The trade unions membership dynamics and union members’ trajectories

This text presents an analysis of aggregated membership’s dynamics for Spanish trade unions, using ECVT data, as well as union memberships’ trajectories, or members’ decisions about joining the organization, permanency and responsibilities, and subsequent attrition. For the analysis of trajectories we make use of information of the records of actual memberships and the record of quitting of CCOO, and of a survey-questionnaire to a sample of leavers of the same union. This study allows us to confirm a linkage between the decision and motivations to become union member, to participate in union activities, the time of permanency, and the motives to quit the organization. We also identify five types of union members’ trajectories, indicating that, far from views that assert a monolithic structure, unions are complex organizations.

Análisis de las condiciones laborales en las entidades de la economía social en España desde una perspectiva de género

Las empresas de economía social comparten unos valores que motivan un comportamiento diferente de éstas en relación con la composición de sus plantillas, las condiciones de trabajo, su especialización productiva y su ubicación geográfica frente a las empresas ordinarias (sociedades anónimas y laborales) que no son de economía social. Este comportamiento diferencial constituye, a su vez, una importante aportación a la cohesión social y, de forma específica, desde el punto de vista de género, proporciona una mejora de la presencia y posición de las mujeres en el ámbito laboral. El objetivo principal de esta investigación es evaluar la existencia de elementos diferenciales entre las empresas de economía social y las ordinarias en cuanto a la igualdad de oportunidades, condiciones y trayectorias laborales desde una perspectiva de género, centrando el estudio en el caso de España. A partir de la Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales (2010) se identifican dos grupos de empresas, de economía social (grupo objetivo) y de economía "no social" u ordinaria (grupo de control) equivalentes en cuanto a tamaño y sector de actividad. Para cada grupo y sus respectivos/as trabajadores/as, se realizan contrastes paramétricos y no paramétricos de diferencias de medias entre mujeres y hombres en relación a diferentes características laborales como el tipo de jornada, la duración del contrato o la estabilidad en la trayectoria laboral en la empresa. Además, se lleva a cabo una estimación de la discriminación salarial en ambos grupos siguiendo el modelo Oaxaca-Blinder. Los resultados muestran que las empresas de economía social ofrecen mejores condiciones en el acceso y la permanencia en el puesto laboral a las mujeres, una mayor estabilidad laboral y menor discriminación salarial frente a los hombres.

Rethinking Care Through Social Reproduction: Articulating Circuits of Migration

Care has come to dominate much feminist research on globalized migrations and the transfer of labor from the South to the North, while the older concept of reproduction had been pushed into the background but is now becoming the subject of debates on the commodification of care in the household and changes in welfare state policies. This article argues that we could achieve a better understanding of the different modalities and trajectories of care in the reproduction of individuals, families, and communities, both of migrant and nonmigrant populations by articulating the diverse circuits of migration, in particular that of labor and the family. In doing this, I go back to the earlier North American writing on racialized minorities and migrants and stratified social reproduction. I also explore insights from current Asian studies of gendered circuits of migration connecting labor and marriage migrations as well as the notion of global householding that highlights the gender politics of social reproduction operating within and beyond households in institutional and welfare architectures. In contrast to Asia, there has relatively been little exploration in European studies of the articulation of labor and family migrations through the lens of social reproduction. However, connecting the different types of migration enables us to achieve a more complex understanding of care trajectories and their contribution to social reproduction.

Perspectives on gender, migration and transnational work: joint work of social reproduction and care in Southern Europe

This paper presents the "state of the art" and some of the main issues discussed in relation to the topic of transnational migration and reproductive work in southern Europe. We start doing a genealogy of the complex theoretical development leading to the consolidation of the research program, linking consideration of gender with transnational migration and transformation of work and ways of survival, thus making the production aspects as reproductive, in a context of globalization. The analysis of the process of multiscale reconfiguration of social reproduction and care, with particular attention to its present global dimension is presented, pointing to the turning point of this line of research that would have taken place with the beginning of this century, with the rise notions such as "global care chains" (Hochschild, 2001), or "care drain" (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2013). Also, the role of this new agency, now composed in many cases women who migrate to other countries or continents, precisely to address these reproductive activities, is recognized. Finally, reference is made to some of the new conceptual and theoretical developments in this area.