 Hello everyone, thank you for joining this webinar on the Labour Social Movement and Development Programme here at SOAS Development Studies. I hope you can hear me clearly enough. We have a technician next door, so if there's any questions with the audio, please order with the slides that you can hopefully see, just pin a notice up there. Any questions that arise as we go through the slides, we've got about nine slides. Just ping them up on the list here, I can see them, and I will come to them at the end of the webinar, which will aim for about 20 minutes or so, so hopefully that can keep your attention for that long. So, here we go. So, yeah, this is a relatively new programme here at SOAS. We have about seven years of history. We are a smallish, intense cohort, and we work through a seminar format. And you can see from the picture there, or hopefully you can hear from the picture there from those. We are primarily interested in agency, in the ability of working people throughout the world, but particularly in the global south to have an impact on development and to study ways and means of increasing that collective impact on development. So, yep, that's me. My name's Tim Pringler. I convene this programme. So I'll be talking chiefly about the module itself, the labour social movements and development module itself, not about other options on the course, on the programme rather. Of course, you can always ask any questions. If any questions come up around the structure, please just ping them over or indeed contact me later by email. I'm not going too far on the slideside. So the programme, core course and options. So with this programme, obviously you do a core programme, a core module. We call the modules now not courses in labour social movements and development. And then you pick one of two other core courses. One is political economy and development. The other is the theory policy and practice of development. You will also, aside from that, you will have another compulsory. So one of those, so you have two core courses there. You have the LSMD, then a choice of PED or TPP. Then you have this compulsory placement module. Now this is designed specifically for people on the labour social movements and development degree programme. I'm going to come back to that in a separate slide. That's a new development. And of course you've got a whole range of optional courses you can pick on from across the school really. Obviously we encourage you to look at development studies department options first, but there is a wider choice as well. So you can basically design your own degree programme around this core programme. Our teaching style in LSMD, and when I say LSMD, I mean that core module from now on. Our teaching style is we don't do tutorials. We've shifted to a two hour seminar, which means that generally speaking you will have a lecturer. It'll be one of five or six of us who work on this programme and they will give anything between the 20 and 40 minute introduction using slides. Maybe longer than that, maybe up to an hour introduction and then we shift over into a kind of participatory discussion really. It's based on both the slides in the seminar and also the core reading. Core reading for each week on this module on LSMD is usually about two or three core texts. Anything between 20 and 30, 40 pages long. We need to do the reading properly maybe three hours, four hours a week to do this reading properly in order to be able to discuss it and contribute to the discussions in the seminar itself. In our syllabus we have additional reading lists as well. These are up to for each seminar up to 20 or so readings, additional readings and of course we encourage you to look beyond that as well. On this module it's essential to do that core reading because we aim to make at least 50% of the seminar a discursive participatory one. A collective learning experience as I think a jargon goes. This is draft this assessment, the way we assess this module. This is a draft version but it's pretty much going to look like this. The reason it's draft is that we've introduced this placement module which will involve reports. The word counts are unlikely to change. The percentage, the way we weighted each assessment may change but it's not going to be very different from this. The first assignment, assignment one which is due at the end of term one. 3,000 words 30% assignment two bit shorter. Assignment two is around, we ask you to write a campaign either a social movement or a labour movement. On a larger or small scale a blog piece really, it's very much a campaigning piece. It's quite different from the first assessment. The first assessment is a much more rigorous academic exercise. Assignment two is really about campaigning and organising and getting people involved so it's a very different piece of work. The group case study I'm going to come back to that and the placement module I'm going to come back to that as well but they're each worth the way we're thinking at the moment about 25%. So let's go to the group study problem first. So the object of this or what we're asking you to do here is to design and outline an international region or basically a labour campaign or indeed a labour policy. So it could be a policy coming from a government agency or government department or indeed a regional or international body that is say for example developing and there might be an ILO convention or some such and looking at implementations there. And so most years almost all of us of our group study projects have been around designing social movement or labour movement campaigns. We have had one which is about the implementation of a visa policy for domestic workers usually coming from the Philippines here in the UK. And that was quite interesting but mostly around students using the before possibly fired the view no more than fired the four of you in groups working to design a virtual labour or social movement campaign. So the subject there are two components around it. One is a written outline that we expect you to bring some academic rigor into that to draw on some of the theory and even the case studies that we talked about during the previous seminars and then a collective oral presentation which is usually about 30 minutes followed by a discussion. So some of the topics that have come up so far have been a trade union for child workers in I think it was in Ethiopia. We've had an overtime fair overtime campaign in I think that was based in South Africa. We've had a trade union recognition campaign. We've had a campaign designed around improving Dalit representation in India. We've had a campaign that's around campaign for against land occupation in Brazil. So it's pretty varied. We even have mountain trekkers in China and based on based on a movement there by mountain guides in a region of China where there's a high tourist train. So it's pretty varied. It's graded by a panel. Everybody in your group will get the same mark. In a panel itself there will be at least two lecturers but we also, if we can get hold of them, we bring in outside practitioners who have very experienced in campaigns to have a look at this. They don't grade but they may ask questions as well. I should point out as well as you may have seen from our video that most of the academics teaching this degree module or this degree programme are academics but many of us are involved in campaigns, social movements, union activities ourselves. So we're not just coming from an academic angle. Most of us are activists as well to a greater or lesser degree. Of the group study project itself what we're aiming to do really is to try to provide a real life situation that we can assess to develop what it's like building or working around a labour campaign. Or indeed a social movement campaign and of course the foster intellectual exchange, both among each other yourselves while preparing this presentation or this campaign but also in the question and answer section itself. Perhaps just as important as well, it's very easy to get over theoretical, particularly in academic circles, in an academic context such as to over intellectualise collective movements. And while we wish to bring rigour to this intellectual rigour to this area, we're also very aware that there is a relationship between theory and practice. And understanding that relationship and applying it to different contexts is central to what we're trying to do with this programme. So moving on to the placement module. So I'll be completely frank about this. This is a new module that we've developed on the basis of student feedback over the last four or five years. And we're very excited about this new module. What we're planning to do is what we have in place, what we will do. This is a module that is, it may be a physical placement if the organisation that you're placed in, you place yourselves in rather, is near to so as, i.e. in London basically or within striking distance or travelling distance of London without great cost. I think more equally exciting or maybe a virtual relationship, a virtual placement. As I said, most of us are on teaching on this on this programme are activists ourselves to a greater or lesser extent, and we have our own network. So we'll share this with students and we have put together a list of activists organisations, a bit social, from social movements, Labour NGOs to trade unions at various levels. And we will ask students to pick one of these organisations and then your work with me. I'll be convening this as likely to be me convening this module as well to pick one of the organisations and to develop a mutually beneficial work schedule. The idea being here is that you're kind of not just an intern. You're not an intern. It's a placement you're, but we want you to provide to be a beneficial relationship so that the work that you do with the organisation will be of use to them as well as obviously you understanding how these organisations may work in practice. It involves about a total of 40 hours work and this will be about 10 hours work over a four week period. But it will also involve seminars in preparing, in working with the convener, probably me to work out the work schedule with the organisation and to make sure the partnership works well. The point of this is to get to understand and apply learning from the placements to the analysis of a specific global labour and social movement. And to kind of bring these what we discuss in class to a real life situation and take back what we learned from a real life situation bring back that back to the classroom. So it kind of is what it says on the bottle really. It is. It's something that we've been very keen to do. There've been kind of various logistical constraints, but we think now we're in a position to particularly through this idea of a virtual placement to overcome this to make this a very exciting new initiative. So we're keen to get going on this. I'm just trying to get the slides to work too far. So the programme itself, I thought I might talk a little bit about the rationale behind the labour social movements and development programme. As I said, it's a relatively new programme here in Development Studies. We began in 2012 and it came out of really a kind of increasing awareness among colleagues who work on labour that at the core of development lies employment at the core of development lies in employment. And one rationale is that most people in the world who are poor are working as well. And to focus on poverty as a static concept really didn't get us very far. We need to look at the social relations that undermine poverty, that underlie poverty rather, that undermine development and tend to kind of bring a closer look at collective agency and how this may impact on development programmes. So to get away from the idea that development is something that rich people do to poor people, really to bring this back into how the working poor across the world. And this includes the global north as well. We are also interested in developments in the global north as well, how the working poor impact on their own destiny really. The other side of this rationale linked to that is that labour is in the discipline of development and history of development, it tends to be understudied and we think it is a key lens, a really important lens through which to assess development outcomes. Most people across the world to be poor is to be in work and to be in work requires a distinct whether that be reproductive work or a reproductive work so that is a distinct social relation. We wish to try and understand that in order to increase collective agency and impacts on development. The other rationale behind it is that is really to look at labour movements as social movements that are key drivers of social change and development, that out of struggles, out of collective agency development occurs. I don't know if you've seen that. Some of you may have seen the video. There's an interesting point where one of my colleagues, Jan Slurker, makes the point that the slave trade was defeated by the active agency of slaves. It wasn't defeated by people doing development, i.e. campaigning in the global north, campaigning to abolish the slave trade. Not that that wasn't important, but the key fight was the collective agency of slaves themselves. This rich history both in the global north and the global south, across movements and the key moments in development that they create, the end of apartheid in South Africa and the role of trade unions and that is another example that springs to mind. These are profoundly important. We're also interested in the relationship between labour movements and or social movements, governments and international development organisations. So we might want to look at, for example, in China in 2008 we had a new labour contract law was introduced that in many ways did seem to be in attempt, if not to level the playing field between employers and workers. But certainly to shift the pendulum back a little bit in favour of working people in China. Why did the Chinese government decide to do that? We're really interested in that. What was the impact of a rise in a dramatic rise in in labour disputes rights in so in unrest in general in China in bringing about that kind of what I would loosely loosely frame as a pro labour law. The examples go on examples from around the world. So we're interested as I said in that in that agency in that collective agency. We're interested in to on international organisations, how the, for example, the international labour organisation, its own conventions and standards, how this feeds into the developed narrative, how the ILO's role has changed over the decades from one that was very much about setting labour standards to one really that it's kind of a different metamorphosis into a, a development organisation, which may or may not be the direction it needs to go on. It's something that we spend quite a lot of time discussing. So the ILO's reaction to globalisation or what we term in SOAS often neoliberal globalisation has been to shift the campaigns like the decent work agenda. The campaign on to bring an end of forced labour on the worst thought or to abolish the worst forms of child labour. Are these appropriate responses? Are they top down? Is there a way that the labour and social movements can feed into into these into these initiatives? Indeed, what is the theory behind? What is the theoretical framing of these of these ILO initiatives? And are they adequate? We also, you know, that takes us into questions around modern slavery and the debates and literature around that, which is also something that we cover closely. So the organisation of the course, you know, of the module rather, I did have a slide that had seven or eight or nine points that spoke to the main main organisational points or nodes, if you like, in the module. Excuse me, but I thought now that's that's to detail. Let's just talk about some of the three core strands that we're interested in. One is around the social construction of new labour forces. And there's an article by Chuck Colt Taylor in Third World Quarterly that speaks closely to these strands as well. So in 2000. We're interested in the expanding international division of labour, how production has shifted to areas of the world where labour may be cheaper, where labour law may be more lax, where trade unions or other social movements may be less able to exercise any influence on the process of processes of control, subjugation and resistance taking place in different parts of the world. A really interesting book there, I'd advise any of you guys to read, is Beverly Silver, a famous American sociologist, a book called Fortress of Labour, where she charts the movement of capital across the world over the last, I think between 1878 and quite recently up to about the turn of the century, and looks at the impact of why capital moves and what the outcome of that is. In terms of outcome, we obviously are particularly interested in the organising potential of trade unions in these new abodes of production, or as David Harvey has called them, spaces of accumulation. There's no doubt about it that organised labour, or shall we say incorporated organised labour in terms of mainstream trade unions have their influence and both the number of members they have and their ability to influence the processes at work itself, but also beyond the workplace have declined in recent years under what we terms mainly neoliberal reforms and processes. So we're looking at how this decline has happened, how has Labour, or the Fortress of Labour of Beverly Silver said, how has that their ability to influence development declined over the last two or three decades. And what are the possibilities for either rebuilding traditional trade unions or revitalising as the literature calls it, or indeed building new, probably even more exciting, building new social movements or building relationships between trade unions or other types of social movements that may focus more on identity, or on other issues, environmental issues in particular, or housing issues, etc. The nature of, as I'm sure everybody knows, the nature of how stuff is produced has changed dramatically with globalisation, and this has led to the growth of supply chains. You may be holding a phone or looking at this on a computer where the parts in that computer will be made from three or four, five, probably even more different sites of production across various global supply chains, or regional supply chains. So what does that do to the ability of working people, the people working in those supply chains to the person from the workers who may be polishing the screens on your mobile phones to the people who are designing some of the more integral components within that phone? What are the possibilities for building solidarity or campaigns that may improve conditions across the supply chain as well? What is the relationship between, say, a local campaign in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh? What is the relationship between that campaign between local governments, local labour NGOs going back to regional organisations, and indeed the brand itself? What are the weak points in that chain? What are the points around which labour organisations or social movement organisations can intervene in order to increase the likelihood of an outcome that is beneficial to working people? So those were some of them. Let me just go back to some of the key strands of thinking around it. And as I said, I'm drawing on Taylor tutorial. We're building that around Taylor, and indeed those are the strands around global labour studies, really, in terms of some of the key themes in the degree module itself. So we start from the argument, really, that global capitalism creates poverty, that although it may create wealth, it also creates poverty. The cat labour relationship is an exploitative relationship, so the question then arises how to either end the exploitative nature or at the very least to improve the conditions of that exploitation, to make life better, to try and understand how campaigns and agency may be organised to improve that situation or change that situation. Another key theme is the relationship between production and reproduction, something that feminist literature, particularly since the 70s, has contributed greatly to this debate. The fact that the most reproductive work usually carried out by women, almost always carried out by women, is entirely unpaid. The global north, an example of that, is that it's become, unfortunately, a historical footnote, but it was a key campaign in the global north, at least, was the wages for housework campaign. And around that was the notion that this reproductive work, this idea of bringing up the next generation of workers and the care work that that involves is almost entirely unpaid. How does that relate, how does the value created around that, how does that, how should that affect our organising strategies, the organising strategies of labour movements or social movements or trade unions or that level. What is the relationship between that reproductive work and so-called productive work as well? How can we turn that to the advantage of working people? How can we use that to affect gender relations in a positive way? Another key theme has been the rise of precarious work or vulnerability, or perhaps I should say the return of all the mainstreaming, if you like, of precariousness, ranging from the beginning in the workplace with a course going on to housing, to education, access to education. We shouldn't forget that throughout most of human history, or certainly in the history of capitalism, work has been a very precarious experience for most of the working people in that history. For a very small minority of the global population of the global workforce, the post-World War II settlement, with a lot of cash splashing around the system in reconstruction following the devastation of World War II, led to a certain formation in certain sectors, semi-skill sectors that led to what we call the post-war settlement. What Beverly Silver and Giovanni Origi refer to as the golden age of labour. But we should never forget that this relatively secure, usually male breadwinner model of production in which unions had an influence in which contracts were just individual. They were sometimes collected as well, and really only ever applied to a small minority of the workforce, and that was nearly always in the global north. Not entirely, but nearly always in the global north. So neoliberalism has pretty much done for that. So we need to understand that model, why that model was so gendered. But we also need to, out of the extreme precariousness that has become precariousness, that has become normalised as a result of the decline of, let's say, formal work through processes of informalisation. What's the impact of that? What does that mean for people who wish to organise at work, or indeed organise in the community, to organise for or among informal work, streets, street food sellers, talktook drivers, taxi drivers, Uber drivers, that matter, or DD drivers, as in every channel? What does that vulnerability mean, and are there new methods of organising, well there are new ways of organising that are being developed by workers in the global south? How do we understand, how do we make the links with more established forms of worker or labour or social movement organising, and how do we build solidarity across transnational boundaries really? Now the key theme in this, and you'll hear this word, quite a lot of sources is neoliberalism, and the processes such as outsourcing, informalisation and feminisation, the huge entry in significant numbers of women into the workforce, and how that process has been very much gendered in itself. How to understand these processes and indeed how to, when necessary, challenge them, and what are the forms of movements and struggles that are most efficient at challenging. The themes really, I think that is my last slide on this little webinar, I hope it is really, so you should have had a grasp by now, a few of you have arrived late, but the slides will be made available. I hope you give you an idea of the nature of this degree programme, and how this module in particular focuses on collective agency, and how best to alter the course of development through the agency of working people. There will be other modules in the degree programme that focus on other aspects, but this is very much the core of this module in particular. So, if you've got any questions, you can flag them up here. I think there should be a chat box there that you can type them. Yeah, there is a chat box, which you can type in any questions that you have, either relating to what I talked about, or indeed any other questions that you might have, or you can email me as well. My name is Tim Pringle, and if you go to SOAS and type in Tim Pringle, my email address will come up. It's tp21atsoas.ac.uk. But if you have questions now, please do ask them, and I will do my best to answer them. Okay, so there's not exactly a tsunami of questions coming over. Maybe I should go back to the slides, and I'm just going to click through them and see if anything comes up for you guys as we go through them really. First slide on the course options. The seminar teaching model, which is a bit different from other modules, will do a lecture and tutorial format, but as we're a relatively small cohort, roughly between anything between 10 and 20 students, we can afford to be a little bit more participatory, a little bit more intense about it. So that obviously means that you need to do the reading, particularly the core reading, should I say. So yeah, do any questions on that, and the differences between that seminar pedagogy compared to a lecture tutorial approach. As I said, that's draft. The group case study usually starts off with being quite a stressful experience for participants, but always, and I've been involved now in probably about 30 of these case studies, have always turned out to be a positive experience. So hopefully that tradition will continue. As I said, the placement report is a new initiative, the placement module rather, and the report that we ask you to provide to be assessed is a new initiative. Group study projects, there you have it. Really, I've been through that slide already. The chief principle thing underlying this is to get people to work together on a campaign that they're interested in. You guys choose between, you choose the campaign, you send us a proposal, we look through the proposal, we send by any ideas that we might have, but the principle point of that proposal is to make sure that there's enough literature on the campaign that you've chosen. Really, the placement module, it's the key point there is it's physical or virtual, it can be either with near so us and it could involve visiting an organization and working out of that organization. More likely, I think it will be a virtual relationship because as I said, this is a global placement and we want people to to really get an understanding of how Labour or social movement organizations or NGOs operate in other parts in across the global south really. Rational behind the program briefly, most people in poverty are also in work. Work provides the opportunity for people to organize collectively that opportunity is stymied or constrained by informal working conditions among many other factors or gender relations or many other factors. So, how to overcome that, how to build solidarities in which people, working people can exercise an influence over their lives. Three strands of global labour studies and we very much key into these, how new labour forces are constructed. Okay, so thanks for that question, Hamza. I hope you can hear me having a problem with the mic. I think your mic, I think the idea is that you type in questions that you don't speak the questions over your mic. Tyfan, sort of your question, you would like to ask a possibility to change or upgrade the MA or the MSc in this case. It's a Masters of Science to an MFIL or PhD. That is a different track, Hamza. You would need to apply for an MFIL PhD track there, which would be really based on the fact that you already have an MA or a master's degree. So, yeah, this is just a Masters and we have quite a number of students at LSD, proportionally quite a high number of students, who once they've got their masters in our degree programme, then move on to a PhD programme. But you would need to get this Masters first. The MFIL PhD track that you mentioned there is a different pathway. Okay, so this is an independent Masters programme. Is that many of us, many of our students, do go on to do PhD programmes. So, just while Hamza is... Oh, you've got the answer. Good. I hope that works. I hope that explains. As I was saying, there's those three course rounds in global labour studies, which we're very interested in, which we bring in, which we focus on, and then our key themes here. These aren't the only themes. The themes are obviously much broader than this, or discussions that emerge after these things. But these, and as I said, I had another side with a lot of different points on, but I thought best, given the nature, the time constraints, to bring it down to three, five key themes there. And of course, there's lots of literature on all this stuff. So, and we think this kind of covers really, I suppose, if you take that last point of forms of movements, or new forms of movements and struggles, really how they emerge out of the previous four themes would be pretty much what, you know, sum up what we're trying to get at there in the programme. Hi, Mateus. Thanks for that question. I'm not sure if everyone else can see these questions, so I'll quickly summarise it. So you're asking how many places are available on this programme and what is the average response time from the department after the application. So, yes, there are places available, definitely. As I said, we are not a huge, we don't get, we're not a huge programme. We don't want to be too big because this is quite an intensive programme and degree programme, and as I've stressed earlier on, we do focus on participatory learning and participatory pedagogy. What is the average time of response from what we call admissions? So your application will go to admissions and they will have a look at it and then they will send it to me. If you've got, excuse me, if you've got an application in and haven't got back from admissions, please do write to me and I'll chase it. I mean, you can chase admissions, the email you sent off your application to, but otherwise you can, if you're still having a lot, write to me at TP, T for Tim, P for Pringle. 21, that's digits, at s-o-a-s dot ac dot uk. I wonder if I can type that out. I think I can. I'm going to type that out so folks can get in touch with direct. So the average time, I don't know what the turnaround time is, but it should be about, certainly shouldn't be more than a couple of weeks at most. So if you've got an application in, Mateus, please do write to me there and I'll chase it up for sure. Hello all. So a couple more questions there, Mateus. You've got another question about funding options. If you go to the SOAS webpage and type in funding my degree, you should be able to find various deadlines from various funding organisations there. Obviously funding options are often competitive and it can be fairly competitive as well, but you'll find the deadlines on that webpage. So yeah, you type in funding my degree and then have a look at the webpage and the organisations that come back at you from there. Again, any questions that arise from that, either write directly to the organisations or to me and I'll try and find the answer for you. Hamza, hi again. Where can we find the material and the recording? I am assuming this will be made available to folks. I'll check that with our technical people, but I'm pretty sure this will be made available. Probably on the labour social movements and development webpage that I hope you've all seen, but I will check that out. Yeah, it will be made available. If nothing happens in the next week, do write to me and I'll make sure that happens. Oh, here's Michael from SOAS. Hello Hamza, you will be sent the YouTube, there you go. Michael's answered it. Thank you Michael. Hello all. So it seems that there are no more questions, but as I said, do drop me a line if any questions come up. I'm going to sign off now, thanks to you all for your interest in this degree programme and SOAS in general and for participating in this webinar. Have a great day. Bye bye.