This study examines how artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes the labour process in concept art, a craft-like occupation where skill and identity are deeply intertwined. We propose a contingent model of AI-mediated labour. We find that AI's effects are contingent on worker involvement in technology deployment and foster human-AI complementarity and stronger task-technology fit. In contrast, worker exclusion in the discussions around technology implementation leads to skill substitution, work intensification, fragmented workflows and heightened level of anxiety around technology. These dynamics undermine occupational identity of the artists and echo patterns observed across other craft and trade settings. Our findings highlight the central role of worker participation in shaping equitable AI-mediated labour processes.
Trade unions need money to sustain the staff, infrastructure and activities on which all forms of union power depend, yet the financial dimensions of unions and their power have been largely overlooked in the comparative study of industrial relations. This article addresses the gap by using unions' financial means as a revealing lens for understanding the role of the state in shaping union power. The comparison distinguished two ideal-typical logics of state action behind union funding. Under indirect action, the state enables unions to convert membership into income, producing a tight coupling between union funds and organisational power. Under direct action, the state channels funds to unions on the basis of their recognised societal roles, decoupling income from membership. Systematised during the early decades of the twentieth century, these two action paths present fundamental transformations through liberalisation, leading to the financialisation and politicisation of union funding. By analysing the structures and changes in unions' financial sustainability, this framework reveals the state's constitutive role in shaping and transforming union power.
Based on interviews with employees in UK employee ownership trusts (EOTs), this article interrogates understandings of 'ownership' and explores confusion, tensions and frustrations in the lived experience of ownership stemming from employees' dual status as employees and owners. Employees assume that ownership brings various rights, but these often conflict with management understandings, the perspectives of other employees and the limited rights legally embedded in the EOT model. This emphasises the tensions between employee-owners' legal status as beneficiaries and aspects of their ownership status that are dependent on norms and discourse. Relationships are crucial in developing shared understandings of ownership within the internal 'community' of employee-owners. By showing how relationships shape such understandings and how ownership 'works' in practice, the study illuminates how conceptualisations of ownership impact the functioning of EOT firms.
England's adult social care sector faces persistently high staff turnover. This article examines the effects of individual-level within-sector job mobility on hourly pay and working hours and identifies the employer types and contractual arrangements that attract such mobility. Using an event-study difference-in-differences (DiD) design, we show that job mobility increases hourly pay by 4.5% in the first year, rising to 6.1% after 5 years. Instrumental variable analyses either corroborate the DiD estimates or show higher impacts. Mobility also raises weekly working hours and reduces the likelihood of 0-h contracts by around 7.0 percentage points. Employer-specific wage premia account for nearly half of observed pay gains, whereas worker-employer match effects play little role. Workers predominantly move to higher paying employers-particularly local authorities and community-based services-into fixed-hours contracts and out of direct care roles. Moves into 0-h contracts result in modest pay losses. Men experience larger pay gains from mobility than women.
