Despite decades of labor governance initiatives, most attempts to improve working conditions for vulnerable workers in global supply chains have produced limited and short-lived results. This outcome is because prevailing approaches have failed to address the structural factors of hypercompetition among suppliers, monopsony power of lead firms, and state control over labor. However, by analyzing labor campaigns led by apparel workers in Honduras and auto workers in Mexico, the authors identify cases in which change has been both significant and sustained. These cases demonstrate how labor can leverage external governance mechanisms to build bottom-up power that enables workers to organize and bargain collectively. In these successful cases, top-down labor governance mechanisms are displaced by bottom-up labor governance. Findings underscore the importance of dynamic interaction between external enforcement and grassroots organizing in addressing power asymmetries in global supply chains to improve working conditions.
The expansion of digitally mediated work has intensified concerns about employee availability and working time, particularly in contexts where workers have limited capacity to shape their working conditions. In response, several European countries have introduced right-to-disconnect (R2D) legislation to formally recognize employees’ right to disengage from work-related digital communications outside working hours. Rather than functioning as a prescriptive and uniformly enforced statutory right, R2D legislation often relies on workplace interpretation, negotiation, and implementation. This institutional openness provides a useful opportunity to examine how employee voice operates under conditions of digital connectivity, conceptualizing voice as a capability that enables workers to translate formal rights into meaningful control over their time. Using a difference-in-differences design and focusing on European workers in teleworkable occupations with high exposure to R2D provisions, the analysis shows that well-being improvements following the introduction of R2D legislation are concentrated among workers with greater employee voice.
Does imperfect competition in the labor market influence workers’ opinions and perceptions? To address this question, this study leverages rich survey data from Italy, focusing on employees’ self-reported satisfaction, job insecurity, and beliefs about re-employment prospects combined with labor market concentration measures. Two-stage least squares (TSLS) estimates indicate that labor market concentration negatively affects workers’ satisfaction with their jobs, tasks, earnings, and employment stability. Moreover, although labor market concentration does not significantly impact self-reported job loss risk, it reduces workers’ perceived likelihood of finding and securing comparable employment positions.
Research on platform work has largely focused on algorithmic management in sectors such as delivery and ride-hailing, paying limited attention to care and domestic services. This article theorizes how platforms integrate technology-mediated economic activities with moral principles of care. Drawing on ethnographic data from 64 narrative interviews in Belgium and France, the authors show how platforms legitimate AI-based and technologically embedded forms of management by aligning them with institutional care logics. They conceptualize this as a “digital moral economy” of care, structured around three key dimensions: efficiency, civic contribution, and transactional relationships. Through these, platforms frame algorithmic coordination as socially valuable, morally acceptable, and practically enabling forms of care exchange. While these justificatory logics partly converge across national contexts, the article also highlights important cross-national differences in justificatory logics. Findings advance debates on algorithmic management by demonstrating how moral narratives are central to the legitimation of platform-mediated care services.
