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Using data from a multi-method study with a national reproductive justice coalition, this chapter examines the emergence of the US reproductive justice movement. I first examine how reproductive justice emerged in relation to the mainstream women's movements. Then I demonstrate how, due to the relationship between reproductive justice and social identity, the boundaries of the reproductive frame and movements are simultaneously broader and more constrained in meaning than reproductive rights. Finally, I show how (perceived) co-optation leads to tensions between movement sectors and weakens the potential for reproductive justice to reinvigorate activism around reproductive issues. I conclude with how the success of the reproductive justice movement, including around diversity and coalition building, can inform other social movements.

In the last decades, migration of domestic workers and, in particular, care workers has grown into a significant part of movement from the global South to the global North. This phenomenon is referred to as the “new international division in social reproductive work” – outsourcing domestic chores to (mostly) migrants enables families in the global North to escape from the tensions arising from balancing productive and social reproductive work. This paper seeks to address these issues.

Considering two empirical examples of stereotypically male and female migrant domestic work – Polish handymen and elderly care workers – this paper puts the phenomenon in the context of the broader feminist debate on care work, global care chains and social policies.

It attempts to analyze how the employment of Polish handymen or elderly care workers in Germany results from and recreates social inequalities based on gender, class and ethnicity/citizenship.

For this purpose, it looks at both “ends” of this specific European “care chain” – the employing families in Germany as well as the migrant's families in Poland.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural Manitoba and throughout the Philippines with temporary foreign workers employed at a small inn and conference centre and their non-migrant kin, this chapter offers an introduction to and expansion of feminist engagements with social reproduction and global care chains. This chapter illustrates the importance of feminist analysis of migration trajectories and labour processes that fall outside of the conventional purview of gender and migration studies. To this end, it suggests that in addition to interrogating the conditions and rational under which reproduction comes to be articulated and experienced as labour, consideration of how divergent forms of labour also constitute and shape reproduction can provide significant insight into the social consequences of neoliberal capitalism, while revealing the ways in which the gendered and racialized parameters of reproductive and intimate labour come to be reproduced.

This chapter examines how gender interacts with informal workers’ collective action strategies in the context of contemporary development scripts around economic growth. Specifically, it engages the theoretical debates on the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism as the systems of domination that organize gender and class. Drawing from a comparative analysis of informal workers’ movements in India’s domestic work and construction sectors, I find the relationship between gender and class and between patriarchy and capitalism is being reconceptualized from below and differs by occupational structures and organization histories. For domestic workers, movements assert what I call a “unitary” model of exploitation. Because domestic workers’ organizations entered the productive sphere through a focus on social reproduction, their struggles conflate gender and class to reverse the shame attached to domestic work and increase the recognized worth of women’s labor. Because construction workers’ organizations mobilize male and female workers and began as class-based organizations focusing on productive work, they articulate what I term “a dual systems” approach to patriarchy and capitalism that exposes inequalities between men and women within the sector, such as unequal pay, glass ceilings, and issues of embodiment. In both cases, global development scripts have not only shaped movement approaches, but also enabled movements to articulate gendered labor subjects in innovative ways. While domestic workers’ unitary model has had more success in increasing women workers’ dignity and leadership, construction workers’ dualist model has attained more successes in attaining material benefits in the reproductive sphere. These findings suggest that debates on unitary versus dual-systems models of exploitation present a false dichotomy and veil the reality that both are necessary for feminist theory, development models, and women workers’ struggles on the ground.

A growing body of literature suggests that creating a just sustainable society will require reorganizing economic arrangements and, in particular, rethinking work. Previous studies have recognized alternative organizations, such as cooperatives and intentional communities, as sites for building more democratic, sustainable models of work. This study contributes a description and analysis of work and sustainability at Twin Oaks Intentional Community, an 80-person income- and resource-sharing commune in Louisa, Virginia. Some measures show that Twin Oaks members live more sustainably in terms of energy consumption than the average US resident. In this article, I investigate the relationship between sustainability and work at Twin Oaks. I find that sustainable work is linked to the following key principles: broadening definitions of work, prioritizing community well-being, and democratizing decision making. In doing so, I contribute to previous literature on work, sustainability, and alternative organizations by suggesting that (1) sustainability in intentional communities is deeply intertwined with systems of work; (2) broadening definitions of work to include social reproductive labour contributes to sustainability; and (3) the democratization of work can further goals of sustainability.

The thesis of our paper is that the industrial dispute articulates a counter-movement against the progressive capitalist Landnahme of care work. What is ostensibly a standard wage conflict proves, on closer scrutiny, to be a dispute that contains a transformative social dynamic. It cannot be conceived either as a traditional class struggle or as a movement against the market’s unreasonable demands. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors draw on a qualitative survey in the social and childcare services (expert interviews, groups discussions, expert hearings) and two partial-studies on the renewal of trade unions in East and West Germany (54 expert and 46 employee interviews).

Professional pride along with confidence in their own professional skills collides with the market- and competition-driven devaluation of the work of entire groups of employees. Used correctly, a putative professional consciousness can transform into a source of resilience, protest and collective engagement, which the authors interpret as counter-Landnahme. A consciousness rooted in professionality develops into a subjective power resource, the activation of which simultaneously strengthens trade unions’ power to effectuate change.

In the case of the childcare workers, this movement is rooted in a newly awakened consciousness as skilled labourers. What at first appears as a wage conflict is in fact, upon closer inspection, a conflict loaded with transformative potential. After all, any greater social recognition of this occupational group will naturally, at least by tendency, prompt a discussion concerning the modes of financing public reproductive activities.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question of how continuity and change coexist in the work of institutional actors who can combine maintenance, disruption and/or creation. Past studies mention this coexistence without an explanation.

The paper develops a perspective through literature review.

Institutional actors are both socialized into the norm-oriented space of continuity and maintenance through their reciprocal relations and associated social knowledge and roles and disciplined into the goal-oriented space of change and disruption/creation through their power relations and associated expert discourse and subject positions. Their institutional existence indicates a particular combination of reciprocity and power and thus their work includes changing degrees of maintenance, disruption and creation, depending on the nature of this combination.

The paper points out research directions on the relational conditions of the actors, which facilitate or constrain their work toward institutional continuity or change.

Organizations whose concern is to continue the existing practices in a stable environment should emphasize reciprocal relations whereas organizations whose concern is to change those practices for more effectiveness in a dynamic environment should emphasize power relations. Also, too much emphasis on either relations leads to inflexibility or instability.

The paper provides an explanation on the sources of coexistence of continuity and change in institutional work. It also contributes to the discussions on contingency of institutions, resistance productive of institutional change, reflexivity of institutional actors and intersubjective construction of institutional work.