Contrary to HRM's prevailing view that low wage work is routine and not requiring specific HR strategies, this study reveals how employers within low wage sectors pursue active and diverse strategies to segment the labour force and shape the work package. By applying and extending the job queues/labour queues framework to two case studies (an hotel and a residential care facility), we show that contracts and conditions are influenced not only by operational and competitive considerations but also, importantly, by employers' control strategies and tools, including contract form. The hotel's enforced new recruitment strategies following the Brexit vote led to contract changes that were informed and legitimised by the employer's stereotyped perceptions of their targeted workforce group's behavioural characteristics. Furthermore, regular contracts in care and salaried contracts in the hotel were converted into precarious work by requiring acceptance of long or varied hours for low pay. Far from being routine, control and hiring strategies in low wage sectors are complex and dynamic but still constitute different ways of extracting maximum labour for little cost. Consequently they also often fail to deliver on all employer objectives.

When predicting the future of retail work, commentators tend to focus on automation and labour replacement and neglect the continued role played by labour, particularly in food retail. To understand this role, this article draws on both interview and newspaper data to show how change unfolded in the sector from before to just after the Coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, it shows how increased technology adoption and use in food retail occurred alongside an increased reliance on labour. The availability of a flexible labour pool that was easy to scale and later disband enabled employers to respond to increased consumer demand rapidly. In contrast to futurist predictions of the proliferation of labour-replacing technologies, the analysis shows how food retailers continued to prioritise short-term solutions contingent on human labour rather than investments in longer-term automation programmes, reflecting historical patterns of sociotechnical change within the sector.

Drawing on 12 case studies across 10 countries of how trade unions and collective bargaining institutions supported front-line workers in healthcare, social care and food retail, this article finds that pre-existing or new collective bargaining or social dialogue forums provided important avenues for employee voice on pandemic management. Trade unions also supported marginalized front-line workers through multiple tactics, though most initiatives predated the pandemic and often depended upon gaining active state support, which was not always possible. Trade unions were thus pursuing sword-of-justice objectives, though they were sometimes less open to revaluing front-line work already covered by collectively negotiated grading structures.

This article investigates the intersection between precarious work and precarious lives through interviews with workers in the care, hospitality and art sectors. These revealed that workers experienced precarity as a double-edged sword of time and income uncertainty shaped by the context in which they were embedded – namely their employment, their household and their relations with state welfare and care systems. These three domains shaped both the constraints they faced and the buffers and resources available to them as they managed these time and income uncertainties. A dynamic work–life articulation framework is developed that embeds the strategies workers deploy to mitigate uncertainty within these three domains and their intersections. These strategies may still only result in the least bad and often far from sustainable outcome due to changing contexts and trade-offs between time and income uncertainty.

Les auteurs s’appuient sur 12 études de cas se rapportant à 10 pays pour examiner si les syndicats et institutions de la négociation collective ont soutenu les travailleurs de première ligne dans les secteurs de la santé, de l’aide médicosociale et du commerce alimentaire. Ils constatent que des instances existantes ou nouvelles ont permis aux travailleurs de s’exprimer sur la gestion de la pandémie. Les syndicats ont déployé de multiples stratégies pour aider les travailleurs essentiels précaires, même si la plupart de leurs initiatives sont antérieures à la crise et ont nécessité un soutien fort de l’État, qui n’a pas toujours été obtenu. Quoique parfois réticents à revaloriser le travail de la main-d’oeuvre essentielle couverte par des grilles professionnelles négociées collectivement, ils ont donc défendu la justice sociale.

Through qualitative research into the career experiences of two groups of Malawian professional women, this article reveals the value of expanding research into women's careers to the global south. Although displaying elements of western-focused traditional and new career models, these women's careers did not conform to either. Instead, due to heavy family responsibilities for both care and breadwinning, including for the extended family, and faced with inflexible human resource practices, their careers were mostly characterised by serial compromises necessary to maintain full-time continuous employment while dealing with life events and workplace setbacks. These accommodations to the realities of their complicated lives often resulted in second-best, far-from-ideal solutions. This career form, conceptualised here as a makeshift career, extends career models to fit the Malawian context and the global south but also expands conceptual understandings of women's careers in ways also applicable to the north.

This introduction to the special issue on the future of work and working time offers an overview of issues of relevance to present-day debates on working time. The aim is to bring together two divergent debates, the first on working time reduction for full-time workers and the second on the diversification and fragmentation of working time. It considers the history of working time including the forces that led to the establishment of the standard employment relationship and to reductions in standard working hours. It addresses contemporary trends and examines why there has been both a stalling of working time reduction and a diversification of working time norms. Some limitations of focussing only on clock time are considered as well as some of the benefits, from more meaningful work to better health and well-being, that stem from both regular and non-excessive working time. The final section turns to the case for reform: it argues that policies are required to address the fragmentation of working time, and that these policies should be combined with a focus on shortening standard working hours that could increase the sustainability of working time in a dual-earner society and even limit the supply of labour for jobs offering only fragmented working time.

This chapter highlights the particular contribution of industrial relations to our understanding of labour markets. It explores the changing nature of labour markets and wider long-term developments, including: globalization; the dominance of the service sector; the fragmentation of employing organizations through the use of outsourcing; and flexibilization, feminization and financialization. These wider trends are analysed with reference to key recent developments in terms of technology, platform work, the pandemic and prospects for the further deterioration and segmentation of conditions of work. The chapter analyses the implications of COVID-19 and the subsequent cost-of-living crisis for these longer-term trends, and considers the likely direction and force of future trends without a reversal of current policy agendas.

Although reduced working time and furlough policy initiatives are widely regarded as important for economic and business reasons, little is known about their impacts on workers’ mental health at the onset of COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Panel Study data from 2018 to February 2020 and April 2020 and change score analysis, this study aims to compare mental health changes between those who worked reduced hours, were furloughed and left/lost paid work. The results suggest that at the onset of COVID-19 reduced working time and furlough can protect workers’ mental health, but only for men not for women. The gender differences remain significant even after controlling for housework and childcare responsibilities at the onset of COVID-19. These results highlight the importance of distributing paid work more equitably and formulating gender-sensitive labour market policies in protection of workers’ mental health.

The ideal worker concept, typified by an unencumbered male, continues to influence workplace norms, despite a more gender-mixed workforce. This article examines whether this concept is being disrupted or reproduced as digitalisation becomes increasingly embedded in the workplace. Based on qualitative research in two professional services firms, the analysis shows how the ideal worker themes of work prioritisation and presenteeism have been maintained but adapted. Significantly, the study reveals how the novel dimension of connectedness is reshaping the ideal worker norm as enhanced digitalisation becomes interwoven in social relations. This has modified informal expectations about how, when and where work is performed, altering work organisation. This reconfiguration may in principle broaden scope for conformity with the ideal worker model, but in practice the heightened intrusion of work demands on personal time and into domestic space potentially works against gender equality.