Migration intermediaries and codes of conduct: temporary migrant workers in Australian horticulture

Over recent decades, developments in network governance have seen governments around the world cede considerable authority and responsibility to commercial migration intermediaries for recruiting and managing temporary migrant labour. Correspondingly, a by-product of network governance has been the emergence of soft employment regulation in which voluntary codes of conduct supplement hard (enforceable) legal employment standards. This paper explores these developments in the context of temporary migrant workers employed in Australian horticulture. First the paper analyses the growing use of temporary migrant labour in this industry. It then describes how different types of intermediaries interact with this workforce. The paper then outlines both hard and soft employment regulations, and contrasts them with actual employment conditions, questioning how a network governance approach has affected this vulnerable workforce. The paper concludes that changes in network governance of migration and employment relations have emasculated formal legal regulation, leaving market forces to operate without effective or ethical constraints at the expense of the public good.

Young Afghans facing return

A project in the UK aiming to prepare young men for return to Afghanistan through an assisted voluntary return programme was unsuccessful. A different, longer-term approach might have been more appropriate and more effective.

The return of the traditional birth attendant

The World Health Organization has noted much progress towards the realisation of Millennium Development Goals related to maternal and child health. Eighty percent of women in many developing economies now receive at least one visit during pregnancy by a skilled birth attendant (although only 52% had the recommended four visits), and 68% of women across developing regions receive skilled health attendant care (up from 56% in 1990). However, disparities follow regional and urban-rural gaps. Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia lag behind other regions in the provision of antenatal care and skilled attendance at birth (although typically attended by a family member or villager) and over 32 million of the 40 million births not attended by skilled health personnel in 2012 occurred in rural areas. Overall, one-quarter of women in developing nations still birth alone or with a relative to assist them. While increased numbers of medically-trained midwives and health workers or midwife assistants would increase coverage by up to 40%, these are longer-term solutions. In the short term, gross disparities in services in some resource-poor areas have been alleviated by recruiting Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) re-trained in emergency obstetric skills to deal with emergency situations and to refer women onto health facilities when necessary. Samoa and Bangladesh are examples. For many women for a range of reasons TBAs are preferable to hospital care. It therefore makes sense to recognise their place within maternity care, to offer basic and ongoing training and to set up registration procedures thus better ensuring the monitoring of outcomes. Incorporating TBAs into the formal healthcare system would meet both physiological and relational components of birth. In terms of the latter, TBAs would act as cultural brokers between Western and traditional cosmologies and provide women with continuity of care from a known carer; in the West a demonstrably simple but effective intervention promoting physiological safety and reducing the need for higher level medical interventions.

Intraday return predictability, portfolio maximisation, and hedging

We examine whether intraday Chinese return predictability is linked to optimal portfolio holding and hedging. We find that: (1) S&P500 futures returns only predict Chinese spot market returns in up to 5-minute of trading with predictability disappearing at higher frequencies of trade; (2) the portfolio weight is maximised at the 5-minute trading frequency, when predictability is the strongest; and (3) when predictability is the strongest, significantly less shorting of the futures is required to minimise risk when a long position is taken in the Chinese market.

Lazarus rises: storying the self in the migrant fandom of David Bowie

In this article we focus upon the ways that “migrants” in Melbourne have used David Bowie to story and make sense of their arrival to Australia, often as refugees or as people looking for a better life. In relation to identity and belonging, some recent work on music fandom (Groene and Hettinger 2015; Lowe 2003), has imposed a meta-frame on the empirical method, substituting voices for a top-down analysis and interpretation. Our approach is to instead draw both upon auto-ethnography and to allow our fellow fans to “story” their own responses, in an attempt to get beneath the modes of feeling that music fandom ignites – situated within the narratives that people construct as they talk these stories. We argue that Bowie’s alternative and outsider status resonates keenly with people who find themselves “strangers” in a new land.