Wage theft – the nonpayment of employees’ wages and benefits by employers – is a violation of national, state, and local labour standards, yet it is prevalent in the low-wage labour market of the United States. Building upon the recent increase in attention to the wage theft problem through advocacy, policy, and research efforts, we contextualise the problem within the country’s deregulated neoliberal labour market. We then propose a conceptual framework to demonstrate how the problem occurs when the price of labour standards violation is low due to lax enforcement, and there is a high price of compliance due to ambiguous and increasingly outdated labour standards. We further evaluate extant federal, state, and local policy initiatives designed to curb wage theft by modernising outdated labour standards and strengthening their enforcement. Finally, we propose future research agendas, such as examining the effects of fissured employment relationships and the enforcement efforts of state and local anti-wage theft laws, to guide the development of effective policy interventions.

We introduce a themed collection of articles examining how the public sector has responded to, and been impacted by, the COVID-19 crisis. Although the pandemic has affected the roles, functions, economies, governance and structures of public sectors, this themed collection focuses on public sector employment relations. Authors examine significant areas which have been subject to accelerated change stemming from the pandemic. Building on decades of public sector reform, these changes impact public sector enterprise bargaining, terms and conditions of employment, working arrangements and practices, and the relationship between public servants and their employer. The articles in this collection provide important insights into the longer-term influences of the COVID-19 pandemic for public sector workforces. The collection also raises questions around whether the positive lessons from this crisis can be sustained to help manage serious crises in the future, or whether the public sector will slip back into a state of unpreparedness.

Major reforms in education, globally, have focused on increased accountability and devolution of responsibility to the local school level to improve the efficiency and quality of education. While emerging research is considering implications of these changed governance arrangements at both a school and system level, little attention has been afforded to teacher union responses to devolutionary reform, despite teaching being a highly union-organised profession and the endurance of decentralising-style reforms in education for over 40 years. Drawing upon a power resources approach, this article examines union responses in cases of devolutionary reform in a populous Australian state. Through analysing evolving policy discourse, from anti-bureaucratic, managerialising rhetoric to a ‘post-bureaucratic, empowerment’ agenda, this article contributes to understandings of union power for resisting decentralising, neoliberal policy agendas by exposing the limits of public sector unions mobilising traditional power resources and arguing for strengthening of discursive and symbolic power.

This article maps the major changes taking place in academic work within the broader context of the neoliberalisation of universities. Recognising the great variability in the form and pace of neoliberalisation across institutions and national contexts, the article identifies a set of features and indicators to aid in the comparative assessment of the extent and effect of neoliberal processes at different institutions. The authors use conceptual tools from labour process theory to highlight the ways that neoliberalisation has resulted in academic work that is fragmented, deskilled, intensified, and made subject to greater levels of surveillance, hierarchy, and precarity. In doing so, the authors also demonstrate the importance of combining political economy and Foucauldian approaches to neoliberalism, to highlight the way that external structural conditions and subjective processes combine to create new labour processes to which participants find themselves consenting and actively reproducing.

This article takes a short personal ‘helicopter ride’ over the main policy issues in the UK labour market, putting them into the context of the developments which have taken place in applied econometrics. We overview NIESR's role in the study of labour economics in postwar Britain and review some recent advances of importance in the current Institute research agenda.

The aim of this paper is to examine, both at partial and general equilibrium, the consequences of work sharing policies, when the wages, the length of the working time and the participation rates are endogenous, in an economy where workers get utility from leisure. It is shown that the effects of a shorter working time are very different at the firm level and at the aggregate level. At a steady state, a decrease in working-time is likely to increase employment at the firm level, but reduces employment and welfare at the aggregate level.