Drawing on an international sample of 20,576 observations between 2002 and 2021, we find that greater female employment is positively associated with a higher salary gap, implying that firms employing more women are more prone to a higher salary gap. However, a greater proportion of female executives and directors per se are not associated with the salary gap. Considering the outputs of interaction effects, the solidarity of female executives with female employees, female directors with female employees, and female directors with female executives diminishes the firm’s salary gap. Besides, smaller firms having more female employees are more afflicted by the salary gap than larger firms, and female solidarity is less functional in smaller firms. Lastly, firms domiciled in high-Worldwide Governance Indicator (WGI) countries with more female employees are more beset by salary gaps than those in low-WGI countries. Although female solidarity is functional in both institutional environments, it is stronger in high-WGI countries.
This article addresses a set of broadly theoretical issues concerning how neoliberalization should be conceptualized in Nordic industrial relations. The first issue is the appropriate metrics of neoliberalization in industrial relations in the Nordics. The article argues that neoliberalization should be thought of as having both universal elements and regime or country-specific ones. Then the article examines the relationship between industrial relations institutions and capitalist growth models. It argues that neoliberalization can be understood as a mode of regulation of post-Fordist growth models, specifically here the role of industrial relations institutions in the regulation of contemporary Nordic growth models. Finally, the article examines the role of the state in the neoliberalization of industrial relations in the Nordics, arguing that neoliberalization in the Nordics often operates through the state and involves substantial political regulation of industrial relations.
Using a quantitative approach, we analyzed the extent to which Japanese unions alleviated workers’ difficulties with employment stability, income security, and work style during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found a statistically significant correlation between union membership and reductions in both working hours and income. We can interpret these results as suggesting a mechanism adopted to preserve employment. Union membership showed no layoff-preventing effect among regular workers but did prevent reductions in working hours of non-regular female workers. This finding contradicts the conventional image of Japanese labor unions as “regular employee clubs” and traditional assumptions of Japanese labor–management relations.
This article examines regulatory disputes in Chile’s retail sector amid sociotechnical change, employing the Regulatory Spaces Approach (RSA) to analyse a functional flexibility plan in supermarkets. Implemented alongside new logistics and sales technologies, the plan redeployed specialised roles into the contentious ‘store operator’ position, leading to wage reductions and work intensification. Drawing on qualitative interviews and documentary evidence, the article makes two contributions to the literature on employment, regulation and digitalisation. First, it extends RSA to sociotechnical change in traditional work settings, showing how firms, trade unions and state actors contest and shape transformation processes even in weak and fragmented industrial relations contexts. Second, it highlights innovative employer strategies of ‘institutional toying’ through which firms restructure work, misclassify labour and leverage labour data to drive change.
Extensive scholarship examines the regulation of platform work, yet less is known about how and why reforms emerge and what they ultimately achieve. This article addresses that gap through a comparative analysis of Spain and Chile, two regulatory innovators that moved in opposite directions. It develops a sequential perspective on institutional change, recognising layers of incremental shifts, critical junctures and a contested enforcement arena, and shows how labour and capital deploy power resources across successive phases of reform. The analysis demonstrates that regulatory divergence is shaped not only by legal design but also by actors' capacity to activate power resources over time and to project that power into enforcement. While both cases reveal the limits of legal reform, Chile's approach institutionalised self-employment and shows early signs of regulatory drift, whereas Spain shifted the sector towards employment contracts through sustained regulatory pressure, despite ongoing business contestation and emerging avoidance strategies.
While (prospective) workers sharing certain (perceived or ascribed) group affiliations and/or stigmas are more at risk of being discriminated against with regard to work, within these groups some individuals face more risk than others. Using Hirschman’s work on exit and voice as the theoretical backdrop, I propose that individuals’ external job mobility predicts the likelihood that they experience discrimination with regard to work. Empirically, I consider two key constituents of external job mobility: willingness to leave a bad job and employability. Results confirmed that both these constituents matter. A practical implication is that enhancing workers’ mobility may help reduce discrimination.
In this article I rethink international migration law by analysing the Model International Mobility Convention (MIMC) through a concrete-utopian lens. Starting from the premise that coloniality remains an active structure of the global order, I show how progressive legal projects often reproduce the hierarchies they seek to overcome. Combining Gary Wilder's concrete utopianism with Ruth Levitas's utopia as method, I examine how MIMC's provisions on residency, differentiated rights and representation both open and limit possibilities for post-sovereign mobility governance. I argue that the Model's transformative potential depends on integrating decolonial and explicitly anti-imperialist perspectives that centre migrant experience and confront the material and historical inequalities structuring the contemporary border order. By situating mobility regulation within debates on labour precarity, the article highlights implications for collective organisation and transnational labour rights.
This study reassesses job segmentation in UK agriculture under post-Brexit migration regulation. Using a qualitative case study of a fruit company, it examines to what extent agricultural work remains organized into distinct job quality segments, how citizenship and visa status shape placement across those segments, and how health and well-being vary across them. Findings identify a multi-tier hierarchy extending beyond a primary-secondary divide, including marginalized subsegments linked to visa dependency, nationality, and language. Health and well-being outcomes become more adverse toward the lower tiers. The study shows that segmentation is institutionally contingent and must be reassessed when migration regulation changes.
European industrial relations face a dual challenge: long-term erosion of collective representation (fragmentation, declining membership, decentralised bargaining) and the rise of populist actors promoting disintermediating, anti-pluralist narratives. This article theorises populism as a disintermediating force in industrial relations and examines how it pressures the institutions of economic and industrial democracy. It advances two claims: (1) populist disintermediation targets unions and social partners through delegitimation, institutional marginalisation and political bypass; (2) its effects vary with the institutional embeddedness of collective governance and unions’ strategic capacity. Empirically, the study conducts a structured, focused comparison of Austria, France, Italy, Poland and Spain, combining secondary sources with 25 semi-structured interviews with union representatives and national experts. Findings show that outcomes range from resilience to reconfiguration and erosion risk, and that unions’ role as democratic stabilisers is contingent on institutional resources, legitimacy across fragmented constituencies and strategic positioning.
This Special Issue explores the role of utopian thinking as a theoretical, methodological and political resource for the study of work, labour relations and workplace democracy. Against a backdrop of intensifying inequalities, precarious employment, authoritarian tendencies, ecological crises, genocide, and the erosion of workers’ rights, the contributions engage with utopia not as escapism or idealism, but as a critical practice for questioning the present and imagining alternative futures. Drawing on critical utopian studies, feminist theory, labour studies, decolonial scholarship and labour law, the issue examines how workers, activists, scholars and legal thinkers challenge dominant understandings of labour and envision more democratic, equitable and sustainable forms of work. The contributions span diverse empirical and theoretical contexts, including domestic workers’ organising in Tanzania, waste labour in South Asia, municipal workers’ strikes in Sweden, activation programmes, labour law, migration governance, menstrual justice, workplace democracy in socialist Yugoslavia, and the legacies of utopian socialism. Collectively, they explore how utopian perspectives expose the limits of existing arrangements while foregrounding workers’ own knowledge, experiences and aspirations as sources of transformative possibility. The articles highlight how work is shaped by intersecting relations of capitalism, colonialism, caste, gender, migration and social reproduction, while showing that alternative futures emerge through everyday struggles, collective action and practices of hope. Rather than offering blueprints for a perfect society, the contributions reveal utopia as already present in fragmented and contradictory forms within contemporary struggles over work. Utopia thus emerges as an ongoing collective practice of contesting existing conditions and imagining alternative ways of organising work, life and society.
Sweden is renowned for its centralised wage bargaining system, which has been studied from the point of view of inflation, wage differentials and unemployment. This article studies media coverage of wage bargaining rounds in the 1950s-1960s and in the 2000s-2010s to investigate the social understanding of what the wage bargaining institutions are supposed to do. The results indicate that the operation of the wage bargaining system in the 2000s and of that in the postwar era are in fact understood very differently: while widely shared aims for wage bargaining rounds in the 1950s and 1960s were to a high degree formulated by the trade unions, trade union influence over the agenda was significantly weaker in the 2000s and 2010s, when external experts, not least from the financial sector, were to a much higher degree used to define and formulate what good bargaining outcomes would be.
This article expands knowledge on the (inter)sectoral dimension of industrial relations, specifically how sectoral differences in product market competition, scope and mobility have shaped organized actors' regulative responses to the rising cross-border labour and services mobility in the post-2004 EU/EEA Single Market. We compare how organized employers and labour in the (non-tradeable) construction sector and the (tradeable) shipbuilding sector approached the extension of collective agreements and navigated EU posting rules in wake of the 2004 enlargement. Showing how organized employer interests in tradeable and non-tradeable sectors are oppositely affected by enhanced cross-border mobility, competition and national re-regulation of migrant workers' rights, we explain why shipbuilding employers acted as antagonists while organized construction employers in alliance with their union counterparts served as protagonists in the strife over extension.
The shift from state to occupational pension plans has raised concerns among scholars because occupational plans tend to lack the redistributive elements found in state plans. This disadvantages workers with interrupted careers and low pay, who are usually women. However, occupational pensions also enable trade unions, including unionised women, to exert influence. Using Norway as a case study, we investigate how male- and female-dominated unions shape pension policy. We argue that the structure of wage bargaining and the potential for coalitions between male-dominated unions and employers have sidelined female-dominated unions and privileged fully individualised occupational pension models.
This study examines how perceived organizational support (POS) and job crafting influence job satisfaction among home care workers in Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), a unionized worker cooperative. Survey data from 314 workers and structural equation modeling indicate that the positive aspects of POS are the strongest predictor of satisfaction, with a modest indirect effect via cognitive job crafting. This suggests that, even in precarious care work, organizational support embedded in worker-led structures enhances satisfaction directly and by reshaping the meaning and value of work. This extends POS and job crafting theories to precarious labor and highlights worker-led organizations as viable institutional supports for care workers.
While the staffing crisis in long-term care has stimulated research into rising turnover rates, it is far from certain that the resulting proposals can address the causes of the crisis. Through group discussions with nursing home workers in Switzerland, this article focuses on workers who remain in the profession, arguing that their loyalty acts as a trap. Drawing on Hirschman's concept of loyalty and Nies' insights into the tension between the production of use and exchange values, we identify a conflict among workers between commitment to the social value of care and the alienation from a system that does not respond to residents' needs.
While attracting workers by promising autonomy, gig platforms exercise significant control through algorithmic management. This article explores the algorithmic management of taxi platforms in Oslo, Norway and how it is experienced by the drivers. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the industry, it shows that although the algorithmic management is opaque, unpredictable, and non-negotiable, the drivers nonetheless highlight their flexibility and do not necessarily experience it as control. The analysis highlights two factors explaining these experiences. First, drivers in Oslo have access to multiple platforms and non-platform market segments and therefore remain economically independent of each individual platform. Second, the platforms' algorithmic management is a non-interventionist form of control, operating primarily through market mechanisms and without intervening directly in the drivers' labor process. This underscores the importance of market structures in conditioning algorithmic management and emphasizes how platforms are able to provide autonomy at work while maintaining authority over the market.
This article examines Argentina's worker-recovered enterprises (Empresas Recuperadas por sus Trabajadores, ERTs) movement, which emerged after the 2001 economic crisis, as a bottom-up construction of the right to work under neoliberalism. The ERTs uniquely link the struggle for the right to work with worker self-management amid widespread unemployment and precarity. Drawing on field research conducted in six ERTs and interviews with academics from the Open Faculty Programme (Programa Facultad Abierta, PFA), the study argues that the right to work is not merely a legal norm but a collective social practice built from below.
Using unique data from East Germany, this study is the first to provide systematic evidence that employees in establishments with a works council experience more democracy at work than those in establishments without a works council. Employees in establishments with a works council perceive the organizational climate as being more open to discussion and feel to a higher extent that they have collective control over what happens at work (collective efficacy). Unionization plays an important moderating role in the link between works councils and experienced workplace democracy. The presence of a works council strengthens perceptions of an open organizational climate and collective efficacy to a larger extent for union members than for nonmembers. For union members, the presence of a works council even bolsters the perception that their individual engagement plays a role in what is going on at work (self-efficacy).
This article investigates the job satisfaction and working conditions responses of welders after the implementation of collaborative welding robots in their workplaces. Through semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations at three sites, it explores themes such as pay, prestige, professional identity, social interaction at work and career prospects. Our research suggests that working experiences and responses to the robot are highly varied among welders, and many individuals were ambivalent about the new technology. We found evidence of improved work experiences, such as improvement in occupation safety, offloading repetitive tasks and the social prestige related to working with a robot, but also drawbacks and anxiety surrounding the adoption, change in professional identity and the possibility of being replaced by robots in the future. Building on previous literature on automation and job displacement, especially on the impact of new technologies on blue-collar workers, we broaden academic debates from questions surrounding labour replacement to delimiting contexts where new technologies enable the retention of workers and the creation of more meaningful work.
Migrant care workers (MCWs) are increasingly relied upon in contemporary care economies, yet they often labour under restrictive immigration regimes and precarious employment conditions. This article explores how non-EU MCWs employed under the Health and Care Worker visa scheme in the UK cope with these constraints in their everyday work. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 20 West African MCWs and informed by practice theory, the study conceptualises coping as an enacted social practice rather than an individualised response to stress. The analysis identifies three interrelated forms of coping: collective and relational practices, hybridised caregiving practices and tactical acts of micro-resistance. These practices, we argue, illuminate how MCWs navigate legal dependency, workplace surveillance and devalued care labour while exercising limited but meaningful forms of agency. The article extends practice theory to migrant labour and coping literature, with implications for practice further highlighted.
