Revisiting labour and gender issues in Export Processing Zones : the cases of South Korea, Bangladesh and India

The establishment of Export Processing Zones (EPZs) is a strategy for economic development that was introduced almost fifty years ago and is nowadays employed in a large number of countries. While the number of EPZs including several variants such as Special Economic Zone (SEZs) has increased continuously, general interest in EPZs has declined over the years in contrast to earlier heated debates regarding the efficacy of the strategy and its welfare effects especially on women workers. This article re-evaluates the historical trajectories and outstanding labour and gender issues of EPZs on the basis of the experiences of South Korea, Bangladesh and India. The findings suggest the necessity of enlarging our analytical scope with regard to EPZs, which are inextricably connected with external employment structures, whether outside the EPZ but within the same country, or outside the EPZ and its host country altogether.

The Changing Nature of Employment and the Reform of Labor and Social Security Legislation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This paper tries to understand the current status of South African labor market, which is changing in contradictory directions, i.e. a strengthening of the rights and protection of workers at the same time as the flexibilization of employment, in the context of the characteristics of labor and social security legislation in South Africa, as well as the nature of labor and social security reforms after democratization. We put emphasis on the corporatist nature of labor policy-making as the factor influencing the course of reforms; it is argued that the apparently contradictive changes can be explained consistently by the corporatist labor policy-making process which has been practiced notwithstanding the problem of representativeness.

Migration, labor and business in the worlding cities of the Arabian Peninsula

This short essay, built on a foundation of more than a decade of fieldwork in the hydrocarbon-rich societies of the Arabian peninsula, distills a set of overarching threads woven through much of that time and work. Those threads include a discussion of the social heterogeneity of the Gulf State citizenries, the central role of development and urban development in these emergent economies, the multifaceted impact of migrants and migration upon these host societies, and the role of foreign 'imagineers' in the portrayal of Gulf societies, Gulf values, and Gulf social norms.

Issues Affecting the Movement of Rural Labour in Myanmar: Rakhine Case Study

This paper presents issues affecting the movement of rural labour in Myanmar, by examining the background, purpose and earned income of labourers migrating to fishing villages in southern Rakhine. A broad range of socioeconomic classes, from poor to rich, farmers to fishermen, is migrating from broader areas to specific labour-intensive fishing subsectors, such as anchovy fishing. These labourers are a mixed group of people whose motives lie either in supplementing their household income or accumulating capital for further expansion of their economic activities. The concentration of migrating labourers with different objectives in this particular unstable, unskilled employment opportunity suggests an insufficiently developed domestic labour market in rural Myanmar. There is a pressing need to create stable labour-intensive industries to meet this demand.