WORKSHOPS AND CONFERENCES

As a central element in its research and outreach activities, CGIRS sponsors, supports, and helps to organize a range of workshops and conferences, including those of other UCSC research centers and faculty working groups. Some of these meetings are associated with CGIRS projects, while other are address issues such as global food systems, genomes and justice, and innovation in Asia. CGIRS also sponsors and cosponsors talks by visiting speakers and research fellows. Among the workshops and conferences in which CGIRS has been involved are the following:

"Bodies, Brokers, and Borders: Labor Market Intermediaries and Transnational Migration"
A one-day conference.
April 3, 2010, 8:45am - 5:30pm in Oakes College, Room 105

Temp agencies, bodyshops, shape-ups, headhunters. In today’s global economy, workers at all skill levels face more precarious, insecure and temporary jobs. Meanwhile, more people must push across international borders in search of decent work. • Both employers and workers increasingly turn to a rising player–labor brokers–to match jobs to workers, whether across town or across oceans. Do these labor market intermediaries, now fixtures in industries from construction to healthcare to IT, provide new paths to innovation and migrant mobility, or simply new frameworks for exploitation? • This conference brings together a wide range of scholars to explore just how transnational brokerage actually works, whether alternatives exist, and what the rise of brokering means for workers, industries and for the future of labor markets.


PANELS

Governing Brokerage: From Brokerage States to Abetting Forced Labor

XIANG BIAO, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Oxford
author of Global ‘Body Shopping’: An Indian International Labor System in the IT Industry

ROBYN MAGALIT RODRIQUEZ, Rutgers
author of Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Workers to the World

DAVID KYLE and KATIE VALENZUELA, UC Davis
Brokering Labor and Capital: How the Evolution of Global Financial Markets and State Regulations Created a Migration Industry

Brokering Cross-Border Professionals: IT & Beyond

ANNALEE SAXENIAN, Dean, School of Information, UC Berkeley
author of The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy

PAYAL BANERJEE, Smith College
Corporate Clients, Employers, and Indian Immigrant IT Workers in the U.S.

ANNA GUEVARRA, University of Illinois, Chicago
author of Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers

The Migration Industry & Precarious Employment

RUBÉN HERNÁNDEZ-LEÓN, UCLA
author of Metropolitan Migrants: The Migration of Urban Mexicans to the U.S.

LAURA LOPEZ-SANDERS, Stanford
Brokering Incorporation: Bilingual Brokers and Ethnic Replacement Processes in New Immigrant Destinations

FIDAN ELCIOGLU, UC Berkeley
Producing Precarity: The Role of Temporary Help Agencies in the Labor Market

Brokering Alternatives? Community-based Worker Centers & Migrant Day Labor

JAMIE PECK, Research Chair, Urban and Regional Political Economy, University of British Columbia
author of WorkPlace: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets

and NIK THEODORE, Director, Center for Urban Economic Development, University of Illinois, Chicago
co-author of Flexible Recession: The Temporary Staffing Industry and Mediated Work in the United States

ABEL VALENZUELA, Director, Center for the Study of Urban Poverty
co-author of On the Corner: Day Labor in the United States

JANICE FINE, School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers
author of Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream

Free and open to the public
This is event is presented by the UCSC Center for Labor Studies, funded by the Miguel Contreras Labor Studies Fund of the University of California Office of the President, with generous additional support from the UCSC Center for Global, International, & Regional Studies, and co-sponsored by the UCSC Division of the Humanities and the Vice Chancellor for Research.

Previous Events

"Race and Food" (January 31 - February 2, 2008)

“The Global IT Industry: The Future of China and India” (May 30, 2003)

"Global Sourcing and Regions of Innovation" (April 30, 2004)

White Food: Race and the Politics of Purity (Oct. 17, 2005)

“Transforming Asia in the 21st Century: The Political Economy of Asian Integration” (March 10, 2006)

Globalization, State Capacity and Islamic Movements (Washington, DC, March 16-19. 2007)

Genomics & Justice: Promises, Perils, and Paradoxes (May 17-18, 2007)

The Petro-Politics of Energy Security: Alternative Development and Security Strategies for the Gulf of Guinea (Washington, DC, June 8-9, 2007)

Mapping Global Inequalities: Beyond Income Inequality (UCSC, Dec. 13-14, 2007)

Rough Seas for Global Capital Markets: Implications for India, China and the US (November 9, 2007)