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In Vietnam garment factories are increasingly moving to rural areas, encouraged by government incentives and labour shortages. Many factories predominantly employ women, and in this article we examine the experiences of 12 women working at a factory in their home village in northern Vietnam. Factory work, because it is in the formal sector, has made visible to the women's families and their communities that they are 'workers', in contrast to the invisibility of domestic and family agriculture work. Taking an empowerment approach to frame this study, we argue that their new financial resources and visibility as workers led them to challenge gendered roles in their households in important ways, including around financial decision-making and the distribution of domestic work. They also felt their status within the community was elevated. However, our findings show that empowerment is conditional, incremental and constrained by patriarchal familial dynamics and gendered societal scripts. As with elsewhere, the tensions between factory work as a form of empowerment and as a form of exploitation are inherently linked, and women's gendered identities shape the ways factory owners are able to create a cheaper factory workforce in rural Vietnam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University students are increasingly required to undertake lengthy unpaid placements, and for many students this needs to be balanced with the paid work they already do. The literature about internships has focused on whether internships help students get jobs post-graduation, or if placements are exploitative, given pay is minimal or non-existent. This article contributes to this literature by examining how placements affect students' current paid employment. Vosko's framework, published in 2010, which identifies the precarious features of the employment relationship and interrogates the social context and location of this employment, is drawn on here. The article is based on a quantitative and qualitative survey of social work students at an Australian university, who need to complete a lengthy placement. The argument made here is that the requirements of lengthy placements restrict the conditions in which students can engage in the workforce and by doing so increase the precarity of their workforce participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, there are 130,000 students studying social work across 30 universities. The Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) mandates the completion of at least 1,000 hours of field education for qualification, across at least two placements in different fields of practice. This means a full-time social work placement at 7.5 hours per day is typically just under 3.5 months' duration. Yet, recent Australian research has demonstrated that students experience significant levels of financial and other stress during lengthy, unpaid placements. In response to this, we surveyed Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) students who were currently undertaking or had recently undertaken (n = 60) their first or second field placement at Victoria University, in Australia to elicit their feedback on their experiences of lengthy unpaid placements. The descriptive survey was completed anonymously online and consisted of 38 short answer questions that elicited demographic information and respondents' opinions on key field placement criteria. The results of this study have important implications for field education, as it adds to the existing calls for a reworking of the AASW accreditation standards to address this issue. Future research could incorporate feedback from field liaisons, and field directors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore through analyses of interviews the meanings and experiences of everyday multiculturalism in a suburb in Melbourne, Australia. The people we interviewed valued and experienced diversity in different, yet interrelated ways: as an experience of multiculturalism, as providing comfort in diversity and as embodied in ethnic hubs in a segmented geography. Everyday racism can make forging belonging and connections across diverse ethnic groups difficult. Yet, Footscray is constructed as a place in which diversity is regarded as normative and protective. Our focus on a local suburb has allowed us to develop insight into the diverse ways identities are constituted through multiple understandings and experiences of diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]