Economic Development WG Session at the 23rd Annual AHE conference

Dear all,

The Economic Development Working Group (EDWG) invites young scholars to submit papers for presentation at the YSI EDWG panel on "Chaning World of Labour and Work" at the 23rd Annual Conference of the Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE), and receive feedback from a senior mentor in the area.

Theme: The changing world of labour and work

The economies of the Global South have for long been characterized by a persistence of informal self-employment, operating without wage labour, and by informal and precarious wage employment. Moreover, the recent decades have witnessed an increased in informalisation and precariatization even within the formal sector. In parallel, the past few decades have also seen an increased precariatisation of employment relations even within the Global North. This has important implications for the current trajectory of the global capitalist development. In the Global North, with internationalization of capital, increased flexibility in the labour process, and dilution in workers' bargaining power, the ability of the current phase of the existing economic system to create decent work and to provide Fordist-type 'standard' jobs and secure work has come under serious scrutiny. On the other hand, for the economies of Global South, whose development trajectory was imagined in terms of Global North economies being the archetype of development, are coming to question the ability of that model to provide secure livelihoods to the vast proportion of the population. This raises some pertinent questions regarding how to understand the world of work in the current juncture of global capitalism and the ability of the current growth process to provide secure livelihoods, both in the North and in the South. On a related note, this also raises the need to think about new ways of labour organization under these changing labour relations.

To engage with these issues, we invited submission from the young scholars focusing on, albeit not limited to, the following themes:

• Interaction between growth and informality
• Rethinking the issue of labour from the lens of the Global-South
• Relation between Informality and capitalist development
• Informalisation of the formal sector – the new normal?
• Relation between the persistent informality in the Global South and the newly emergent informal labour relations in the Global North
• Labour maket and worker bargaining
• Labour rights and new forms of labour organisation

Submissions: For consideration, please submit papers / work in progress around 5000-12000 words-long, with an abstract of 300 words by 15th May 2021. Selected paper presenters will be notified by the early June 2021.

Location and Date of the conference: online (Zoom platform) on Fridays throughout July 2021

Membership and Registration: There are no registration fees for attending the conference. All participants are required to become AHE members or renew their membership to attend the presentation sessions. The plenaries are open for general attendance.

Project image: Art by Haren Das, "In the Kitchen". (procured from: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/haren-das-in-the-kitchen)