7 results on '"Pahle, Simon"'
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2. The rise and demise of the 'social clause' proposal in the 1990s: implications of a discourse theoretical reading
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Pahle, Simon
- Subjects
International Labour Organization -- Standards ,Trade and professional associations -- Standards ,Labor movement ,Industry association information - Published
- 2010
3. UniLúrio: Present and Future – A feasibility study of academic cooperation between Mozambique and Norway
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Braathen, Einar and Pahle, Simon
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Cooperation ,UniLúrio ,Norway ,Academic ,Mozambique - Abstract
Based on a field visit to University of Lúrio and its six faculties, the report assesses the needs, conditions and possibilities for future cooperation between UniLúrio and Norwegian universities.
- Published
- 2018
4. Back to the Future? Charting Features of the Not-So-New Convergence in Aidland.
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Pahle, Simon
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MODERNIZATION theory , *CASE studies , *ETHICS - Abstract
During the last decade, the liberal paradigm, hegemonic in development assistance from the 1980 and well into the 2000s, has seen a fracturing. Rather than an impasse or outright conflict between 'aid with Chinese characteristics' and that of traditional donors, we might now be witnessing an evolving convergence. Through a concise review of China's aid –its modalities, motives, substance, underlying conceptions of development, and morals – I extrapolate the following key features across the Chinese approach: Collateralization of development finance; neo-mercantilism; a preference for aid to tangibles; a deep-seated 'growthmentality'; and a non-moralizing politics. I then take these features as referents for charting possible convergence in a case study of recent shifts in the development assistance of Norway – a hitherto ardent advocate for liberalist thinking and practices in aidland. In ways of thinking and acting, there seem to be some clear commonalities emerging. Convergence around said referents may owe much to the fact that these are not so novel – they exhume much of that which is associated with the modernization paradigm, which traditional donors now seem to re-discover as both feasible and desirable templates for aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
5. Bringing the workers' rights back in? : the discourse and politics of fortifying core labour standards through a labour-trade linkage
- Author
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Pahle, Simon, Berge, Gunnvor, Shanmugaratnam, Nadarajah, and Derman, William
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Social science: 200::Political science and organizational theory: 240 [VDP] - Abstract
Throughout the 1990s the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) conducted a campaign to convince states to institute a linkage between the international labour and trade regimes (also dubbed a social clause): Trading rights granted to countries qua members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) would be made conditional on their compliance with International Labour Organisation (ILO) core labour standards – i.e., their upholding of the rights that enable workers ‘to claim a fair share of the wealth they have helped to generate’. The proposal was premised on the claim that increasing global competition confers commercial advantages on producers that undercut labour standards, and that this incites a regulatory race to the bottom. With a labour-trade linkage, however, such undercutting would become a commercial liability and presumably unleash a race to the acceptable. While the campaign was the most wide-ranging in the history of the international union movement, it won limited support: Few trade unions or civil society organisations in the developing world rallied behind it, and developing country governments resolutely refused to make the proposal part of the Doha Round negotiations mandate. However, the question is not if the linkage proposal will return to the international debate, but when and on whose terms. The present thesis explores whether and how a labour-trade linkage may help to tackle the challenges that confront labour in developing countries. In so doing, it privileges the viewpoints of activists in Brazil and South Africa. It furthermore pays particular attention to the challenge of realising agricultural workers’ freedom of association and right to collective bargaining (i.e., ‘trade union rights’) in the two countries. The study is organised around three key research questions: First, why were certain influential workers’ rights activists lukewarm towards, if not actively opposed to the linkage idea during the 1990s? Second, to what extent are the trade union rights of South African and Brazilian agricultural workers realised, and how may the present situation be accounted for? Third, what would be the properties of a linkage helping to tackle the challenges that confront Brazilian and South African labour, including in agriculture, and to what extent can a linkage thus conceived be accommodated by the international trade and labour regimes? With regards to the first question, the main finding is that previous attempts at gauging the linkage debate as a showdown between a liberalist and an interventionist discourse ignores that the strength and sources of linkage resistance owed a lot to a pervasive counterhegemonic discourse. This brings into view the principled and practical problems that would follow if labour rights were to be safeguarded by the fair competition logic of WTO. As to the second question, the study finds that agricultural workers, in Brazil and South Africa alike, do not organise themselves to any considerable extent, nor are they in a position to meaningfully affect the terms and conditions of employment through collective bargaining. However, the respective case studies highlight quite different reasons for such poor trade union rights realisation. In the case of Brazil, a corporatist labour relations system in conflict with the relevant ILO conventions plays a considerable role: Significantly, legislation prescribes union monopoly representation in predetermined occupational categories, and this forces agricultural wageworkers to share trade unions with smallholders. This ‘cohabitation’ constitutes a significant obstacle to the organisation and collective bargaining of wageworkers. South Africa’s pluralist labour relations system was borne out of the transition to democracy, is praised by the ILO and trade unionists alike, and the inability of agricultural workers to organise and press collective claims here is not readily attributable to legislation. The fundamental problem relates to enforcement: The system rests on the assumption that progressive labour legislation will suffice to cast rural unions in the role as effective custodians and enforcers of individual workers’ freedom of association. But structural features of the agricultural sector collude with union ineptness to prevent this from happening. When individual workers’ freedom of association is nevertheless taken to be the reserve of trade unions, that freedom is left de facto unprotected. As regards to the third question, the thesis finds that a linkage helping to tackle the challenges that confront Brazilian and South African labour (i) should be part of a wider internationalist labour compromise that heeds not only the protection of rights but also of jobs in developing countries; (ii) should superimpose ILO rule on WTO (not the opposite); (iii) be premised on the use of targeted and positive trade measures; and (iv) should consider how to give traction to the trade union rights of presently unprotected or unorganised workers. The question of political will of governments notwithstanding, the major obstacles to a labourtrade linkage with such properties reside in the make-up of ILO – not WTO. Nordiska Afrikainstitutet
- Published
- 2011
6. Bringing Workers' Rights Back In? Propositions towards a Labour-Trade Linkage for the Global South.
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Pahle, Simon
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INTERNATIONAL trade , *HISTORY of labor , *ECONOMICS & politics , *LABOR unions - Abstract
ABSTRACT The idea of forging a linkage between global trade and labour standards has a long history and has been the subject of fierce debate. In a global political economy that incites 'competition for jobs', the idea cannot escape controversy. Crucially, it has failed to win significant support from trade unionists in the global South. Drawing on viewpoints voiced by workers' rights activists in South Africa and Brazil, this article presents four propositions on the features and functions that a labour-trade linkage would have to possess if it is to serve workers' interests, and explores whether and how these may be accommodated by the ILO and WTO regimes. It is argued that a linkage requiring a new single WTO undertaking is out of the question; a linkage would only make sense if it superimposes ILO rule onto the WTO, not the opposite; a linkage should be premised on positive trade measures; and, finally, it should serve the interests of presently unprotected and unorganized workers. Overall, the main challenge of such a linkage would be to achieve the necessary reform within the ILO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2015
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7. What difference does the International Labour Organisation make? Freedom of association norms, supervision and promotion vis-à-vis Brazil.
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Pahle, Simon
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INDUSTRIAL relations , *FREEDOM of association , *COLLECTIVE bargaining , *LABOR unions , *ECONOMIC policy - Abstract
Drawing on a case study of Brazil, this paper explores the extent to which and how International Labour Organisation's (ILO) freedom of association norms, supervision and promotion affect domestic provisions for workers' associational power. In terms of its legislative, judiciary and executive dimensions, ILO illustrate key challenges of a ‘soft law’ regime; indeed, it has allowed successive Brazilian governments to escape key freedom of association obligations. I detail what this means for workers in agriculture: crucially, Brazil's non-standard provisions for associational power exacerbate, rather than countervail, labour's structural disadvantages vis-à-vis capital. ILO norms have nevertheless been of great political significance. They sat at the heart of the discourse through which oppositional labour framed repressive labour–state relations during the late 1970s and 1980s. However, in the context of neoliberal globalisation, the meanings that Brazilian labour inscribed in these norms saw ‘rightwards’ slide, while the political connotations of the previously discredited corporatism slid in the opposite direction. Eventually, labour failed to support Lula's attempt, during the 2000s, to align Brazil's labour relations system with ILO's standards. Still, the deep historical identification of Brazil's left with ILO norms has, in combination with ILO's regularly issued denunciations and recent domestic ‘decent work’ promotion, helped a certain permutation of legal and political practice. The case suggests that the force of ILO is highly contingent on particular structural conjunctures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
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- 2014
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
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