Working conditions in South Africa since the end of apartheid a comparison between the agricultural, forestry and mining sectors

International audienc

For a Future of Work with Dignity: A Critique of the World Bank Development Report, The Changing Nature of Work

Technological change has brought about rapid changes in the world of work over the past decade. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work is a welcome contribution as it discusses the transformations that are taking place and tries to advise governments on how best to adapt to them. The report also brings out the concern related to the growing risks associated with tax evasion by large corporations that control the market power and have an ever-greater share of economic activity. However, the report is flawed in many ways as it portrays these changes in the nature of work as essentially benign, requiring “adaptation” and skills acquisition by workers facilitated by the provision of skills and “universal” social coverage by governments, with the latter understood as a prelude to labour-market deregulation. Such a narrow perspective ignores the growing body of research that points to very serious risks and challenges faced by workers in ensuring decent working conditions due to technological changes. This article provides a critique of the World Bank report by focusing on five areas related to technology and the future of work that are fundamental for ensuring minimum standards for workers and to ensure social cohesion: inequality, jobs, labour regulations, trade unions and social protection. KEYWORDS future of work; technology; inequality; jobs; labour regulation; trade unions; social protectio

Public Opinion Polling and the Millennium Development Goals

Monitoring changes in public awareness and attitudes in rich countries towards aid and other international development policy issues is extremely difficult: due to lack of systematic polling or monitoring, there is no reliable, comparable data across DAC member countries. This paper suggests a way to address this problem: a common questionnaire for all DAC countries to use in their national surveys, centred on the Millennium Development Goals. It sums up the process that led to the setting up of this questionnaire, provides a short analysis of the main methodological issues and brings together three versions, respectively for face-to-face, phone or mail processing. These should allow information and communication professionals, as well as policy makers, to improve the comparability of public opinion surveys in OECD DAC member countries on development and the MDGs, especially if —as proposed by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Development — parts of the questionnaire are included in the next Eurobarometer survey on development across EU member countries (possibly in 2005)

The impact of armed civil conflict on household welfare and policy

This paper offers a framework for analysing the effects of armed conflicts on households and the ways in which households in turn respond to and cope with the conflicts. It distinguishes between direct and indirect effects, and shows that the indirect effects are channelled through (i) markets, (ii) political institutions, and (iii) social networks. Drawing upon the recent empirical literature, the paper portrays the processes running along these various channels and offers policy suggestions to be adopted at both national and international levels. Keywords: armed conflict; civil conflict; household welfare; transmission mechanism; coping mechanism; remittances