Abstracts: 

 

Localism, Solidarity, and Belonging in Polarized Times

Yishai Blank & Issi Rosen-Zvi

At the core of the law governing municipalities lies an inherent tension, indeed a dialectic, between local autonomy and national (or regional) solidarity. Cities have a primary duty to care for their residents, but they are also integral parts of a broader political entity - the nation. Consequently, they bear a duty of solidarity not only to their own residents but also to neighboring cities and their state. This principle of solidarity embodies the legal reflection of the fact that the residents of cities are typically citizens of the state as well, belonging to the broader national community. This belonging is primarily psychological and sociological but also political and legal. This paper will delve into how this fundamental tension can be theoretically understood and how it is, and should it be, legally regulated.

 

 

Nos Toca Cuidar: The Role of Solidarity in the Emergence of a Caring Society in Zapopan, Mexico

Samuel Segura Cobos & Diana Figueroa Prado

In the late 1990s, demographic transitions and the rise of New Public Management (NPM) in developed countries with a solidarity system organised around welfare states triggered processes of reflection on the existing organisation of care, its social nature, as well as its gender implications. Over the last two decades, this process of reflection has highlighted the transformation of care from a private matter within the family to a public policy concern with the potential to reconcile demands of solidarity and the gendered division of unpaid care work. In Latin America, where the construction of a universal welfare state was adversely affected by budgetary constraints in the 1980s, the region currently faces multiple challenges that aggravate old trends. Hence, persistent gendered inequalities and poverty incidence are compounded by accelerated population ageing and deteriorating family support networks. Against the backdrop of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, these challenges stress the imperative need to rethink solidarity as articulated by the welfare state and to move towards building caring societies as an optimal public policy that addresses the region’s unequal socioeconomic structures. Since 2018, the Mexican government has explored the creation of an integrated care system (ICS) as a public policy to help address gendered practices in caring and to encourage new forms of solidarity to very little avail. Before this lack of political consensus at the national level, some local governments are taking up this public policy innovation. First implemented during the spring of 2022, ‘Nos Toca Cuidar” constitutes Zapopan’s local ICS approach. Its programme guidelines tout the importance of rebalancing existing solidarity forms by addressing prevailing labour market inflexibilities that replicate gender imbalances in unpaid, care and domestic work. In this paper, we use Elson’s three R-model of recognition, reduction, and redistribution of unpaid work to assess the impact of “Nos Toca Cuidar” in rebalancing solidarity by interviewing policymakers and target public policy participants. The first section discusses the Mexican experience in the development of a care system, emphasising the most recent debate on the articulation of a National Care System (NCS). The second section details the socio-economic context of the municipality of Zapopan and the formulation of ‘Nos Toca Cuidar’ as a public policy considering both the legal instruments and policymakers involved. The third section provides a brief description of the implementation of the ICS by the end of summer 2024 considering the experience of target public policy participants. The fourth section assesses the design and implementation of ‘Nos Toca Cuidar’ in reducing gendered relations in unpaid care work using the three Rs model. The fifth section offers a final reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of “Nos Toca Cuidar” as a public policy seeking to advance new forms of gender-sensitive solidary relations in Zapopan, Mexico.

 

 

The scope of cooperation and special interest politics in organizations

Pablo Balán

Failures of collective action explain some governance failures—but so does its success. Collective action underpins special interest politics (Bates 1981; Olson 1982). Convergent lines of research show that collective action is supported by parochial altruism (Bowles and Gintis, 2004). What is less understood, however, is how this principle plays out in private and public social organizations. I argue that the nature of cooperation within social organizations can be a source of political distortion and, at times, cause failures of programmatic policy. Studying thisrequires going beyond traditional approaches based on network analysis and invites the application of insights from organization science, which can help understand the equilibrium effects of policies. In turn, policy interventions may alter equilibria in social organizations. I illustrate these points with materials from Africa and Latin America.

 

 

Tax and solidarity in a global world

Tsilly Dagan

Tax is one of the key state institutions facilitating long term cooperation in providing public goods and promoting redistribution. In that, it economically supports communities' collective self-determination and their constituents' inter-dependence by allowing them to rely on their peers. Ideally, this long-term interdependence may cultivate a sense of belonging and solidarity among community members. (Although one may wonder whether the coercive nature of taxation might crowd out this sense of solidarity, where taxes become a duty enforced by state power rather than part of one's intrinsic motivation, and the sense of solidarity and commitment to others is funneled through state's bureaucracy.)  

Under globalization, tax has increasingly become elective, or at least elective for some. People's mobility allows (some) people to relocate, thus de facto allowing them to choose their political affiliation. This is particularly true for those in high demand. Moreover, some people can even pick and choose among the public goods and services offered by more than one country, by choice of law mechanisms and tax planning; they can even opt out of tax (indeed of many regulatory systems) they fancy less.

This electivity undermines the ability of states to serve as hubs for redistribution and for facilitating long-term cooperation. States are less able to collect taxes and thus need to provide lesser public goods and services and afford less redistribution. People's mobility and the ability of some of them to consume public goods and services in multiple jurisdictions, create new rifts within societies between mobile and immobile individuals as well as between those who can afford the costs of opting in and out of a jurisdictions' regulatory schemes.

The meaning for this phenomenon for solidarity and taxes is complex. On the one hand, by making taxes a choice it reinforces the sense of solidarity among those who can otherwise choose.  On the other hand, it makes their cooperation elective and undermines others' ability to count on their commitment for the longer term. 

 

 

Foucault For and Against Solidarity

Shterna Friedman

In 1872, at the First International, Marx declared that “solidarity” is “the basic principle of the International.” For him, solidarity was an answer to the question of how to carry out revolutionary change. Roughly a century later, many social theorists declared that revolutionary change was impossible. This pessimism was particularly pronounced in Foucault, who rejected revolution, not because a proletarian class could not be found, but because he thought that no collective subject could be constituted in a way that would not reproduce the domination of the status quo. In this view, he accepted Durkheim’s description of how discipline, power, and social norms constitute solidarity. However, he reversed Durkheim’s normative valence: if discipline is what constitutes solidarity, then there must be something insidious about solidarity itself. This is not to say that Foucault rejected all solidaristic practices: he made space for highly local, contingent, and shifting forms of solidarity. This paper will examine Foucault’s reasons for rejecting and retaining various forms of solidarity, with the aim of suggesting that changing accounts of solidarity (from Marx to Durkheim to Foucault) are not precursors to, but rather symptomatic of, changing attitudes towards radical social change.

 

 

Workers’ Solidarity in Global Value Chains

Hila Shamir

Contemporary labor law is failing an increasing number of workers, particularly those at the lower tiers of Global Value Chains (GVCs). This failure is attributed to the outdated architecture of labor law, which remains tailored to the industrial-era modes of production and capital ownership. The conventional premise of labor law, both on the international and national levels, revolves around the employer-employee dyadic structure, under which the employer is the owner of capital, and, therefore, workers can leverage collective power to negotiate for a greater share of the pie and improved working conditions through collective action against their employer.

However, in the era of supply chain capitalism, the employer-employee dyadic structure is no longer suitable for workers’ struggles. Often the employer is merely one link in a lengthy global supply and production chain led by a multinational corporation (‘lead firm’). This lead firm holds the power to determine key elements of work, despite being legally distanced from the workers. Consequently, attempting to negotiate with or strike against the direct employer becomes futile, as the lead firm may respond to increased labor costs by simply terminating its contract with the supplier. Despite this shift in dynamics, research indicates that the broader structures of collective bargaining, wage bargaining coordination, and centralization have remained largely unchanged in recent years. Current labor law tools fail to address the power and ownership structures of supply chain capitalism, rendering its promised protections inaccessible to millions of GVC workers worldwide.

This article investigates how to foster worker solidarity across borders and along GVCs, while exploring the role of labor law in facilitating GVC solidarity and offering renewed institutional power resources to workers within supply chain capitalism. Firstly, the article examines how GVC structures hinder the ability to easily identify the workers' bargaining unit and to establish solidarity among workers, which is essential for effective collective action.  An underlying assumption of contemporary labor law is that the bargaining unit, the group of workers relevant for a unionization campaign, is straightforward to discern. While some complications may arise regarding various worker types, such as management or specialized units within the same business, the test in many jurisdictions for determining the bargaining unit at the enterprise level is relatively simple: it focuses on all workers employed by the same employer. This approach excludes suppliers' workers from the employer's bargaining unit, thereby diminishing or eliminating workers' bargaining power against the lead firm. Consequently, the lead firm can terminate a contract with a unionized supplier without being perceived as violating workers' freedom of association. This further disintegrates workers’ collective power in the supply chain and poses a significant challenge to creating worker solidarity along the chain.

Secondly, the article delves into existing organizing strategies employed by unions and other worker organizations aiming to enhance workers' rights in GVCs and foster worker solidarity along the chain. These efforts primarily operate outside the realm of traditional labor law, as it lacks the necessary tools and protections for transnational workers' collective action. The article specifically investigates the "Make Amazon Pay Coalition," organized by the UNI Global Union, which has sought to establish solidarity and articulate common demands among workers across this diverse international chain. This campaign holds particular interest due to Amazon's highly successful and intricate supply chain model, coupled with the company's strong anti-union stance, creating a challenging environment for worker organizing.

Finally, the article lays out a preliminary roadmap for the restructuring transnational labor unions and transnational labor coalitions to cultivate solidarity and ensure workplace democracy for workers located at different points along the supply chain. Potential solutions encompass a reevaluation of the forms of participation and solidarity pursued by unions, including the differentiation of their roles in enterprise bargaining versus sectoral bargaining. Furthermore, it may necessitate the adoption of innovative organizing strategies, such as leveraging technology to nurture worker communities, enhance communication, and fortify solidarity, all tailored to address the evolving dynamics of capital and labor within the framework of supply chain capitalism.

 

 

Universal Employment Standard and the Constitution of Organic Solidarity

Guy Mundlak

Drawing on Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity, the article seeks to identify the role of employment standards in fostering organic solidarity, that is solidarity among the members of a community with a high degree of differentiation and diversity. This type of solidarity is achieved when legal and social ‘strangers’ are aware and accept the norms governing their status, rights and responsibilities. A sense of justice is required to legitimize the regulatory system that distributes resources, opportunities and outcomes.

It is commonly considered that the electorate power, in combination with interest groups, affects the law. A neo-institutional view also reveals that the law constitutes interests, communities as well as a sense of solidarity. In the context of welfare state institutions (pension schemes), Korpi and Palme (1998) describe what they designate as the paradox of re-distribution. Despite the seemingly inefficient use of resources, universal pension schemes have a greater effect on distribution and equality than selective, or targeted schemes. Those favoring universal benefits often explain their benefits in terms of lower administrative costs and the elimination of strategic perverse incentives. But the authors further note that universal benefits constitute a stronger political clientele. Selective provision of pension schemes, for example – ones that are designated only for the poor, will be supported only by the weaker segments of the population, which will be stigmatized for being in need. Moreover, the literature on privatization suggests that when some pay and others benefit, privatization of services risk putting one group in confrontation with the other. The stability of a welfare scheme that is universal will be better secured when everyone enjoys its gains. In terms of solidarity, universal arrangements, allowing some differentiation but binding all, have a stronger effect on community building, and hence – organic solidarity. Targeted benefits risk doing the opposite, dividing resources and opportunities in ways that hermetically categorize, split and place individuals in constant competition.

While the paradox of re-distribution is commonly evoked in the context of welfare state provisions, it is less commonly used to analyze regulation generally, and employment law in particular. I argue that when considering the scope and means of employment regulation it is important to consider the effects of various options on building a cohesive and inclusive political clientele. As a rough and general rule of thumb, more inclusive and universal forms of regulation are better suited to constituting organic solidarity. This argument will be demonstrated by several examples, including:

• from maternal to parental rights, and then to universal rights of accommodation
• From the prohibition of sexual harassment to general norms against harassment of all forms
• From minimum wage to regulation of wage inequality
• From rights of citizenship to the inclusion of migrant workers on a territorial basis, and extending rights down the supply chain, ex-territorially
• The disadvantage of employment standards that are exclusively targeted at those with lower wages
• From employment protections to ‘employees’, to a guarantee of social rights for all

These examples will demonstrate the meaning of universality, their cumulative effect on the notion of organic solidarity, the relevance of the political explanation as derived from the re-distribution paradox, and surface the potential arguments against such claims of universality.

 

 

Class, Country, and Cleavage: Inequality, Mobility and the Transformation of Electoral Politics over the Long Run

Torben Iversen & Philipp Rehm

In the past two decades the academic literature on electoral politics in advanced democracies has turned gloomy. A Golden Age of growth and prosperity -- characterized by declining inequality and responsible political parties appealing to middleclass voters by expanding education opportunity and insuring against economic uncertainty -- has been replaced by a period of rising inequality and, arguably, more contentious partisan politics organized around increasingly narrow understandings of group interests. Yet, we lack a general account, theoretically and empirically, of how voting has changed over long periods of time and whether changes are cyclical or structural. This paper offers such an account based on the universe of national elections since 1945.

We argue that people vote for policies that advance aggregate welfare when they can see themselves, and their children, as part of a national community of shared fate; otherwise, voters become more preoccupied with their class position and may retreat into a defense of narrowly construed in-groups. The value orientations that prevail in the electorate depend on the degree of socioeconomic equality and mobility, which are shaped by public policies. We show that in this strategic interaction between government policies and voter value orientations, different equilibria are possible. Shocks that drive politics off one equilibrium can lead to a different one, but the status quo ante can also be restored through a cascade of corrective changes. We interpret the Golden Age and the rise of postwar income equality in light of the model, and we then consider the consequences of the post-1980s transition to a new and much more unequal knowledge economy.

 

 

Solidarity as a Political Value: The Case of Israel’s Savings for Every Child Program

Ayelet Carmeli & and Rachel Friedman 

This paper examines the prospects for solidaristic welfare policy by analyzing a counterintuitive case study: Israel’s Savings for Every Child program (SECP), which transformed a portion of a universal cash benefit for families with minor children into an individualized savings program. The SECP emerged as a compromise between the ultra-Orthodox parties, which demanded increased child allowances, and the budget division of the Ministry of Finance, which opposed generous allowances as a cause of low labor-force participation. Combining theoretical and qualitative methods, our analysis of the SECP shows how bargains between otherwise opposing groups, each pursuing very different aims, can produce relatively solidaristic policy outcomes.

 

 

Poverty as a Constitutional Failure: Is Solidarity Constitutionalism the Answer?

Yael Rimer-Cohen & Fady Khoury

Negative constitutionalism, i.e. the constitution as a limit of governmental authority, has predominated normative conceptualizations of the function of constitutions, primarily influenced by American constitutional theory and praxis. Yet, over the last two decades, theoretical recognition of the positive dimensions of constitutionalism began to emerge, suggesting that constitutions are not only vehicles of limits on governments or a simple legal mapping of political authority; rather, constitutions often impose positive duties and obligations on the state. Another function of the constitution is to raise certain issues, primarily rights, above the vicissitudes of normal majoritarian politics.

The question that we seek to explore is whether these functions of the modern constitution – which as shown by Ran Hirschl, have been utilized to preserve the hegemony of values endorsed by neoliberal elites – may be put in the service of transforming social solidarity into a constitutional mandate (placing duties on the state) and protecting it from the effects of reactionary political polarization and social fragmentation.

Building on existing literature, we conceptualize poverty as a structural constitutional failure. This failure may present itself in a myriad of ways and at different stages, from the theory undergirding the constitutional text to the ways in which constitutions are implemented in practice. This failure runs deep and wide, affecting not only actual constitutional practice, but the negative attitudes expressed in constitutional law scholarship about the constitutional entrenchment of social and economic rights.

To be sure, an explicit reference to social solidarity in national constitutions is relatively uncommon, and whatever commitment to social justice there is, it is usually expressed through the enumeration of social and economic rights, whether they be general guidelines that should inform state policies (e.g. Ireland, India) or fully enforceable rights.

From a normative perspective, we argue that conceptualizing social solidarity as a constitutionalist value should not only give substance to the constitution as a set of precommitments, duties and a conduit through which the constitutional order insures those subject to it against the risks of poverty, but it may also act as a bulwark against populist instrumentalization of the economy to the detriment of those most vulnerable.

Consequently, we hypothesize that constitutionalizing social solidarity may have two overlapping benefits: 1. It serves an expressive function, which in turn may have the added benefit of articulating and discursively promoting the values guiding society; 2. It provides rationale for and imposes positive duties on the governing authorities to pursue social policies, placing the limiting function of liberal constitutionalism and the positive function of (what we shall call) solidarity constitutionalism on the same normative footing, forcing courts and other state organs to promote policies that address poverty and other social needs.

These functions are then tested against the ways in which three apex courts have approached the topic of social rights and the doctrines developed to address certain state failures in executing their mandates: the Indian Supreme Court, which has transformed the ‘directive’ nature of social rights into justiciable rights in certain domains; the South African Constitutional Court, which issued a series of remarkable decisions, with varying degrees of success, on a myriad of social rights; and, the Columbian Constitutional Court, which since the 1990s has developed the ‘unconstitutional state of affairs’ doctrine where it identified a structural failure on a large scale by the state seen by the Court as violating the Constitution. These strategies’ success has received conflicting evaluations by constitutional scholars, but the language of social rights embedded in these countries’ constitution gave rise to creative judicial initiatives.

We evaluate the success of these experiences while maintaining an eye towards what we shall call the constitutionalization strategy. We argue that while the constitutionalization of specific social rights may empower courts to creatively intervene in the domain of socioeconomic policy, anchoring in the constitutional text the very idea of social solidarity as the ideational basis for social rights may provide a stronger basis for such interventions, even if the remedies that courts may issue, such as in the Columbian case, are limited to a dialogical process between the Court and the responsible governmental authority, compelling the latter towards finding a solution that addresses broad constitutional failures characteristic of a state of poverty.

Our conceptualization extends the discourse on law's role in fostering and maintaining social solidarity, while offering a nuanced perspective on this value: rather than viewing it solely as a foundational social principle upon which constitutions are constructed and which they reflect, we propose considering it as an aspirational value that constitutions themselves create and strive to realize. Through this lens, solidarity – with its emphasis on seemingly contradictory traits of proximity and distance, embodying a sense of responsibility toward the other – provides a framework for better understanding poverty as a constitutional failure and for addressing such failure within constitutional discourse.