Alumni Association

eCornell Keynote: Freedom at sea is still a dream for hundreds of thousands of workers in commercial fishing and seafood processing. They are working in forced labor situations around the world — in Asia, in South America, and in the U.S. — and conditions are dire. Jason Judd, Executive Director of the Global Labor Institute at Cornell’s ILR School, aims to end the practice of forced labor and has authored a Handbook for the detection of forced labor in commercial fishing called Towards freedom at sea: Handbook for the detection of forced labour in commercial fishing. “Our shared vision is one of freedom at sea, where forced labor has been relegated to the past and decent work is a reality for all the world’s fishers. It is our hope that this Handbook will serve as a valuable resource for actors throughout the commercial fishing industry who are working to achieve this vision.” — Jason Judd We’ll talk to Mr. Judd as well as reporter and activist Daniel Murphy about the prevalence of forced labor and how to combat it through detection and reporting. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN Why forced labor is still an issue in seafood supply chainsWhat works in policy or technology to combat forced labor in fishingHow new tools like the Handbook help authorities pinpoint forced laborHow new journalism and worker organizing can helpSPEAKER Jason Judd EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GLOBAL LABOR INSTITUTE Cornell ILR School

Antoine Bertheau The Unequal Impact of Firms on the Relative Pay of Women Across Countries Abstract: We use matched employer-employee datasets from the US and Europe to document the contribution of firm-specific pay premiums to the gender hourly wage gap. Our findings are as follows: (1) The impact of firm-specific wage premiums on the gender wage gap —the firm effects gap— varies considerably across the 11 countries we study. It accounts for two-thirds of the gender wage gap in the US and, at most, one-third in Europe. (2) A decomposition of the firm effects gap into sorting (women working in lower-paying firms) and pay-setting (women earning less in similar firms) reveals stark differences across countries. The pay-setting effect explains less than 10 percent of the gender wage gaps in most countries. In countries with a lower degree of wage-setting centralization (Hungary and US) the importance of the pay-setting effect is much larger.

Cosponsor: Department of Global Labor and Work Latin America’s “left turn” at the beginning of the twenty-first century was unprecedented in its scope and duration, producing 32 presidential victories by left-of-center parties or leaders in 11 different countries between 1998 and 2015. Despite notable achievements in reducing poverty and extreme inequalities, leftist parties found it difficult to “deepen” democracy by empowering popular majorities, and they suffered a series of agonizing political defeats between 2015 and 2019 that allowed conservative forces to reclaim their customary hold on state power. This project traces the different origins and trajectories in power of “populist” and “social democratic” currents within the Latin American left. Through a comparative analysis of several leftist cases, it also examines how their alternative conceptions of democracy carried the seeds of their own demise, setting the stage for new forms of political polarization in the region. Santiago Anria is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Labor and Work at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He is the author of When Movements Become Parties: The Bolivian MAS in Comparative Perspective.

Patricia Cortes Abstract:

Speaker: Laura T. Murphy, Policy Advisor, Department of Homeland Security and Professor of Human Rights, Sheffield Hallam University Laura Murphy will discuss the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the landmark forced labor legislation that prohibits goods made in the Uyghur Region of China from import into the United States, including the effects of the law after two years of implementation. She will discuss the methods researchers use to uncover forced labor in China and the critical importance of that work to government efforts to prevent forced labor-made goods from entering the US. She will also discuss the government’s collaborations with industry and civil society to effect meaningful change for workers and protect the rights of people globally. Bio: Laura T. Murphy, Ph.D. is Policy Advisor to Under Secretary Robert Silvers in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Policy. Her role in the Office of Policy is to advise on forced labor, in particular on the implementation and enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. She is Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K. Her recent academic work focused on researching forced labor in the Uyghur Region of China and identifying risk of forced-labor-made goods in international supply chains. She has worked internationally on forms of forced labor and human trafficking, including in West Africa, India, the United States, and Canada. She is author of numerous academic books and articles on the issue of forced labor globally. Introduced by faculty host, Magnus Fiskesjö (Anthropology). Cosponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, Contemporary Muslim Societies Program, Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies Program, the Department of Global Labor and Work (ILR), and the Global Labor Institute, Government, as well as the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

Lorenzo Lagos Union Bargaining Power and the Amenity-Wage Tradeoff Abstract: This paper studies the relation between the wage and amenity components of compensation under collective bargaining. Using the universe of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in Brazil, I augment information on workers’ wages with the comprehensive set of amenities codified in the text of these contracts. I then estimate the effects of increasing union bargaining power with a difference-in-difference strategy that leverages 1) a judicial decision that prevented the expiration of existing CBA provisions—a policy known as ultractivity and 2) gaps in CBA coverage across establishments when the policy was enacted. I find that boosting union power causes an increase in both wages and CBA clauses without a subsequent decrease in employment. A revealed preference approach to estimating the wage-equivalent value of negotiated clauses shows that amenity value also increases, comprising approximately45% of workers’ total gains in compensation. Results are consistent with collective bargaining functioning as a labor market institution that counters monopsony power, but where employers retain the right-to-manage the composition of their workforce.