Companies and business lobby groups bemoan a lack of qualified workers, even for entry-level or low-skill jobs. At issue is a stated inability to find workers with the right ‘fit’ for the role or business. But what does fit really mean? We draw on human capital theory and labour segmentation theory to examine how perceptions of fit are shaped. We conducted ninety-three interviews with food service workers, managers, and other industry stakeholders and found that employment decisions are shaped by stereotypes, with a particular focus on ‘pretty privilege’ or aesthetic labour, as well as Indigeneity, citizenship, race, and gender. We present implications for research and practice in the food services industry.

Australia’s education system is one of the most developed globally and also one of the most privatised. Despite the substantial expenditure by state governments and the federal government, it is profoundly unequal with respect to access, funding, resources, and results from early childhood education to university. The inequality has class and spatial features, and Indigenous Australians are at the bottom of the rung. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural, social, and economic capital, I show that the education system, whilst certainly allowing for some mobility, facilitates the reproduction of the existing class structure. Children from low-income households are more likely to not attend childcare, to attend a school that lacks resources and where going on to university is viewed as exceptional rather than the rule. In contrast, the economic capital of wealthier households allows them to access childcare and elite private schools. The cultural and social capital of these schools reproduces a born to rule ethos, and progression to an elite university is an assumed path.

In this paper, we introduce a unique dataset derived from a survey conducted among 450 Syrian refugee workers and the owners/managers of the firms in which they are employed in Istanbul, Turkey. We utilise this data to investigate the connection between the wage-productivity gap and perceived economic and social discrimination. The findings of the study indicate that individuals facing a wider wage-productivity gap tend to report higher levels of economic and social discrimination. These results remain consistent even after incorporating various variables at both the worker and firm levels into the analysis. These findings imply potential policy recommendations that policymakers should take into account.

Most truck drivers experience economic pressure in the form of low pay rates, no pay for non-driving work time, and long work hours. Unpaid working time, leading to low effective pay rates, encourages drivers to work excessive hours to pursue target earnings, which leads to fatigue and working time violations, and ultimately raises crash rates. This paper explores the complex relationship between regulatory violations, pay incentives, and crashes, to determine the effects of economic forces on carrier safety. We use data from 13,904 intrastate trucking companies in the United States, as well as median hourly truck driver wages from data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We find that controlling for observed regulatory violations (hours of service, unsafe driving, and substance abuse), at the mean, 1% higher driver wages are associated with 1.04% fewer crashes. Stated differently, a 10% wage increase would be 5 times as effective as a 10% reduction in ‘unsafe driving’ or 2.5 times as effective as a 10% reduction in ‘driver fitness’ violations. This unit elasticity between driver pay and crashes suggests that higher compensation will bring direct and commensurate worker and public safety benefits. Every unit in higher pay, at the mean, will lead to a corresponding unit improvement in safety. Our findings suggest that the most effective way for regulators to pursue their mission to reduce crashes, fatal or otherwise, would be to collect firm-level data on truck driver compensation and allow their methodology to follow sound science.

Working Nation is not the radical break with the existing policy framework implied by Albanese’s pre-election rhetoric. However, restoring a meaningful definition of full employment as an objective of government policy is a step in the right direction.

There is evidence that seaweed production can involve a variety of physical risks, but there has been little study of how wider contextual factors – such as enterprise size, economic and business relations, and forms of employment arrangements – may affect workers’ safety. This study explores the impact of such aspects on workers’ experiences of occupational safety and health (OSH) risks and their management in the developing seaweed industry, in North West Europe. Based on qualitative findings from a survey and discussions with owners/managers, workers and stakeholders in the industry, the study identified a number of issues relating to OSH in seaweed production. These include the predominance of micro small enterprises, the presence of significant risks to health and safety and limitations in the capacity of owners/managers to address them, as well as structural and economic factors in the sector that promote precarious work, and the low visibility and inaccessibility of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) to both public and private regulations. The paper discusses experiences of these issues in the emergent industry and relates them to the wider literature about work health and safety in micro and small firms and precarious and non-standard forms of work, typically found in agriculture and food production. Findings point to the need for better orchestration of public and private regulatory influences and further research to determine if strategies that are seen as successful in other sectors could be transferred to the emergent European seaweed industry.

This paper investigates how interest groups in France and Germany communicate information about Industry 4.0 technologies and approaches. Specifically, this explanatory study employs cutting-edge big-data-type tools and machine-based automatic text processing to delve into the topics, arguments, and postulates related to Industry 4.0 strategies by trade unions and employers’ organisations. The goal is to determine which of these factors have been pivotal in shaping social dialogue in France and Germany. The findings reveal that social partners in both countries are involved in similar digitalisation-related initiatives and express predominantly favourable viewpoints regarding Industry 4.0 technologies. Key themes in the dialogues of both France and Germany centre around workers’ rights, working conditions, and skills training.

Residential independence and incorporation into the labour market are two fundamental aspects of the transition of young people to adulthood, and gender differences have been observed in both. This study aims to determine the reasons behind the gender gap seen in young adults leaving their parental home and in finding paid employment. We analyse both the decisions of residential independence and employment jointly, for the sample of men and that of women. We separate the influence of observed factors from the influence of unobserved factors or preferences on the gender gap using decomposition techniques. The analysis is carried out for two points in time; this temporal comparison can help demonstrate whether the recent social changes experienced have modified the behaviour patterns of young people. Our findings indicate that, in accordance with the trend observed in recent decades in Europe, there is a convergence between men and women in the residential independence of young adults in Spain. However, in the labour market, there is still much to be done to reduce the gender gap. One recommendation arising from our study would be to promote policies which further improve the conciliation of family and work life, since this could reduce female labour abandonment associated with starting a family or motherhood.

This article studies the association between the characteristics of individuals’ social networks and expectations of career advancement, including pay raises and job promotions. The literature has extensively documented the role of social capital as a determinant of labour market outcomes. However, the formation of expectations constitutes another critical path by which social ties may affect work through their influence on individual motivation and behaviour. This study attempts to explain the relationship between social capital and career-related expectations and empirically assesses these associations by employing data from a survey administered to a representative sample of the Spanish population. Our findings suggest that the ability to mobilise network resources is positively linked with both measures of career advancement. However, access to the upper class is only positively associated with expecting a pay rise. Additionally, for non-employed individuals, higher mobilisation is positively associated with the expectation of an increase in income.

The introduction of the 2012 Labour Code is considered ‘groundbreaking’ in industrial relations in Vietnam. However, knowledge about the effects of this law is still minimal. This study provides the first evidence of the impacts of the law on worker outcomes, disaggregated by location and migration status. The Vietnam Labour Force Survey is used as the primary dataset. Both difference-in-differences and fixed-effect models are applied in the investigation. The estimated results show a relationship between the introduction of the law and the labour supply of contracted workers in urban areas, especially long-term migrant workers. Furthermore, income for these long-term migrant contract workers was affected significantly by the introduction of the law. A link between the law and health insurance participation was also found among non-migrant contracted workers in urban areas. We also perform estimations using a short panel sample and find notable results. The study likewise reveals disadvantages of rural workers compared to urban workers in terms of earnings, and of short-term migrants compared to other workers, in terms of labour supply.

This paper investigates how contemporary labour-capital conflicts in the Cerrado and Amazon biomes of Brazil are centred on the expansion of value from land via dispossession and land titling, and the extraction of value through financial mechanisms that enhance the current and future rent from landholdings. Understanding the consequent territorial struggles between traditional collective ownership on the one hand, and private individual and corporate value capture on the other requires a departure from incumbent capital-(salaried) labour analyses in value chain studies. Resistance to further land capture for speculation reveals inter-and intra-class class tensions, and the facilitative role of the state in validating illicitly grabbed resources. Despite the adverse political conditions in Brazil, there are modest, but significant gains by autonomous land occupations and demarcations in confronting capital expansion. In the face of intensified land grabbing, violent threats, and the laundering of illicit resource extraction, the two cases presented open up new dimensions of, and possibilities for, capital-labour struggles linked to commodity expansion and extraction on resource-rich frontiers.

The social and economic impacts of the emerging platform economy are most obvious in urban settings, where platforms are giving rise to unfamiliar dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, cooperation and division, as well as social and political integration and fragmentation. Platform urbanisation has created a new and unprecedented kind of politics. It has given rise to new political spaces and new subjectivities, resulting in a permanent reorganisation of ‘historical’ assemblages of territory, authority and rights. Drawing on the results of the European-based PLUS Project (Platform Labour in Urban Spaces: Fairness, Welfare, Development), this themed collection offers a fresh perspective on the platform economy by analysing it in terms of the relationship between urban contexts and the ongoing platformisation process, with an emphasis on how this relationship is reshaping (platform) labour and reconfiguring (or even reinvigorating) social action. Along the way, the articles in this issue consider whether platforms are useful for the development of urban environments and labour markets, or whether urban environments and labour markets are useful for the development of platforms. Likewise, they seek to identify the conditions under which relevant actors can mobilise and build alliances to ensure that such forms of development can be made to benefit not only workers but also (urban) citizens and the (urban) environment in general.

Research on collective organisation of migrant platform workers is mostly concerned with ride-hailing and delivery logistics, where explicit forms of collective action have been visible. This paper addresses the issue of the self-organisation of migrant workers on cleaning platforms through a case study of Helpling cleaners in Berlin. In the paper, we ask why the attempts for organising workers have failed to scale up beyond the informal exchange of information and tactics among the workers. Our article argues that the spatial dispersion of work across the city, lack of occupational identity, and the legal framework of work, make worker organising difficult for cleaners in Berlin. Still, these factors do not lead to an absence of collective practices. Helpling workers in our study gather in online groups, can receive help and exchange in a community centre, and have been in touch with political groups. Based on the case study, the article discusses potentials and hurdles for the development of collective counter-power.

Many countries use employer-sponsored visas to regulate migrant worker recruitment. By tying each sponsored migrant to a single employer, employer-sponsored visas have contributed to problems of workers being underpaid and mistreated. Through a critical assessment of temporary visas in Australia, particularly the Temporary Skill Shortage visa, and an analysis of relevant Australian and international literature, we argue that employer-sponsored visas are fundamentally flawed in their design and should be replaced. We consider various alternative options to employer sponsorship for regulating migrant worker recruitment before proposing the creation of a ‘mobility visa’, which would allow migrant workers to move freely between employers. We argue a mobility visa is a superior model for protecting worker equity and voice while also helping to address labour market needs.

This article considers, summarises, and analyses the merits of various arguments regarding options for regulating (or not regulating) ‘gig work’, concluding with observations about currently proposed legislation. There is a strong argument for regulating gig work. Many workers are vulnerable, and many of the arguments against any form or regulation – in terms of innovation, productivity, employment, or the inevitability of this trend – lack merit. Current definitions of employment, indeed current labour law, are not adequate and many, but not all, gig workers are like employees in terms of the control exercised over them. However, treating gig workers as employees would encounter several problems. The outcomes would be uncertain. Not all would be covered. Many gig workers would be opposed (despite wanting protection). The gig firms could render such legislation ineffective, or alternatively succeed in mobilising opposition, almost ensuring such legislation would be revoked at the next change of government. Regulating gig work as a form of contracting is a viable alternative. It has the potential to attract support from gig workers themselves, undermining opposition by the gig firms, and attract support from some parts of capital. The New South Wales experience shows us that regulation of gig work as contracting is feasible and politically sustainable. Despite limitations, the ‘Closing the Loopholes’ Bill provides a sustainable model for regulating and protecting many ‘gig economy’ workers. It is time to envisage labour law as something that extends not just to employees but to many contractors as well.

Gig work is defined by a (mostly) automated management, operating remotely through an app. Without human interaction, workers are left with only guesses about the functioning of the algorithms they are subjected to. To better position themselves in their competition for tasks, they try to influence the data profile that platform build about them. Made of performance indicators, personal information, and sensor data, these profiles are an essential part of algorithmic management. This paper will identify data profiles as core sites of the struggle in the gig economy. It will discuss the benefits and limitations of bringing data at the centre stage through a workers’ inquiry of food delivery platforms. The analysis will distinguish three actors in this inquiry and discuss their uses of data profiles: the couriers themselves, as they attempt to make sense of algorithmic management; the researcher, and how they can use personal data in order to reconstitute this field of struggle; and the trade unions, which can provide a way to collectivise data governance and gain better information in building their case in favour of gig workers’ rights.

We study the dynamics of the profit rate of United States (US) non-financial resident firms between 1945 and 2020. The 1970s entailed the abandonment of industrial policy and the liberalisation and globalisation of markets. This left the US-resident productive sector at the mercy of an unstoppable growth of imports. These imports helped to contain inflation but cornered the US domestic market, which negatively affected the profit rate of non-financial resident firms. The increasing foreign competition forced US-resident firms to invest and increase their productive capacity. Such increasing productive capacity demanded higher market shares; however, US-resident firms continued to lose domestic and foreign markets. This explains the fall in the degree of productive capacity utilisation, capital productivity, and ultimately, the rate of profit since the 1980s.

In the article, we will explore the impact of platform labour on urban spaces and the new frontiers of unionism by leveraging a ground analysis and theoretical elaborations from the PLUS project. PLUS was designed to analyse the impact of four platforms (Uber, Airbnb, Helpling, and Deliveroo) in seven European cities (Barcelona, Berlin, Bologna, Lisbon, Paris, London, and Tallinn). In doing so, PLUS supported its sociological investigations with theoretical and historical elaborations concerning the operation of contemporary platforms and the characteristics of the new form of unionism. We will present some results from PLUS, with a focus on the Bologna case, where platform workers express their dissatisfaction with their organizations, attempting to relate their strategies to certain structural aspects of business territorialization within urban spaces. We will draw upon the well-known distinction proposed by Albert Hirschman between exit, voice, and loyalty and adapt it to frame the various strategies that platform workers may adopt.

For migrant workers who do not have access to other means of income, the platform economy offers a viable yet exploitative alternative to the conventional labour market. Migrant workers are used as a source of cheap labour by platforms – and yet, they are not disempowered. They are at the heart of a growing platform worker movement. Across different international contexts, migrants have played a key role in leading strikes and other forms of collective action. This article traces the struggles of migrant platform workers in Berlin and London to explore how working conditions, work experiences, and strategies for collective action are shaped at the intersection of multiple precarities along lines of employment and migration status. Combining data collected through research by the Fairwork project with participant observation and ethnography, the article argues that migrant workers are more than an exploitable resource: they are harbingers of change.