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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of day labor worker centers in improving wages and working conditions of migrant casual workers in the USA.

The paper reports the results of a survey of worker center executive directors and senior staff, with particular attention to the ways in which centers maintain wage rates, allocate jobs, and redress grievances.

Day labor worker centers are now an important presence in construction industry casual labor markets, performing HRM functions that benefit employers and workers.

The research was undertaken during a time when the US construction industry was enjoying an expansion. It is unclear what a macroeconomic downturn might mean for the effectiveness of worker centers to maintain labor standards.

Conditions of instability and the violation of basic labor standards that occur in casual labor markets in the USA exist in other countries as well. Day labor worker centers might be a model intervention that could apply in other contexts.

The paper presents results from the first national survey of day labor worker centers. It highlights the key activities of these emerging labor market institutions.

Workplace temporalities are being reshaped under globalization. Some scholars argue that work time is becoming more flexible, de-territorializing, and even disappearing. I provide an alternative picture of what is happening to work time by focusing on the customer service call center industry in India. Through case studies of three firms, and interviews with 80 employees, managers, and officials, I show how this industry involves a “reversal” of work time in which organizations and their employees shift their schedules entirely to the night. Rather than liberation from time, workers experience a hyper-management, rigidification, and re-territorialization of temporalities. This temporal order pervades both the physical and virtual tasks of the job, and has consequences for workers’ health, families, future careers, and the wider community of New Delhi. I argue that this trend is prompted by capital mobility within the information economy, expansion of the service sector, and global inequalities of time, and is reflective of an emerging stratification of employment temporalities across lines of the Global North and South.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of task interdependence and leader–member exchange, as social exchange variables, on affective commitment and turnover intent of new workers in an industry with high attrition rates. In addition, the paper examines the mediating effects of affective commitment.

The present study drew insights from the literature to formulate hypotheses that link the two social exchange variables on affective commitment and turnover intent. Through the utilization of the data collected from 441 call center agents working for eight call centers in the Philippines, the hypotheses were tested and analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results reveal that task interdependence and leader–member exchange are positive antecedents of affective commitment and negative predictors of turnover intent. Further analysis reveals that affective commitment fully mediates the effects of the two social exchange variables on turnover intent.

The results imply that call centers can help improve new workers' affective commitment and reduce their turnover intent through job designs that can facilitate high task interdependence. Furthermore, training team leaders or supervisors to develop leadership styles that are more focused on people and relationships may also increase the agents' commitment and reduce their quit intention.

This paper is the first to demonstrate that social exchange variables can also impact the affective commitment and turnover intent of new workers in an industry known to have heavy supervisorial monitoring, high demands in terms of work quotas and high turnover rates.

This chapter compares and contrasts organizing and advocacy among US domestic workers and day laborers. These two occupations share many features: both are ill-suited to conventional unionism; immigrants, many of them unauthorized, have long dominated the workforce in both; both are entry-level jobs at the bottom of the labor market (although both are also internally stratified); and both have been the focus of advocacy and organizing at both the local and national level in recent decades. Yet, there are also significant contrasts between the two. First and foremost, women are the vast majority of domestic workers while men predominate among day laborers. Another striking difference is that while domestic labor is hidden from public view inside private households, day laborers are regularly on display on street corners and other public spaces. This chapter explores the effects of such similarities and differences on the collective action repertoires of day laborers and domestic workers. In both cases, many workers have individualistic, entrepreneurial ambitions, a formidable organizing challenge; yet, orientation does not necessarily impede and sometimes even facilitates collective action. Day laborers’ demands are largely economic, and these (predominantly male) workers often hope to return to their countries of origin; domestic workers (overwhelmingly female) are more interested in improved opportunities within the US. Although women are overrepresented in the leadership of both domestic workers’ and day laborers’ organizations, male day laborers and female domestic workers have distinct experiences and aspirations, and put forward different types of demands, generating gendered collective action repertoires.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the experience of women working in New Zealand call centres after finding contrary evidence in the international research which suggests call centre work does not offer career opportunities for its mainly female workforce. The research seeks to explore the career progress of women in a selection of call centres to determine whether the New Zealand employment relations context contributed to outcomes different to those reported in the international research.

Case study methodology and six different call centre types were used to find 32 women who had experienced career progress. Semi‐structured in‐depth interviews were held with the women and senior management representatives at each organisation. Analysis of interview transcripts identified common themes and patterns across the case studies. Insights were gained from survey responses from 60 entry‐level workers, many of whom were return‐to‐work mothers, new immigrants or students.

The findings demonstrated that women were achieving considerable career success in the call centres investigated. Management practices accommodated their different labour market needs and respondents spoke about their passion and enjoyment of call centre work. The entry‐level workers reported that being part of the call centre workplace, allowed them to meet people, develop new skills and confidence while enhancing their career prospects. At many levels, call centre processes seemed to have enabled respondents to become competent, connected and confident workers.

Contrary to the international portrayal of call centre work and the career prospects for female workers the paper highlights the need for researchers to link employment outcomes to particular employment contexts.

To investigate the level of organizational commitment in agency workers compared with permanent workers by taking into account relations between the two groups.

A mixed methods design was employed comprising of a quantitative survey of 157 call centre workers followed by 29 qualitative interviews with permanent workers, agency workers and employers.

Agency workers had a significantly lower level of organizational commitment compared with permanent workers once the relation between agency and permanent workers was controlled. Significant correlations were found within the sample between organizational commitment, being valued and job satisfaction further supported by a hierarchical multiple linear regression.

As with all cross‐sectional research causality cannot be confirmed and difficulty accessing call centre workers led to a restricted sample size. The measurement of worker relations needs developing. Further research is proposed to address these limitations and extend the findings.

The implication for human resource management is that employers must be aware of the possible adverse influence that agency workers may have on permanent workers and as such try to incorporate agency workers within the organization to support their commitment.

Previous studies have found inconsistent variations in the relative organizational commitment of permanent and temporary employees; a counter‐intuitive finding given the precarious employment contract held by temporary workers. This study casts light on these results by controlling for the relation between agency workers and permanent workers.

This study sought to explain the high turnover rates in Philippine call centers using a cultural lens. Specifically, the study looks at the phenomenon of work‐life conflict and its impact on turnover intent. It also examined the moderating role of perceived organization support on the relationship between work‐life conflict and turnover intent.

The study utilized a two‐phased, mixed‐method approach. In the first phase, qualitative data from 30 interviews were obtained to validate the existence of the constructs among Filipino call center agents. In the second phase, 991 surveys were administered to quantitatively test the hypothesized relationships between the study variables.

Results show that work‐life conflict predicts intent to leave over and beyond that explained by job satisfaction. Findings also show that organizational support moderates the relationship between work‐life conflict and intent to leave. The results also reveal the context‐specific sources of work‐life conflict: physical and psychological impact of work schedule, social isolation and lack of social support.

The study focused on work‐life conflict and perceived organizational support. However, there are other variables that may be examined in future research such as personality, family, and organizational variables.

Beyond the traditional responses to the issue of work‐life conflict, the results suggest the importance of cultural nuanced responses to address work‐life conflict.

Although outsourcing is a boon to the economy of developing countries, policies encouraging call centers need to be coupled with an understanding of the personal and social costs of call center work.

This study highlights the importance of considering culture in viewing management practices and their impact on workers' behavior and wellbeing. It calls attention to the unique experience of call centers in developing countries and the importance of developing work‐life interventions that are contextualized to local culture.

This paper aims to advance the literature by testing the boundary of this relationship with reference to a key construct in employee performance in the service domain: employee customer orientation. Organizational identification refers to employees’ perceived oneness and belongingness to their work organization, and has been argued to be associated with higher employee performance.

Data were collected based on a sample of call center service workers. Employees rated their organizational identification, customer orientation and personality traits. Supervisors independently rated their subordinates’ performance. Variables statistic tools were used to analyze the data and test a series of hypotheses.

It was found that customer orientation strengthens the relationship between organizational identification and service workers’ job performance, and it enhances the mediating effect of organizational identification on the relationship between service workers’ personality trait (i.e. agreeableness) and their performance.

This research advances an argument that employee customer orientation moderates the relationship between employee organizational identification and employee job performance in the call center service provision domain. In addition, this is a pioneering study examining the roles of personality traits on employee organizational identification.

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 paper focuses on how gendered processes of working life are (re)constructed and are also challenged discursively in paid and volunteer care and work in reception centers. The purpose of this paper is to show how caring work with asylum seekers can both enhance the traditional gender order and challenge it through enabling men to have opportunities to care.

The data were produced through qualitative interviews among paid workers and volunteers in reception centers, and analyzed through a discourse analysis approach.

Three discourses of care and work were identified: a discourse on solidarity and care; a discourse on control and order; and a discourse on caring men. The findings show that traditional attitudes toward gender are easily discerned in other cultures, but not as easily recognized in the everyday processes near at hand. Gender order is retained through traditional roles, which also reflects conventional attitudes in a society often seen as a model country for equality. However, change is possible, and one core issue is the need to involve men in care work and caring in general.

The findings can be applicable to the deconstruction of traditional gender order in working life; to the disclosure of gendered xenophobia in work with asylum seekers, in particular through dialogue with “Others”; and to the enabling of care by men.

Little previous research has been done on care in reception centers and care as a gendered activity with value. In the future many countries are likely to encounter increases in asylum seekers, and therefore, intersections of gender and ethnicity are of importance in societies as regards migration, work and care.