Work,Employment and Society

Since both ‘conflict and co-operation are at the heart of employment relations’, unions need to strike a balance between mobilizing workers against employers and ‘social dialogue’ when communicating with members and the public. Drawing on a case study of unions and grassroots communication on Facebook during sector collective bargaining, this article develops a framework of politico-communicative logics that inform the social media strategies of unions and their grassroots: a logic of mobilization and a logic of settlement. These logics are reflected in how unions and grassroots engage with followers, their choice of words and the topics they address. These theoretical developments on politico-communicative logics on Facebook open up the door for further studies of intra-organizational union communication in an increasingly digitalized world.

In a context of growing dualisation of the workforce that in France takes the form of a ‘contractual dualism’, this article analyses the mechanisms supporting the resort to contract observed in the public teaching sector otherwise modelled on (statutory, long-term) civil service. It departs from analyses mainly focused on the institutional variations of dualism and their outputs, and contributes to the literature on labour market segmentations by adopting an analysis of workers’ experiences and professional trajectories. Findings reveal that contract teachers receive little support from the state to secure their careers and develop professionally, but nonetheless commit to their careers despite the differential in employment and work conditions, which they seemingly consider as acceptable comparatively with their previous work and employment conditions, and given their social origins and aspirations. Analyses thus bring forth new evidence of intersections between institutionalised forms of dualism, social reproduction and the employment trajectories of individuals.

In examining the collective mobilisation of migrant workers, scholars have explored the emergence of community organisations as alternative forms of worker representation. However, community unionism scholars tend to adopt a union-centric perspective, which leaves unexplored the complex nature of community organisations. We argue that it is important to adopt a ‘community’-oriented perspective. Such a perspective allows us to explore varied capacity for collective actions and different forms of identity framing across community organisations. We argue that these can affect the union–community relationship and organising outcomes. By comparing ethnographic case studies of the role of two community organisations vis-a-vis the collective mobilisation of migrant workers, we conclude that community organisations which focus on participatory internal relations, and which frame collective identities (including class) in an intersectional way, are more likely to have reciprocal relationships with trade unions and contribute to collective mobilisation.

A persistent problem in trade unions is the discrepancy/tension that exists between their progressive national equality-seeking agenda and the translation of equality principles into workplace activism and their application to members’ everyday working lives. Building on the notion of ‘feminising’ the union agenda, this article explores professional unions’ efforts towards ‘racialising’ the agenda, which is a neglected equality focus in extant literature. The study is located within nursing and midwifery in NHS workplaces where the existence of racism has long been recognised by all employment relations actors. It investigates how the national union anti-racism project is implemented by workplace union representatives. While it reveals recognition of the existence of workplace racism among union representatives, a degree of denial and discomfort also exists. This, combined with the absence of the empowering union strategies that might be expected, hinders the delivery of a racially inclusive union agenda on the front lines of healthcare.

In many countries, unions, with conflicting political identities, compete for works council positions. However, inter-union solidaristic forms of cooperation can occur within these same institutions. This article advances the concept of strategic group identity to explain the makeup, success, failure and longevity of inter-union cooperation in this context. Based on case studies of inter-union conflict and cooperation on works councils in the French automotive industry, the article highlights the importance of inter-union identity congruence in examining responses to shared threats. Several implications for understanding inter-union solidarity are developed.

This article examines ‘work therapy’ in the US, a sprawling but overlooked realm of work in which people are put to work—usually without pay and employment rights—in the name of ‘therapy’. For whom is work constructed as ‘therapy’, this article asks, what is deemed therapeutic about labour, and what are its consequences? Through content analysis of organisational documents, this article finds ‘work therapy’ to be a mechanism for disciplining and extracting labour from already-marginalised populations. Yet not all ‘work therapy’ programmes are equally disciplinary and extractive, and so this article distinguishes between those of extractive exclusion and extractive inclusion. Despite such variation, however, the commonalities between these programmes overshadow their differences. For, when organisations discursively frame work as ‘therapy’, their goal is to put marginalised groups to work in underpaid or unpaid jobs, while justifying workers’ low or non-existent wages with unfounded claims of medical treatment.

This article offers a scoping review and thematic synthesis of qualitative research on the relationship between precarious employment and mental health. Systematic searches of primary qualitative research in western economies, focused on insecure contracts and a broad conceptualisation of mental health, identified 32 studies. Thematic synthesis revealed four core experiences of precarious employment: financial instability, temporal uncertainty, marginal status and employment insecurity, each connected with multiple, interrelated experiences/responses at four thematic levels: economic, socio-relational, behavioural and physical, leading to negative mental health effects. Reported mental health outcomes could be predominantly understood as reductions in ‘positive mental health’. Findings are theoretically located in models of work-family conflict and latent deprivation; insecure work constrains access to benefits of time structure, social contacts, social purposes, status and identity, which correlate with psychological wellbeing. Frequently failing also to provide the manifest (financial) benefits of work, insecure employment poses mental health risks on both fronts.

Existing workplace bullying literature suggests that ethno-racial minorities and women are more likely to be bullied in relation to their ethnicity, race or gender. However, very few studies apply an intersectional framework of analysis to consider, for instance, how ethno-racial status and gender interacts to affect general workplace bullying experiences and their reporting decisions. This article uses an intersectional analytical framework and a cross-sectional quantitative analysis of the British Workplace Behaviour Survey (2007–2008) to examine bullying in the workplace, as experienced by the intersections of ethno-racial status and gender. In discussing how some groups report particular dimensions of bullying more than others, this article closely examines the somewhat unexpected finding that ‘white’ men were significantly more likely to report instances of workplace bullying. This article argues for the use of an intersectional analytical approach to understand and progressively address the nuances of identity, power and workplace bullying experiences.

The present study investigates education-to-occupation linkage by race/ethnicity in the increasingly diverse educated workforce of the United States. We use a recently introduced linkage approach and identify two dimensions of linkage between educational credentials and occupation (vertical and horizontal linkage). Using data from the 2014 –2018 American Community Survey, we find notable differences in the total strength of education-occupation linkage by race/ethnicity. Highly-educated Black workers experience weaker vertical and horizontal linkage than their white counterparts; this is also true for Hispanic workers, though to a lesser extent. Ethnoracial differences in vertical linkage are stronger and more consistent than those in horizontal linkage. We decompose group differences in linkage strength and find that differences in occupational distributions and the composition-invariant structural component account for a large part of the overall difference in linkage strength. Separate analyses by degree levels show that, while the linkage is generally stronger for advanced degree holders than bachelor’s degree holders, ethnoracial differences remain similar between the two groups of highly-educated workers.

This article seeks to advance the understanding of how human and material agency enmesh in human-robotic workplaces. By means of a qualitative study, the practical use of robots is investigated within two organisations for medical rehabilitation. The theoretical framework combines Andrew Pickering’s ‘dance of agency’ with a process-oriented view of technology as technical rationality. It shows how resistances and accommodations are enacted by both humans and nonhumans as analytical loci of the dance of agency, and it explains how the experimental activities that are concerned with technology adoption and use are emergently fixed in formal or informal rules of coordination of action – the ‘choreographies of care’. By extending the processual orientation of Pickering’s ‘dance of agency’, and by further elaborating on the organisational implications of technological change within it, the article increases understanding of how the transformation of material agency may enact processes of change in the organisational culture.

This article explores two examples of worker housing in India, and compares these with China’s ‘dormitory labour regime’, arguing that these methods of labour accommodation are part of a broader, increasingly global, workplace-residence regime aimed at migrant labour control for the purposes of value extraction. Contrary to previous studies, it argues that China’s system is not unique, but part of the political economy of contemporary global capitalism. Although there exist historical and contextual variations between the two Indian case studies, drawn from the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) garment sector and the Andhra Pradesh electronics industry, as well as between the Indian and Chinese contexts, the aims and many of the outcomes are similar. Moving beyond a focus on the country- and space-specific ‘dormitory labour regime’ facilitates a broader understanding of the crucial role contemporary workplace-residence systems play in enhancing control of migrant labour for the benefit of global accumulation networks.

Labour process approaches have extensively documented the impact of digitalisation and remote work on managerial control, though the role of managers has been less explored. This article fills that gap in the extant literature by examining how adopting remote work affects managerial compliance with corporate goals. Particularly, it shows that this development entails a process of de-institutionalisation and re-institutionalisation of the control regime operating over lower-level managers to act on behalf of companies. These processes are driven by corporate decisions but also by the managers’ attempts to negotiate this regime. Overall, the article claims the need to study managers as agents rather than as a mere extension of the management function or passive subjects of corporate restructurings. The arguments are based on a study conducted in a multinational mining company operating in Chile, which adopted a research-in-action approach and included interviews, document reviews and a survey of line managers.

This article explores the application to Italy of Goldin’s hypothesis that the unexplained gender pay gap is crucially linked to firms’ incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who work long and particular hours. The study draws mainly on Italian responses to the 2014 European Structure of Earnings Survey for data on earnings and the individual characteristics of employees and their employer, but also uses data from the Occupational Information Network and the Italian Sample Survey on Professions to measure characteristics reflecting the work context within occupations. For graduate and non-graduate workers, the results reveal a positive relationship between various measures of the unexplained gender pay gap and the elasticity of earnings with respect to work hours. For graduate workers, in accordance with Goldin’s hypothesis, both these variables are correlated with the occupational characteristics that impose earnings penalties on workers seeking more workplace flexibility.