Economic and Industrial Democracy

The regulatory setting and growing worker mobilization in the digital platform economy have recently attracted much political and academic attention. However, the perspective of platforms as employers and their role in regulating the online market are less researched. This article contributes with a fresh perspective on labour platforms as potential employers and their various strategies towards collective bargaining. Empirically, the article draws on in-depth case studies of three labour platforms operating in Denmark, but choosing very different strategies towards collective bargaining. The study identifies four factors impacting their choice of strategy: platform ownership, existing sector-level agreements, growth rates and customer base.

Digital technology is gradually changing the organisation of production and work. In this article, the authors explore the implications of such developments for workers through the lens of skill, and the skill needs developing out of the shift towards Industry 4.0 technologies now being employed within the European steel industry. Specifically, the article examines the preparedness of initial vocational training systems to support adaptation to Industry 4.0 and the changes in work and employment that will follow. The article addresses such developments from the point of view of institutional theory, analysing how different institutional architectures influence responses to change.

This article seeks to examine the role of life course in understanding job quality. It uses a qualitative case study analysis of Australian restaurants and reveals how chefs at different life stages can subjectively perceive the same objective job characteristics differently. The findings extend pre-existing knowledge by demonstrating how workers’ subjective perceptions of job quality are shaped by their life stages.

This article analyses a campaign urging a British university to re-establish in-house cleaning services after years of outsourcing. The small independent union leading the campaign began from an extremely low level of power resources and managed to build enough associational and societal power to win the dispute on cleaners’ working conditions. The study is based on participant observation of the union’s activities, document analysis and interviews. The article argues that the strategy emerging from the study, centred around three key strategies (collectivization of individual grievances, education, and disruption of core business activities), can be articulated in a process following the main categories of Mobilization Theory: organization, mobilization and collective action. Additionally, the union managed to conciliate servicing and organizing strategies, as well as attention to class-oriented and migrant-specific issues.

Against the European trend, German statutory collective bargaining extensions (SBEs) have decreased in the last two decades, contributing to the exceptional erosion of German wage-bargaining coverage. This article distinguishes between two liberalization dynamics: an intrasectoral dynamic that started with the introduction of employers’ association memberships outside the scope of collective agreements, and an intersectoral dynamic. The latter is the result of an abnormal German institutional feature, the veto power of the employers’ umbrella association in the committees that have to approve SBE applications. Activation of this veto enabled employers to promote collective bargaining erosion in sectors other than their own, in order to contain cost pressures. This intersectoral liberalization dynamic has been part of Germany’s transition into an asymmetrically export-driven growth regime and could be stopped by means of political reforms.

The condition of European economic democracy is generally recognised to be in a fragile state. Recent discussions have centred on pressures to converge towards an Anglo-American model of flexible and deregulated employment relations and systems, consonant with a broader neoliberal economic governance discourse. Existing approaches suggest an uneven experience between countries around a general trend of deterioration. In this article we offer two new contributions to these debates. First, we introduce findings from an Economic Democracy Index (EDI) we have developed. This goes beyond existing indices of employment and industrial democracy to allow us to examine the changing nature of individual employment rights as well as collective bargaining conditions between European countries. Second, we depart from existing studies of European employment relations, which tend to take a comparative national approach, by situating national employment relations and trajectories within a wider set of spatial and social relations. Qualitative analysis of three country cases (Denmark, Portugal and Slovenia) supplements our EDI analysis. Our evidence suggests the importance of multi-scalar relational and institutional dynamics between social actors at the national scale and those at higher scales such as the European Union in understanding variations in country performance on the EDI.

This study examines the determinants of underemployment among part-time employed Australian females, accounting for the interaction of their age, educational qualifications and offspring presence. Females who are young, tertiary educated and without offspring are likeliest to be underemployed, and in general the presence of children lowers the probability of underemployment for those aged below 35, but this impact ameliorates significantly for those aged 35 and above. Policies to address female underemployment need to account for the fact that there is no representative ‘average female worker’, so as to ensure requisite policies better target those most at risk of underemployment. This finding holds for those working either minimum or maximum hours within the part-time spectrum, where greater uniformity of underemployment is found. Age of offspring affects the likelihood of underemployment with younger offspring reducing the incidence of a mismatch between preferred and actual hours, while the opposite holds for older offspring.

Despite a generous system with high wage subsidies for the long-term unemployed and newly arrived immigrants, many Swedish employers do not make use of this opportunity. This study seeks to increase knowledge of why some employers use the opportunity and others do not. Both register and survey data and combined register and survey data are used. One finding is that employers lack information about the subsidy programmes, although employers that had previously employed subsidised workers were much more likely to employ them in the future. Thus, a key policy question is how to present these subsidies to employers to reduce this barrier. The study also found that some employers hired people from these groups from altruistic motives. However, some employers responded that they would not employ a person entitled to a subsidy, regardless of the content of the subsidy scheme.

This study examines the drivers of the steady decline in South Africa’s private sector labour share between 1971 and 2019. The focus on South Africa is instructive as its distributional contestation is bounded in a matrix of racial conflict. Crucial reforms on trade, finance and welfare were undertaken since 1994, but the study finds little evidence that the extension of the franchise promoted egalitarianism, since white economic elites invested in de facto political power. This study employs an Unrestricted Error Correction Model to estimate the drivers of the private sector labour share, and the findings suggest that globalisation, financialisation and public spending have decreased the labour share, while the effects of education have been positive but insufficient to halt the decline.

Recent research shows that the focus of labor-standards advocacy by transnational civil society organizations (CSOs) has shifted to building the organizational capacity of workers’ organizations in developing countries, suggesting cooperation between transnational CSOs and local trade unions potentially improving working conditions in global supply chains. However, scant attention has been paid to how the two actors interact in practice. Based on fieldwork in Cambodia, including in-depth interviews with garment sector stakeholders, this article examines the interaction between transnational CSOs and trade unions in improving working conditions in the garment industry. The data analysis shows that transnational CSOs and trade unions have distinct comparative advantages in improving working conditions. Rather than the conflicting relationship between CSOs and trade unions as suggested in the literature, this article demonstrates a complementary relationship between the two, indicating the significance of the cooperation between these actors in improving working conditions within global supply chains.

This article examines managerial ideology and identity in the nationalised British coal industry. On nationalisation in 1947, the National Coal Board (NCB) – after 1987 the British Coal Corporation – became the largest socialised industry outside of the Communist bloc. Privatised in 1994, as part of liberal market reforms, the industry was a crucible for ideological clashes amongst managers. The article responds to interest in the impact of managerial ideologies and identities on organisations and in the search for illuminating historical case studies in different organisational settings. The authors position those ideological clashes, and distinctive managerial identities, within a moral economic framework.

This article documents the working conditions and experiences of tech professionals at a leading Chinese e-commerce firm. Using intensive qualitative research methods, the author finds that digital management of tech professionals has accompanied and perhaps explains some of the Chinese tech industry’s much-heralded increases in efficiency and productivity. This management form can be understood as digital Taylorism, which has similar pathologies to the original Taylorism: a dehumanising effect on the workplace, increased work intensity, a higher income but proportionately lower share of the gains from increased productivity, and intensified competition among workers. It is hoped that this study will open up new avenues for evidence-based discussion about the future of work and the ethics of algorithm use in the workplace.

While citizen opinion polls reveal that Europeans are concerned about the labour market consequences of technological progress, our understanding of the actual significance of this association is still imperfect. In this article, the authors assess the relationship between robot adoption and employment in Europe. Combining industry-level data on employment by skill type with data on robot adoption and using different sets of fixed-effects techniques, the study finds that robot use is associated with an increase in aggregate employment. Contrary to some previous studies, the authors do not find evidence of robots reducing the share of low-skill workers across Europe. Since the overwhelming majority of industrial robots are used in manufacturing, the findings should not be interpreted outside of the manufacturing context. However, the results still hold when including non-manufacturing sectors and they are robust across a wide range of assumptions and econometric specifications.