I attended a talk today on a paper, a really interesting project in Barnsley, East Yorkshire, basically about the role that civil society organizations have played/are playing within industrial relations systems at the moment -- not only gap-filling, but creating and fulfilling new roles in support of immigrant workers in particular. (In the context of the UK, when they're talking about "migrants", it's often unclear to me if they're just referring to asylum seekers/refugees, or also other types of immigrants; on this, too, perhaps there's no real route anymore except the asylum and student routes, so it might make no difference.) The talk ended up being about two areas I'm familiar with in practice terms: worker centers and funding shortages that lead to CSOs/NGOs (1) being subject to a certain kind of disciplining through these funding regimes, as are the folks they serve, (2) having to function on a survival/competition logic. Very familiar to anyone familiar with Ngo-land in the global south.
I two questions - one about worker centers, one about if they'd read any of the literature from or about the global south. to the second, the lead author sighed. "No, we didn't work on the global south, but we did look at the periphery of europe, since this is a european project," he said. it was fair, but not my question. It also reminded me of this frequent truth, how those in the global north - even when working on issues that are problems of neoliberalism, marketization, and funding constraints - never *have* to think about and read about the global south. and yet those of us writing from there, feel or actively experience the requirement of reading from or about these people. I wonder if I should write to him. I think I will, if I can attach a paper or two. It's tiring, really. So tiring.
