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The purpose of this manuscript is to examine the negotiations of health among low-wage migrant workers in Singapore amidst the COVID-19 outbreaks in dormitories housing them. In doing so, the manuscript attends to the ways in which human rights are constituted amidst labor and communicative rights, constituting the backdrop against which the pandemic outbreaks take place and the pandemic response is negotiated.

The study is part of a long-term culture-centered ethnography conducted with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, seeking to build communicative infrastructures for rights-based advocacy and interventions.

The findings articulate the ways in which the outbreaks in dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers are constituted amidst structural contexts of organizing migrant work in Singapore. These structural contexts of extreme neoliberalism work catalyze capitalist accumulation through the exploitation of low-wage migrant workers. The poor living conditions that constitute the outbreak are situated in relationship to the absence of labor and communicative rights in Singapore. The absence of communicative rights and dignity to livelihood constitutes the context within which the COVID-19 outbreak emerges and the ways in which it is negotiated among low-wage migrant workers in Singapore.

This manuscript foregrounds the interplays of labor and communicative rights in the context of the health experiences of low-wage migrant workers amidst the pandemic. Even as COVID-19 has made visible the deeply unequal societies we inhabit, the manuscript suggests the relevance of turning to communicative rights as the basis for addressing these inequalities. It contributes to the extant literature on the culture-centered approach by depicting the ways in which a pandemic as a health crisis exacerbates the challenges to health and well-being among precarious workers.

This research note focuses on the quest to move beyond the poverty paradigm in researching, planning, and developing distressed urban neighborhoods. It is based on the notion that the poverty paradigm hides more than it reveals about the positionality of people in neoliberal society. It argues that low incomes and joblessness are structural components of neoliberal economies. Therefore, they cannot be eliminated without making fundamental changes in the way that neoliberalism operates. Thus, in a neoliberal society, with a small, passive government, both low incomes and joblessness will grow over time, especially among blacks, Latinos, and immigrants of color. Within this context, the distress found in inner-city neighborhoods is a product of failed urban institutions and the lack of investments in such places. However, there are no laws of socioeconomic development that say low income and joblessness must equate with living in distressed neighborhoods, where dilapidation, crime, and violence are characteristic features of the landscape. This reality is a public policy decision. Therefore, it can be changed by altering the investment strategy in distressed community and by radically transforming the institutions operating in these communities. If this happens, it will be possible to produce communities where low-income workers live in energetic places where they enjoy a high quality of life and standard of living. In such regenerated neighborhoods, it will also be possible to develop innovative strategies that put the jobless to work.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate low-wage retention using a survival analysis approach.

Variables explaining low-wage retention take into account the characteristics of the employee, such as education, age, tenure with the company, gender and nationality, and the characteristics of the job and the company such as industry affiliation, number of employees, age of the company and location.

Female workers and workers with low level of education, older ones, those with more seniority in the company and those of Asian origin remain longer in a low-wage situation. Also, workers in smaller and older companies located outside the Lisbon region are more likely to stay in a low-wage situation.

The policy implications are clear. Education plays a prominent role: the higher the level of education of the individual, the higher the probability of him/her leaving low pay. Training programs may help employees in Portugal to leave the low-wage situation. Furthermore, policies must address the different mobility rates of different nationalities and different activities. Training programs are more urgent for hotels and restaurants and transports and communication. The findings also indicate that those initially working in younger firms and larger firms have a higher probability of leaving the low-wage situation. This is a stimulus for decision makers to stimulate employment in the younger firms or in the larger firms.

Despite low-wage retention being a well-known field of research, to our knowledge this is the first research paper using survival analysis to explain the duration of a low-wage situation.

The purpose of the paper is to propose that stakeholder scholarship should take its rightful role in the acknowledgement of stakeholder value production, the enhancement of stakeholder voice and public stakeholder advocacy. Its focus is on low‐wage workers particularly, although the analysis holds for dependent stakeholders generally.

This paper analyses and develops extant stakeholder theory with regard to employer treatment of low‐wage workers. A general point is made about the need for stakeholder research, writing and advocacy to take more explicit normative stances. This is achieved in three stages: by explaining why low‐wage workers are dependent stakeholders; by considering the strengths and weakness of stakeholder theory as an explanatory framework for low‐wage workers; and by identifying how stakeholder theory should be developed in order to provide an explicitly normative account of low‐wage workers that leads to pragmatic action.

Labour and industrial relations scholarship would benefit from the integration of stakeholder language and scholarship, as the stakeholder concept has gained currency and legitimacy among academics in a variety of fields. Stakeholder theory scholarship would benefit from explicit consideration of power, which is common to work in labour and industrial relations scholarship.

Stakeholder theory can benefit from labour and industrial relations scholarship and practice. Likewise, industrial relations can benefit from understanding and integration of the increasingly ubiquitous stakeholder concept. It is believed that the integration of stakeholder theory with insights from labour and industrial relations scholarship helps further work in both fields.

Most countries around the world base their old‐age pension programs largely on the pay‐as‐you‐go defined benefit (PAYGO DB) model. However, due to a number of factors including population aging, the maturing of these schemes, rapidly increasing old‐age pension costs, and the perceived need to become more competitive in international markets, many nations have become increasingly concerned about the present (or projected future) economic burden of paying for the pension benefits promised by these schemes. This concern has led policy makers to look for alternative models. One of the most innovative alternatives to emerge during the past ten years is the notional defined contribution (NDC) model. In this article we describe this model and discuss some of the implications of a shift to this model for women and low‐wage workers. We conclude that in the industrial nations women and low‐wage workers are likely to do less well with schemes based all or in part on the NDC model because such schemes are typically designed to be less redistributive (from higher to lower income groups) than the PAYGO DB schemes they will be replacing. However, in developing countries the reverse will often be true as the NDC schemes are likely to be replacing PAYGO DB schemes that tend to redistribute from low‐income groups to higher income groups. Relative to funded DC schemes a major advantage of the NDC model is that it does not subject individual pension benefits to the volatility of financial markets. This issue is relevant to workers in both developed and developing nations, but it is a particularly important consideration in developing nations.

Much of the recent debate on the minimum wage has focused on its employment implications. The theory of human capital suggests that minimum wages should also have important adverse effects on human capital accumulation. In the standard human capital theory, as developed by Becker (1964), Ben-Porath (1967), and Mincer (1974), a large part of human capital is accumulated on the job, and workers often finance these investments through lower wages. A binding minimum wage will therefore reduce workplace training, as it prevents low wage workers from accepting the necessary wage cuts (Rosen, 1972). The early empirical literature has confirmed this prediction. The negative impact on human capital formation has been an important argument against minimum wages in the minds of many economists and policy-makers, and an important piece of evidence in support of the standard theory of human capital.

Anecdotal accounts of suicide among temporary low-wage migrant workers in the UAE are numerous, but unofficial and qualitative accounts remain unexplored. This study aims to examine how the socio-environmental context can lead some low-wage migrants, irrespective of their nationality or culture, to contemplate suicide for the first time after arriving in the host country.

The findings draw from ten months of qualitative fieldwork (2015–2016) and in-depth interviews conducted with 44 temporary migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, earning in the lowest wage bracket in Dubai. The study used a non-probabilistic, purposive sampling approach to select participants. Three criteria drove eligibility: participants had to reside in the UAE, be non-national and earn Dh1500 (US$408) or less a month. Otherwise, diversity was sought in regard to nationality, occupation and employer.

Eight (18%) of the 44 study participants interviewed admitted to engaging in suicidal thoughts for the first time after arriving in the UAE. The findings suggest that for low-wage migrants working in certain socio-environmental contexts, the religious, gendered or other cultural or group characteristics or patterns that may be predictors of suicide in migrants’ country of origin may become secondary or possibly even irrelevant when one is forced to survive under conditions that by most objective standards would be deemed not only oppressive but extremely exploitative and abusive.

This study contributes to understandings of how the emotional and psychological well-being of temporary foreign low-wage migrant workers can be impacted by the socio-environmental context of the host country. It is a first step in understanding the intimate thoughts of low-wage migrant workers on the topic of suicidality, furthering our understanding of suicidal ideation and the factors that can contribute to it.

The market equilibrium model predicts that the supply and demand schedules of labor to an industry will cross at a level at which labor receives the value of its marginal product as contributed to the output produced. The imposition of an effective minimum wage in that industry creates a price floor for labor which will reduce employment as it promotes incentives to substitute capital for labor and/or workers with higher marginal productivity for those with lower skill and lower marginal productivity. This means in effect that it will lead employers to eliminate less productive jobs. Teenagers (youths 16–19 years old) with little training or work‐experience may be priced out of the market because they are not “worth” (in terms of productivity) the minimum wage.

The neoclassical ethos is predicated on a goal of efficiency, which is assumed to be advanced through competitive markets where market-clearing wages are achieved when the demand for labor is exactly equal to the supply of labor. In such a market, there is no such thing as unemployment because wages either rise or fall until the demand for labor is exactly equal to the supply of labor. At the wage at which demand equals supply, all those willing and able to work at that wage will be employed. If more people are willing to work, the wage will fall further, thereby inducing firms to hire more workers, with the result being that the supply of labor once again equals the demand. Conversely, when firms are unable to hire as many workers as they would like, the wage rises to induce additional people to enter into the workforce until supply and demand are once again equal.

American workers at nearly every level of the income spectrum are not and often cannot to save properly to be secure in retirement. Addressing this challenge will require a comprehensive policy discussion by both federal and state policymakers. Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) are the primary form of employee ownership, and for reasons explored in this report, companies organized as S corporations are especially likely to be fully ESOP-owned. The purpose of the paper is to explore the role played by employee ownership in retirement security overall and across wage and age groups.

The findings described in this report are derived from a survey of privately held S corporation ESOPs. The report compares these findings to nationally representative survey data. The online survey, conducted between January and March 2018, received responses from 39 companies that supplied the median and average account balances of a total of 61,020 plan participants. It breaks new ground by presenting retirement account balances by wage and age categories (e.g. 20,000 lower-wage workers and 8,000 employees nearing retirement).

ESOP participants represented in this survey have more than twice the average total retirement balance of Americans nationally: $170,326 vs $80,339. This is not just a function of higher wage ESOP employees driving the average up. ESOP employees making less than $25,000 a year also have on average more than double the retirement savings ($55,526) compared to similar workers nationally ($22,447). Nearly all of the respondent companies (97 percent) offer at least one other retirement plan in addition to the ESOP. By contrast, 32 percent of all workers in the US workforce as a whole do not have access to any retirement benefits at work, and 49 percent of all workers are not participating in the plan that is available to them. Additionally, these S corporation ESOP companies provide an array of benefits at levels solidly higher than firms overall where comparison data exist. Certainly, these benefits make their own contribution to retirement security because workers are less likely to have to dip into savings for critical investments or expenses, such as tuition, to advance their career or unexpected medical expenses. Among the surveyed S ESOPs, workers nearing retirement have on average a median account balance of $147,522 in their ESOP plus $98,974 in a non-ESOP plan(s). By contrast, more than one-third (35 percent) of all workers nearing retirement have neither retirement savings nor a defined benefit pension. This percentage rises to 50 percent among low-income workers in this age bracket. As such, national data place the median account balance of all US workers aged 55–64 years at zero. Even among workers who have retirement accounts, the median balance nationally is $100,000. A typical millennial worker (25–34 years old) at a surveyed S ESOP company has a median ESOP account balance of $22,588 and a median balance of $11,239 in a non-ESOP account. In contrast, the median savings of US millennials is zero. Among the surveyed S ESOPs, lower-wage employees ($10.00–$12.85 per hour) typically have median account balances in their ESOP of $4,381 and in a non- ESOP plan of $2,149. In contrast, nationally, 56 percent of workers in this category do not have access to any retirement benefits at work. This translates into a median savings for this group of zero. Finally, ESOPs are clearly associated with reduced turnover. Respondent companies report quit and separation rates that are more than two times lower than national rates.

This is the first such study of its kind.