Search results for ""Author Ursula Huws""
Pluto Press Reinventing the Welfare State: Digital Platforms and Public Policies
The Covid-19 pandemic has tragically exposed how today’s welfare state cannot properly protect its citizens. Despite the valiant efforts of public sector workers, from under-resourced hospitals to a shortage of housing and affordable social care, the pandemic has shown how decades of neglect has caused hundreds to die. In this bold new book, leading policy analyst Ursula Huws shows how we can create a welfare state that is fair, affordable, and offers security for all. Huws focuses on some of the key issues of our time – the gig economy, universal, free healthcare, and social care, to criticize the current state of welfare provision. Drawing on a lifetime of research on these topics, she clearly explains why we need to radically rethink how it could change. With positivity and rigor, she proposes new and original policy ideas, including critical discussions of Universal Basic Income and new legislation for universal workers' rights. She also outlines a 'digital welfare state' for the 21st century. This would involve a repurposing of online platform technologies under public control to modernize and expand public services, and improve accessibility.
£18.99
The Merlin Press Ltd Spark in the Engine: Creative Work in the New Economy
The global economy has an insatiable need for creative workers - to develop new products and services in a speeded-up hyper-competitive environment; to provide content for the exponentially growing mass media; to manage; and yet educate inform and pacify the expanding population. Yet creative workers themselves are subject to new forms of control and expropriation and many understand only too well the nature of the system they work under. What sort consciousness are they developing? Will they rebel? Is there an endless supply of geese to keep laying the golden eggs or might some decide to fly the coop and imagine how to create a better world?
£14.95
Pluto Press Reinventing the Welfare State: Digital Platforms and Public Policies
The Covid-19 pandemic has tragically exposed how today’s welfare state cannot properly protect its citizens. Despite the valiant efforts of public sector workers, from under-resourced hospitals to a shortage of housing and affordable social care, the pandemic has shown how decades of neglect has caused hundreds to die. In this bold new book, leading policy analyst Ursula Huws shows how we can create a welfare state that is fair, affordable, and offers security for all. Huws focuses on some of the key issues of our time – the gig economy, universal, free healthcare, and social care, to criticize the current state of welfare provision. Drawing on a lifetime of research on these topics, she clearly explains why we need to radically rethink how it could change. With positivity and rigor, she proposes new and original policy ideas, including critical discussions of Universal Basic Income and new legislation for universal workers' rights. She also outlines a 'digital welfare state' for the 21st century. This would involve a repurposing of online platform technologies under public control to modernize and expand public services, and improve accessibility.
£76.50
Monthly Review Press,U.S. Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age
For every person who reads this text on the printed page, many more will read it on a computer screen or mobile device. It's a situation that we increasingly take for granted in our digital era, and while it is indicative of the novelty of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is also the key to understanding its driving force: the relentless impulse to commodify our lives in every aspect. Ursula Huws ties together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of the last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. She examines the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation: in culture and the arts, in the privatization of public services, and in the commodification of human sociality by way of mobile devices and social networking. These trends are in turn accompanied by the dramatic restructuring of work arrangements, opening the way for new contradictions and new forms of labor solidarity and struggle around the planet. Labor in the Global Digital Economy is a forceful critique of our dizzying contemporary moment, one that goes beyond notions of mere connectedness or free-flowing information to illuminate the entrenched mechanisms of exploitation and control at the core of capitalism.
£15.00
The Merlin Press Ltd Defragmenting: Towards a Critical Understanding of the New Global Division of Labour
This issue brings together important research from Europe, Australia, North America, Latin America and Asia and considers - How can the global knowledge economy be conceptualised to enable us to understand the current transformations of work taking place globally? What is the relationship between global forces and differing national models of capitalism? How are global value chains being restructured? And are service industries now following the patterns set by manufacturing in the past? Are we seeing the birth of a network economy in which small firms can thrive, or a new phase of consolidation by global transnational corporations? And What are the impacts for regional development for working conditions and for workers' ability to organise?
£14.95
New York University Press The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World
The workplace has been changed by the rise of digital technologies. This work examines this process by covering women in the workplace and at home. It explores changing categories of employment and modes of organization, and how new divisions of race and gender are created in the process.
£13.95
Springer International Publishing AG Platformization and Informality: Pathways of Change, Alteration, and Transformation
In this edited volume, scholars from Mumbai, Bengaluru, Jakarta, Cape Town, Sao Paulo and other cities of the global South explore the complex relationship between platformization and informality through a different lens. Drawing on extensive theoretical, quantitative and qualitative scholarship, they provide both a useful overview and insights into the lived realities of gig work for platforms covering a range of skills, working conditions, and forms of algorithmic management. Platform work has attracted considerable attention from scholars in the global North, who have tended to view it as a form of casualisation of work that was previously regulated. But what about the global South, where most employment, especially that of women and migrant workers was historically already informal?Beyond a focus on livelihoods, employment, and work, the authors show how labour platforms take on powers that bring about broader impacts, including those affecting identity and personal wellbeing. They also illustrate the impact of platformization on the governance of affected sectors by public agencies, thus affecting political power, and how public data infrastructures contribute to further platformization. The purpose of this pioneering work is to lay bare these interactions to then rebuild our understanding of platformization and its social, political, cultural and economic impacts. Its insights are attentive to gender and ethnic differences, as well as geographical ones.
£109.99