#9 December 15, 2024

« Decolonizing Work and Value Creation »

Time: 5am San Francisco-Vancouver | 6am Mexico City | 8am NYC-Montréal | 9am Santiago | 2pm Paris–Johannesburg | 5.30pm New Delhi | 7pm Jakarta | 10pm Sydney 

Location: online 

Organizers: #DemocratizingWork and WageIndicator Foundation

Speakers: Janna Besamusca (Leading researcher at WageIndicator – Assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science at Utrecht University ), Jennifer Nedelsky (Professor at the Osgoode Law School in York University)  

Chair: Fiona Dragstra (General Director, WageIndicator Foundation)

Work time reduction has become a new policy issue and matter of negotiation between employees and employers. Recent experiments with shorter work weeks have garnered a lot of media attention. One motivation is the need to honor people’s care work and other forms of unpaid work, with some scholars calling for everyone to get engaged in care work. How should one think about such ideas from the perspective not only of employees’ autonomy, but also of society as a whole? Are they feasible for all societies, or are they a luxury that only richer societies can allow themselves? And how do they hang together with suggestions for making both our work and our societies more democratic? 

Janna Besamusca is a leading researcher at WageIndicator, where she is in charge of multiple projects related to Collective Agreements, such as BARWAGE. She is also a member of the Supervisory Board of WageIndicator Foundation.

Janna is an assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science at Utrecht University. She obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2019 for her research into the position of mothers in the labour market in middle- and high-income countries. As a labor sociologist, she has conducted research into decent work in low wage sectors, wages in collective bargaining, self-employment and motherhood, and the effects of work-family policies on mothers’ labour market position.

Jeniffer Nedelsky is a Professor at the Osgoode Law School in York University. Her teaching and scholarship have been concentrated on Feminist Theory, Legal Theory, American Constitutional History and Interpretation, and Comparative Constitutionalism.

Prof. Nedelsky’s research focusses on three areas – the organisation of care and work; the role of property law in the climate emergency and its link to inequality; and theories of judgement.

Her most recent book, Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law (2011) won the C.B. Macpherson Prize, awarded by the Canadian Political Science Association. She is currently completing a jointly authored manuscript (with Tom Malleson), A Care Manifesto: (Part) Time for All (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).

The recording is available in English on this page and below: