This study investigates the relationship between stress, job insecurity, and economic conditions among employed individuals in Finland from 1984 to 2018. Drawing on seven waves of the Quality of Working Life Survey (total n = 28,164), we examine how perceived job insecurity—operationalized as the threat of unemployment—relates to stress across different phases of the economic cycle. We explore whether economic downturns intensify stress due to reduced re-employment opportunities or, conversely, normalize job loss and mitigate its psychological impact. Our findings show a consistent positive association between job insecurity and stress across all survey years. However, this relationship does not systematically vary with national unemployment rates, nor is it moderated by individuals’ unemployment history or perceived employability. The results show that Finnish labor market institutions help buffer the effects of economic uncertainty on employee well-being. While economic cycles shape perceptions of job insecurity, their link to stress remains stable.
This study examines how political and ideological identities are carried into organizations and become consequential at work. Drawing on a comparative qualitative study of 38 interviews across four organizational settings in Türkiye, it suggests that workplace polarization is not a uniform spillover from society but a conditional, organizationally mediated process. We propose that it operates through three interrelated mechanisms: boundary filtering, which structures who enters and remains; asymmetrical identity expressibility, which conditions whose identities can be voiced without cost; and threatened contact, through which interaction across difference becomes shaped by avoidance and anticipated sanction. These mechanisms condition one another and shape belonging, fairness, and the unequal distribution of voice at work.
Public support plays a key role in determining the success of strike action, particularly in the public sector where disputes affect taxpayers and essential services. This article examines public attitudes towards strike action by school teachers and university lecturers in England using seven waves of YouGov survey data collected between 2022 and 2023 (N = 3839). We analyse how demographic, socioeconomic and political factors shape support for educational strikes. Results show that political orientation is the strongest and most consistent predictor: right-leaning and Conservative-voting respondents are substantially less supportive of strike action than those on the left. Education level and age also influence attitudes, though to a lesser extent. Strikingly, parenthood has no measurable effect. These findings highlight the deep politicisation of industrial relations in the education sector and the strategic challenge unions face in mobilising support across an increasingly divided public.
This article argues for the importance of the utopian method in understanding labour law's weaknesses and in explaining why labour law cannot achieve the (social justice) goals that it sets for itself. In particular it highlights the importance of adopting the utopian method for labour law through embracing the alternative ontology that this method suggests. This alternative ontology focuses on the relationality and sociality of human nature and the interest of all in visions for the future. Adopting this alternative ontology would allow us to overcome the constraints of liberal legal subjectivity and lead to better social justice outcomes for workers.
Labor inspection plays a crucial role in regulating transnational labor mobilities. Based on qualitative fieldwork including interviews and observation, this study examines inspectors’ responses to fraudulent posting and bogus self-employment arrangements in the Belgian construction sector. The findings show that enforcement practices rely on discretion and professional ethics that guide inspectors’ decisions under conditions of legal and organizational constraints. We argue that three distinct regulatory mechanisms – transactional, egalitarian and pragmatic – structure how inspectors prioritize sanctions, financial regularization and ultimately case resolution. The article highlights the role of frontline enforcement in shaping labor market regulation of transnational labor mobilities.
