Abstract
The ILR Review editorial team has had a busy year. Emilio Castilla completed his term as Associate Editor, Chiara Benassi moved from Book Reviews to Associate Editor, and Maite Tapia has joined the Review as the new Book Reviews Editor. We appreciate Emilio’s contribution to the journal and are excited to welcome Chiara and Maite, who are already bringing energy and ideas to their new roles.
We have continued to publish individual, high-quality articles as well as new and ongoing special issues and series, connecting cutting-edge research to current events in the world of work. Our series “Novel Technologies at Work” and “Work, Labor, and Employment Relations in the COVID-19 Era” are encouraging innovative submissions on employment and labor issues related to advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, and the evolving impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on firms, workers, and labor markets. The current issue includes an article in our “Policy Papers” series, by Erin Kelly, Hazhir Rahmandad, Nathan Wilmers, and Aishwarya Yadama, examining how employer practices affect workers’ economic mobility.
We also have published several special forums, bringing together short pieces based on research and reflection on a contemporary theme. These include A Forum on Emerging Technologies (Volume 75, Issue 4) and A Forum on the Politics of Skills (Volume 75, Issue 5). The authors contributing to the Politics of Skills forum discussed their pieces in a webinar that is linked to the online article—adding a more dynamic, live debate to accompany their written reflections.
In August (Volume 76, Issue 4), we published a special issue on “Labor in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA),” guest edited by Dina Bishara. This issue breaks new ground for the journal and the labor and employment relations field, drawing on multidisciplinary research to analyze emerging challenges confronting labor movements and labor markets in the MENA region. Topics range from labor organizing and protest within authoritarian regimes to precarity and migration within globalizing or oil-dependent economies. We hope that this issue will encourage employment relations scholars to engage more broadly with theory and research developed outside of the wealthy economies of the Global North—and encourage more submissions to the Review from colleagues studying these regions.
Several forthcoming special issues and forums are planned. These include articles from two Festschrift conferences celebrating the work of George Borjas and of Tom Kochan, an issue on transnational employment relations in Europe, and a forum on the regulation of artificial intelligence in the workplace. We also have a new call for papers for a forthcoming special issue on “Public, Private, and Social Labor Governance in Global Production.”
We are pleased to announce that Michael Maffie is a co-winner of the 2023 Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award for his article, “The Perils of Laundering Control through Customers: A Study of Control and Resistance in the Ride-hail Industry” (ILR Review 75(2): 348–372). The Industry Studies Association (ISA) sponsors this competition to recognize the best papers published in industry studies for the year. Professor Maffie has written a reflection on the role of the industry studies tradition in his research and analysis, which follows this letter.
Michael Maffie’s prize-winning article is exemplary of multi-method research grounded in an in-depth understanding of industry and organizational context, which has long been a key focus in the ILR Review. In 2016, we launched a special article series with the ISA, which features both past winners of the Gomory Award and articles in the industry studies tradition published in the Review. We encourage submissions that build on the strengths of this tradition, while applying these methods to emerging industries and forms of work in increasingly heterogeneous and interconnected workplaces.
Finally, we want to thank our authors and reviewers, who are critical to the success of the journal. Their efforts from submission to refereeing to final revision are essential to continuing the ILR Review’s tradition of publishing high quality and influential research.
Virginia Doellgast Lawrence Kahn
Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Employment Relations and Dispute Resolution Braunstein Family Professor and Professor of Economics
ILR School, Cornell University ILR School, Cornell University
Michael Maffie’s reflections on his ILR Review article “The Perils of Laundering Control through Customers”—winner of the Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award
A ride-hail driver I interviewed recalled a simple yet revealing story about the dynamics of her job: a group of intoxicated college students were determined to squeeze six passengers into a standard car to avoid paying for a larger vehicle. In addition to their planned creative contortions (including asking if they could tie someone to the roof of the car with bungee cords), several passengers had red Solo cups of various alcohol. As the driver told me, she was in a difficult spot: should she cancel the ride now, her clients could “one star” her, damaging her performance rating and risking her future work on the platform. Similar retaliation could come from asking the students to pour out their drinks. Alternatively, should she accept the ride and say nothing, it would place her in legal jeopardy for transporting too many people, some of whom had open containers of alcohol. “Whatever,” she thought, “we’re not going that far anyways.”
In this article, I explore how granting customers this kind of direct power over gig workers’ performance evaluations shapes the worker–customer interaction. To understand this phenomenon, I attended driver meetings, interviewed 55 drivers across the United States, and surveyed 486 drivers. Through the eyes of Uber and Lyft drivers, this article illustrates how customers can abuse the now ubiquitous “five star” rating and push gig workers to take legal risks, such as transporting too many people in a vehicle. I describe this system as a distinctive version of the customer–employer–worker service triangle, in which employers “launder control through customers.” I also examine how workers fight back against this method of control, particularly when it is designed in a narrow and one-sided way. At the time of my study, some ride-hail companies granted workers the power to block future pairings with customers. I find that workers rewarded these companies by spending more time working on their apps and attempting to “poach” passengers for them from companies that lacked this option.
This article connects with the “industry studies” tradition by exploring how social and economic institutions shape management practices and worker outcomes. Studying this interaction is particularly challenging in the gig economy because the workforce is dispersed, working hours vary widely, and working dynamics are shaped by a rapidly evolving patchwork of local regulations. By drawing on workers’ experience, this article illustrates the empirical and theoretical insights that can be gained from applying an industry studies lens to emerging forms of work.