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Bégin,
Gilles
A
dominant model of identity has a profound influence on subsequent
innovations and strategy development
(Ganz: 190). Consequently, unions are
constrained by their past (experiences, shared ideas, habits, values)
(Hyman, 2007). Will unionism
overcome these references to past identities and
remain a central hub of collective representation?
Berton,
Fabienne
If
one understands that the knowledge economy is based not only on the
dematerialisation of exchanges and telecommunications networks but
also on all production processes and transformation that lead to the
existence of information and knowledge, then its scope covers a broad
spectrum of current human activities (automation, networks,
automation, service sector). The objective of the paper
is to update the skills valued in the knowledge economy through the
analysis of career paths of a sample of French workers. Thirty French
workers were interviewed using
semi-structured interviews and they were
questioned about their careers before and after a break
(voluntary or involuntary) in employment.
Following the breakdown of their employment contract some
workers pursued (and developed) their full
involvement in the knowledge economy, some
retreated, and others were clearly excluded.
The paper examines a number of features are
common to workers in each of these three groups.
Brophy,
Enda
Political theorist Jodi Dean employs communicative capitalism to
name the way our political economic system has, over recent decades,
incorporated and become increasingly dependent upon “the proliferation,
distribution, acceleration and intensification of communicative access and
opportunity.” Emerging in the 1980s and exploding in the 1990s, call centres
have rapidly become an integral part of the global knowledge economy. These
factories of communication, where knowledge, language and emotion are put to
work, increasingly mediate relations with the institutions in our lives. Call
centres nurture long-term customer relationships, sell us services, help us
through our technological mishaps, collect on our (growing) debts, and ensure
that our cultural and political preferences are continually probed, sorted, and
fed back to marketers. As a result of their steady meshing into the circuits of
the global economy, the growth of these workspaces has been remarkable,
producing significant shifts in the composition of labour forces across many
regions over the last twenty years. Communicative capitalism requires
communicative labour, yet for millions of call centre employees across the world
working with a headset has not quite lived up to the “knowledge worker” hype,
tending to include a well-established mixture of high stress, low wages, shaky
employment, disciplinary management, draining emotional labour, and pervasive
electronic surveillance. Drawing on an ongoing international study of labour
organizing in call centres and arguing that call centres are a vital test case
for the recomposition of labour, this presentation offers an overview of labour
struggles in the global call centre industry.
Campbell,
Shelagh
This
paper describes a case study of professionals who seek collective
bargaining. Professionals find themselves increasingly in
dependant employment. In the move from self employment to
captive or dependant employment, professionals’ power to control
their labour process changes. Within self regulated
professions, the professional regulatory body controls much of the
labour process. Apprenticeships, such as clinical locums
in medicine and articles in law, play an important role in the
transfer of labour process norms. However, more and more
professionals seek employment in large organizations where the
autonomy previously enjoyed by the self employed is now subject to
bureaucratic and administrative controls. The result of the
erosion of traditional labour process power under bureaucratic forms
of organization leads professionals to seek alternate forms of
control. Many turn to collective bargaining as a means to wrest
back control over the application of discretionary judgement from
large, often public sector, employers.
In
the case of the law in Canada, a great many lawyers are employed in
the public sector. The subspecialty of prosecution was broadly
framed as a service private sector lawyers provided on a
fee-for-service basis, but until recently it was not a distinct area
of practice to which one dedicated a career. The
regularization of employment in the public sector results in a strong
sense of occupational community among criminal prosecutors.
This occupational community is further enhanced by the association
that conducts collective bargaining. The forces of bureaucratic
control and occupational community act together to support collective
bargaining among professionals who otherwise have been opposed to
this strategy, claiming it is “unprofessional”.
The
emerging forms of online peer-based production and distribution as
part of the networked information economy are threatening the
incumbents of the old industrial economy. The conflict over
intellectual property is just one manifestation of a crisis resulting
from contradictory tendencies in the capitalist system. On the one
hand businesses are compelled to exert greater control over
information commodities through expanding intellectual property
provisions (and new advances in Digital Rights Management
technologies). On the other hand businesses are simultaneously
compelled to grant greater autonomy in the arrangement of cooperative
social relations as part of the processes of production. Stated
another way, despite the expansion of intellectual property law, both
in terms of its scope and duration, contemporary forms of capitalist
production make possible and even necessary the very forms of
cooperative social relations which now threaten it. Nowhere are these
contradictory tendencies more visible than in the conflicts over
copyright in the networked information economy.
Over
the course of the previous five years approximately 40,000 people
have been targeted for civil suits by the world’s four largest
record companies (BMI, Sony, BMG, and Warner Brothers).
These companies, represented by their media trade organization—the
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)—launched a
litigation campaign in which suits were filed against individuals in
U.S. district courts alleging copyright infringement for content
shared across peer-to-peer networks. The vast majority of these cases
resulted in either settlements or default judgments in favor of the
plaintiffs. Default judgments have often been in amounts more than
1000 times the actual damages while settlement amounts have often
been in excess of 2000 times the actual damages. Despite these
circumstances, a growing sense of outrage among members of the
peer-to-peer community helped produce a number of legal challenges to
the RIAA litigation campaign. Moreover, there have been a small
number of high profile cases in which the individuals who decided to
challenge their accusers in court garnered some amount of media
attention.
Cohen,
Nicole
Freelance
writing is technology-based knowledge labour that draws on workers’
creative and communicative capacities to produce commodities for the
media industries. It is also low-paid, precarious work that
increasingly pits individual producers against powerful corporate
employers in the high-stakes struggle over intellectual property
rights.
This
paper will discuss the conditions of labour that have spurred a
disparate group of workers to begin the unlikely and difficult task
of collective organizing. The paper will outline the range of
strategies and organizational models workers have taken up to defend
their rights. This includes
individual negotiation strategies, coalitions and campaigns, formal
and informal networks, professional associations, a literary agency,
and a trade union model. The paper will examine the possibilities and
limitations for organizing freelance writers in Canada and will
assess the implications of the organizational forms writers have
adopted.
Coles,
Amanda
The
available pool of highly-skilled professional, creative, logistical
and technical workers is the essential infrastructure for the
screen-based industries; industries that
are routinely positioned at the centre of progressive economic
development strategies across Canada. All
levels of government pursue a broad policy
framework for economic development emphasizing
public investments in human capital and the creative economy.
However, there is
strong evidence that insufficient training and skills development
resources are
available
for screen-based workers.
This
paper examines the degree to which the
existing public policy frameworks for training and skills development
meet the specific needs of workers in the screen-based industries.
Using Ontario as a case study, I will examine the structure and
resource allotment for the Ontario LMA/LMDA agreement, how the
government has chosen to use those resources to invest in skills
training and professional development for the cultural sector, and
whether the current policy framework is sufficient to support
Ontario’s vision of a thriving creative economy.
Deer, Joann The Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and
Radio Artists (ACTRA) is a union representing 21,000 professional performers
working in recorded media in Canada including TV, film, radio and digital media.
It is tackling many of the thorny problems bedevilling self-employed knowledge
workers. As a trade union and affiliate of the Canadian Labour Congress, ACTRA’s
principal role is to negotiate, administer and enforce collective agreements to
provide performers with equitable compensation as well as safe and reasonable
working conditions. ACTRA and its predecessor organizations have fought hard to
protect the rights of Canadian performers for more than 65 years, making
important gains including: regulated work hours, minimum pay rates, safer sets,
meal periods, residual and use payments, comprehensive health and insurance
plans, and protection for children and other performers on set. In 2007, ACTRA
members went on strike for their first time in our history. ACTRA won the
strike, securing ground-breaking new media provisions in the Independent
Production Agreement. The union also lobbies tirelessly for regulation
and government policies that protect our culture and encourage audio-visual
production in all genres, thereby expanding work opportunities for Canadian
performers.
dePeuter,
Greig
The video game industry is paradigmatic of the
contours, contradictions, and challenges of the workforce animating the
contemporary knowledge economy. Contesting the popular image of video games as
playful devices or pointless distractions, this presentation begins with the
argument that video games are exemplary media of Empire, the hyper-capitalist
complex theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Situated within this wider
analytical frame, the paper zeroes in on the immaterial and material labour
fuelling the rapidly globalizing game industry. It identifies defining features
of the composition of video game labour, including the ‘work as play’ image that
has been historically attached to the game development workplace; the
outsourcing of game development work, a trend which has accelerated in response
to the financial crisis; the work in the African coltan mines and Asian e-waste
sites that lie at the beginning and end of the video game console value chain;
the unpaid creative labour of game players that has consistently driven the
industry forward; and the use of gaming as a training technology in a range of
occupational contexts. Searching across this fractured workforce for expressions
of resistance, the paper concludes that although there are instances of
collective association among game developers, at present, dissent in the
planetary game factory is most apparent outside the walls of the industry’s
largest studios among the autonomous media-makers connecting virtual games to
wider currents of struggle against Empire. If virtual worlds are deployed to
socialize the labouring subjects of Empire, why should the opposition not
include them in its media toolkit to experiment on escape options? This question
opens one path among many toward narrowing the gap between the promise and the
reality of the knowledge economy.
Deslauriers,
Jean-Simon
The
transformation of the labor market faced by workers directly
influences the practices of their
institutions of representation. The erosion of the manufacturing base
is forcing unions to incorporate new categories of workers to ensure
the turnover of staff and continuity of the movement.
The paper proposes, from a survey of the literature, a
portrait of the challenges involved the construction of collective
action on issues related to work organization in an economy where the
work is increasingly individualized and where the question of
knowledge is becoming increasingly important. It will seek to
highlight the features relating to the integration of new categories
of workers in the labor movement and the challenges underlying the
construction of a collective action under these
new conditions. Specific attention will be paid to
items related to changes in work organization, how they transform the
relationship to work, and challenges facing trade unions around the
issue.
Durbin,
Sue
This
paper describes upon the careers of
thirteen senior female scientists in a UK public sector organization
engaged in scientific research and development. To date, very few
studies have been conducted with female scientists in the UK, despite
their central role in the so-called knowledge-based economy and their
position as key stakeholders in the emerging world of knowledge work.
The paper explores what it means to be a
‘knowledge worker’ and how this may be gendered. Each
of the female scientists in
the study have achieved a relatively senior status in a field
where men dominate and where the sector is gendered. The
majority have followed the traditional
career path, have experienced a steady and
rapid career progression, yet they
have not broken through the ‘armoured glass ceiling’ at
the top of their organisations. This has implications for gender
equality in a knowledge-based economy where women’s careers are
defined differently to those of men.
Fiorito,
Jack and Daniel Gallagher
Although many have
identified shifts toward knowledge work as an important development,
the nature of associated changes and their implications are less
clear.
The proposed study
focuses on three worker perceptions, specifically: 1) Trust in
employers to treat employees fairly; 2) Relative efficacy of
collective and individual approaches to solving workplace problems;
and, 3) Whether union representation makes workers better off or
worse off. We examine the sensitivity of
results for these industrial relations
outcomes to alternative operational definitions of knowledge work.
We
expect our findings to help sharpen understanding of issues raised by
the growth of knowledge work. By relating worker “type” to
a broad range of work-related perceptions we expect to advance
comprehension of knowledge work and its implications for industrial
relations outcomes and worker representation forms.
New
forms of non-traditional employment in the
emerging knowledge economy reveal the inadequacy of the conventional
rules of collective representation. In the past, representing a group
of men in full time
employment with a single employer was relatively easy.
Nowadays, the diversity of forms of employment, especially from the
knowledge economy, creates heterogeneous groups of workers. The
extent of the power of collective representation
by unions is determined by analyzing several criteria,
including community of interest. This criterion is perhaps the most
difficult to implement, and analyze, in the knowledge economy for the
simple reason that labor groups are split. This paper
examines the applicability of community of
interest for knowledge workers. Does
a community of interest transcend the diversity of
jobs? Is it
applicable as it is or must
it be adapted or completely redesigned?
Fontaine,
Laurence-Léa
New
forms of non-traditional employment in the
emerging knowledge economy reveal the inadequacy of the conventional
rules of collective representation. In the past, representing a group
of men in full time
employment with a single employer was relatively easy.
Nowadays, the diversity of forms of employment, especially from the
knowledge economy, creates heterogeneous groups of workers. The
extent of the power of collective representation
by unions is determined by analyzing several criteria,
including community of interest. This criterion is perhaps the most
difficult to implement, and analyze, in the knowledge economy for the
simple reason that labor groups are split. This paper
examines the applicability of community of
interest for knowledge workers. Does
a community of interest transcend the diversity of
jobs? Is it
applicable as it is or must
it be adapted or completely redesigned?
Haiven,
Judith
This
paper discusses and “old style” work
that depends on at least one aspect of
knowledge work—emotional labour. Looking at preliminary data
from the hospitality sector, this paper
examines the notion of “friendliness” on a scale beginning
at one end with being pleasant and at the other end, wearing “sexy”
clothing. These differing views of “friendliness” tend to
anchor the server, who is often part time and
female, in behaviours that she thinks will assist her in
maximizing the tips she receives. Lurking
behind the issue of “friendliness” is the bigger and more widely
researched area of emotional labour. Emotional
labour binds the service workers to a rather unequal (and unwritten)
agreement. Their ongoing relationships with customers and
their very jobs are dependent on the workers’ acceptance of
customers’ anger, taunts or nastiness. The paper
concludes with a discussion of the impact of servers’
emotional labour on their income.
Haiven,
Max My paper will provide a theoretical groundwork and some
historical evidence for understanding race and racism as knowledge/culture work.
I argue the study of knowledge and cultural work in the new economy has largely
failed to take race seriously and that in order to do so we need to do more than
add it as another “variable” to our research. Instead, I seek to rehistoricize
knowledge/cultural work within Western capitalist modernity and demonstrate that
the old and the new economy have always relied on what Omi and Winant call
“racial projects” or the production of racialized distinctions in the broad
interests of the economic system as a whole. I seek to demonstrate how these
“racial projects” constitute ongoing forms of knowledge/culture work, with
venerable if horrific pedigrees. Drawing on several historical and contemporary
examples, I argue that our analysis of knowledge and cultural work in the new
economy is incomplete when we fail to attend to race, especially today where the
dominant form of the knowledge/culture work of race is to render race invisible
or insignificant, even while racialized inequality, oppression and exploitation
deepens and globalizes.
Haiven,
Larry
Most Canadian writers, performers and visual
artists, whether rich or poor, are self-employed. In recent years, they have
formed and joined unions to further their interests. More recently, one of the
biggest areas of contention with those who purchase their work has been over
intellectual property rights. Canadian public policy has delegated the capturing
of the returns on those rights to copyright collectives, some of them attached
to unions, others not. This presentation explores the war over those returns,
its battle lines, skirmishes and outcomes.
Hannah,
Richard
The
importance of inquiry into individual employer-employee non-compete
contracts lies in their intersection of product and labor market
relationships. These contracts are intended to neutralize the
competitive threat from former employees. This paper probes the
human capital aspect of specific investment as employer justification
of this control.
The
paper presents an analysis of U.S. court
cases to explore how courts have viewed the
problem of investment-return in human capital, original endowments
confounded with improvements, and the control of productive or
profitable knowledge in a competitive system.
A
summary is developed as to the state of maturity of this issue in
courts. General comments are offered
regarding relevance of non-compete agreements to traditional notions
of human capital theory, the implications
for the spread of non-compete agreeements across occupations and
industries as part of the continuing shift away from collective
agreements and toward individual contracting in the United States;
and the international dimension of non-compete agreements.
Holmes,
John
In the old economy, firms established geographically
based upon economic inputs: raw materials, costs of transportation, financial
incentives, and quality and quantity of available workforce. Workers tended to
be either in situ or to follow the lure of employment to a location remote to
them. Their needs and their relation to the geography were secondary to the
firm's.
Houle,
France
Le
droit au travail pour les immigrants qualifiés repose, dans un
premier temps, sur la reconnaissance de leurs qualifications
professionnelles par les ordres professionnels et les associations de
métier. Or, les politiques publiques visant à faciliter cette
reconnaissance se sont développées, jusqu'à tout récemment, très
lentement. Depuis quelques années, toutefois, les gouvernements
fédéral et provinciaux (ainsi que territoriaux) prennent plusieurs mesures
et normes juridiques qui ont pour effet d'accélérer au rythme de la
vitesse grand 'V' les mécanismes de reconnaissance de ces
qualifications.
Jones,
Paul
Legault,
Marie-Josée and Johanna Weststar
Is
the very notion of “representation” relevant for the regulation
game of video game developers?
Video
game developers are the graphic artists, animators, computer
programmers, game designers and producers who create video games.
They are emblematic of the rising players on the contemporary labour
scene: highly skilled, mobile, non-unionized knowledge workers who
are members of a project team. The industry has maintained the
non-conformist feel of the dotcom era (Ross, 2003) and created an
image of a hip, fun, and free culture where you can get paid to play
games.
The
reality is somewhat different. The nature of how work is organized
under the growing project management regime (Chasserio and Legault,
2009; Legault and Bellemare, 2008; Legault and Chasserio, 2003) is
that the iron triangle of constraints: budget, time and scope, are
paramount drivers in the lives of project team members (Chatfield
and Johnson, 2007). The process to complete each video game outlines
these constraints as each game is a unique project (Deuze, Chase
Bowen, Allen, 2007) that must be completed on time, within budget,
and be popular among customers, because pre-release marketing and the
date of product release are a decisive factor of success (Deuze,
Chase Bowen, Allen, 2007; Kline, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2003).
In a former research project, Chasserio and Legault (2009) showed how
pervasive the iron triangle is in IT work. Since reputation is the
main asset in today’s highly mobile portfolio career (Kelan, 2008),
quite often, the solution at hand is for employees to increase work
hours at so-called “crunch time” to complete the project. One of
the utmost risks in the industry (exceeding cost) is thus passed to
employees.
An
overview of the content of the social web conducted to date by
Johanna Weststar and a pre-inquiry by M.J. Legault reveals a host of
risk concerns among video game developers: working hours and
overtime, quality of life, balancing work and family, scarcity of
women, high incidence of certain illnesses (musculoskeletal disorders
of the arms or hands, burnout), intellectual property, crediting
standards, non-compete and confidentiality clauses, knowledge sharing
and updating, etc (see also Batt, Christopherson, Rightor, and van
Jaarsveld, 2001; Deuze, Chase Bowen, Allen, 2007).
Workers
in the IT sector are often overlooked as a population that might
require support in their employment relationship. Haiven (2003)
places high-skill, high-tech workers outside of the traditional
‘Union Zone’. These workers are seen to hold the highest
individual negotiating power in their employment relationships.
However, workers in the IT sector have more limited protections and
representation than professionals; without the protection of
professional status or other representative groups, individual
workers in the global IT sector (video game developers included) may
actually bear a high burden of any risks or challenges associated
with their employment.
How
do video game developers cope with these employment issues? Video
game developers take various approaches towards achieving workplace
regulation:
-
Given the prosperity of the industry, as the demand for labour is
much higher than the supply, video game developers seem to turn
primarily to the “exit” strategy when dissatisfied at work – as
opposed to the “voice” strategy (Hirschman, 1970). In fact,
mobility is seen as a virtue and is mentioned as the most current way
to get a pay raise (Chasserio & Legault, 2009).
-
Creating professional or community networks and associations; a
professional association called the International Game Developers
Association (IGDA) is “dedicated to improving developers’ careers
and lives through community, professional development and advocacy.”
(IDGA, nd). Though perceived to have very few teeth, the IGDA does
set standards for some employer policies, for instance regarding
non-compete agreements, and they have proposed a grievance procedure
that is obviously non compulsory, but rests on the power of bad
publicity
(http://www.igda.org/wiki/Quality_of_Life_SIG/Grievance_Committee).
-
Taking spontaneous job action internationally by the means of social
web, as a tool for organization, advocacy and action around
particular issues.
-
Negociating individually with managers.
-
Implementing local joint committees.
Apart
from obstacles pertaining to labour laws and non standard employment
practices, we must note the feeble propensity to unionize among IT
high-skilled workers (Hossfeld 1995; US Department of Labor 2000).
Often unionism is said to be irrelevant to
the high-tech workforce, because of their individual economic power,
individualism, mobility, and satisfactory
working conditions (Robinson and McIlwee 1989; Hossfeld 1995; Milton
2003).
The
result is that the individual worker tends to be more of an
entrepreneur, the bearer of risk who makes choices within the market
and has to live with the consequences of those choices as risk is
more and more externalized (D’Amours,
2009). This can be interpreted as a deficit in workplace citizenship.
Neff,
Gina
Several
social theorists note that contemporary jobs entail a lack of job
security and observe the increase in the precarity of modern life.
While there is much writing on theories of these changes, less has
been done on why people accept riskier work and how they are
adapting, especially within technology industries. I examine what I
call "Venture Labor"--the investment of financial, human,
and social capital that ordinary employees make in the companies they
work using a case study from the early pioneers of the commercial
internet. I argue that not only is Venture Labor applicable to many
different high-risk and innovative industries, but it arises during a
particularly charged moment in the transition of the U.S. economy
from an industrial economy to a post-industrial economy. I will
outline the origins and rise of employees' entrepreneurial behavior,
the dynamics of risk during the dot-com boom and bust, and employees'
strategies for managing this risk.
Newell,
Sue
Many
knowledge workers are focused on some kind of innovation activity –
creating, developing or implementing knowledge that will facilitate
innovations in products, services or organizational arrangements.
Much of this innovation work takes place in projects, since projects
are seen as more flexible forms of organizing than traditional
bureaucratic structures. However, there is a paradox here since while
research has demonstrated that successful innovation (at least more
disruptive innovation) is inherently indeterminate and messy
the project management literature stresses the importance of
planning and control. In this presentation we will explore this
paradox, considering how this tension between messy innovation and
planned projects is played out in practice and its effect on the
management of knowledge workers.
Quinlan,
Elizabeth
This
study uses institutional ethnography to explore the social and
institutional forces that shape the knowledge work of health care
providers in and across multi-disciplinary teams. The
‘standpoint’ of the study is the teams’ cornerstone members,
the newly minted nurse practitioners. Habermas’s theory of
communicative action informs the study in order to analyze knowledge
work as the potential production of new, communicatively achieved
knowledge. The study demonstrates that the on-going
coordination of teams’ knowledge work activities is a complicated,
dynamic process involving an interplay of talk and text regulated by
the requirements of the mandating texts. However, when
knowledge work is fully deliberative, the activation of texts
involves challenging mandated courses of action. In this way,
teams engaged in fully deliberative knowledge work are the site for
creating new knowledge and disrupting the existing professional
knowledge structures and the associated interests.
Saunders,
Patricia
This
presentation will first outline the ethical challenges created by the
current global migration of health professionals and briefly review
the lessons learned from the past decade of efforts of health and
labour organizations –at both national and international levels- to
address the inequities created by global migration for both source
nations and migrating health professionals within receiving
countries. This overview will be followed by a critical
analysis of Canada’s draft of Pan-Canadian Principles for the
Ethical Recruitment and Retention of International Health Providers
with a particular focus on the approach that has been taken to
government and employer responsibilities for protecting the rights
and ensuring equitable treatment of international health
professionals.
Shniad,
Sid
Despite
decades of being on the receiving end of ferocious attacks from
corporations and governments, organized labour is not functioning
like a movement at all. The experience of unions in the
communications sector provides a startling illustration of the
prevailing situation, showing that even though unions have faced
staggering challenges over the last 25 years, they have not made a
serious effort to come to grips with the destructive, anti-social
forces that are arrayed against them. Instead of responding as a
movement, they have chosen to function as individual, isolated
organizations and have been picked off one by one as a result.
Silver,
Will
This
paper discusses that as a result of
post-industrial development—particularly the flexibility and
reflexivity that Harvey and Lash and Urry theorize—professionals
have had to become more flexible and adaptable to structural changes
in their environment. I develop the concept of flexible
professionalism, which relates to the flexible working arrangements
and working conditions, and the continuous process of education that
professionals partake in. Furthermore, with professionals focusing on
re-skilling and on the job education, flexible professionalism also
points to flexibility in terms of career development. My findings
suggest that individuals are taking greater ownership of their career
paths and, somewhat paradoxically, are in some cases using horizontal
mobility as a means to achieve faster vertical mobility.
This
research is significant because it provides a grounded, ethnographic
perspective on professional itinerant work in a Canadian context.
Moreover, it provides a gateway into understanding the changing
nature of professional work.
Stevenson,
Siobhan
The
research described in this paper deals directly with questions
concerning working conditions, careers and the labour process, and
indirectly with the contestation surrounding immaterial voluntary
labour and intellectual property rights. Using the conceptual tools
of French Regulation school theory as a means of interpreting
contemporary labour conditions in the transition from a Fordist
regime of accumulation and mode of social regulation
(manufacturing-based, welfare state) to a post-Fordist regime
(information-based economies, neoliberal state), the evolution of the
public library as both a site of knowledge work and a mode of social
regulation is interrogated. To that end, changes in the social
relations of material and immaterial production within the field of
public librarianship are considered against a parallel development in
the transformation of the library user from Fordism’s library
patron through to today’s post-Fordist library consumer-producer.
Based on a critical discourse analysis of the key public library
planning documents produced by the Ontario government since the
1950s, the appropriation of the library consumer-producer’s
immaterial and voluntary labour within a reorganized and increasingly
technologically-mediated and corporatized public library service is
described. Within this context, a model is proposed which explores
the dialectic between the ascendency of the seemingly novel library consumer-producer
identity as a source of immaterial and voluntary labour, and the
diminishment of the public librarian as a skilled, waged and
unionized public service worker. While the object of this analysis is
the public library as a place of work and the public librarian as
knowledge worker, the findings have implications for working
conditions, careers and labour processes across the full range of
public service occupations at the juncture of the new information and
communications technologies (specifically “Web 2.0”), the
neoliberal state, and the demands of citizens for the full range of
welfare services. Further, as a site of social regulation, analyzing
the ways in which government policy documents constitute the citizen
identity as consumer-producer provides clues to the ways in which
citizens are being prepared for work, specifically immaterial and
voluntary, in the current political economy.
Stone,
Katherine V.W.
Labour and Employment Law in the Knowledge Economy:
International Developments Throughout the twentieth century, most countries in
the industrialized work had labor law regimes that were designed to give workers
protection for job security, steady incomes, social insurance, and other
benefits. Different countries used different mixes of regulation, bargaining,
and custom to accomplish these goals. In the late 20th century, the labor laws
came under attack. This paper looks at a sample of countries in the developed
world and shows how the most common legislative changes in the employment
regulatory structures have had the effect of promoting more types of short term
employment, expanding the use of temporary workers and independent contractors,
breaking the norm of uniformity in pay and benefits, aligning pay systems with
market rather than institutional factors, revising pensions and benefits so they
are no longer tied to continuous employment, reducing firm-specific training,
and dismantling employment security protections.
Sundararajan,
Binod and Malavika Sundararajan
Jobseekers
and students have always been trained to network to get their jobs.
But for the 20-30% of job seekers whose resumes never see the light
of the day the word “networking” becomes almost an anathema. It
is not that these people do not want to network. For whatever reason,
they are not able to meet the right people and seem to languish in
the “black holes” of their dysfunctional
networks. On the other hand we observe organizations
struggling to hire and retain the right knowledge worker, while
keeping their training and development costs low in a tight economy.
We
propose a model that places the onus back
on firms by having them tap into this
black-hole of the jobseekers network and focus on jobseekers before
they are hired. We describe how the solution lies
in both the firm and jobseeker’s abilities to train and be trained
and collaboratively network constructively.
Tremblay,
Diane-Gabrielle
There
appear to be differences and similarities in the management of
independent IT professionals and multimedia knowledge workers who are
part of semi autonomous work teams, and in the forms of autonomy they
enjoy. In project management as well as in semi autonomous teams,
success depends on the commitment and mobilisation of the
individuals. Commitment to work is often considered among the core
values of professional work, a factor by which knowledge
professionals are distinguished from other workers. A number of
studies show that autonomy and responsibilisation could potentially
translate into increased stress and pressure in the workplace (Guérin
et al., 1996; Bouffartigue and Bouteiller, 2002). In our paper, we
will reflect on the issue of autonomy, on the basis of two previous
research projects, one with independent IT workers, and the other
with salaried multimedia workers to try to determine to what extent
the concept of autonomy may present itself differently.
Tremblay,
Michel
Le Réseau public québécois de santé et de services sociaux est
actuellement à la croisée des chemins en matière de planification de la main-d’œuvre.
Pénuries de personnel, disparités régionales et demandes croissantes de congés
pour concilier famille, vie personnelle et travail exercent une pression
constante sur les travailleuses et travailleurs du système public, entraînant à
la fois surcharges de travail, démotivation et un sentiment largement partagé de
non-reconnaissance. Dans ce contexte, le recours accru par les établissements du
secteur public aux agences privées de personnel semble avantageux à la fois pour
les établissements publics et les travailleurs. Mais cela n’est qu’un mirage.
S’inspirant des modèles nord-européens de « flexicurité », le modèle présenté
ici constitue une solution de rechange qui pourrait permettre la rétention et
l’attraction des professionnels et techniciens dans le réseau public. De plus,
il permettrait d’améliorer l’efficacité et l’efficience des services publics,
ainsi que la qualité de vie au travail des travailleurs concernés.
van
Jaarsveld, Danielle
In this paper, we
analyze both qualitative and quantitative data collected from
Canadian call centre employees to evaluate
the knowledge management challenges encountered by customer service
representatives. These workplaces feature high levels of
knowledge demands given shortened product lifecycles and the intense
competitive pressures companies encounter. Customer service
representatives, therefore, need to adapt as products change and as
companies introduce new campaigns to attract customers. In order to
handle such pressures, call centres hire a mix of full-time and
non-standard staff. Much research attention has considered the
expanded use of the non-standard workforce. Yet the consequences of
blending these employment classifications is a relatively underresearched topic.
This
paper addresses:
(1) how the hiring of non-standard workers affects
overall performance (2)
the
kinds of resources employees rely on in this context to manage their
knowledge demands (3)
the
extent to
which
use of these resources influences
the levels of stress customer
service representatives encounter.
Vieta, Marcelo
Abstracts
In alphabetical order by author
École
de relations industrielles, University of Montreal
& CRIMT
The
organization of work and trade unionism in knowledge workers
One
interpretation of current tensions suggests that new identities cause
a collapse of trade union issues, amplifying confrontation with the
dominant culture, and triggering a decline
in the defense community (Touraine et al, 1984).
This is the atomization of union action around particular interests.
A more optimistic view suggests that issues of job control (eg,
professional autonomy), its encroachment on private time (eg
work-family) and diversity (eg gender, visible minority) will be an
inspirational source of renewal for the labor movement that will lead
to the development of more organic solidarity (Zoll, 1998)
which will, however, require the
deployment of new strategic capabilities.
Conservatoire
National des Arts et Metiers, Paris France
“What
are the valued competencies in the
knowledge economy? Some evidence from the careers of French workers
in the 2000s”
Simon Fraser
University
Communicative Capitalism and Labour Struggles in the Global Call Centre Industry
Saint
Mary’s University
Erosion and renewal of professional
powers in knowledge work: The role of occupational community
Caraway,
Brett
University
of Texas at Austin
Commons
and Commodities: The Conflict over Copyright in the Networked
Information Economy
This
paper explores the social structures implicated in the conflict
between opposing understandings of peer-to-peer file sharing by
looking at some of the high profile court cases resulting from the
RIAA litigation campaign. The cases are selected based on their
significance in terms of legal precedence, the arguments advanced,
and the amount of media attention each received. Understanding that
intellectual property is first and foremost an attempt to organize
social relations based on a hierarchy of access to resources, the
inquiry emphasizes the structures implicated in alternative systems
of value which are outside the system of commodification. These
structures include the circumstances which originally brought
defendants into conflict with the RIAA, the reasons which defendants
decided to mount legal defenses, as well as the support they received
from the peer-to-peer community.
York
University
Negotiating
writers' rights: The struggle to organize freelancers
McMaster
University
Under
(professional) Development: Policy, programs and resources for skills
training in the screen based industries
Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA)
Wilfrid Laurier University
Labour
and the Globalizing Game Factory
Laval
University
The
challenges of union representation among workers in a knowledge
economy
University
of the West of England,
Bristol
Knowledge
Workers and Careers: a case study of senior female scientists in a UK
public sector organization
Florida
State University and University of Central Florida
Trust
in Employers, Collectivism, and Union Efficacy
University
of Quebec at Montreal
Union
democracy and community interests? Is there a community of interests
for knowledge workers?"
Saint
Mary’s University
Emotional
Labour: the Servers' Dilemma : How 'friendly' do they have to be?
Mount
Saint Vincent University
The knowledge/culture work of race: an intervention
Saint
Mary’s University
Copyright
collectives and the struggle for intellectual property rights
Middle
Tennessee State University
Contractual
Neutralization of Competitive Threats of Human Capital
Queen’s
University, Kingston, Ontario
Knowledge
Workers and a Sense of Place
University
of Montreal
Toward
a global administrative law for qualified immigrant workers?
Ces
mesures et normes prennent plusieurs formes :
* lois,
règlements et directives administratives relatifs au droit de
l'immigration applicable aux immigrants qualifiés et ayant pour
objectif de faciliter l'acquisition rapide du statut de résident
permanent et celui de résident temporaire dont l'entrée est
possible en vertu des accords de libre-échange.
* Ententes
intergouvernementales (intra-gouvernementales et
supra-gouvernementales), accords et coopération interétatiques dans
le but de favoriser l'harmonisation des systèmes réglementaires
internes; le tout baignant dans la mise en oeuvre de la Directive (du
Cabinet fédéral) sur la rationalisation de la réglementation qui a
pour objectif la mise en oeuvre impérative du concept de la
'réglementation intelligente'.
L'objectif
de la communication est de présenter ces différentes initiatives
étatiques (gouvernementales, intergouvernementales et
supragouvernementales) en insistant sur l'importance de comprendre la
construction et le fonctionnement de ces nouveaux réseaux de normes
en émergence et qui affectent le droit au travail; ces nouveaux
réseaux de normes qui font partie de ce qui est dorénavant convenu
d'appeler le droit administratif global. Le droit administratif
global comprend les mécanismes, principes et pratiques ainsi que les
codes sociaux s'y rattachant et son étude inclut celle des
institutions réglementaires intergouvernementales formelles, des
réseaux réglementaires intergouvernementaux informels ainsi que les
arrangements relatifs à la coordination des systèmes
réglementaires, des institutions réglementaires nationales agissant
par référence à un régime intergouvernemental international, etc.
(Kingsbury, Krisch et Stewart, 2005).
Canadian
Association of University Teachers
Intellectual
Property: Producers and Users
The
Open University of Quebec – Téleq-UQAM
Video
Game Developers and Portfolio Careers
University
of Washington
Venture
Labor: Knowledge Work and Risks in the New Economy
Bentley
College
The
Management of Knowledge Workers: The Costs of Being a Gold Collar
Worker
University
of Saskatchewan
The
coordination of knowledge work in Saskatchewan's new
multi-disciplinary health care teams
Dalhousie
University
Neo-Liberalism
and the Ethics of the Global Migration of Health Professionals: Do
Codes of Ethical Conduct Work?
Retired,
Telecommunication Workers of Canada
Neo-liberalism
and Its Impact in the Telecommunications Industry: One Trade
Unionist's Perspective
My
presentation will focus on the continuing
decline of organized labour that has resulted and the kind of tactics
and strategies that must be embraced if this decline is to be
arrested.
University
of Alberta
Who's
Career is it Anyway? Flexible Professionalism and the Itinerant
Engineer
University
of Toronto
Public
librarians as knowledge workers in the knowledge economy
University
of California, Los Angeles
Labour
and Employment Law in the Knowledge Economy: International
Developments
Dalhousie University and North Carolina Central University
Jobseeker
and Employer Struggle in the Network Black Hole
The
Open University of Quebec – Téleq-UQAM
Autonomy
in Knowledge work ? The case of IT and multimedia workers
Federation of Professionals,
Confederation
of National Trade Unions - Quebec
"Flexicurity:"
A Model for the Quebec Public Sector?
University
of British Columbia
Knowledge
Management in Call Centres: The Consequences of Workforce Blending
York University
Transforming from Managed Employees to Self-Managed Workers The Knowledge
Economy of Argentina’s Worker-Recuperated Enterprises
Strict focus on “new” creative or cognitive jobs when talking about a “knowledge economy” creates a blindspot regarding more “traditional” knowledge economies that can be said to have long existed within all workspaces where workers engage in intersubjective exchanges of know-how, acts of cooperation, on the job learning, apprenticeship, and mentoring. One type of work organization where workers’ collaborative knowledge, skills sharing, and self-management capacities have historically stood out is the worker cooperative—worker-owned workplaces where labour controls capital, where work is the common contribution of each member, and where labour processes are organized democratically with each worker member possessing an equal vote in the overall running of the firm. Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises (empresas recuperdas por sus trabajadores, or ERT) are a particular group of contemporary worker cooperatives that are putting into sharp relief the ability for workers from traditional industrial and service sectors, with no prior knowledge of cooperativism or experience in political activism, to take up cooperative work and learn how to self-manage their formerly capitalist and crisis-riddled places of employment. In the process, they are transforming collectively from managed employees to self-managed workers and creating new knowledge economies rooted in solidarity, free knowledge exchange, and mutual aid rather than individualism, commodification, and competition.
This paper reports on workplace ethnography research I have been conducting since 2005 with Argentina’s ERTs, exploring the modes of learning and knowledge acquired by participants as they engage in self-managing their coops and the relationship between democratic self-management and workers’ learning processes. My work focuses in on four diverse ERT case studies: a small and emblematic print shop in an economically challenged Buenos Aires neighbourhood; a 99-member waste recycling, construction, and parks maintenance cooperative in the southern Buenos Aires working class suburb of Avellaneda; a worker-recuperated newspaper in the industrial city of Córdoba; and a formerly private medical clinic recuperated by its mostly female nurses and maintenance staff, also in the city of Córdoba. My data gathering method uses a series of learning indicators within extended interviews aimed at gauging changes in participant subjectivity before and after participation in their coops in four main areas: democratic and political knowledge, skills, practices, and attitudes and values. The conceptual tools of social action learning, situated learning, and social movement learning guide the subsequent analysis.
Weststar,
Johanna
Saint
Mary’s University
Desires,
Obligations and Rights: A Cautionary Tale about Parental Leaves in
Academia
Most Canadians take parental leave largely for granted due to provincial and federal legislation that grants one year of leave with EI assistance for those who are eligible. Unions and their workers tend to have even greater benefits due to the bargaining of additional salary top-ups. Despite these rights, negotiating parental leave can be a complicated experience. This paper presents a case study of a parental leaves among unionized faculty at an Atlantic university and shows that the actual negotiation of leave dates is more nuanced and challenging than the collective ‘right to take parental leave’ belies. Outside the purview of their union, faculty members often engage in individual negotiations with departmental chairs, deans and senior administrators that undermine their basic rights and results in inequity across the university. This paper examines the challenges for unions in professional settings where individual negotiation occurs, the challenge of writing collective agreement language that benefits professional workers without over-regulating their flexibility, the challenge of balancing individual rights with general principles of equity, and how a sense of vocational duty and careerism can lead to self-exploitation when faculty attempt to be accommodating in the timing of their leaves. The paper also extrapolates to a discussion about how parental leave and the work done or not done while on leave impacts the careers of academic faculty.
