The vulnerability associated with the drudgery of drivers in the ride-hailing enterprise of the platform economy has come under both public scrutiny and scholarly study. There remains, however, a dearth of knowledge around how driver vulnerabilities are produced and maintained, and which actors drive those. This paper contributes to the discourse by unpacking how the political economy of digital capitalism plays out to undermine the fortunes of ride-hailing drivers in Ghana. Using qualitative interviews and focus group discussions, the paper shows that drivers’ vulnerabilities stem primarily from the unbridled control over the means of production, which are the digital platforms and the vehicles, as well as the ensuing unequal power relations between capital owners and drivers as capital producers. The paper also characterises the ambivalent role of the State as a capitalist agent that maintains the status quo, albeit nuanced. The need to interrogate alternatives to augment State regulation is therefore recommended for mediating the relationship between capital owners and drivers as capital producers. Effective alternatives would be reducing capital’s monopoly by replacing private, foreign platforms with local public platforms and strengthening drivers’ collective agency to mediate the excessive power of the capital owners.

This paper focuses on the state of precarious work in Spain: Are all those who work as self-employed persons and interns truly operating under those descriptions, or are many of them employees so precariously engaged that they have no labour contracts? If so, how has this come to pass? Why is it increasingly happening? This paper raises some answers based on the Marxist approach. We link employment instability to increased exploitation of the Spanish labour force. This trend is a reaction by capital to low rates of profit and the implementation of particular governmental economic policies implemented to meet the demands of the European Union. Due to the precariousness of work, prospects for achieving a stable and autonomous life for a large cohort of Spain’s working youth are seriously threatened.

Workplace bullying literature has focused mainly on actions of individual targets of mistreatment, undertaken to address the problem, and on analyses of the effectiveness of responses. Less attention has been paid to the efficacy of state regulation in establishing a climate of prevention as well as redress. We examine the role of the Dutch Working Conditions Act as a means of mitigating workplace bullying from the perspective of legislative intention, processes and outcomes. Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders involved in creating, influencing and implementing the Act are analysed thematically to highlight how contextual, employer and phenomenon-specific factors affect the effectiveness of legislation with regard to workplace bullying. The findings indicate that state involvement, organisational commitment and collective action are all important contributors in reducing workplace bullying, but that even in the context of neoliberalism, the role of the nation-state is of critical importance, notwithstanding initiatives by employers.

This article explores the relationship between precarious employment and seafarers’ control over the scheduling and location of their work, and considers the implications of this relationship for their occupational health and safety. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 20 permanently and 17 precariously employed seafarers. In contrast with those on permanent contracts, seafarers employed by crewing agencies on temporary contracts were deployed at short notice and commenced work on vessels irrespective of whether they had experienced an adequate rest period at home. Such precariously employed seafarers were also deployed across the various sectors of the industry on unfamiliar vessels. Seafarers felt strongly that scheduling and location uncertainties were closely linked with increased risks to their safety and well-being, and it was clear that these areas of uncertainty were frequently experienced in combination, in particular, by those with precarious employment arrangements. The article, therefore, suggests that the widespread disorganisation of the employment relationship increases the occupational health and safety risks faced by those working in an already dangerous industry. It concludes that this lack of commitment by shipping companies to their workforce means that, for many seafarers, protection against these additional risks is effectively at the discretion of the captain on board.

Financialisation is now an emerging field of research. Recently, the field has attracted criticism for its focus on large-scale economic processes, such as profit accumulation based not on production, but on a diversification of financial risk management tools – a focus which ignores the way in which individuals and households experience financialisation in everyday life. In addressing this gap, theorists have sought to understand financialisation as it relates to individuals as consumers and investors, increasing their need to integrate financial calculation into daily life. This article takes the analysis two steps further. First, it argues that precarious work is actually an aspect of financialisation, based on risk-shifting by employing organisations – a process of structural change in the labour market that actually undermines individual workers’ capacity to manage financial risk successfully. Second, it argues that financialisation is an ideology or narrative of individual responsibility, which seeks to legitimate structural change by promising emancipation through individual calculation. It draws on interviews with precarious workers to explore the gap between such norms of financial self-determination and the lived experience of insecure employment. It identifies this paradox of precariousness by focusing on people in professional occupations, who in theory are best placed to successfully negotiate economic change.

Employer breaches of New Zealand’s minimum employer standards and other forms of worker exploitation have been increasingly recognised as a significant problem. This affects migrant workers in particular, and among them those working without documentation or on various types of non-resident visas. Exploitation has become particularly embedded in a number of industries: fishing, hospitality and tourism, and in some sectors of agriculture, particularly those dependent on seasonal labour. Initially, government action to mitigate these problems was slow and reluctant but over the last decade, culminating in the reforms of 2016, there has been a more focussed effort to provide a strong legislative framework to support minimum employment standards. This article describes the background to those reforms, analyses the reforms themselves and goes on to consider whether they are adequate to ensure access to justice by disadvantaged workers.

In the period leading up to the federal government’s May 2009 announcement of a paid parental leave scheme, there was a surge in community and media debate about the absence of such a scheme in Australia. This article explores whether this context had some bearing on bargaining outcomes during that time. We analyse data from the Australian Workplace Agreements Database to determine the incidence and length of paid parental leave in collective agreements registered between 2005 and 2010. The results show an increase in the number of agreements that included paid parental leave clauses in the period, with just over 14% of all current agreements including a paid parental leave clause by 2010. Moreover, 18% of all agreements lodged in 2010 included a paid parental leave clause, suggesting an increase in bargaining outcomes over time. We also find a slight increase in the average duration of paid parental leave in collective agreements. A leave of 14 weeks is most common in public sector agreements but less than 3% of agreements in the private sector provide for 14 weeks or more. These marked differences between the public and private sectors suggest minimal change in private sector bargaining outcomes. We conclude that the legislative context does influence bargaining outcomes, but that this effect is felt more in public sector than private sector bargaining.

Marketised models of social care provision in Australia are placing pressures on service providers and driving changes in work organisation and employer practices, with potential to degrade social care jobs. While international experience of marketised social care has demonstrated the vulnerability of social care workers to wage theft and other violations of employment laws, Australia’s relatively strong industrial relations safety net might be expected to be better able to protect these low-paid workers. Nevertheless, there is emerging evidence of negative impacts on the pay and entitlements of frontline workers in the expanding community support and homecare workforce. This study investigates the paid and unpaid work time of disability support workers under Australia’s new National Disability Insurance Scheme. The research takes a novel approach combining analysis of working day diaries and qualitative interviews with employees to expose how jobs are being fragmented and work is being organised into periods of paid and unpaid time, leaving employees paid below their minimum entitlement. The article highlights the role of social care policy along with inadequate employment regulation.

This article examines the impact of the neoliberal restructuring of health services on female nurses in Turkey. It provides a qualitative analysis of work–family conflict, establishing that not only work but also family life has become more precarious. The contours of precariousness of both work and family are analysed through interviews with 50 female nurses working full time in different areas of health service provision. The findings suggest that the neoliberal restructuring of health services has led to staffing deficits along with workload intensification, unpredictable work schedules and poor organisational support. This has increased work–family conflict, defined as a form of precariousness because it heightens the difficulties, risks and insecurities entailed in balancing family-related expectations with increasing work demands for female nurses. This precariousness makes spousal support critical if nurses are to be able to address work–family conflict and leads to nurses’ compliance with unfavourable working conditions as a way to resolve the mutual interference of family and work. The increased subordination of life to work has resulted from the neoliberal managerialisation of health services, creating precarisation in the lives of female nurses.

We introduce a themed collection of articles examining how the public sector has responded to, and been impacted by, the COVID-19 crisis. Although the pandemic has affected the roles, functions, economies, governance and structures of public sectors, this themed collection focuses on public sector employment relations. Authors examine significant areas which have been subject to accelerated change stemming from the pandemic. Building on decades of public sector reform, these changes impact public sector enterprise bargaining, terms and conditions of employment, working arrangements and practices, and the relationship between public servants and their employer. The articles in this collection provide important insights into the longer-term influences of the COVID-19 pandemic for public sector workforces. The collection also raises questions around whether the positive lessons from this crisis can be sustained to help manage serious crises in the future, or whether the public sector will slip back into a state of unpreparedness.

This article critically challenges the findings and assumptions of mainstream job polarisation literature. Based on the European Working Conditions Survey data and on the Job Demand-Control model, which allows for capturing the organisational dimension of jobs, we examine the patterns and evolution of occupations in 22 European countries from 2005 to 2015. Instead of pervasive job polarisation, we observe a near-pervasive trend of upgrading job quality, suggesting that job polarisation may be caused by the undervaluation/devaluation of jobs low in the occupational hierarchy – not by computerisation-driven changes in work tasks. Indeed, only the former can explain the decrease in the number of low-quality jobs while the number of low-paid jobs increases. After documenting the relevance of firm-level organisational choices, we suggest that counteracting job polarisation requires, beyond meso-level collective bargaining, a public intervention that promotes participatory decision-making in firms.

Non-compliance with labour standards impedes enforcement of workers’ rights in human resource supply chains. Despite governments’ efforts to improve labour standards and encourage employer-centred voluntary compliance programmes, infringements of workers’ rights are widely reported. Using a qualitative socio-legal study of Chinese seafarers’ workers’ compensation rights, we investigate whether shipping companies and their crewing agencies comply with their legal obligations following workplace injuries and fatalities. Through 74 semi-structured interviews and analysis of crew management policies from 7 shipping companies, we identify a failure of most shipowners’ internal policies to comply with legal obligations. Furthermore, multinational shipping companies use crewing agencies to evade their liabilities to injured seafarers. We propose the establishment of a joint liability mechanism between employers and labour intermediaries to fill this compliance gap that exists in global human resource supply chains.

This article critically examines the relation between work and utility and challenges the mainstream economic view of well-being as a hedonic state for which work is a less pleasurable trade-off. It proposes a conception of work as a potential source of eudaimonic well-being, providing meaning and contributing to human flourishing and self-realisation. Based on micro-level data, the article shows the relevance of distinguishing between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being by way of comparing the effects of increased financial difficulties and deteriorated work conditions on these two types of well-being in five European Union countries – Germany, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and the UK – in the post global financial crisis years between 2009 and 2014. The article concludes by underlining the political importance of addressing aspects pertaining to the quality of working life and of creating jobs that serve to improve the eudaimonic well-being of citizens.

The activism of coalmining unions in Australia, the UK, the USA and elsewhere securing improvements in safety including better legislation in the 19th and 20th centuries, has been widely researched and acknowledged. However, a relatively neglected aspect of this history was a campaign to secure worker inspectors (check-inspectors). These began in coalmining a century before similar measures were introduced for workers more generally as part of overhauling occupational health and safety laws in the 1970s/1980s. We document this struggle for mine safety in Australia and New Zealand, and the activities of check-inspectors in the period to 1925. Notwithstanding strong opposition from coal-owners and conservative governments, check-inspectors played an important role in safeguarding coalminers and improving the regulatory oversight of coalmines. Check-inspectors not only gave coalminers a ‘voice’ in OHS, but they also provided an exemplar of the value and legitimacy of worker’s ‘knowledge activism’. This system remains. Furthermore, the struggle is relevant to understanding contemporary debates about collective worker involvement in occupational health and safety.

The employment relationship in a growing number of industries with large concentrations of low wage workers has become ‘fissured’, where the lead firms that collectively determine the product market conditions in which wages and conditions are set have become separated from the actual employment of the workers who provide goods or services. Instead, the direct employers of low wage workers operate in far more competitive markets that create conditions for non-compliance. We examine this evolution in employment and its implications for public policy in the US, discuss the factors driving fissured employment and sketch its main features and outcomes. We then look at the traditional methods used for labour standards enforcement in the US and discuss why they are poorly suited to address fissured workplaces. Finally, we survey how public policies might better address the realities of the modern workplace, including efforts in this regard by the Obama administration.

Australian policy on paid parental leave (PPL) has been highly controversial in recent years. While a universal PPL scheme become operative in 2011 under the Australian Labor Party, alternative policies continued to be proposed by the leader of the Liberal Party. These ranged from an expanded, comparatively generous PPL scheme, to one which would maintain the status quo, to a scheme with lesser provisions than are currently available. This article examines the PPL policy which would have provided the most generous entitlements to employees, and considers how public servants may have fared had it been introduced. The proposal would have meant that public servants would no longer have been able to access PPL provisions in their industrial instruments, but would only have been entitled to the legislated provisions. This article assesses whether public servants may have gained or lost under such a change, and then considers the broader issue of the most appropriate avenues to regulate public sector employment conditions. While a rare opportunity for enhanced PPL has been lost, this may be the best outcome in ensuring that unions can continue to bargain collectively for this important provision and ongoing improvements to it.

Based on the material obtained from focus group interviews conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the article analyses the mechanisms used by employers towards employees, as well as the adaptation strategies applied by those in precarious employment in Poland. The authors’ considerations refer to anti-worker changes introduced under the pretext of the pandemic in the capitalist labour market: layoffs and cuts in wages, manifestations of discrimination against precarious workers and the potential attitudes of employee self-defence. The authors conclude that it is almost certain that under the conditions of post-pandemic capitalism, the number of the precariat will grow and the neoliberal system will want to retain as many of the anti-worker solutions introduced in the shadow of the pandemic as possible.

While the extent of employer non-compliance with minimum employment standards has yet to be decisively determined in Australia, there is evidence to suggest that it is both prevalent and persistent. This article draws on the scholarship emerging from the regulatory studies field to explore the underlying impulses and issues that may have led to this compliance gap. It considers how a more pluralistic and decentred understanding of regulation may improve compliance. This understanding is then applied to examine the various ways in which the federal labour inspectorate — the Fair Work Ombudsman — has sought to supplement and strengthen its existing compliance and enforcement mechanisms by harnessing or ‘enrolling’ non-state stakeholders, such as employer associations, trade unions, top-level firms and key individuals.

Shipping is a safety critical industry where operational errors may lead to maritime accidents involving property damage, loss of lives and environmental pollution. As part of the trend towards self-regulation, the International Maritime Organisation has adopted a worldwide International Safety Management Code which made ship managers responsible for workplace health and safety. This study, based on interviews in two Chinese shipping companies, examines how ship managers use ship visits to monitor shipboard safety management. Interviews with managers from company offices and crew members indicated that managerial ship visits mainly take the form of inspections that focus on low-trust surveillance and disciplinary action rather than genuine support, being based on the safe person rather than the more effective safe place approach. From the perspective of crew members, because the managers visited ships only occasionally, they were unlikely to have sound knowledge of the specific situations and work routines on their ships. Consequently, managers’ interventions for safety compliance were seen by crew members as failing to address real risk factors, and leading instead to increased workloads, psychological pressure and fatigue, the very antithesis of safety management. Meanwhile a coherent, supportive system for reducing risk remains underdeveloped in the shipping industry.

Wage theft has emerged as a major problem for regulation of work in Australia. Yet, the state has done little to address the issue. In this context, this article considers why there has been recent growth in reported cases of underpayment of wages, particularly of temporary migrant workers, and why the state has failed to implement a strategy to adequately address this problem. The article examines the fragmented nature of employment regulation and visa categories constraining worker agency which, combined with widening avenues for temporary migration, have contributed to the underpayment problem. We also consider how conflicting imperatives of the state, business influence over the policy process and weak political incentives to address underpayment help to account for the state’s inaction.