrease in responsiveness to local labor market conditions and suggest that incentivizing job creation in local labor markets may not be enough to offset the trend of declining internal migration in the United States.     

Visibility as concealment: Informal football matches and wealth disparities in rural Jamaica (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Every weekday evening men from Black River (a coastal Jamaican town) and the nearby communities of New Town, Logwood, and Spring Park play ‘pick‐up ball’ (informal football matches) together. Some of the players are wealthy and well educated and are respected in the communities. Others are unemployed, dependent upon relatives, wives, girlfriends, or cash‐in hand employment opportunities for subsistence. My presentation proceeds from the question: why do these groups play football together? I argue that men of higher socioeconomic status aim to counteract disparities in the economic sphere with competition in the social sphere. By visibly mixing and competing with men of different socioeconomic statuses, wealthier men aim to conceal these disparities. My work proceeds from an understanding of Jamaica as a country with significant and growing inequalities of wealth and class. By looking at the social lives of higher class men in Black River, I argue that these men aim to negotiate potentially volatile socioeconomic conditions through competition and ‘strategic socializing.’ In a sense, these men aim to conceal socioeconomic disparities by making themselves visible as individuals.     

The new face of development: The ‘bottom of the pyramid’ entrepreneurs (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In recent years, ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) initiatives – from Grameen Phone Ladies and Solar Sister, to Women First and Living Goods – have captured increasing attention, not only in corporate boardrooms where the desire for untapped revenue streams looms large, but also in the arenas of development policy and practice, where entrepreneurship is celebrated as a way to repurpose ‘informal’ and/or ‘subsistence’ workers through new forms of private sector engagement. Based on fieldwork with BoP schemes in Bangladesh and South Africa, and cases drawn from other regions, this paper explores how development is outsourced through the figure of the BoP entrepreneur, the ‘poor’ woman who travels door‐to‐door delivering a range of branded manufactured goods across the ‘retail black spots’ of developing countries. These women are actively converted into entrepreneurial subjects through a set of ideological and material practices that aim to produce and hone the requisite traits of industry, market discipline and entrepreneurial distinction to succeed in global business; subject positions that can bring tangible rewards to those who successfully assume them. However, the process of outsourcing development to a reservoir of ‘informal labour’ unsettles BoP claims of ‘inclusive capitalism’, as an ethos of meritocracy and individual responsibility not only deflects the responsibility for development onto the poor themselves, but remakes their subjectivities in service to global brands.