Adult webcam performers cultivate financially rewarding digital interactions with clients. Like other creators they monetise ‘authentic’ relationships with their audience. This article examines the ways in which this livestreamed intimate labour is shared between admins and models in Romanian webcamming studios to maximise profits. It draws on 25 interviews with Romanian webcam performers, the ‘admins’ that assist them, and studio managers. Analysis of these interviews shows how webcam studios intermediate in intimate labour to maximise labour control. This sharing of intimate service work weaponises gendered narratives of skill and the invisibility of admins to control how performers present themselves and interact with clients. This analysis of intermediation in intimate service labour highlights the role of synchronic management control in purported individual service labour processes. It contributes to analyses of platform labour by showcasing how intermediation reinforces traditional control over workers and conceptualises the digital optimisation of intimate service interactions.
This article introduces Josephine (Jo) Noon, a woman truck driver in her early 40s. Speaking as a woman in a male-dominated occupation, a recent entrant into the UK’s truck driving workforce and with experience driving in the UK and Europe, Jo’s account disrupts common misconceptions about truck driving and truck drivers. The article contributes to sociological debates at the intersections of mobility and labour by drawing attention to how spatial mobility itself constitutes work for mobile logistics workers and becomes a site of surplus extraction for capital. We highlight the less explored material, embodied realities of occupational auto-mobilities, and the physical infrastructures necessary for the daily social reproduction of mobile workers, foregrounding their affective, generative effects for worker wellbeing and retention. The article ends with a provocation: that truck driver shortages be read as a ‘refusal’ by drivers to continue labouring under exploitative logistics capital and uncaring state actors.
Ethical recruitment is a core principle of policy governing international labour recruitment, yet how it is constituted and violated in practice remains underexplored. This article examines the making of (un)ethical recruitment in transnational care labour markets, focusing on the international recruitment of care workers to the UK. Drawing on interviews with recruiters of care workers, it explores how recruiters understand and navigate ethical and unethical recruitment. Theoretically, the article frames (un)ethical recruitment through the lens of market-making and the externalisation of care. Empirically, it considers how the costs of care labour are externalised onto workers. Externalisation processes involve fee-charging to internationally recruited care workers, limited enforcement of ethical recruitment standards and the design of state immigration policy itself. While some recruiters position themselves as ethical actors, upholding the rights of migrant workers, it is argued that ethical recruitment ultimately requires employers and states to bear the costs of care labour.
This article treats background acting as an archetypal case for theorising sociologically the work and workers that exist in the backdrop of a workplace. Turning to the sociology of attention and its conceptualisation of the background of everyday life, it draws on Zerubavel’s ‘social structure of irrelevance’ to understand background acting as an occupation. Based on in-depth interviews with unionised and non-unionised background actors working in the Canadian screen industry, three backgrounding practices are identified that naturalise the workplace background and minimise these workers’ labour: silencing, dividing, and objectifying. ‘Backgrounding’ as a concept highlights how the workplace background is constituted through day-to-day practices where labour is visible but socially constructed as ‘irrelevant’. The final discussion emphasises how backgrounding connects to other concepts for understanding devalued work (e.g., invisible work, or hidden work) within low-status occupations.
This article explores inequality regimes in medicine, examining structures that create social closure and explaining the under-representation of women from racio-ethnic minorities at senior levels and in high-status specialties. We juxtapose these with agency to evidence how inequality regimes are experienced and navigated through accommodatory usurpation and everyday resistance. Drawing on 26 interviews with women of varying racio-ethnic backgrounds, the findings illustrate deeply embedded inequality regimes that maintain White, male norms; individual agency did not change these regimes, meaning women could progress only where they could comply with them. We contribute to the understanding of inequality in medicine, where women’s experiences remain under-researched. We also contribute to inequalities theory and the understanding of change by offering a rare juxtaposition of structural inequality with individual agency to evidence the latter’s limitations. We argue that collective agency is needed to create radical change and enable women’s progression. Practically, we argue for collective organisational change driven, potentially, by coalition building.
This article explores how disabled people navigate normative temporalities in the workplace through everyday practices of adaptation and resistance. Grounded in qualitative research with disabled participants, it examines how linear, productivity-driven temporal norms—referred to as chrononormativity —shape discriminatory and exclusionary structures that possess constitutive power in the production of disability. Using the lens of crip time, the analysis reveals how ongoing temporal negotiations and adjustments generate additional labour for disabled people and challenge the common assumption that flexibility offers a sufficient remedy to temporal constraints. The article thereby contributes to broader debates on disability, work and precarity while strengthening and empirically supporting critiques of the ableist foundations of the labour system, which marginalise those whose temporalities diverge from the norm. Ultimately, it calls for temporality—until now largely overlooked—to be foregrounded as one of the key structuring forces of ableism in the workplace.
This study explores how debt relations entrap workers through complex power dynamics involving employers, intermediaries, and local lenders. Using a Foucauldian framework, we introduce the concept of the dispositif of debt bondage to analyse how debt produces bonded subjects while maintaining control via everyday life practices. Central to our study is a 14-minute documentary - Of Labour and Love, which depicts lived experiences of debt-bonded kiln workers. Our analysis demonstrates that debt bondage is not merely an isolated exploitative labour arrangement but a structural feature of labour relations, particularly in Indian brick kilns, deeply embedded in relations of exchange, power and meaning. The paper contributes by extending the understanding of debt bondage as a set of relations that shape and control behaviours, making work on self essential for the reproduction of indebtedness and subsequently producing debt-bonded labour.
A growing and significant ‘new-wave’ of literature maintains that studies on equality and inclusion in labour representation would benefit from a stronger focus on collective action led by (migrant) precarious workers, both within but especially beyond established unions. The debate also incorporates and overlaps with the growing recognition of intersectional approaches to industrial relations and the need to think more inclusively about identities at work. Starting from a reflection on these theoretical developments, the article discusses the (direct or indirect) implications of this literature for the established forms of interest representation and argues that the move to a more inclusive and less institutionalised approach would benefit from a greater sensitivity to organisational tensions and representative claims. In particular, it cautions against a binary and deterministic notion of worker organising and makes the case for considering the ‘space between’, which allows for a recognition of the ambivalent nature of trade unions.
This article analyses the mobilisation of migrant workers in SAC, the main syndicalist trade union in Sweden. It theorises mobilisation and solidarity from a labour process perspective and, based on ethnography, identifies accessibility, contentiousness and belonging as key mechanisms to explain the union's form of mobilisation. By drawing on the class struggle unionism framework, it conceptualises two strategies - of 'collapsing servicing and organising' and 'participation follows action' - to explain why and how SAC is successful in its mobilisation efforts. It shows that SAC's confrontational methods mobilise a migrant worker community where workers' intersubjective experiences of migration and precariousness shape solidarity and build associational power. The article concludes that SAC's mobilisation of migrant workers is groundbreaking in a Swedish context and that class struggle unionism has plenty to offer also to other unions.
