Regulation and the future of work: The employment relationship as an innovation facilitator

Digital transformation and the reorganization of the firm have given rise to new forms of work that diverge significantly from the standard employment relationship. Advocates of digital disruption suggest that the existing legal framework cannot accommodate “innovative” working templates and business models. This article, however, argues that labour regulation can continue to facilitate innovation, presenting the employment relationship as a flexible instrument, and standard forms of employment as the means of achieving efficiencies and cost advantages. First, they allow for the full exercise of managerial prerogative and attendant internal flexibility in workforce deployment, and, second, they constitute an effective device to deliver training and develop skills.     

Three scenarios for the future of work

After presenting a historical overview of the concept of work and the different meanings that it has acquired over the centuries, the author analyses the value it holds for Europeans, and the impact on work and employment of the popular rhetoric about a technological revolution and its “inevitable” consequences. She then considers the future of work in the light of three scenarios: a “dismantling of labour law”, a “technological revolution” (where automation brings an end to employment), and an “environmental transition”. She argues that the latter is compatible with the imperative to take action on climate change and the expectations placed in work and employment.     

Back to the future: A continuity of dialogue on work and technology at the ILO

Concerns about technological unemployment are not new. Specifically, policy debates surrounding automation processes in the 1960s reflected both optimism and concerns about the job-destroying potential of technology. Studying the archives, and in particular the information collected by the Bureau of Automation, shows that many of today's policy proposals were originally raised at the ILO during that period, even though they were never translated into regulatory policy. This article thus suggests that reopening this past dialogue may reveal useful insights for addressing current challenges, and enable us to achieve the world of work we wish to see in the future.     

Keynes's grandchildren and Marx's gig workers: Why human labour still matters

The current anxiety around the globe regarding automation and “the future of work”, the irrelevance of human labour and the superfluity of humans is based on recurring ideas about technology, work and economic value. Not quite novel, the debate on these ideas dates back to prominent thinkers, such as Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. To grasp the present moment, therefore, the authors revisit this debate within the broader history of capitalism. With a focus on labour and technology, they bring attention to the hidden forms of value creation in the current economy and to the blind spots of the historical debate, and envision various possible scenarios for the future.     

Labour geographies of the platform economy: Understanding collective organizing strategies in the context of digitally mediated work

The article examines the geographies of collective labour struggle in the platform economy. It distinguishes between the unique spatial features associated with place-based work and crowdwork to examine the divergent collective organizing strategies developed therein. Taking works councils, collective bargaining and multi-enterprise agreements as three examples of social dialogue, the article considers why different types of platform workers gravitate towards particular strategies, analyses the regulatory frameworks within which these workers' collective struggles are bound, and assesses the propensity for these expressions of solidarity to improve the terms and conditions of platform work.     

Bodies of work: skilling at the bottom of the global nursing care chain

ABSTRACT

In the midst of a growing global market for migrant care work, there is a need to investigate not only how such labour is consumed but how ‘ideal’ care workers are also produced. This paper investigates how schools within migrant-sending countries produce nurse labour through body work or the testing and honing of hospital procedures on patients’ bodies. Focusing on the case of the Philippines, this paper shows how the education of nurses for export creates a paradoxical impact on care work within local healthcare institutions. Aspiring nurse migrants provide much-needed manpower to understaffed public hospitals yet, treat poor patients as docile bodies to enhance their skills for future foreign employers. This practice creates an inherent inequality in the actual skilling of aspiring nurse migrants, where the poorest bodies allow nurse migrants to provide better care to more privileged bodies in wealthier nations.     

Challenging the Rhetoric of Choice in Maternal Labour‐Force Participation: Preferred Versus Contracted Work Hours

The notion of choice in maternal labour‐force participation (LFP) is a contentious one, with assertions that LFP is a direct result of either personal inclinations, such as employment commitment or external factors, such as historically available opportunities. This article suggests an alternative framework for understanding and testing choice in LFP using preferred versus contracted work hours. It explores these constructs quantitatively in a group of working mothers (N = 275) with dependent children and investigates qualitatively the underlying reasons for discrepant preferred versus contracted work hours in a sub‐sample of these women with under‐school‐aged children (N = 20). The results show that nearly two‐thirds of women working full time would prefer to work part time and the major reasons for not acting on their preferences is because of the nature of the job and the lack of career opportunities available for part‐time employees.     

Readers' response: The place of social work in the Contemporary University: Meeting the challenges of the profession and the Academy

Abstract

The pressure to attract funds and produce research, to spend more time on scholarship rather than on teaching and practice links challenges the nature of social work education. This paper outlines the impact of both funding cuts and the managerial and business culture of contemporary Australian Universities on the teaching of social work. It addresses social work practitioners concerns' about these changes, and outlines attempts made by social work schools to respond to these challenges.     

Museum acrobatics: artistic intervention and the work of cultural studies

This paper responds to questions posed to the panel regarding intellectual work and the division of labour in the academic and non-academic work of cultural studies. Using examples of ‘failed attempts’ at producing change at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the paper re-frames notions of transmission in the project of cultural studies in relation to questions of participation to provide a framework for thinking about how cultural studies practitioners engage with the public sphere.     

Launching the workplace flexibility movement: work family research and a program of social change

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Workplace, Work Force & Working Families program was established in 1994 and ended in 2011. Over the course of its 17-year lifespan, this program – through its vision, commitment and unique, pragmatic grant-making strategies – pioneered the interdisciplinary field of work–family research and spearheaded a national movement to create more flexible workplaces that effectively meet the needs of employees and employers. The program's first strategic phase supported high-quality, multidisciplinary research to examine what was happening within working families at all stages of their lives, both at home and at work. Results from these investigations highlighted the structural mismatch between the needs of this diverse workforce – comprised increasingly of working parents and older workers – and the demands of a rigidly structured workplace requiring full-time, full-year work, with little to no flexibility in how, when, or where work gets done. After a decade of scholarly research documenting that the challenges facing American families were not private, individual problems but public, societal concerns, the Sloan Foundation designed and launched in 2003 the National Workplace Flexibility Initiative. Its goals were twofold: to make workplace flexibility a compelling national issue and to establish it as a standard of the American workplace. As a result of the collective efforts of Sloan-supported organizations and people, the stage is now set for a social movement to realign the structure of the American workplace to the needs of the twenty-first century workforce. Lessons for subsequent research-driven social movements close the article.     

A critical evaluation of competing representations of the relationship between formal and informal work

Analysing the extensive literature on informal work reveals multiple, often contradictory, views regarding its relationship with formal work. The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically these competing claims. Evaluating in turn the predominant views of informal work as a residue, by-product, complement and/or alternative to formal work, reveals that universal generalizations are not possible and that all of these articulations only apply in specific contexts. However, rather than simply conclude that these contrasting readings of the relationship between informal and formal work are therefore context-bound generalizations, two features common to all these perspectives are identified that necessitate a more fundamental rethinking of the relationship between formal and informal work. These relate to the way in which all firstly, simplistically attribute one form of work with positive features (e.g. modernization, virtue and progress) and the other with negative attributes (e.g. tradition, backwardness, exploitation) and, secondly, delineate formal and informal work as discrete and separate entities. The paper concludes by setting out a research agenda to not only highlight the political values underpinning each of these representations but also achieve a fuller and finer-grained understanding of the relations between informal and formal work.     

Migrants' regular army of labour: gender dimensions of the impact of the global economic crisis on migrant labor in Western Europe

The purpose of this article is to remedy the lack of explanatory endeavours concerning the positive performance of female migrant workers during the recent economic crisis in Western Europe. This phenomenon both interrogates the established association between economic downturns and their negative impact on migrant labour in low‐skilled jobs and enriches the theory of the reserve army of labour, which has been applied to understanding the fragile status of migrant workers in Western economies. Secondary analysis of Labor Force Survey (LFS) and OECD data concerning the impact of the crisis on migrant labour shows that women employed in the care‐domestic sector have been affected significantly less than men employed in manufacture and constructions. To explain this evidence, the article proposes a theoretical framework that draws on key concepts and debates in different strands of sociology: the increasing demand for paid care‐domestic work due to the ageing population and the growth of native‐born women's rates of activity; the commodification of care and the state management of migration; the affectivity and spatial fixity of care‐domestic labour. All these factors contribute to configure female migrant labour, mostly employed in the reproductive sector, as a ‘regular’ rather than a reserve army of labour.     

The humanitarian crisis of migration versus the crisis of humanitarianism: current dimensions and challenges for social work practice*

People who comprise today’s mass migrations are the embodiment of an increasingly hurtful planetary interconnectedness between towering inequalities and hegemonies and human lives. The humanitarian crisis has turned into a fundamental crisis of humanitarianism. The crisis of humanitarianism builds up by the state borders increasingly militarized, equipped with one manner or the other of securitization, seeking to externalize the migrating people. Further, the governments seek to institutionalize and spatially segregate the people, whilst the resident population is subjected to programmatic inciting of racism and xenophobia. Racist eurocentrism pictures the West as democratic, and migrant people as non-democratic; it does not distinguish between individuals and political regimes; does not take into consideration the emergency situations from which they flee: it is thus a form of armed humanitarianism. The Balkan countries which were part of the Balkan Refugee route have become prison countries, custodians of the EU border. They conserve the image of the dangerous Balkans and consolidate Balkanism. A complex social work response includes individual, institutional, curricular, and research levels of reflection and intervention.     

The World Bank's “Employing Workers” index: Findings and critiques – A review of recent evidence

This note provides an update on the ongoing debate over the World Bank's Doing Business project with a particular focus on its “Employing Workers” index, which is intended to measure difficulty of hiring, rigidity of working hours and difficulty of firing. The authors review the findings of studies that have used this index or been influenced by it and of those that inspired its construction. They go on to examine criticisms of this instrument, highlighting both conceptual and empirical problems. Their paper concludes with suggestions for alternative approaches and future research.     

Social work in Greece in the time of austerity: challenges and prospects

The aim of this article is to critically assess the impact of austerity on social work in Greece and the main challenges that professionals face today. Within this context, this article argues that scarce resources and staff shortages have put social workers under extreme pressure and have limited their ability to respond to increased social needs. At a time when the individualized model that has prevailed in social work practices for decades seems to have reached its limits, a dialogue concerning the adoption of more progressive approaches such as radical social work and collective practices drawn from community work has already emerged in Greece and in other countries where professionals and society are facing similar challenges and problems incurred by neo-liberalism. The paper aims to participate in this dialogue by critically assessing the progress thus far. Although this dialogue remains weak and occurs mostly on an academic level at this time, adjusting a radical model of social work to the particularities of the Greek context and providing an effective guide for everyday practice may enhance its development.     

The fallacy of the lump of labour theory: Evidence for Latin America

In a context of population ageing, this article analyses the “lump of labour” theory using empirical evidence from Latin America. Instead of finding a crowding-out effect, estimations using a fixed effects model on a panel of annual data drawn from household surveys in 11 countries between 2002 and 2019 suggest a positive correlation between the employment rates of older adults and young people. Additionally, results show a positive association between the labour incomes of older and young workers. These findings could indicate that an expansion in the employment of older adults maintains economic growth and, therefore, a greater demand for labour, which could be supplied by young people.     

Labour is not a commodity: The content and meaning of work in the twenty‐first century

In his valedictory lecture before the Collège de France, Alain Supiot reviews his work on the transformation of labour in the twenty‐first century, highlighting the role of law and institutions in addressing the consequences of the digital revolution and environmental crisis. In his view, the moral, social and environmental bankruptcy of neoliberalism calls for us to reconsider the legal fiction of labour as a commodity and to re‐establish the truly “humane labour regime” envisaged by the preamble to the ILO Constitution, recognizing both the meaning and content of work. He uses the case of scientific research to illustrate his argument.     

The challenges of a hidden disability: Social work practice in the field of traumatic brain injury

Abstract

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has become an important area for social work practice. Children and adults sustaining TBI often undergo hospitalisation, rehabilitation and face the prospect of lifelong cognitive and psychosocial impairments. Families are profoundly affected by the consequences of the injury. TBI is a ‘hidden disability’ because there are typically no physical markers indicating a person has brain damage. This paper aims to provide some guidelines for social work practice in the area, in particular, outlining options for social work interventions at individual, family, community, service system and policy levels. Social workers need to acquire specialised knowledge about brain injury, reformulate traditional models of grief counselling to address the adjustment challenges and utilise community education and service innovation to address the social stigma and reduced level of community participation associated with brain damage. Finally, social workers aim to nurture a sense of hope in the face of the tragedy.     

The transition from college to work during the great recession: employment,financial, and identity challenges

This study examines the challenges that recent college graduates face in a hard-hit US region during the Great Recession. In their poignant and sometimes heartbreaking perceptions of their ‘biggest challenges,’ graduates vividly illustrate the negative implications of degree completion during the recession. Based on an analysis of both closed and open-ended survey data of Michigan's 2012 graduates, we find that women and first generation college graduates fare the worst in terms of their employment status, debt and income levels, and subjective assessments of job opportunities and financial stress. In contrast, men, especially those whose parents have at least a bachelor's degree, were more likely than their counterparts to report that their ‘biggest challenge’ since graduation was linked with making the transition into adult roles. Taken together, these findings suggest widespread difficulty after graduating from college during the Great Recession, and the ways in which these difficulties are linked with gender and class inequalities.     

Employment effects of skills around the world: Evidence from the PIAAC

Using an international survey that directly assesses the cognitive skills of participants, the author studies the effect of skills on employment in 32 countries. On average, a 1 standard deviation increase in numeracy is associated with an 8.4 percentage point increase in the probability of being employed, reducing the probability of being out of the labour force and unemployed by 6.4 and 2.1 percentage points, respectively. After controlling for numeracy, the estimated employment effect of years in education falls by one third, from 2.7 to 1.8 percentage points. Notably, the employment effect of skills is more pronounced in countries with higher unemployment.