Conference Agenda

The economy of the countries of the Latin American region has been characterised in recent years by a complex macroeconomic scenario, marked by a stable informality around 50% and an unemployment rate that, between 2010 and 2019, was close to 7%.

These difficulties have been made more visible and extreme by the current health crisis and will have long-term repercussions for the various countries in the region. In this context, several political, economic and social efforts emerged to address these problems that may have been thought to be on the way to being overcome, or at least have not been so visible. In other words, the pandemic has set the scene for a policy laboratory at different levels and scales.

The aim of this research was to systematise the experiences of public policies that, in the context of the pandemic, have been promoted and implemented by public bodies in Latin American countries to ensure access to social protection for the informal or unemployed working population. It sought to answer the following research question: What was the response of the social protection systems in the Latin American region to improve access for the informal or unemployed population in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how did this response make it possible to analyse the situation of generalised crisis in terms of social protection in the region?

In terms of methodology, an Integrated Multiple Case Study (Yin, 2009) was carried out, in which a set of 10 experiences or public policies from countries in the Latin American region were analysed in terms of their origin, design, results and evaluation. This, together with data on the context of the different countries in terms of social protection, health and labour market systems (informality and unemployment). From a general perspective, case studies are relevant for "contrasting theories, creating theories, identifying antecedent conditions, verifying the importance of these antecedent conditions and explaining cases of intrinsic importance" (Van Evera, 2002: 65).

The analysis of the different experiences was consolidated following the methodology of comparative analysis based on a series of previously defined variables.

This research allows, first, to identify experiences at the regional level with the possibility of scaling up or replicability to other similar contexts and, second, it provides the opportunity to comparatively analyse the lack of protection and gaps in social protection for the informal or unemployed population in the region.

The multiple shocks to the global economy, including war in Europe, COVID-19, the great recession and austerity, have undermined decent work and universal social protection transnationally, but with varied effects on different places and people. As rising energy and food prices affect the cost of living and impact households within and between countries unevenly, crises unfold following decades of neoliberalisation. In Europe, the paradigm of social protection shifted away from seeing markets as a problem (tackled through equality-enhancing redistribution) to positing markets as a solution (enabling workers through competitiveness). Simultaneously, globalisation has shaped European Union policy framework to promote a transnationalisation of work and, less so, social protection policies. How do the multiple crises affect transnational social reproduction via labour mobility? With what implications for social protection systems? The case of Poland and Ukraine – countries that have undergone post-communist transformations through ‘shock therapy’, soaring unemployment, diminished social protection, mass out-migration, and Russia’s war against Ukraine – demonstrates the scale and scope of the crises and the need for multifaceted policy responses. We present a case study of Polish and Ukrainian migrant workers in Germany, Poland and the UK employed in care, food and housing sectors – domains critical to the reproduction of societies, all of which have experienced state retrenchment and market expansion, and are paradigmatic of a social reproduction crisis. Using an extended case methodology, we combine in-depth interviews with migrant workers and secondary data analysis of labour market, sector and policy developments, and consider the implications of interlinked crises on work and social protection. Through the prism of social reproduction provisioning, which entails a balance of market, state and household sources of welfare, we highlight how a flourishing social reproduction is incompatible with market-reach, since state retrenchment depletes households, while encroaching markets intensify labour, widen poor labour practices and lower labour’s rewards. We show how, despite EU migrant workers’ privileged access to the current ‘gold-standard’ transnational social protection offered by the EU’s freedom of movement framework, welfare remains centred on individualised paid-work logic, leaving many needs unmet and work and workers excluded. The war-related pressure to redirect fiscal flows from social protection towards military spending to secure peace, presents an added threat of disconnecting human security from social protection. We conclude with implications of these aggravated pressures, including the role of labour market actors and institutions in mainstreaming social objectives in labour market and macroeconomic policies transnationally.

While the public health effects of the Covid pandemic have begun to recede, the socio-economic effects persist, particularly in the global South, where countries have had to deal with challenges such as rising public debt, persistent and growing levels of unemployment, rising food prices, rising inflation and severe macro-stability issues. The experiences of countries in the global South has received very limited analytical analysis. In order to consider the design and efficacy of macroeconomic policy, and social protection responses to these crises, it is essential that our analysis is based on a careful appraisal of the macro- and socio-economic situation in the global South. In this paper we take a comparative view, from the perspective of South Africa. Placing the South African situation in some comparative perspective by comparing South Africa to six other global South economies - Botswana, Brazil, China, India, Turkey, Malaysia - we examine the following questions: Firstly, what was the state of the economy in March 2019 and again in the post-pandemic period? We examine the general growth impacts, and fiscal policy responses implemented to counteract the economic fallout of the pandemic. We review the employment effects, both of the pandemic and the recovery, and examine social effects on health and learning. We evaluate the efficacy of the economic policy measures introduced to address the multiple crises, and asses the implications for the design of social policy. We then turn to focus on the growth and development challenges facing the country, including high unemployment and inequality, growing poverty, and the climate crisis. We conclude by arguing for the central role of social policy in addressing these intersecting crises, and ensuring a sustainable and inclusive economic recovery in the coming decade.

The Italian economy is characterised by several structural problems that have become particularly acute after the Great Crisis of 2008 and during the pandemic crisis of 2020. The main symptoms of Italy’s economic system difficulties are the long-term stagnation of real wages and the slow upswing of employment. Since 2020, Italy, which had not yet reabsorbed all the consequences of the 2008 crisis, went back under pressure due to the COVID-19 crisis and, afterwards, to the cost-of-living increase.

Taking into account the weak Italian economic framework, we questioned what were the impacts of the Italian macroeconomic policies on wages and labour market during and after the pandemic crisis (2020-2022).

On this basis, we analysed the wages and the labour market trends by processing official data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Statistical Office of the European Union (EUROSTAT), the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and the Italian National Institute for Social Security (INPS). In particular, we focused on payroll mass (average annual wages in the whole economy and in the private sector), on the structure of employment (professional status, occupation, working hours), on inflation rate and on wages from the National Collective Bargaining Agreements (NCBAs).

This study shows that, during the pandemic crisis, the decrease in the average gross annual wage observed in 2020 was more than halved by the intervention of the job retention scheme, and that the substantial stability of employment was guaranteed by the freeze on layoffs. After the emergency phase, however, the Italian recovery experienced similar dynamics to the ones from previous crisis. Indeed, we show that, despite a strong post-pandemic economic growth, Italy average wages are currently lower than in 2019, and the country is experiencing an increase of non-standard jobs and of the substantial unemployment area. Moreover, the recent strong increase in the inflation rate, associated to the long time lag to renew the NCBAs, are reducing the wages purchasing power. All these elements show the need and urgency to address the decent work agenda through the “full and good employment” strategy, which is a pro-employment macroeconomic policy based on wage growth and the creation of higher quality employment. This strategy can be implemented through four actions: (i) faster NCBAs’ renewal; (ii) reduction of fixed-term employment contracts; (iii) active role of the State in the economy; (iv) extension of social safety net programs.

Given the globalized market system, the creation of decent jobs depends on the vitality of international trade, in particular, the extent to which productive activities participate in global value chains (GVC) with robust forward and backward linkages, and generate competitive advantages grounded in innovation rather than low wages. The present case study focusess on Mexico, a country highly integrated into international trade and global value chains. The objective of the study is to analyse the links between the country’s export success and its employment performance, specifically in the automotive industry. To carry out the analysis, this study differentiates exports associated with GVCs and more traditional exports not associated with GVCs, with a specific emphasis on gender and skills.

The analysis sheds light on the quantitative as well as qualitative aspects of employment, such as wages and security, that are used to measure the evolution of decent work as highlighted in ILO (2013, 2021a, 2021b). It is the continuation of a previous study on Mexico’s textile and automotive industries (see Moreno-Brid et al. 2021).

The electrification of the automobile industry has been lingering for several years in the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis. But it has gained momentum only recently. While the tempo of electrification will still vary between regions, it is now clear that electrification is happening at a much faster pace than anybody could anticipate in the 2010s.

Amongst the several disruptive consequences that this accelerated electrification will have on the automotive sector, the first and most evident one concerns the phasing out of the conventional powertrain industry and its accelerated replacement by a complete new industry that will produce batteries and electric powertrains.

In this article I would like to focus on the implications of such a dramatic change for the future of work and employment in the automotive sector. The article develops a general overview of the main economic, political and institutional factors that are shaping the structuring of this emerging industry and their implications for the quality of jobs that are created. It discusses these developments from the viewpoints of two distinct literatures: the global value chain literature and the productive models literature.

In the first section, GVC concepts of upgrading/downgrading are used to discuss the transformations of automotive value chains brought by the rapid structuring of new battery industries driven by a combination of new industrial policies, venture capital investments and new environmental and trade regulations.

In the second section, the productive model approach is used to characterise the current employment relationships of battery makers. The article highlights in particular the co-existence of three different productive models with different employment relationships:

1) The current “dominant” productive model of global suppliers of the electronic consumers industry embodied by the leading East-Asian battery makers such as CATL, BYD, LG, Samsung and SKI;

2) The “challenger” productive model of innovative start-ups such as Tesla, Northvolt, BritishVolt, QuantumScape, Fryer and Verkor;

3) And the “traditional” productive model of automotive companies represented by the growing number of joint ventures and direct investments in battery manufacturing by OEMs.

The article discusses whether these transformations as well as the competition between these different groups of firms and their related productive models are leading to upgrading, reproduction or downgrading of existing automotive employment relationships, in particular concerning the new jobs created in battery manufacturing, both in core and emerging countries.

Informal sector has been significantly contributing to the employment generation across industries and countries, however, existing evidence regarding quality of employment in this sector is not encouraging. Frequently cited reasons for poor quality of employment conditions in informal sector has been lack of employment opportunity in formal sector, skill gap, lack of formal education and others. Like other manufacturing sector Indian gold jewellery manufacturing sector too relies heavily on informal workforce (no formal employment contract) for various purposes not necessarily for labour cost optimization. Research in Indian gold manufacturing studying labour practices and working conditions in informal sector is not adequate however, anecdotal evidence suggest absence of quality employment in this sector. This qualitative study is first of its kind that attempts to understand the labour dynamics, labour practices, working conditions and challenges faced by the artisans in Indian gold jewellery manufacturing informal sector.

We have captured experiences of 123-artisans (Karigars) working in informal workshop across country using in-depth interviews and observation about working conditions and labour practices prevailing in informal gold jewellery manufacturing sector. Data has been analysed using inductive approach of qualitative method and results are framed using ‘Decent work (ILO, 1999)’ framework that proposes characteristics of productive and quality employment.

Result shows absence of basic hygiene elements at the informal workplaces, longer working hours, absence of social security (owing to informal employment), discontinuity in work because of seasonality and demand – supply uncertainties, and work insecurity. In addition, we found this sector suffers from lack of skilled artisans to match demand, and young generation are no more interested joining this sector as Karighar’s. Based on our results we have developed a framework for Gold Karigar talent management process (GKTMP) in the informal sector, wherein we have highlighted the processes of karigars acquisition (social network, employee referrals), development of karigars (on job learning), productivity linked compensation plans, and various routes to enter into formal manufacturing unit and finally different career paths taken by Karigars during and after the active years of their working life. Findings of this study has relevance for policy makers and manufacturing firms, both in formal and informal sector for the creation of skilled karigar pool and managing the karigars in gold jewellery manufacturing sector.

As the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic remain evident, governments are intensifying social support packages to prevent households from sliding into poverty. In this paper, we examine the impact of government support programs provided during the COVID-19 pandemic on household income in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. We seek to investigate whether the existing social programs in Egypt and Jordan are sufficient to protect individuals from being pushed below the poverty line. Previous studies on the subject matter are minimal within the developing countries and particularly in the MENA region although it records alarming figures for extreme poverty. Not enough attention is given to the socio-economic crises that the MENA region countries are encountering and not enough empirical research has been directed to antipoverty programs, mainly governmental programs, and their success or failure in defeating poverty and supporting the poor in any of the region’s countries. Empirical studies on the MENA region, even those implemented after the pandemic, do not target the impact of government support programs on income and poverty. For this purpose, we utilize a Propensity Score Matching approach (PSM) to control for selection bias and capture the causal effect. We use a unique panel dataset from the Economic Research Forum (ERF) COVID-19 MENA Monitor survey. Our empirical findings suggest that the average treatment effect of the government social support programs on household income is negative and significant across both countries. This reveals that COVID-19 has caused a sharp decline in income levels across households, and the existing social protection schemes were not sufficient to offset the negative income shock. Hence, the paper provides governments with empirical analysis to reconsider their existing social support programs aimed at poverty prevention.

South Africa exhibits one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, which was only aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the far-reaching and progressive nature of the country’s social protection system, prior to the pandemic there was no targeted income support to the working-age population. The government’s introduction of the COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant – targeted at the unemployed – played an important role in addressing this hole in the safety net. Given the country’s extent of unemployment, the transfer provided income support to millions of vulnerable, previously unreached individuals in a relatively short amount of time. Importantly, in a crisis context, anti-poverty programmes and economic recovery policy need not be mutually exclusive. As such, despite not being its primary aim, it is plausible that the SRD grant played an important role in aiding labour market recovery. At the time of writing, however, no causal evidence exists on the effects of the grant on any outcome. Such effects may vary from those of pre-existing grants which are characterised by markedly different eligibility criteria.

In this paper, we present the first estimates of the causal effects of receipt of the grant on several labour market outcomes. Our identification employs a semi-parametric, doubly robust, dynamic difference-in-differences estimator on representative panel labour force data collected in 2020 and 2021 and the exploitation of a credible proxy receipt identifier in the data. Despite the relatively small size of the transfer, we find robust evidence of notable labour market effects. Our preferred models suggest that grant receipt increased mean employment probabilities by 3 percentage points. Effect heterogeneity estimates show this effect was driven by positive effects on wage and formal sector employment. Smaller effects are also estimated for the probabilities on self-employment, becoming an employer, and informal sector employment. Notably, employment effects all vary by duration of receipt, with larger short-term effects which appear to reduce with additional exposure. Small, positive effects on the probability of trying to start a business are also found, but no effects on job search. These results are strongly robust to alternative control group compositions and alternative estimands which seek to address the validity of the design.

Together, these findings provide evidence on the potential for cash transfers to serve a multi-purpose role of providing income relief as well as enabling a path towards more favourable labour market outcomes during a crisis in developing countries.

Introduction

We analyse precarity in Australia and Canada during the turbulent times of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. We compare academics’ experiences as workers facing job insecurity and related stress in each country. Both are liberal market economies (LMEs). However, Australia’s higher education (HE) has been the subject of more radical neoliberal transformations than Canada’s in terms of funding and work in HE.

When explaining cross-national differences, we consider the effects of “academic capitalism” including marketization, commercialization and competition for students’ tuition fees. “Academic capitalism” describes the context of universities that induces them to act like rival enterprises that seek to maximize their reputation and revenues rather than as disinterested, public-spirited institutions. We also consider the role of industrial-relations and labour-market institutions including collective bargaining, unions, workers’ protests and solidarity-based responses.

Research Question

Our main research question examines to what extent the differences between these two LMEs’ institutions influenced the impacts on academics, specifically with regard to precarity and associated stress in in Australia and Canada.

Methodology

Our methodology draws on two cross-national sources of survey data of academic workers (N=2,888) across 14 comparable universities (seven in each country). We compare academics’ experiences with precarity and related stress in both countries.

Contribution to Literature

We contribute to the literature on academic capitalism, which hitherto has been published mainly in HE domains. We also contribute to the comparative employment-relations literature by contrasting Australia and Canada, two countries that in many ways are similar LMEs. The industrial-relations regulatory context in Canada has provided more stable forms of union security to HE workers that has facilitated protests and solidarity-based responses. The lack of such security in Australia has hampered unions from pushing back against the spread of neoliberalization in HE.

Findings

We find that academics in Australia experienced more job insecurity and related stress than those in Canada. Australian universities’ reliance on volatile funding from tuition fees, especially from international students, played a key role in explaining the contrasts including the greater reliance on contingent “casual” academics in Australia. Casuals were more negatively impacted than “permanent” academics in both countries; yet again, they fared relatively better in Canada than in Australia.

We offer a critique of HE policy that has reoriented the HE industry towards a deepening reliance on markets. We also suggest alternative paths to foster decent work as well as the quality and accessibility of HE in both countries.

Introduction

Non-standard work arrangements are a significant part of national economies worldwide as algorithms and contracting practices enable recruitment of many types of contingent workers. New type of workplaces like digital platforms exemplify this trend even as traditional workplaces undergo restructuring of worker roles. The labor response to these changes is studied through the prism of trade unions and grassroots unions. There is a compelling need to analyze other forms of responses such as mutual aid societies especially since they have been a sustained form of worker organization of non-standard work arrangements such as freelance workers for decades. The covid-19 pandemic brought out a new context for mutual aid societies in enabling worker organization and collectivisation.

Research questions

In this context, this study seeks to understand how mutualism has used organization and strategies to provide social protection for freelance workers in the United States. The questions that are of interest are: how does mutualism work in the context of non-standard workers in terms of philosophy of mobilization and organization? What are the workplace and social rights that are of interest to such workers and what are the strategies used to achieve them? What are the implications of this case for policy making and coalition among other types of workers?

Methodology

The study uses the case of Freelancers Union in the United States as a case to answer these questions. Data is collected from archival sources to understand the philosophy of mutualism. On the case study, the researchers examine online news media reports and database of print and online news about the organization, union action, direct quotes and legal cases. Semi-structured interviews are done with experts through snowball sampling to contextualize the case in historical and contemporary forms.

Contribution to literature and Findings

The study argues that mutual aid societies work with associational power of workers and collectivise based on geography rather than workplace. The workplace rights they are most interested in are pay, tax benefits and reclassification. The social rights that are of significance are healthcare, unemployment and housing. They use the strategies of mutual insurance and litigation over collective bargaining. Mutual aid societies call for policy intervention in areas such as worker classification, tax benefits and social enterprise funding and new forms of alliances with traditional unions.

Introduction

In light of hyper-globalisation causing multiple interlinked crises, one of many avenues to help rein in unfettered capitalism could come in the form of a multilateral treaty on business and human rights. Such treaty can be understood as a global value chain due diligence law, in addition including access to remedy for rights violations. If it materialised, it could help reduce in-country and between-country inequalities and support a move towards fair, environmentally sound, gender-equitable working conditions across the globe. The paper would examine the dynamics of the negotiations process, with a view to supporting progressive forces in creating coalitions to move towards a binding multilateral agreement.

Research question

Ever since creation of the UN, there have been attempts to establish regulation in the form of a multilateral agreement regarding the operations of transnational corporations (MNEs). Failed UN-based efforts for a Code of Conduct for TNCs (1972-1992) were followed by the neoliberal, OECD-led and -limited Guidelines on Investment (1998) which did at least contain language around “not lowering standards” and a clause on labour and the environment. The Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2011) moved the process back to the UN, but in a voluntary format. In 2014, Ecuador and South Africa tabled a proposal at the UN Human Rights Council to re-establish negotiations for a binding agreement on business and human rights.

The paper will trace the economic, political and judicial constellation that triggered each of the initiatives, and map the actors involved: TNC-home and -host governments, TNCs and business associations, trade unions, civil society, and UN agencies. In a negotiating process that notionally addresses human rights including gender justice and child rights, decent work, and environment and climate concerns, the paper will attempt to track the actors’ normative reference points; their objective economic and political interests; and the interconnectedness with emerging and deepening globalisation and the generic role of global value chains and of TNCs therein. This analysis could hopefully serve as a basis to analyse which actors support, water down or oppose a global business and human rights treaty, and hence facilitate more effective progressive alliances.

Methodology

Literature review; selective desk review of statements at the 8 rounds of discussions/pre-negotiations of the current UN binding treaty process.

Contribution to literature

A political economy mapping of one of the processes of multilateral economic regulation.

Findings/Hypothesis

The negotiation progress is an outcome of political, economic and coalition building-building constellations.

In granting Ministers and employers virtually unrestrained powers to restrict (and effectively prohibit) industrial action by minimum service levels (MSLs), the Strike (Minimum Service Levels) Bill is the first comprehensive statutory minimum service intervention in UK strike law. The Bill seeks to inject an ‘executivist political technology’ into the established post-1979 restriction method. This paper critically assesses the proposed Act by advancing three principal claims. Firstly, it argues that the Bill is shaped by what is termed as ‘coercive dual unilateralism’ (CDU), an authoritarian crucible of three elements: (i) executive unilateralism (ii) employer unilateralism; (iii) coercion. Dual unilateralism refers to the empowerment of Governments and employers as key institutional poles in setting MSLs to the profound exclusion of unions, employees, and the Parliament. The provision of drastic sanctions for workers and unions (dismissal and damages), compounded by the ‘chilling’ legal uncertainty generated by unspecified duties, renders this dual unilateralism highly coercive. Secondly, the article challenges the Government’s claim of the Bill’s compliance with ILO standards and Article 11 ECtHR as a misconstruction. Thirdly, the paper places the Act in conversation with Bogg’s account of the previous Trade Union Act 2016 as a shift form neo-liberalism to authoritarianism (Alan Bogg, ‘Beyond Neo-Liberalism: The Trade Union Act 2016 and the Authoritarian State’ (2016) 45(3) ILJ 299). Despite tracing in the Bill all the authoritarian markers he identified (suppression of industrial and political dissent, coercion, elevation of social order as justification), the paper resists any conclusion of a move beyond neo-liberalism. On the contrary, it is argued that the Bill shall be seen as a strategic response of a ‘strong-weak state’ (strong in power, weak in securing consent) that seeks to fortify neo-liberalism against a sharpened contestation of the dominant neo-liberal power structures reflected in the current strike wave.

While work policies are in place to protect workers in many instances, there are some working environments in which organizations are either unincentivized or unable to protect workers, potentially resulting in unnecessary worker turnover. In this research, I aim to better understand the relationship between government health policy and meaningful workplace outcomes. Specifically, I draw on cross-sectional time series data across 2,609 counties and 44 states to investigate the effects of mask mandates on worker turnover in low, medium, and high-risk industry contexts. I take advantage of state policy variation to examine the effects of strict and non-strict policies on county-level worker turnover during the COVID-19 pandemic, prior to the widespread introduction of vaccines. Using CBPS matching paired with differences-in-differences estimation, I find that mask mandates significantly reduce turnover rates overall and result in large reductions in county-level turnover rates in high-risk working environments. This negative effect is found to be even stronger when policies are strict, or in other words, announced with specific consequences for non-compliance. These results highlight the significant impact government policy can have both on worker safety and turnover decisions, especially for frontline workers. Future research would benefit from further examination of the relationship between public health policies and worker behavior.

As the first wave of lockdowns swept the globe, the least fortunate workers simply lost their jobs. Of those who kept them, many ‘knowledge workers’ were permitted to work from home, while many ‘essential workers’—e.g., in healthcare, food production, and public services—had to continue working in person. Both groups, however, experienced a rapid uptake in fine-grained monitoring and ‘algorithmic management’ technologies. Employers installed software to monitor remote workers’ keystrokes and mouse movements, take screenshots of their screens, and take photos through their webcams. Some of these systems were so disruptive that a market in ‘mouse mover’ devices developed to let remote workers leave their computers to take bathroom breaks. In-person employers also intensified surveillance, deploying finer-grained worker location-tracking and work quotas—in some cases even firing workers algorithmically, with no intervention by human managers. In severe cases, workers reported being unable to take bathroom breaks because of algorithmically-increasing quotas. Algorithmic systems have also been deployed in hiring: industry research suggests over 95% of the Fortune 500 have adopted automated systems that rank applicants by scanning their CVs; some companies have also adopted machine learning-based video interview software. The severe efficiency pressures on employers make it easy to understand the motivations for adopting these technologies. But they also pose severe—and largely underappreciated—risks.

We report the findings of a two-year interdisciplinary review of literature on algorithmic management in economics, policy, and law, including recent investigative journalism and legislative developments. We report three main findings. First, algorithmic management poses new and significant risks to workers’ fundamental rights, to decent work, and to labour market institutions. We identify the mechanisms producing these risks: increased privacy harms; widening of information asymmetries between employers and workers; and loss of human agency in workplace decision-making. Second, existing regulations do not adequately address these risks, even in jurisdictions with robust protections. Third, a range of policies can serve as interlocking elements of a regulatory strategy for addressing these risks, including: prohibitions on specific practices, including automated termination; restriction of legal bases; individual and collective notice obligations and data access rights; rights to explanation and human intervention; and impact assessment and information and consultation obligations.

We hope the presentation can support discussion of: whether these policy proposals are sufficient, especially in different cultural contexts; how they can be implemented in different jurisdictions; and what international action might help address the risks posed by algorithmic management.

The spread of digitization, automation and the emergence of platforms constitute an important source of changes in the organization of companies, employment relations as well as the labor market. The algorithms underlying these processes are increasingly determinants of social order, work organization and corporate decisions. The analysis of the impact of digitalization therefore implies the study of new economic relations that arise through 'datafication' and the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) via digital networks or are enabled or exacerbated by these technologies. AI-based mechanisms and the increasing reliance on algorithms to take decisions in both work organisation and HR are likely to involve an intensification, standardisation, and optimisation of the production process. These instruments provide new tools for companies to surveil and monitor employees and their performance. As decisions may be taken by “the algorithm”, transparency and accountability in managerial processes are reduced, undermining workplace participation and employee involvement. The combined effect of intensified control and intransparent decisions can lead, in the absence of adequate institutions and regulations, to an erosion of industrial democracy. The extension of AI and Algorithmic Management (AM) at the workplace level in all EU countries and its disruptive impact on employment relations contrasts with a diverse regulatory response. The diversity of forms in which AI and AM are applied across companies and sectors calls for flexible approaches, where collective bargaining must play an important role. However, governing and regulating AI through collective bargaining not only requires social partners to share a common diagnosis of the problems and solutions to them, but also having the skills and capabilities to implement them.

The challenges to employment relations posed by the extension of AI and AM by companies have led to growing demands from unions to regulate its use. This research examines the role of collective bargaining and employee participation mechanisms in regulating the use of artificial intelligence and algorithms at the workplace level and rendering it more inclusive and transparent. This is done through a comparative analysis of institutional developments at EU-level as well as in four countries belonging to different industrial relations models (Denmark, Germany, Hungary, and Spain). The study maps regulatory developments and gaps in response to these challenges, paying attention to the role of collective bargaining in governing the use of Artificial Intelligence and algorithms in the workplace.

Adoption of new Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based tools in workplaces is rising. Launched at the end of November 2022, ChatGPT, an AI-based tool which offers a range of functions from generating human-like responses to coding, is bringing public attention to the expanding potential of AI to transform professional jobs. These new technologies may eliminate many tedious tasks and expand worker voice and power through broad access to new tools to complete complex tasks. However, AI can also widen inequalities by deskilling or eliminating existing jobs and by concentrating control, knowledge, and skills among a small number of users.

This paper aims to analyze how ownership models and institutions supporting worker voice influence management approaches to reorganizing work and managing workers using AI-based tools. We focus on the game development industry, as this sector has been pioneering innovative approaches to apply AI-based tools in the workplace, and has been a target of worker activism aimed at improving worker voice due to often unstable hours and precarious conditions. Software engineers, programmers, and testers are experiencing significant changes to their job content and skills, as AI and algorithms are used to automate coding, software testing and maintenance, and to monitor remote employees. Our research design is based on a matched pair case study comparison across the US and UK. In each country, we will conduct semi-structured interviews with managers, employees, or worker-owners, and (where relevant) union representatives at one traditional non-union company, one worker-owned cooperative, and one unionized company. Archival data, company reports, and expert interviews will support findings.

Our analysis will examine differences in work organization, skills and training, and performance management practices across the cases, with a focus on the changes in each area connected with AI- and algorithm-based tools. Our central concern is to evaluate the impact of different forms of collective worker voice on each area; and their repercussions for job quality - particularly worker control over their job content, tasks, and working time. We expect to find more cross-national similarities in the traditional company cases, while outcomes at the union and worker-owned cases should be affected by industrial relations institutions and local ‘ecosystems’ supporting worker-owned cooperatives.

Our findings will contribute to the literature on worker voice, the impacts of AI on workplaces, and the future of work, and how institutional and policy measures can foster decent work in the increasingly international ICT and game development industries.

Introduction: Care work in homes, predominantly unpaid, has caused some groups of South Asian women to withdraw from paid work. We review the pandemic and post-pandemic ‘satellite boundary’ of labour-force participation, offering innovations. We focus attention on three levers of improved research for transformative policy on labour supply. The first lever is widening the age-groups involved; the second is to enumerate key career types; and the third is to match statistical model types to dataset types, giving specifics for six South Asian countries.

Research question: When one notices who cares for children and the elderly (and these age-groups’ unpaid work), what changes occur in forecasts of labour supply?

Methodology: We first theorise about the satellite boundary, reviewing the literature and expanding conceptually the sphere where the general production boundary exceeds the boundary of the Gross National Income. We review evidence about the impact that care-work time-fluidity has had upon recent labour-force participation in six South Asian countries 2015-2022. The third section gives new empirical findings 2019-2021 for India, exploring how the work of children and over-65s can be included so one adequately covers the drivers of labour supply to the market. We consider four modelling approaches that address the fluid boundary between household care work and market work -- these enable visualising the ‘satellite boundary’. Fragmented work careers involve departures from fulltime market work, while parttime work enables returning after maternity. For India, we offer estimates for the age-range 6-75 years in 2019 and 2022 including care hours.

Preferred cross-sectional modelling options are a fractional logit, logistic, and path model, and data-combining models; panel methods include difference-in-difference, growth curves, and two-stage least squares where data permit.

Contributions to literature: The innovation brings gendered difference to the fore in statistical modelling of the satellite boundary.

We also list the key microdata sources for future statistical research on six countries India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Afghanistan, noting which of the models are feasible for each country.

Findings: Indian women tended to do less paid work and more unpaid work after the COVID19 pandemic. New research on such declines in labour-force participation can incorporate the satellite boundary issue, career fragmentation, and South Asian institutions of unpaid-care work.

Among other various inequalities, the division of work is seen as a potential powerful equalizer. The formulation of policies supporting equality in work should be considered when there is a motive for holistic development amid the socioeconomic downturn. Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) in India suggests that females are at a greater disadvantage than males in sharing crisis distress and securing jobs. A direct effect of the shift in the institutional provisions on the household is an increasing care burden, eventually decreasing the time autonomy for paid work. Sharing the equal risk of the disease but unequal care burden by the females have affected their capabilities in manifolds. Alongside, preventive measures of social distancing during lockdown have curtailed the demand for such labour and services. This may have a two-way repercussion- first, females' approachability to the available decent jobs, and second unable to get absorbed by the labour market due to declining work capabilities. In this aspect, gender-responsive policy interventions are necessary as pandemic relief measures.

Against this backdrop, the study provides a conceptual understanding of unpaid care work, its gendered nature, the extent of time allocation to care burden, and the cost of care burden in terms of declining capabilities amid COVID-19. Empirical evidence intends to show that the percentage of females involved in care work diverges across the Indian states. Further, the empirical evidence gathered from 120 household females reveals the significant observation that the unequal sharing of care burden amid COVID-19 has been detrimental to their capabilities. It has affected the choices for paid work in the labour market. The study discusses the challenges ahead for caregivers amid the COVID-19 care burden. Lastly, the study focuses on the policy interventions urgently required to reduce the vulnerability of caregivers in the labour market. This study fills a significant gap in the existing literature by incorporating reflection on subjectivity.

Early years education and care (ECEC) is a foundational public good. Quality ECEC provision addresses inequalities and enables parents of young children to participate in the labour market. Following the Covid-19 pandemic, our research shows the ECEC sector in England and Wales is in crisis, characterised by a combination of lack of affordability for parents, permanent closure of settings and an exodus of staff.

This presentation addresses two research questions relevant to conference track iii:

1) How do the mechanisms of marketisation operate to set wages and place constraints on the quality of work in ECEC; and

2) What policies are required to ensure that the work of ECEC workers is “valued” and protected?

We present findings from a large multi-method ESRC/UKRI research study on the experiences of ECEC providers and workers in the ECEC sector during the pandemic. Data was analysed from 5000 survey responses and over 300 interviews with nursery workers and managers, nannies, childminders, parents and grandparents which represent a broad cross-section of socio-economic demographics, geographic regions and provider types (public, private and third-sector). Surveys and interviews were undertaken at two key points of the pandemic in Winter 2020 and Autumn 2021, with surveys designed to examine patterns in financial viability of providers, workforce stability and responses to Covid-19 in different parts of the sector. Interviews identified rationales for management and worker responses to the pandemic.

We contribute to theories of work and employment relations by identifying how the mechanisms of marketization and the monopsony role of the state direct and constrain wages, labour relations and work quality in ECEC. First, we show how, by stimulating demand-led provision in ECEC, marketization has exposed the sector to a high level of volatility. Second, the state, as monopsony buyer, has acted as a price-setter. Third, these factors, combined with demand inelasticity and low price flexibility limit how providers can respond to adverse market conditions, leaving the erosion of working conditions and pay for ECEC workers is the key lever/flexibility for providers to manage loss. Fourth, these dysfunctions of marketization have resulted in a ‘productivity paradox’ in the delivery of ECEC whereby labour shortages do not prompt wage rises and have further entrenched the undervaluing of care work in this feminized workforce.

We examine possible policy and legal responses whereby government funding and purchasing of ECEC services could limit volatility and support fair wages, pay progression and career development.

The current global context of high inflation, slow economic growth and stagnant earnings presents major obstacles to the goal of inclusive growth. Many developed and developing economies are experiencing prices rises across a range of basic commodities that have caused a major slump in real living standards, with especially large falls among the poorest (ILO 2023). A key institutional tool in combating the deterioration of real wages is minimum wage policy. However, country differences mean that minimum wage policy responsiveness to the current economic context varies significantly. Drawing on six country cases, this paper aims to shed light on the reasons for this inter-country variation and to draw policy lessons for inclusive growth of relevance to both developed and developing countries.

The research method consists of in-depth qualitative country case studies, involving original interviews with minimum policy-makers, social partners and country experts, secondary policy documentation and earnings data. The selected countries are Argentina, Chile, France, Germany, the UK and the US.

Building on recent theory (Bosch, Dingeldey, Grimshaw, Jacobs, Marinakis, Picot, Rubery, Schulten), the paper develops an original framework for comparing the responsiveness of minimum wage policy modes, involving features of technocracy, state politics and social partner power resources, considered in the wider context of labour market conditions. This framework is applied to each country with special attention to recent changes in the trajectory of minimum wage policy and gender equality. In each case it examines the performance of minimum wage policy with respect to inflation alongside three features of inclusive real wage growth: minimum wage solidarity (types of union strategies and campaigns to uprate the wage floor); minimum wage compliance (for formal work and also shadow compliance for informal work); and minimum wage catalyst (regarding wage ripple effects and gender pay effects, including via collective bargaining).

In doing so, this paper seeks to make two significant contributions to theory and policy. First, it seeks to improve our understanding about what characteristics of minimum wage policy prove to be particularly effective and dynamic under current macroeconomic conditions. Most minimum wage studies focus on relative success in avoiding job loss, but little is known about relative success in mitigating falls in real wages and living standards and the reasons for this, including the role of trade unions. Second, it seeks to contribute to building a new policy framework for inclusive growth, relevant to developing and developed countries.

National minimum wages (NMW) exist in 30 out of 38 OECD countries, and in recent years have become increasingly central to political and academic debates on the labour market and poverty. In Europe, in the last twenty-five years, there have been two very important cases of adoption of the minimum wage by countries with consolidated labor market regimes that did not provide for it: the United Kingdom in 1999 and Germany in 2015. Furthermore, some movement has recently occurred in two of the other outliers.

In Switzerland, a national referendum on the introduction of a NMW was held and voted down in 2014, and local minimum wages were introduced in several cantons. In Italy in the last decade there have been several legislative proposals on the subject.

Why at certain moments have these countries approached the turning point, or have they even introduced the NMW? Taken together, the British, German, Swiss and Italian cases, in contrast to the Nordic and Austrian ones, offer an interesting set of observations to try to grasp what are the conditions, which differ from country to country, in which openings can take place to such an important change for the various labor market regimes - in particular with respect to the balance between collective bargaining and the NMW as the boundary between a vision of labor market regulation more shifted towards the state role or the associative role (Meardi 2018 ).

This paper aims to analyze possible explanations - in functionalist (Dunlop 1958), power relations (Grimshaw and Johnson 2022) and institutional (Hauptmeier 2012) terms - to understand the evolution of countries that do not have NMWs and their position regarding at its introduction. Explanations that are tested in the cases of the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, paying particular attention to the Italian case which is still open and which is particularly complex due to the particular institutional set-up of the country. In doing so, the paper intends to grasp some implications both for the institutional theory of industrial relations and for labor market policies. In particular, the contribution aims to contribute to a better understanding of what is at stake (in terms of consequences and impacts) for labor market policy and in particular for trade unions, in the transition from autonomous definition of the minimum wage through collective bargaining in the presence of the NMW.

Many countries have recently reacted to trends of de-unionisation and the spread of low-paid work by introducing statutory minimum wages or raising their level. But what exactly is the moral problem that minimum wages can claim to solve? There is very little normative work on the justification of minimum wages, and existing proposals are not convincing. In this paper, we argue that the most distinctive and strongest justification of adequate minimum wages is not that they contribute to fulfilling desirable overall social goals, such as minimising poverty or reducing economic inequality, nor that they increase generic social esteem for low-paid work. It is that they fulfil a central demand of recognizing economic citizenship. They express appropriate respect for individuals who fulfil their obligation to make a productive contribution to social cooperation by undertaking paid work (though other activities, such as unpaid care work, can fulfil this obligation, too). Developing this distinctive and robust justification for minimum wages matters not only because their increased use is, as noted, an important and widespread policy development, and we should want to know whether these policies are, normatively speaking, on the right track. It also matters for two further-reaching reasons. First, it reveals some general insights about the moral status of paid work in contemporary market economies. Second, on this basis, it also points to a set of additional measures and policies needed to recognise demands of economic citizenship more fully, such as participation in setting minimum-wage levels through collective bargaining, and setting upper bounds to permissible wages.

This is a paper in empirically informed and applied normative political theory. Its methodology is conceptual analysis (e.g., of respect, esteem, citizenship) and establishing wide reflective equilibrium (WRE). In WRE, the plausibility and coherence of normative hypotheses are tested not only against considered moral judgments and normative theories, but also against explanatory social theories and empirical findings (from comparative political science and economy). Thus, the paper contains two case studies of justifications used by policy makers in the UK and Germany, for introducing minimum wages, in addition to analysing the - sparse - normative scholarship on minimum wages.

The main contribution of this paper is the development an innovative justification of minimum wage guarantees with plausible wider implications for wage regulation, labour market justice, and contemporary ideas of democratic citizenship.

Introduction

Energy, food or health crises have greater economic consequences on low paid or unpaid work-ers. Some of them, such as unpaid care workers, nevertheless contribute highly to essential values by conducting work that can be qualified as “meaningful work”. Other activities are highly paid and highly productive, yet may exacerbate crises, such as speculating services on food or housing prices. However, legal institutions, States or the ILO generally do not intervene on the value and purpose of work beyond market mechanisms despite some attempts to look at “essential work” during the pan-demic. Based on post economic growth theories (Raworth 2018, Fioramenti 2018; Hickel 2021; Jackson 2022), this paper aims to discuss the meaning of work beyond its economic valuation in a post-growth logic. It aims to show how a discussion on meaningful work can contribute to reduce inequalities and social protection beyond traditional redistribution mechanisms.

Research question

To which extent should States and the ILO develop and discuss the notion of meaningful work beyond productive market work that are emerging in post growth theories?

How to create opportunities for meaningful work beyond the market and to which extent could meaningful work complement traditional redistribution strategies ensuring social protection?

Methodology

The paper first describes post economic growth theories and the idea of work in these theories. These theories move towards a new concept of meaningful work (Veltman 2016). This paper will then discuss the limits defining meaningful work. Finally, it will review the policy work of the ILO and assesses whether the ILO should engage with post growth theories by defining the value of work beyond market mechanisms.

Contribution to literature

Despite an emerging literature on post growth economics and meaningful work, these notions have also not yet sufficiently been exploited and discussed by labour law scholars (Bueno 2021, Dermin and Dumont 2022). This paper would like to encourage authors to develop legal strategies for promoting work that can be considered meaningful beyond the market.

Findings

The paper would like to start a debate on the meaning of work beyond its value on the market. It aims to discuss the potential and limits of moving beyond a productivism as a manner for workers to become more resilient when facing crisis.

The disruptions of Covid-19 in our lives unsettled many of our assumptions about modern societies —regulation, economy, governance, community, and, of course, about work. It was a moment of awakening, with great potential for change. Standard notions of work were questioned by millions of people who found themselves choosing between income and family, job and health, life and death. But many of these concerns were driven to the sidelines by dominant players who found in Covid an opportunity for intensified extraction, exploitation, and wealth accumulation. For these players, Covid created the best of both worlds — more wealth and less accountability — while for the majority of people it was business as usual, or worse. In between, we had a group of hot-skilled individuals who could find comfort in having the option of teleworking, albeit with some sacrifices in their social life. In short, Covid intensified preexisting fissures in our societies, creating parallel universes — a trend that has, by and large, continued after the pandemic, with protests rising around the globe but capital showing little sign of retreat.

In response to this growing gap, social and labor institutions have to adopt new ways of thinking about labor, work, jobs, employment, and other related concepts. A good starting point would be to revisit the meaning of these terms as a “cluster,” driven by certain evaluation criteria. As shown in the table, the current cluster of concepts around work is driven by “efficiency,” largely emanating from a capitalist logic that takes “profit” as the bottom line. It is because of this perspective and its criteria that terms such as “task,” “gig,” and “AWA” have found their way into the conceptual cluster of “work” in recent times. Thinking about the future of work, however, does not have to be guided by such a perspective or by the efficiency criterion attached to it. In a post-scarcity society driven by a different set of criteria — e.g., decency, dignity, solidarity, mutual support — a different cluster would emerge around “work.” What that cluster might look like would be a matter of social debate and collective struggle, but instead of “task,” “gig,” “AWA,” and even “job” and “employment,” it might include terms such as “meaning,” “creativity,” “ACA” (Alternative Communal Arrangements), “service” and “engagement”, for instance. I propose to explore this alternative cluster as a way to inform and guide the thinking of institutions in ensuring decent work and social protections.

This paper presents the Structural Model for Sustainable Development (SMSD) – a modeling framework developed in the ILO for the purpose of policy and scenario simulation. The framework relies on economy-wide model disaggregated by products, industries, institutional sectors and covers the full sequence of production and income accounts covered by the system of national accounts (SNA). A full Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is the natural source of accounting restrictions and data for a class of models that focus on how system-wide outcomes are generated by integrated socioeconomic components. In other words, the modelling approach links the social, economic and potentially the environmental dimensions of the impacts of policies or shocks at the sectoral and economy-wide level. The SAM and the model may also include industry and labour breakdowns based on the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), the classification of occupation and of status in employment and other international standard classifications. The model works allowing for the composition of different adjustment channels that bring product supply and demand into equality, and determine the different sets of prices, the functional distribution between primary factors of production and the personal distribution between households. These adjustment mechanisms allow capturing the characteristic features of significantly different economic sectors. By closely reflecting the national accounting structure and adopting parsimonious specifications, the model can adapt to a variety of country-specific socioeconomic characteristics and generate detailed and policy-relevant insights.

During the last 40 years there has been a redefinition of the incumbencies of central banks worldwide, and a strong push for their independence. These made that labour market goals are completely ignored when it comes to the interest rate setting. And many times the implications are quite bad for job creation.

In this paper we try to show how the apparent independence and neutrality of Central Banks can severely affect employment creation, beyond the well-known aggregate demand effects of monetary policies.

The dynamic of the financing of SMEs will be analyzed and developed, its implications, and a broad policy recommendation aiming to surpass the "supply side" crisis that emerged with COVID and the restoring of the normal productive process.

The approach is relevant for developing economies, especially middle-income countries, that face financial constraints that can't be solved just by small interest movements and fine-tuning, but also for richer countries where the development of SMEs and "family businesses" stalled in favor of large corporations, franchises, and other oligopolistic practices.

The idea of the so called "garage shop" that goes public, bringing some investors via crowdfunding or other financial instruments, only applies to a handful of successful experiences. In our work we will show how a few regulatory measures, that don't affect other economic measures.

Contribution to the theory and policymaking: Most of the work from mainstream economics on the process of financing private sector development have been around the neo-classical canonical wisdom of property rights, rule of law, ease of entry, fair competition, etc. This will show that there are other alternatives of easier implementation and more in line with the objective of job creation.

Exploitation, forced labour, indecent ‘work-residence’, low pay and long hours, wage theft, dangerous working conditions, violence and sexual harassment are labour conditions persisting in the contemporary global economy. We lack analysis of the ways in which gendered and racial power relations can be mobilised within supply chains and shape patterns of labour exploitation. This paper explores the working and living conditions of migrant workers in Provence, the heartland of southern French fruit and vegetable industrial production. The analysis is based on ten-months’ fieldwork research, comprising 60 in-depth interviews as well as observations Post-COVID. Drawing on this empirical basis, the paper showcases that production and profit-making in the vegetable and fruit chains in Provence is reliant upon unequal historically-constituted social power relations and gendered and racialized workforce recruitment and management practices. Situations of labour exploitation, including in worst cases forced labour, have become part of an industry business strategy in a context of unequal wealth distribution along the supply chain, aggressive price competition, eroding labour rights and restrictive labour mobility regimes. These findings speak to debates on the role of social power relations in work relations and exploitation along global supply chains, its link to reproductive realms, and to discussion on how economic structures, more broadly, are embedded within and reproduce social inequalities.

In 2023, the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act came into effect with the aim to prevent, among others, human rights violations in supply chains. Modern forms of slavery are prohibited by the new Act, and this prohibition covers suppliers of German companies operating outside Germany, thus including suppliers in Brazil. Because Germany is one of the main importers of coffee produced in Brazil and since there are still many workers in situations analogous to slavery in the Brazilian coffee industry, the new German rules are expected to have an impact in this sector of Brazilian economy. The present research paper intents to analyze the extent of this impact, including the applicability and its effects on the improvement of human rights protection in the Brazilian coffee sector. As methodology, the present paper will analyze the German recent bibliography on the new Act, Brazilian legal papers on modern slave work and legislation, as well as court decisions on the concept of slave work in both countries. The initial hypothesis raised is that in Brazil a large number of companies working in the coffee sector still use slave work and such practice remains often not punished. Although Brazilian law prohibiting modern slavery are strict, public policies of controlling and punishing are inefficient. Now the new German standards expected to be upheld in supply chains are high and German companies can be severely punished. The paper seeks to assess the extent of pressure the new act has on Brazilian suppliers and its effectiveness of Brazilian rules on slavery prohibition.

This paper illustrates the potential of the concept of global supply chains both for research on economic and labour dynamics and for development cooperation to contribute to regulatory compliance and decent work.

To this end, the wine chain in Chile is analysed, including the changes in market access during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Although this chain has been a positive example of insertion in global markets, where Chile ranks 4th in the world, with 7.8% of the volume and 4.9% of the total value of global wine exports, the average price of exported Chilean wine is still below the world average. In addition, large gaps in productivity and labour conditions persist between large wineries on the one hand, and smaller enterprises, especially those dedicated to the production and sale of grapes for the production of wine, on the other.

A tripartite pilot project initiated by the Labour Directorate and the ILO, involving vineyards of different sizes and considering labour aspects of the supply chain, demonstrated the potential of global supply chain and due diligence concepts to improve labour compliance and working conditions. For example, some wineries have adopted enterprise guidelines for commercial contracts with providers that explicitly incorporate labour dimensions.

The main innovations compared to previous work on the wine supply chain are to be found in the coordinated execution of research activities and development cooperation, and in the use of administrative tax records, in order to overcome the lack of disaggregation in employment surveys and estimate the volume and characteristics of formal employment.

Our research focuses on informal workers from the perspective of developing countries, using the case of one of the most vulnerable groups of workers: wastepickers from Brazil. The case of wastepickers reveals the limits and potential of labour regulation to include informal workers. Our main argument is that if the learning from limited experiments in Brazil in the last two decades is used to modify labour law and environmental policy, these changes could substantially improve the recycling of waste even as it creates humane and decent working conditions for wastepickers.

Despite the significant contribution to environmental sustainability and public health, of wastepicking, this form of work receives poor recognition in law and policy. Our study collected data from six award-winning cities during 2019, probing in four areas: (1) socioeconomic profile; (2) health and safety at work; (3) working conditions and (4) perceptions about work.

We find that wastepickers who were collectively organized into an association enjoyed much better working conditions than their counterparts who did not belong to a collective. Further, the most successful cases can be directly related to the polices of the municipal government. Some City governments supported wastepicker inclusion through policies such as creation of wastepicker associations, funding for training wastepickers, material support in the form of seed funding and donation of trucks for collecting recyclable waste, etc.

Our research suggests four main findings that can inform policy. First, it is possible to create decent work for the most vulnerable workers who are contributing to environmental sustainability. Second, despite these limited successes, many of these wastepicker associations struggle for survival. They have no formal recognition of their rights to access recyclable waste nor any rights to decent labour standards. Often associations are too small to negotiate a fair price for their sorted recyclable waste and are forced to sell at a discount to the middlemen. Third, if it were not for support and commitment from the local government they would not survive very long. Lastly, policy reforms in labour law alone cannot fully address the complex issue of creating decent work for such workers. In their case, it was coordination across multiple areas of policy that led to improvement in their working conditions: environmental policy, labour policy and social assistance policy. We may conclude that informal work can become decent work but it would need reforms in and coordination across various policy domains, not just labour policy.

1. Introduction

As advocated by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the reach of Labour Inspection, when a traditional model is adopted, which is based on the programming of individualised routine and reactive inspections (complaints), is limited to a restricted universe of organisations and workers, not being sufficient to achieve satisfactory enforcement of labour norms.

On the other hand, the strategic models of labour inspection with a proactive approach, focused on compliance and targets, according to the previous diagnosis of the causes of non-compliance and with the involvement and participation of different social actors through social dialogue and collaboration, constitute a robust strategy to amplify the reach and impact of labour inspection and contribute to long-term compliance with labour laws.

In this sense, the Special Sectorial Actions (SSA), embodied in Decree 10.854 of 10 November 2021, represent a strategic model with a proactive, preventive and collective approach, which is based on social dialogue for the prevention of work accidents and occupational diseases, as well as for the sanitation of labour irregularities, to promote decent work in Brazil.

2. Research question

Is it possible to improve the efficiency of labour inspections using new approaches, in terms of its capacity to remedy labour irregularities, especially compared to traditional models?

3. Methodology

Data available at the Radar SIT 1 were collected regarding the results of the actions to combat child labour carried out in Brazil from January 2021 to November 2022 and compared to the SSAs carried out in the state of Espírito Santo (ES), with the same theme, in the same period.

1- Information and Statistics Panel on Labour Inspection in Brazil. Available at: Radar SIT | Child Labour (economia.gov.br). Accessed on 26 Dec. 2022.

4. Contribution to literature and Findings

The analysis showed that, through the SSAs, 498 children and adolescents in irregular child labour situations were identified 2 , which corresponds to approximately 14% of the result achieved in the whole country (3,557 children and adolescents reached in irregular child labour situations), demonstrating the efficiency of this type of action and the possibility of replication in other inspections around the world.

Data available at: https://www.gov.br/trabalho-e-previdencia/pt-br/composicao/orgaos-especificos/secretaria-de-trabalho/inspecao/ano-fiscal-trabalhista-2021.pdf. Accessed on: 26 Dec. 2022.

To verify the realization of guaranteeing income replacement in case of a work accident, this article measured the reversibility index of the lawsuits filed against the Brazilian National Institute of Social Security (INSS), responsible for grant administratively the accidental benefits (accidental sickness benefit, retirement due to accidental disability and accident assistance), judged by the 16th and 17th Chambers of Public Law of the São Paulo Court of Justice (TJSP) in 2017 and 2018. These Chambers of Public Law have specific jurisdiction to judge occupational accidents cases. The article question is: What is the reversibility index of decisions of the INSS that deny accidental benefits by the Court of Justice of São Paulo? Index calculation had as components the division of the total number of judgments that reversed the decision of the INSS by the total number of judgments analyzed in the period, all of which were submitted to statistical analysis using the IBM SPSS Statistics software 20.0. The hypothesis of the existence of a high rate of reversal of the INSS negatives to the granting of the benefit was proved to be 72.5% in 2017 and 68.3% in 2018 for the accidental disability retirement benefit, 86.2% in 2017 and 85.6% in 2018 for the accident benefit and 77.8% in 2017 and 76.8% in 2018 of sickness accident benefit. A total of 4.960 (four thousand nine hundred sixty) judgments were analyzed, quantitatively using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences with 95% range of confidence and qualitatively by identifying the ratio decidendi of the decisions. The study showed that all decisions analyzed had unanimous judgments, despite disagreement on the interpretation of legal provisions between the judges and the Chambers. The analysis also confirmed that there is underreporting in the official occupational accident registration system, as disability retirement and sickness allowance were granted in 62% (sixty-two percent) and 69% (sixty-nine percent), respectively, of lawsuits in which Occupational Accident Report (CAT) were expressly not mentioned. The paper concludes that a review of the form of expert action of the INSS, with standardization of judicial understanding and legislative changes, is necessary to reduce the judicialization of occupational accidents and the rate of reversal of INSS administrative decisions by the judiciary.

Public procurement accounts for an annual global spend of $13 trillion USD, representing 12% of GDP (OCP, 2020). This significant spending power has driven international interest in public procurement as a strategic lever to support economic and social outcomes, including decent work, jobs creation and labour market inclusion (Jaehrling et al., 2018; Patrucco et al., 2017). The supporting literature is criticised for ignoring contextual influences and system complexity, alongside key perspectives such as procurement professionals (Grandia and Meehan 2017; Torres-Pruñonosa et al. 2021). Qualitive insights and studies beyond environmental or ‘green’ procurement are also limited (Eckersley et al., 2021).

This paper responds to gaps in the existing literature by asking, ‘What are the required conditions for public procurement to act as an effective strategic lever for decent work?’ It draws upon a qualitative, cross-sector examination of implementation of the UK Social Value Act 2012, which requires public bodies to consider economic, social and environmental wellbeing in public service contracts. Externally funded by Carnegie UK Trust, data was collected through semi-structured interviews and focus groups with decision-makers, procurement teams and suppliers during 2018-19 (n=32), with a post-COVID follow-up in 2022 (n=12). Documentary analysis of sample tenders and other key documents was also undertaken. Participants were drawn from 20 organisations in north east England, representing sectors including local government, education, social housing, construction and social care.

The analysis provides insight into how local actors are supporting decent work through regulatory innovation in public procurement, offering practice examples including labour clauses, jobs creation targets and creative ‘lotting’ techniques. Practical (system) barriers are then considered, including an overriding emphasis on price, measurement and monitoring of good work outcomes, and legal considerations. Wider influences including supply market factors and the political landscape are examined, alongside unintended outcomes such as ‘gaming’ of the system and reduced accessibility for smaller providers. The discussion outlines six ‘facilitating factors’ of socially sustainable procurement, including political leadership (national and local), early stakeholder engagement and enhanced contract management functions. The paper draws upon existing procurement theory (Kraljic, 1983; Schapper et al., 2006) and wider public management perspectives, to help explain observed tensions and opportunities. A cross-disciplinary research agenda is proposed, including comparison across political and socio-economic contexts and attempts to better understand the unintended impacts of ‘soft’ regulation on decent work.

The Covid 19 pandemic has exposed the multiple precariousness of migrant workers by manifesting and exacerbating latent risks. Poor housing conditions in group accommodations made social distancing difficult; national borders became barriers to entry to the transnational labour market, even within the EU; and the lack of protection against dismissal or access to short-time allowance resulted in abrupt job and income losses. This is despite the fact that, as a growing body of research on trade unions' engagement with migrant workers since the early 2000s shows, there has been a shift in union strategies across countries - from protectionist and exclusionary to more inclusive strategies of organising and interest representation. Moreover, a number of political developments have improved labour rights and social security entitlements, at least for labour migrants from EU countries – e.g. through the recent reform (2019) of the European Posting of Workers Directive, or through the re-regulation of national labour markets (e.g. introduction or increases of minimum wages). In light of the sobering results of the pandemic, do all these developments turn out to be mere superficial corrections of the “fragmented and flexible regime of European production” (Hürtgen 2021) that is, inter alia, strongly relying on a pool of transnationally mobile, precarious labour, which helps to externalise cost pressures on lead firms in an increasingly competitive global environment? Or did the pandemic only temporarily interrupt a longer-term trend towards reducing social inequality in the European labour market(s), including in its transnational segments? How, in particular, have trade unions adjusted their strategies with regard to migrant workers under the impact of the succession of crisis that hit the European labour markets?

Our paper seeks to explore these questions using the shipbuilding industry in Germany as an example. It is based on an ongoing qualitative study on staffing strategies and industrial relations in the shipbuilding sector in five European countries (Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania) . In line with segmentation theory, our findings underline the importance of company strategies, which, contrary to neoclassical supply-side explanations, play a central role in explaining segmentation processes. Their strategies of ‘institutional avoidance‘ (Jaehrling/Méhaut 2013) or ‚institutional toying‘ (Benassi/Kornelakis 2021) add to ambiguous attitudes of core workers in German yards when it comes to developing ways to combat exploitative working conditions for migrant workers. But the union can also use its available power resources (following Lévesque/Murray 2013) more effectively to support migrant workers.

In an era of globalisation, the international production and offshoring of activities through organised global value chains (GVCs), while optimising production processes for transnational corporations (TNCs), leave workers more vulnerable to violations of their fundamental rights at work. Workers are often left without a viable grievance machinery that could allow them to protect their fundamental labour rights due to the complexity and indirect nature of employer-worker relationships in multiple business organisations involved in these cross-border transactions. Concurrently, when borders are crossed, the jurisdiction of national labour inspectors and judicial systems cease to allow for proper redress for violations of the most fundamental rights of workers.

This study proposes the creation of a multi-Stakeholder, transjurisdictional arbitration tribunal dedicated to address violations of fundamental rights of workers in GVCs, as enumerated in the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and related ILO conventions. The establishment of this GVC Workers Arbitration Tribunal (GWAT), under an overarching non-litigious policy in alternative dispute resolution, was developed through a comparative analysis of existing dispute resolution systems, judicial or alternative, including adopting effective procedures from prevailing international arbitration bodies, while developing new ones that would specifically serve the interest of GVC workers. The multi-Stakeholder composition of the GWAT follows the successful model of multi-stakeholder partnerships for development, using an inclusive process where stakeholders are consulted and given the opportunity to be heard. The transjurisdictional nature of the GWAT solves the practical issues of choice of law and acquisition of jurisdiction since conventional remedies are often confined to the country where the violation arose or the injury was incurred, and likewise provides for easier execution of the arbitral award. The proposed tribunal seeks to be a “green” tribunal which promotes virtual sessions for arbitration hearings to solve the limitations of costly legal procedures and to promote an efficient, inclusive, and speedy dispute resolution process. Tribunal decisions (awards) may be reported motu proprio to existing ILO regulatory supervisory systems, as recommendations and case examples to aid the work on the application of fundamental conventions by member states. Finally, the study discusses the feasibility of establishing the GWAT through an international convention with the political support from member states, workers, employers, and other sectors that will benefit from the proposed dispute resolution process.

INTRODUCTION

Asbestos is carcinogenic to humans and poses a hazardous occupational exposure, as it is estimated to cause approximately half of the deaths from occupational cancer. Eliminating asbestos related diseases depends on stopping the use of asbestos.

In November 2017, the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court set forth that the second article of Law no. 9055/1995, which allowed the economic exploitation of chrysotile asbestos, was unconstitutional. Brazil was the first country in the world where asbestos was banned by a court decision, which would have had the potential to show the power of environmental litigation and a successful joint work between Brazilian institutions and associations.

However, the integrity of the decision was not respected. State of Goiás, in September 2019, established a law that allows asbestos mining for export. Provoked in another lawsuit - according to the Brazilian Constitution, States do not have the right to create mining laws, which is a federal matter - the Supreme Court did not grant the required injunction to suspend this law and mining in Goiás continues.

RESEARCH QUESTION

We raise a hypothesis in this case study, which lies in the fact that the lack of just transition policies related to the stoppage of the exploitation of pollutants, especially those related to global warming or useless, could explain the ineffectiveness of the judicial decision to end mining asbestos in Brazil. The case poses a difficult decision to be taken: choosing between the environment or the worker's salary, which guarantees the livelihood of many families. Litigation is important, but it cannot be the only alternative.

Generally, mining is linked to taxes called royalties. The question is whether royalties should finance alternative activities to mining and also the training of workers for activities related to the remediation of the area degraded by mining or those related to the decommissioning? Workers and unions could be encouraged to monitor the allocation of this money, demanding that part of it be used to incentivize activities other than mining, financing the diversification of the local economy. On a planet of finite resources, finitude is an element that deserves to be considered more carefully in any policy, including labor.

Methodology

The research uses deductive method based on the assumption of the environment of the balanced work as a fundamental right, resorting to the doctrinal revision and documentary on the subject, from the perspective of the just transition guidelines of the ILO.

Several studies have revealed a trade-off between the benefits of Work-Family Balance (WFB) policies and the negative consequences that these may generate on women’s wages and employment prospects (e.g., Brady et al., 2020). Additionally, evidence points to a connection between gender gaps within the household and negative results on satisfaction with WFB (Buchanan et al., 2017).

This research explores the relationship between gender gaps - in paid work, paid and unpaid working time- of dual-income couples in Chilean households and their satisfaction level with WFB. To answer this question, we test three, sometimes opposing, theories: relative resources/time perspective (exchange-bargaining theory), gender role identity (Buchanan et al., 2017), and gender deviance neutralisation (Bittman et al., 2003). We use the 2015 National Time Use Survey of Chile (N= 4,878) to test several OLS models. Additionally, we use an instrumental variable strategy to address, in part, the problems of reverse causality between WFB satisfaction and gender gaps.

Our findings indicate significant gender differences in satisfaction with variations in the agreements of the distribution of resources. Although these effects are tenuous in men, women show that more egalitarian allocations of resources, especially in paid and unpaid work, generate lower satisfaction with WFB. This effect provides evidence in favour of the threat hypothesis, meaning that challenging traditional gender norms translates into dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, women who contribute relatively more than their partner to the total household income show higher levels of satisfaction than the rest of the women. Additionally, evidence is found in favour of the gender deviance neutralisation hypothesis. That is to say, women who contribute relatively more to the household income compensate their partners for deviating from traditional gender roles by working longer hours at home, experiencing a drop in their WFB satisfaction. Therefore, policies that aim to increase the degree of reconciliation between work and family should not affect the potential income of women or their employability to reach positions of higher status and pay. Furthermore, they should seek to lighten the overall workload of more productive women by developing incentives to balance the unpaid working time between genders or through welfare support.

We explore what happened to gender, social class and household differences in remote working in the UK both during and ‘post lockdown’ up to 2022. This allows an investigation of the extent to which trends towards greater remote working appear to be more enduring and whether such trends have exacerbated or reduced gender and social class related inequalities. One criticism of research on work-life balance is that it is overly skewed towards middle class dual earner families above other socio-economic groups (Gatrell et al., 2013; Warren, 2015; Warren & Lyonette, 2018). Research on gender and the pandemic has also predominantly focussed on overall sex differences with a particular emphasis on the relative situation of men and women within coupled households (Andrew et al., 2020; Blundell et al., 2020; Chung et al., 2021; Collins et al., 2020). A broader criticism of contemporary research on work-life balance is that it privileges the position of coupled households above other household or family types, whether with or without dependent children (Chambers, 2012; Gulland, 2020; Kelliher et al., 2019; Levitsky, 2014; Wilkinson et al. 2017). Importantly, a lack of attention to household heterogeneity has meant that the experiences of single parent families the majority of which are headed by women, has largely been missing from discussions. Using the UK Labour Force Survey (2019-21) we examine occupational class, gender and household trends in remote working. The findings reveal that a pre-existing socio-economic divide in access to remote working between managerial, professional and intermediate occupations and other occupational groups widened considerably following the pandemic. However, although men were more likely to work from home prior to the pandemic, more recently this gap has diminished. These developments played out unevenly across households, with single mothers particularly experiencing a smaller increase in such arrangements. Between 2019 and 2022 the gap in the percentage of single and coupled mothers reporting some form of remote working doubled. Single mothers also exhibited a comparatively high representation in ‘lockdown sectors’ but also occupations with a high social contact infectious disease risk. Beyond the effects of specific household circumstances, intersections between pre-existing gender and social class-based inequalities contribute to the labour market disadvantages experienced by single mothers.

The COVID-19 global pandemic generated a great deal of discussion around how we live and work. For many developed economies, COVID-19 led to the widespread adoption of remote working. Similar occurred in developing countries although at a smaller extent, owing largely to the nature of work and employment – often informal, low paid, and arduous. The pandemic and the recent global economic crisis have highlighted further the need to protect poorer and vulnerable workers, not only in terms of higher incomes but improvement in wellbeing.

Our study investigates the linkages between gender, long working days, long commutes and well-being in Greater Accra, Ghana, by addressing the following research questions: i. Are women more time poor than men because of a double burden of work?; ii. How does commuting impact the length and experience of the working day, and; iii. How do long working days and long commutes impact the lives of women and men living and working in urban SSA.

In previous research on time poverty, time spent travelling to work has been considered ‘necessary time’ integral to the working day (Kalenkoski et al., 2011) but commuting time has rarely been incorporated explicitly in analyses (Qi & Dong (2018) is an exception). Commuting time is particularly pertinent in Greater Accra where, time travelling to/from work is often long (Orkoh et al., 2020; Agyemang, 2017). Long commutes and long working hours further reduce time for rest and leisure and may directly impact health, well-being and work-life balance.

We use mixed-methods approach that combined survey data and qualitative data from focus groups to report gender differences in the length of the working day and the experience of time poverty. The analysis of the survey data found that women were both more time poor and income poor than men. Women devote on average almost 25 minutes per day more to household work and also report marginally longer commutes than men. Time poverty was also found to be associated negatively with wellbeing and in particular with satisfaction with leisure time and leisure time use. Women reported lower satisfaction and part of the reason could be their longer working days. The analysis of the focus group data showed that impacts on family life, leisure time, health and well-being were through lack of choice about participation in paid work; the experience of long working days and, for women especially, time spent in unpaid household caregiving and chores.

Wage bargaining and securing social protection for non-standard workers (employment other than the standard full-time open-ended contract) through collective bargaining has been subject to extensive research, but these studies often concentrate on the bargaining outcomes at national and sectoral levels. Although ample research has also examined company-based bargaining practices, especially in the light of the recent decentralization process, these analyses rarely explore company-based bargaining from a non-standard workers’ perspective. Less researched is thus the wage bargaining opportunities for distinct groups of non-standard workers (part-time workers, temporary workers, freelancers and individuals with zero-hour contracts) across diverse sectoral industrial relations (IR) settings.

By drawing on a large scale survey with 3120 low wage workers on the Danish labour market conducted in 2022 via Statistics Denmark, this paper offers novel insights into the wage bargaining opportunities for distinct groups of non-standard workers, including their access to overtime pay, unsocial hours payments and guaranteed paid hours across distinct sectors. We include sectors like transport, manufacturing, construction, industrial cleaning, agriculture, hotels and restaurants as these sectors are characterized by differing collective bargaining coverage and union density, besides having distinct wage-setting systems - the standard and minimum wage setting system with differing latitude for company-based wage bargaining.

Our research questions are: What are non-standard workers’ opportunities for negotiating wages at company level across diverse IR-settings; and How do distinct wage-setting systems influence their bargaining activities? Analytically, we draw on segmentation theory and insights from IR- literature, notably Visser’s (2016) four models of organized decentralization, studies on company based bargaining and non-standard work. We expect that non-standard workers are less likely to be covered by collective agreements and to utilize the company-based bargaining structures to negotiate wages and social protection than their peers in full-time jobs, and if they do, their bargaining activities are typically individualized.

Our findings partly echo our expectations, but also illuminate that there are important variations between distinct groups of non-standard workers. Most - nearly two in three – low-wage workers are covered by existing wage bargaining systems at their workplace, but this institutionalization is no guarantee against exploitation. Unpaid work, unpaid overtime and lack of compensation for unsocial hours were widespread practices, especially among certain groups of non-standard workers, notably in sectors with standard wage-setting systems. These Nordic lessons call for reflections as to the best approach to regulate non-standard work via collective bargaining in both densely and less regulated labour market.

Globally, the domestic work sector suffers from severe decent work deficits, consequently increasing workers lack of resilience to economic shocks. This paper investigates the responses of workers and their organizations which address these deficits through an analysis of the effects of a national minimum wage law in the domestic work sector.

South Africa is the chosen case study. First, it has one of the most comprehensively regulated domestic work sectors in the world. Notwithstanding, the COVID-19 lockdowns and the current economic decline have revealed chronic labour and social security deficits experienced by workers. Secondly, in 2019, South Africa engaged in a globally important legislative experiment in minimum wage regulation by adopting the National Minimum Wage Act which covers domestic work. While this Act constitutes a critical response to deepening poverty rates and income inequality, its effectiveness is thwarted by low rates of compliance and intractable challenges to statutory enforcement.

The study expands on a significant theory in labour law, namely, Lee and McCann’s theory of ‘institutional dynamism’, which refers to the capacity of labour regulations to influence informal work settings and interact with other institutions in ways that lead to improved labour outcomes. This project constitutes the first known attempt at studying the ‘institutional dynamism’ of a national minimum wage law in a largely informal setting, contributing to the scholarship on ‘informality’ and the effectiveness of labour regulation in the global South.

This project posed the following question: is there evidence of the NMWA influencing wages and which factors facilitate this influence? Both doctrinal and socio-legal research methods are employed. The paper presents a qualitative micro-study of the sector, focusing on its configuration as ‘informal’. The data was gathered through 40 semi-structured interviews with workers, employers, government representatives and civil society in Cape Town and Johannesburg during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

The findings reveal that informal norms are a greater determinant of wages than the NMWA, whose limited influence is attributable to conflicting institutional interactions. Various regulatory strategies are adopted by a network of actors to address this challenge. This includes strengthening workers empowerment; initiating sustainable dialogue with employer and employer organizations, including the facilitation of legal awareness; collective organizing efforts in pursuit of evidence-based policy change and realizing improved socio-economic conditions for workers; and instituting litigation to challenge existing legal exclusions. These responses can prove critical in bolstering the effectiveness of minimum wage laws, thus securing improved protections for workers.

A long-standing debate in labour economics concerns the prediction that minimum wages supress aggregate employment through an increase in labour costs for affected firms. However, a large body of empirical evidence finds only limited support for this prediction. In this paper, we explore a new mechanism that may help rationalize this finding: the "application effects" of the minimum wage. The increase in the minimum wage may attract more applicants, making it easier for firms to fill vacancies with qualified candidates. This may attenuate the increase in labour costs.

Exploiting frequent and detailed sectoral collective bargaining agreements in Uruguay, we test for “application effects” based on data from the largest online job board in the country. The data contains rich information on vacancies, applicants, and applications for years 2010 through 2020. We combine it with industry-by-occupation information on minimum wage hikes. We start descriptively and then employ two difference-in-difference frameworks that rely on minimum wage adjustments as quasi-experimental variation, at the industry-by-occupation and vacancy-level, respectively.

We observe a positive correlation between posted wages and applications within those broad occupations that are more substitutable between industries: clerical support workers, sales workers, and elementary occupations. We do not find such a correlation in a second group of occupations, although the economic significance of minimum wages is comparable for these (i.e., among professionals, technicians and associated professionals, craft and related trades workers). The descriptive pattern is corroborated in the two difference-in-difference frameworks.

To better understand underlying mechanisms, we are currently expanding this analysis to consider the role of amenities. For example, it is possible that firms compensate minimum wage hikes by decreasing the amenities that they offer. This could rationalize why “application effects” are absent in certain occupations.

As described above, this paper aims to contribute to the empirical literature on minimum wages (e.g., Clemens 2021 JEconPersp, Manning 2021 JEconPersp), focussing on “application effects” as a new a novel channel through which minimum wages affect employment outcomes. We also build on existing studies on the determinants of job search, some of which analyse job board data. This literature has covered wages and non-pecuniary factors (e.g., Banfi and Villena-Roldán 2019 JLaborEcon, Le Barbanchon et al. 2020 QJE). To our knowledge, however, this literature does not exploit minimum wages or analyse their interaction with amenities. In addition, those papers do not focus on differential patterns by occupation, while our paper suggests that these can be significant.

Okun’s law is one of the best-known empirical regularities in macroeconomics. It addresses the issue of how much a country’s output is ‘lost’ when unemployment exceeds its natural or trend rate. In the existing literature, most of the studies assume a linear long-run relationship between changes in output and unemployment over the business cycle, implying that economic expansions and recessions have the same effect on unemployment. Nevertheless, this negative relationship may take a nonlinear form, in the sense that changes in output may cause asymmetric changes in the unemployment rate. In that context, the objective of this article is to test the linear assumption of Okun's law by deploying a time series analysis of asymmetric adjustments using seasonally adjusted quarterly data from Chile for the period 1996-2019 disaggregated by sex. The analysis is based on the asymmetric error-correction model proposed by Harris and Silverstone (2001), which provides a different approach to describe the short-term dynamics between the variables, but at the same time presents different challenges for its implementation. Hence, the analysis is not only limited to the study of the data, but also to the advantages and disadvantages of procedures that require cointegrated non-stationary time series to establish a long-run equilibrium. Moreover, the relevance of this research lies in the consequences of a misinterpretation of the effects of business cycles on unemployment if asymmetry is ignored. For instance, the existence of asymmetric effects shows different speeds of adjustment towards long-run equilibrium. Therefore, the effectiveness and required ‘size’ of stabilization policy on the real economy will depend on the ‘regime’ in which the Okun’s relationship lies. Additionally, this study contributes to the literature mainly in two aspects. First, there are no other studies on asymmetry in Okun's law using data of Chile, which means a significant gap for policymakers since short-run output and unemployment adjustments to disequilibrium differ according to whether upturns or downturns in the business cycle are considered. And second, incorporating a different econometric approach to test Okun's assumption provides the possibility of analysing the necessary procedural conditions and draw conclusions about the advantages/disadvantages in its implementation. This will lead to a critical analysis of the methods widely used in the literature and the consistency of the results. Finally, the main finding is that changes in output and unemployment in Chile are related in both the long and short-term, but only if an asymmetric approach is taken.

Introduction

The concept of quality of employment (or job quality) has gained international prominence, both for the scientific community and for public authorities, in a global context of an increase in non-standard jobs. In countries where the informal economy is widespread, such as Brazil, traditional indicators such as the unemployment rate, participation rate, and wages are not necessarily the most representative of the dynamics taking place in the labor market.

For these reasons, we analyze socioeconomic conditions through the multidimensional employment quality index proposed by Huneeus et al. (2015), extending their analysis on the evolution and determinants of quality of employment in Brazil that covered the period 2002-2011.

Research question

How has the succession of interlinked crises since 2012 translated into job quality in Brazil?

Data and methodology

The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) has been extending the National Household Sample Survey database with a new continuous database offering micro data on employment and household characteristics (education, work, income, and housing of individuals) disaggregated quarterly and annually. We use it in the construction of our multidimensional employment quality index between 2012 and 2021.

To study the evolution of quality of employment in Brazil between 2012 and 2021, we construct a multidimensional employment quality index of (low) quality of employment that is based on the methodology of the multidimensional poverty measures of Alkire and Foster (2009; 2011). The first dimension concerns the consideration of an appropriate wage and productive work. The indicator chosen is the level of income, which is approximated here by the prevailing hourly wage.

The second dimension relates to social security. The indicator chosen is the formality of employment.

The third dimension concerns job stability and security. The indicator chosen is job stability.

Fortunately, PNADC allows us to retain the dimension of underemployment by asking part-time workers whether their situation is voluntary or involuntary, and how many hours they would like to work if they could (fourth dimension).

To analyse the correlation between employment quality and other worker characteristics, we estimate the probability of observing low-quality employment using a Dynamic Probit with Random Effects.

Preliminary findings

Our preliminary findings highlight that quality of employment continued to improve between 2012 and 2015 and started to deteriorate from the 2016 crisis. Surprisingly, quality of employment improved in 2020 when the Covid-19 crisis hit Brazil hard.

Introduction

ILO’s decent work programme aims at providing full and productive employment by way of facilitating social protection, dialogue and effective representation at work. Most countries are working towards its accomplishment, while some have made significant progress; for others, especially the developing states, challenge of vulnerable employment has made generation of decent work a complex task. ILO, based on status of employment, defines own-account and contributing family workers as vulnerable. However, vulnerability is more widespread than the current definition acknowledges as not all self-employed workers are vulnerable and not all paid-work forms are decent. In this backdrop, the paper aims to develop a composite index for measuring vulnerability in labour markets that addresses the issues of rights at work, job insecurity, social protection and overall decent working environment.

Research Questions

1. Can a technique of measuring vulnerable employment be developed that captures its multifaceted nature and does not generalise a particular status in employment as vulnerable?

2. What is the status of vulnerable workers in the Indian context?

Methodology

The study is empirical in nature and is based on an assessment of the Indian labour market. First, a modified definition of vulnerable employment that recognises its multifaceted nature is proposed, based on which conditions of employment that make work vulnerable are identified. Data is collated from annual periodic labour force surveys furnished by the Indian Government and indicators describing conditions of employment are selected. Several statistical and econometric tools like Principal Component Analysis and Multinomial Logistic Regression are used on the normalised indicators for the development and assessment of the index. The index is further used to identify the factors that lead to vulnerability of a worker and hinders access to decent work.

Findings

Few of the key findings are: (i) self-employment is not always vulnerable but is often driven by the flourishing start-up culture and entrepreneurial spirit in India; (ii) in paid-work, more than two-third workers are working without job and social protection; (iii) lack of skills and training is one of the major reasons why increasing share of workers are in vulnerable work; and, (iv) escaping vulnerability is highly restricted for women, young and older workers.

Contribution

The study presents an innovative measurement technique that not only aids in identifying vulnerability but also provide ways of alleviating vulnerable employment. The results are expected to lend support to policymakers in identifying key areas where decent work deficits exist.

Introduction

Internships (here used to describe a period of work-based learning integrated into a tertiary education curriculum) have become a well-entrenched feature of the tertiary education landscape in many developed economies. However, such experiences straddle the worlds of work and education, which begs the question: should they best be regulated as work, or learning, or do we need specific regulation for this “no man’s land” between the two?

This is not a merely theoretical debate. As internships become more prevalent, it affects practical and legal questions, such as the extent to which participants are/should be protected by labour laws and how to ensure that internship experiences are educational rather than exploitative?

A substantial research project on the regulation of workplace learning in Australia revealed gaps in labour protections extended to student interns. It also established that many Australian universities have relatively poor awareness of, and mechanisms to ensure compliance with, relevant educational and labour regulation. This paper builds on those findings, contributing qualitative empirical insights into how universities in Finland, France and Australia understand and manage work place learning pedagogies in the context of local labour laws and education regulation. This critical analysis aims to ensure accessible pathways for graduates to meaningful work as we transition from the COVID-19 pandemic to a global cost-of-living crisis.

Research question(s)

The paper considers three research questions in relation to Australia, Finland and France:

1. What regulation governs tertiary student internships?

2. What is the regulatory role being undertaken by universities?

3. What can that tell us about the efficacy of each regulatory regime?

Methodology

A doctrinal analysis identifies relevant laws affecting internships (RQ 1). Qualitative data was collected through semi-structured interviews with between two and four university employees in two universities in each jurisdiction. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and anonymized, and analysed using inductive and comparative techniques and adopting a mix of coding strategies (eclectic coding) using NVivo data analysis software (RQ 2 & 3).

Contribution to literature

This comparative project provides insight into various regulatory responses to workplace learning for tertiary students, how universities understand those regulations and the regulatory role they play, and facilitates evaluation of regulatory efficacy.

Findings

The three jurisdictions have diverse regulation regarding academic internships, significantly affecting the regulatory role of universities. In summary, in Finland internships are primarily understood as employment, in Australia as an educational experience, and in France as a unique regulatory category.

Human capital development, including both education and post-school training, has been a central part of the development strategies of most countries because it contributes to economic growth, both through raising productivity and facilitating the use of new technologies. In addition, training (firm-provided or at an institution), is often categorized as a type of transformative social protection allowing workers to raise their earnings via expanding their skills base leaving them better equipped, not least in the face of uncertain situations. Exiting literature focuses largely on training returns among formal workers yet given that in low- and middle-income countries most workers make a living in the informal sector, it is imperative to understand how training may benefit and protect informal workers who, as illustrated during COVID-19, are particularly vulnerable during a crisis. Based on unique survey data, this paper uses quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the returns to formal and non-formal training for workers operating in the sectors of construction, micro-trade and transport in urban areas of Kenya and Tanzania. The analysis shows that workers who have undertaken formal training (at a professional school or an association) have earnings that are between 15-20 pct. higher than workers with no training, and that the returns associated with on-the-job or other kinds of non-formal training are not as substantial as for formal training. Moreover, training gains differ by gender, location, sector, and worker-types pointing to the necessity to tailor training initiatives to the needs of specific workers. Finally, the paper illuminates the role of informal worker associations in terms of offering vocational training on top of other social protection measures, and shows how during COVID-19, many associations redirected their focus to provide or facilitate access to health and safety training as part of their coping strategies. Thus, in a crisis, it seems to be the more immediate training needs that take priority. In the longer term and of relevance to policy development, the results reveal the importance of encouraging more informal workers to undertake formal training whilst also strengthening formal training schemes to further decent work in informal settings. Through upgrading informal worker abilities training may play an important role in formalizing labour markets by enabling more skilled informal workers to find decent and productive employment in the formal sector.

The Covid-19 pandemic has recalibrated the definition of critical occupations and sectors. This is because the public needs throughout the crisis were largely fulfilled by service workers (e.g. staff in retail, logistics or care) whose jobs involve micro-level exchanges or social interactions with customers, patients or similar groups. In many countries, their work was recognized by daily public applause. This gesture, however, underlines the challenges coming along with interactive work, particularly difficult working conditions and lacking recognition. To deconstruct the reasons for these challenges, we integrate key findings from debates on service work and interactive work with a risk sociological perspective. As interactive workers work in close contact with other people, they were particularly exposed to various pandemic-related risks and in need of protection. The question how these risks have been managed is thus relevant.

Our analyses are based on a qualitative cross-sectoral comparative study (54 interviews and five days of observations in ten organisations) investigating the working conditions of interactive workers in four critical sectors (retail, elderly care, public employment service and the police) during the pandemic in Germany (2020-2022).

We identify three (interrelated) sources of disadvantage which contribute to generating (or exacerbating) risks, challenging working conditions, and lacking recognition. First, the intrinsic nature of the work leads to a high exposure to various health-and-safety risks (e.g. contagion, difficult customer behaviour, emotional exhaustion). The emerging risks have often not been properly assessed prior to the pandemic, causing lacking protection regarding particular occupational hazards. Second, the regulatory system does not cover all workers alike. Particularly in private services, collective bargaining and employee representation structures have been weakened, and flexible and low-paid forms of work are widespread. Furthermore, access to health-and-safety provisions tended to differ between sectors already prior to the pandemic, altogether leading to a patchwork of regulations. Third, the workforce in critical sectors is diverse, particularly comprising women and migrants often suffering from precarious working conditions. These socio-demographic characteristics may negatively affect (im)material forms of recognition.

To reduce the triple disadvantage faced by interactive workers, policy responses should address existing inequalities between workers - also regarding the exposure to risks – to enhance overall protection. This does not only entail strengthening employee representation and collective bargaining; the fact that the interactive nature of work comes along with risks should be recognised in job evaluations and risk assessments to offer a better protection for the health and safety of workers.

Introduction:

The uberization phenomenon, as the so-called work on demand, is now a big concern for governments in several countries around the world due to its precarious work conditions, especially in the semi-peripheral economies like Brazil.

In our country, there are more than 1.5 million and a half on demand workers according to IPEA data from 2022 without any labor and employment protection.

The Fairwork project, coordinated by the University of Oxford and the WZB Berlin Social Center analyzed basic parameters of fair work in digital platforms and has highlighted that Brazil unfortunately has one of the worst indicators in the world in terms of fair work in digital platforms.

Research Question:

Our academic research will focus on the analysis of possible different scenarios of regulation of platform work to guarantee decent work and universal social protection in Brazil.

There are different initiatives in the Legislature, Judiciary and Executive Powers.

In the Legislature, it is estimated the existence of almost 150 bills intending to regulate platform work.

In the Judiciary, almost five hundred of labor claims filed by on-demand workers are waiting to be judged by the Labor Superior Court, being 2/3 of the pleadings related to recognition of an employment relationship.

Most of labor courts do not recognize an employment relationship because judges allege that the typical subordinate element of the employment relation is not clear present since the digital platforms neither imposes work schedule nor provides such worker with the equipment to execute the work.

The workers allege that platform companies manipulates the judicial precedents since they settle in the cases where there is a risk of recognizing a labor relationship.

In the Executive, President-elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared his commitment to decent work conditions at the core of this political program, highlighting that workers on digital platforms need regulation of their rights. There have been rumors that a new bill will soon be presented by the Labor Minister providing better work conditions for platform workers.

Methodology:

We intend to present an overview of the types of regulation of platform work in Brazil by data analytical methodology. The ideia is to show the role of the Brazilian institutions: Legislature, Executive and Judiciary.

Contribution to findings:

We intend to contribute to the debate of promoting decent work and universal social protection for platform workers around world by sharing the Brazilian experience of legal regulation.

【Introduction & Research Questions】

The flourishment of new employment forms has invalidated the binary notional frame of “employee versus self-employed” in Chinese labour law: the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security issued the Guidance on Safeguarding the Labour Rights and Interests of Workers in New Employment Forms (MOHRSS [2021] No. 56), which innovatively introduced a new category of workers who "do not fully meet the circumstances for identifying labour relations " and ushered in the era of trichotomy in labourer identities. While this policy reflects the government's inclusive and prudent regulatory attitude towards new employment forms and helps to bridge the social controversy over the issue, it also raises some new questions: what kind of workers belongs to the “third-category” range, namely the quasi-subordinated workers? What are the appropriate practical criteria for identity classification? Given the complex internal heterogeneity, how to divide gig workers if the existing sorting methods by occupations or contract types are inaccurate?

【Methodology】

We provided statistical empirical evidence to fill the gap by collecting data from 7680 food delivery gig riders and using crosstabs in SPSS and latent class analysis (LCA) in Mplus for clustering and subtype division based on diversified patterns of “economic dependency” and “subordination”—important labour law concepts in labour relations identification often used as partition criteria for worker typology by major institutions like Eurostat. Then, Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric test and logistic regression by SPSS are used to test whether different ‘dependency’ patterns have a significant influence on income, work intensity, working hours, social security coverage and subjective feelings such as perceived work pressure and satisfaction.

【Findings】

Our preliminary result showed that (1) Only 15% of gig riders can be classified into an existing dichotomy, while the rest should be grouped into a new “quasi-subordinated” worker category; (1) Riders in different subtypes differ significantly in working conditions. (3) Economic dependency plays a more significant role in predicting riders’ objective labour conditions, while subordination obviously influences the subjective feelings of riders.

【Contribution】

Such findings helped to clarify gig workers’ ambiguity in identity, provide a typology approach for Chinese workers in new employment forms; demonstrated the internal heterogeneity of this special group in the dimension of working conditions; and provide empirical evidence for the possible impacts of current policy innovation (MOHRSS [2021] No. 56).

On-demand ‘gig’ or ‘platform’ work is often associated with precarity, income insecurity, and use of algorithmic management (De Stefano, 2016; Prassl, 2017). There is, however, an increasing recognition that the work is providing an important, albeit fraught, source of income for workers who experience more structural barriers in the labour market, with migrants, workers with disability, and young workers overrepresented on platforms (ILO, 2021; McDonald et al., 2020; van Doorn & Vijay, 2022). Workers from these cohorts are pushed into ’gig’ work by structural barriers precluding formal employment. Individuals with disability, for instance, regularly experience discrimination, stereotyping, and stigmatization in their job search efforts (Ruhindwa et al., 2016). As most platforms do not use selective hiring practices, which invite conscious and unconscious biases (Timming 2019), this work provides a relatively straightforward pathway into paid work for individuals who otherwise might be reliant upon informal work, welfare, or sheltered employment. To date, there is little understanding of how traditionally disadvantaged workers experiences of the broader labour market and the welfare system shape their motivations for, subjective understandings of, and attitudes towards ‘gig’ work. This study addressed this gap in the literature by focussing on the experiences of and motivations for ride-share work by three traditionally disadvantaged groups: workers with disability, caring responsibilities, and aged 45 over. We employ a qualitative single case study design (Yin, 2013) and draws on 59 interviews with workers collected in 2021 who were operating on a major platform in Australia. What makes the Australian case salient, compared to other jurisdictions, is that the legality of ride-share work has been settled in favour of platforms by the state. Our findings, reveal that while the motivations for this type of work are multi-facetted, ranging from an opportunity for social inclusion to economic necessity, a distinction can be made between those who received welfare and those who did not. We further highlight how the organisation of the work, with its high temporal flexibility, is appealing to individuals from these cohorts with ride-share able to accommodate planned and unplanned absences in a way not available in more traditional employment. Finally, we contribute to the job quality literature (see Warhurst et al. 2022) by illuminating how work that is relatively low quality in objective terms can be highly valued and appreciated.

In March of 2022, the Chilean Congress approved a bill (Law 21431) that regulated the (employment) relationship between workers who provide their services through a mobile application and the companies who owned the digital platforms. Specifically, the legislation stated that platform workers being subordinated and dependent on an employer were considered permanent workers and should be formally hired, having a formal employment contract. As this law attempts to increase the overall job security of platform workers (measured through stable income, known working hours, provision of training, and health and safety) it, therefore, wishes to positively affect the quality of jobs and well-being of workers. Being amongst the fewer countries that have formally regulated platform work and the first country in Latin America to do so, Chile is presented as an interesting context to explore the challenges of such changes. Therefore, we aim to explore the impact of such regulation on the job quality of Chilean platform workers. Using the case of Cornershop, a home delivery app with over 3.000 employees in the Chilean territory, we argue that after regulatory measures are introduced, a series of labour issues prevail, which exerts additional pressure on the employment relationship of platform workers and their employers. 21 in-depth interviews with Cornershop workers, labour lawyers, and field experts were conducted, showing that job instability and the lack of health and safety protection remain at the forefront of the issues raised by Cornershop workers, despite the regulatory changes made to increase their on-the-job protection. The article contributes to the academic debate on new technologies and platform work, by empirically addressing the importance of regulation and its effects in increasing the job quality of workers. Similarly, the article contributes to the national-level labour policy by offering a qualitative evaluation of the implementation and application of the law and its results.

Argentina has been subsumed in regulatory battles with platform firms since 2016 (Nido 2021). National regulation of platform work has not been agreed upon at the national level since then, despite numerous attempts (Menéndez 2021) and active demands from workers (Madariaga et al. 2019; Haidar et al. 2020; Gutiérrez Crocco and Atzeni 2022).

Mainly due to those never-ending regulatory battles, most literature portrays platforms as those prevailing either by ignoring litigation results or state demands or by adapting at their convenience to exiting regulation using their power as mediators in the industry they operate in (Valdez 2022).

This article, instead, will unravel a different strategy in which state intervention and firms' interests align to advance in regulating and deregulating work without using work regulation.

Departing from the examination of one of the most significant and successful State responses to platform work growth in Argentina (the amendment of the city of Buenos Aires' Traffic and Transportation Code in 2020) the paper will illuminate the development of what we understand is a novel ‘indirect form of de/regulation’ of (platform) work, tracing its making and effects. The code modification has already called the attention of the ILO Country Office for Argentina (López Mourelo 2020) and legal experts (Mugnolo et al. 2020), showing its significance goes way beyond what its title suggests.

Using qualitative analysis of documents (including the code amendment approval proceedings, press reports and workers’ and unions' publications against it) and drawing from interviews with workers, state officials and experts conducted during fieldwork in Buenos Aires in June and July 2022, we will scrutinize the code modifications and implementation. We will devote special attention to the code's most significant new artefact: the ‘Single Registry’ of workers (the Registro Único de Transporte de Mensajería Urbana y/o Reparto a Domicilio de Sustancias Alimenticias, RUTRAMUR), inquiring in its role to sustain platforms' understanding of their link with drivers and contribute -as a control mechanism- to the management of workers’ autonomy.

The work will allow us to rediscuss platforms and state regulatory designs and enrich debates on platform (algorithmic) management and control of their workforce strategies. It will also contribute to revising litigation significance, relevance, and variations of state regulation.

Introduction

Wages in Western Europe have diverged across occupations, contributing to rising wage inequality. Previous arguments based on the idea that wages decline in occupations being replaced by machines or offshored to low-wage countries do not fit the data. Instead, we propose autonomy, defined as the degree of control workers have over their work process, as a new predictor of wage dispersion across occupations.

Research questions

This study answers two research questions:

1. Do wages in occupations with higher autonomy grow faster?

2. How do technological change, institutions, and demographics impact the return to autonomy?

Methodology

Our study applies advanced micro econometric analysis to explore the connection between worker autonomy and job wage growth in Western Europe. We use high-quality individual-level wage data from the European Union Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU SILC) for 15 Western European countries between 2003-2018, with jobs defined as occupation-industry cells.

Contribution to literature

This study advances our understanding of wage inequality in European by presenting the first cross-country analysis of the relationship between occupational autonomy and wage growth. We contribute to the literature on occupational wage divergence, which has previously focused on the automation or offshoring risk of occupations.

Our second contribution is to examine the determinants of wage dispersion between high- and low-autonomy occupations. Economic theory suggests that technological change and institutions influence the relationship between wages and autonomy. We use data on computer adoption and ICT capital as well as differences in labour market institutions across European countries to test whether the wage gap between high- and low-autonomy occupations is driven by technological change or the decline in collective bargaining institutions.

Findings

Our study shows that workers in high-autonomy jobs have experienced significantly faster wage growth than those in low-autonomy jobs, resulting in an increased "autonomy wage premium." We also find that faster computer adoption and investment in ICT technology lead to faster increases in this wage dispersion. Collective bargaining reduces the autonomy wage premium but has not prevented rising wage inequality in recent years. Lastly, the increase in the autonomy premium increases wage inequality between men and women and between younger and older workers. Since higher autonomy is usually associated with higher bargaining power, our study confirms that recent technological advances are not distributionally neutral and have disadvantaged low-autonomy workers.

This paper estimates explained and unexplained components of wage differentials between formal or informal employment in eight EU transition countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Slovakia) utilizing the data of the EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions for the period of 2009-2016 among 445,931 individuals. We apply the Oaxaca and Blinder (1973) model with selection bias correction to decompose the wage gap at the mean of income into explained and unexplained parts. The results demonstrate that both males and females experience wage discrimination in informal employment. The hourly wage rate among individuals in informal employment is on average 23.7% lower than among individuals in formal employment. For males, this difference is 24.8%, and 23.9% for females. When the model is run without correcting for endogenous selection into informal employment, the ‘unexplained component’ that can be attributed to wage discrimination is estimated at 20% for males and 30% for females. When the model is corrected for employment status selection, the estimated wage discrimination reaches 34% for males and 44% for females.

Employer non-compliance with minimum wage laws is widespread in developed nations. This presents a challenge to state regulators seeking to enforce labour laws to benefit underpaid workers and compliant employers robbed of a level playing field. The large literature seeking to explain employer non-compliance with wage laws has rarely drawn on primary data from employers, instead relying mainly on the employee perspective. Related in part to this empirical limitation, extant research has tended to assume deliberate wage theft, focusing on the contribution of vulnerable, in particular migrant, workers. Despite the paucity of reliable insight into why employers breach minimum wage laws, countries like Australia have introduced new strategies for labour law enforcement including increased civil penalties and new criminal sanctions. This research addresses the empirical gap by examining the employer perspective of wage law compliance.

The key research questions are: Why do employers breach or comply with minimum wage laws; and what are the implications for the effectiveness of traditional and new strategies for labour law enforcement?

The main research method employed is qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with 60 business owners and managers, and eight key informants. These employers operated businesses in the retail, hospitality and horticulture industries, in which employer non-compliance has been identified as common. The businesses examined ranged in size from one employee to thousands of employees, and operated in a variety of Australian city, suburban and regional locations.

The study found that, in addition to deliberate non-compliance, employers often lacked full knowledge of their breaches of minimum wage laws. They were either unknowingly or wilfully ignorant of their minimum wage obligations, of potential penalties for non-compliance, and of state enforcement. This research contributes to literature on why employers breach minimum wage laws through detailed analysis of these findings with particular attention to the novel employer perspective and non-deliberate forms of employer non-compliance. By providing greater insight into employer decision making and actions, this research also contributes to understanding of effectiveness of strategies for labour law enforcement.

This paper aims at comparing various characteristics of labour force participation and employment, either formal or informal, for both men and women in seven emerging or developing economies (Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines and South Africa) using pseudo panels and the Age-Period-Cohort method. This study allows us to disentangle the effects of three factors (age-effect, time/period-effect and cohort effect) shaping participation and employment patterns and understand better how the life-courses of individuals are influenced by these three factors. We provide detailed results for each one of these effects and put a specific focus on the case of women.

With regards to the age effects, we observe that in the case of men, the seven countries share relatively similar profiles of participation with the standard inverted-U shape indicating that men increase substantially their chances of participation in the young adulthood, then participation reaches a relative plateau in most of the countries, and starts an accelerated decreasing pattern around the fifties. In the case of women, we see much more diversity. Only South Africa shows a standard inverted-U shape for women’s participation. In other countries, labour force participation seems to be more affected by childbearing with noticeable differences in terms of amplitude.

The analysis of time-effect allows us to observe a clear and consistent pattern of increased female participation in cases of medium and large recessions in the countries concerned (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico). This confirms the hypothesis of an added worker effect. This has mainly concerned women with basic and to a lesser extent intermediary levels of education and in majority through the channel of informal employment. However, we do not find the same pattern in case of milder contractions on a larger set of countries. In case of mild recessions, female participation is rather pro- or acyclical.

Finally, regarding cohort effects (or long-term effects reflecting structural changes), we see that in most cases, newer generations have very different behaviours than past generations. We observe a long-term downward trend in the male participation in most countries with the exception of Mexico and Egypt. The case of women shows more divergent long-term trends according to regions and education levels. However, the long-term evolutions in male and female participation could indicate that those will not increase naturally in the coming years simply through generations renewal.

Vietnam today becomes one of the most successful developing countries thanks to enormous efforts of legal reforms, including those in the labour field. The labour law becoming effect on 1st January 2023 might touch key fundamental principles and rights at work, but there are concerns that do not suffice, especially, in context of Vietnam. How effective new strategies for labour law enforcement? What enforcement mechanism could be deployed to extend protection to those workers and enterprises increasingly lying outside strict purview of the labour code and beyond the reach of labour administration?

The aim of this paper is to examine what key challenges that constrained the above enforcement mechanism and explored different perspectives of strengthening the current labour inspectorate system and engaging more cooperation with the representative organizations of the workers and the organizations of the employers, particularly in times of critical crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic, and the climate change.

The research paper is based on desk review of the available recent sectorial study reports (electronics and garment sectors) and selected expert interviews.

Lessons drawn from the above paper are expected to enhance better understanding and significantly benefit the ILO constituents with insightful knowledge and good practices that help future planning and/or programming for practical actions to address the crises. Hopefully, those lessons and field experience in terms of institutional arrangements and responses will also motivate other countries to deal with the similar cases as Vietnam does deal with the multiple crises.

This study examines the probability of old-age workers transitioning into retirement and the risk of poverty that may accompany it. We use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) for European Union countries (EU27) collected over eight waves ranging from 2004 to 2019/2020. In order to estimate the correlates of transition into retirement, we consider two models: a pooled Logit with clustered standard errors at individual level, and a random-effects panel Logit model with robust standard errors. The consecutive model to estimate the effect of transitioning into retirement in one’s risk of poverty adopts an instrumental variable approach. Results indicate that retirees are less likely to fall into risk of poverty compared to those who are still in the workforce. Factors such as education, gender, household size, and marital status are found to be associated with the probability of transition into retirement and hence risk of poverty. Though studies documented higher risk of poverty for retirees, our findings show the opposite, which could be due to a combination of pension systems characteristics, longer life expectancy, high savings, and participation in social assistance programmes.

The flexicurity paradigm generally proposes that the negative impacts of job insecurity can be compensated by generous unemployment benefits and greater employability. In this study we evaluate this principle by analysing if employability can mitigate the negative impacts of job insecurity on well-being.

To measure job insecurity, we use two subjective indicators (fear of job loss and risk of job loss over the last year) and an objective one (having a temporary employment). We assess well-being by studying three different facets that are normally negatively related to job insecurity: job satisfaction, life satisfaction and mental health. Since previous studies suggest that the moderating effects of employability and the negative impacts of job insecurity on well-being frequently differ by gender, we perform separate analyses for men and women. We apply fixed-effects models to analyse panel data from Switzerland, a country that closely reflects the flexicurity model due to its structurally low unemployment rate, its generous unemployment benefits, and its high labour demand.

Results indicate that employability does not seem to mitigate the negative impacts of any of the measures of job insecurity on job satisfaction, neither for women nor men. For life satisfaction, employability seems to reduce the negative impacts of the different measures of job insecurity on life satisfaction, but only among men. These moderating effects are not observed for women, even if they are almost as impacted by job insecurity as men are. For mental health the results are mixed: employability appears to reduce two thirds of the negative impacts of fear of job loss only for women, and about two thirds of the negative impacts of the risk of job loss over the last year, but only for men. Employability appears to mitigate almost completely the negative impacts of having a temporary employment on mental health for men, but these effects are not observed for women, for whom temporary jobs are not negatively related to mental health. Overall, the results suggest that employability can reduce some the negative impacts of job insecurity on well-being, but mostly among men: out of the six associations where subjective job insecurity had similar negative impacts on well-being for women and men, employability reduced these negative effects in three out of six occasions for men, and only in one out of six occasions for women.

The UK food supply chain, like other lower paid and lower skilled sectors, is heavily reliant on temporary agency workers (TAWs) and the voice of these precarious workers has not been adequately heard. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, food workers in the UK were identified by the UK Government as ‘key workers’ with TAWs a vital element of this workforce.

Whilst temporary agency work has been subject to extensive research, few accounts take into consideration the view from below to consider the overall lived experiences of these workers. This is surprising and, given the significance of this form of employment, warranted further examination.

In this study I give an ethnographic account of the lived experiences of TAWs in a UK food factory, focusing on three aspects:

(i) precarious work and employment insecurity, exploring the experiences of TAWs as they seek work and then aim to maintain work.

(ii) the type of work offered by organizations and experienced by TAWs.

(iii) the multi-faceted relationships experienced by TAWs whilst at work.

The ethnographic approach that I adopted for this study combined participant observations and semi structured interviews to provide valuable insights into the work experiences of TAWs and this approach was necessary as we cannot really learn a great deal about what actually happens, or about how things work, in organizations without undertaking the intensive and close-up participative research that is central to ethnography.

By examining the lived experiences of TAWs in this way, this study makes an important contribution to the literature as follows. First, I add to our knowledge of temporary agency work by highlighting and explaining how TAWs exhibit individual agency to lessen the effects of employment insecurity. Second, many TAWs carry out intense work and this study contributes to the literature on temporary agency work by examining how the combined effect of temporality and hard work intensifies their workplace experiences. Finally, the relationships experienced by TAWs from within a blended workforce have not been adequately examined from their perspective and I contribute to the literature in this area.

Whilst blending suggests a workplace which is smooth and homogenous, I introduce the concept of the mixed-up organisation to appropriately reflect that life on the diverse factory shop floor is far more complicated.

Formal sector entry-level jobs in Mexico offer low starting salaries but substantial wage growth. This paper experimentally tests whether a six-months wage incentive can increase formal employment among secondary school graduates. Combining survey and high-frequency social security data, the paper shows that the incentive increases formal employment among vocational school graduates by 4.2 percentage points (14.5 percent) over the first two years driven by a 5 percentage point (25 percent) increase in permanent formal jobs. These employment gains are due to both extensive and intensive margin effects. Treatment effects are concentrated among youths with binding reservation wages who also tend to underestimate formal wage growth.

The paper advances a new ‘Society-Actors-Processes-Policy (SAPP) framework to aid policy makers, scholars and other actors in developing innovative forms of regulatory policy to address big societal crises.

SAPP responds to calls for greater policy and conceptual focus in work and employment research on issues that are a source of public concern (Harley and Fleming, 2021; Phan, 2021).

The research questions posed are: 1) How are policy options pertaining to big societal crises embedded in existing work and employment scholarship? What are the implications for policy makers and future research?

The following broad search string was formulated: “Global challenges” OR “societal” OR “society” OR “grand challenges” OR “crises” OR “crisis” OR “the changing nature of business” OR “the changing nature of work” OR “the changing nature of organizations” OR “contemporary challenges” OR “practical challenges”. We then searched the abstracts, keywords and titles in 18 journals classed as 4 or above in the Chartered Association for Business Schools’ (CABS) journal ranking list (Wood & Bischoff, 2020). It was decided to focus on policy recommendations/implications published in articles from September 1st 2010 to September 1st 2022 (inclusive). During this period, 13851 articles were published and 984 included our search terms.

Articles were excluded if they did not provide a clear focus on work and employment issues, which left 515 relevant articles. At the final sifting stage, articles were excluded if they did not mention explicit and/or implicit policy debates in their discussion or conclusion sections that raise implications and/or recommendations (Aguinis et al. 2021). This left 441 relevant articles, which constituted 3% of the total number of articles published between September 1st 2010 and September 1st 2022.

From our final sample of articles, we identified three main societal crises to focus on that evidenced a common thread running through the crises: ‘climate change and sustainability’; ‘technological advancement’; and ‘diversity and inclusion’.

In the findings section we evaluate the level of suggested policy intervention in the articles (e.g., organisational, national, international) and the relevant actors (e.g., organisations, employees, NGOs, policy makers, trade unions etc). We link the forms of regulatory policy to three ‘processes of change’ (the re-orientation of objectives; the re-configuration of experiences; the re-positioning of decision-making governance); three ‘policy enactment issues’ (‘disconnected from the reality of policy and practice’; ‘disengaged from the front line’; ‘detached from complexity’); and three ‘policy context spaces’ (temporal- time; geographical- location; situational- occupation, industry etc).

The current paper introduces the Labour Rights Index (LRI), comparing labour legislation in 135 countries. Given that labour law comparisons are rare or restricted only to employment protection legislation, working condition legislation or trade union rights legislation, LRI is the first comprehensive de-jure Index. It follows an employment life cycle approach and evaluates countries along ten indicators - fair wages, decent work hours, employment security, family responsibilities, maternity at work, safe work, social security, fair treatment, child and forced labour, and trade unions. The ten indicators and 46 sub-indicators are rooted in the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda.

The Index compares local labour legislation with international labour standards and scores a country accordingly. Based on their scores, countries are rated on a six-point scale ranging from a “Total Lack of Decent Work” to “Decent Work”. The Index analyses all labour legislation, ranging from minimum wage laws and employment protection laws to social security legislation and fundamental principles and rights at work legislation to the laws supporting work-life balance, as applicable on 1 January 2022. It uses publicly available labour legislation (on Government websites, ILO NATLEX, and WageIndicator Labour Law Database) and codes this information under a detailed yet straightforward methodology to make it comparable. The country profiles provide a full legal basis for each sub-indicator score, adding to the transparency and external validity of how each country was scored and rated. This leads to objective and replicable scoring.

Comparative work on labour regulations has been done before; however, it either covers a limited number of countries or a limited number of topics (World Bank’s Women, Business and Law Database, ITUC Global Rights Index) or is outdated (CBR-Labour Regulation Index).

With its binary scoring system, the Labour Rights Index provides a unique dataset enabling researchers, policymakers and transnational employers to track changes in labour regulations from 2020 onward for these countries. The Labour Rights Index is released biennially, and the next edition will be released in 2024, covering 140 countries.

Given that the WEF’s Global Risks Report 2023 identifies employment crises as an important risk in the short and long-term risk, comparing labour legislation globally and identifying best regulatory practices is crucial. Moreover, the Index provides a comprehensive perspective of de-jure working norms, making it a useful benchmarking tool in policy debates at the national and international levels.

https://labourrightsindex.org/

South Africa is still considered the most economically, ethnically, and culturally diverse country in the world. Ensuring that workers enjoy a level of fairness and equality in the workplace the Employment Equity Act (EEA) No. 55 of 1998 was passed into law. The purpose of the Act is to protect the rights of workers against any form of discrimination by their employers.

This law also aims to correct past injustices by implementing affirmative action measures.

The Minister of Employment of Labour in South Africa recently amended the EEA of 1998 to regulate both sector-specific Employment Equity (EE) targets and the compliance criteria for the issuing of EE Compliance Certificates in terms of Section 53 of the EEA. These amendments will come into effect on September 1, 2023.

This study focuses on the impact and gaps of the EEA since its inception in 1998 and highlights the number of EEA reports submitted to the South African Department of Employment and Labour, from 1998 to 2022. The focus between 2019 and 2022 will be on determining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the South African labour force, employed by the designated companies, which need to report on EE targets.

This research project used a mixed-method research approach. This approach combined qualitative and quantitative research methods to collect and evaluate the data for this study. This study is based on the analysis of a series of documents and secondary data obtained from various sources for the period 1998-2022.

The research questions are (1) what is the relationship between EEA and gender differences; (2) what is the relationship between the EEA and the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) initiatives; (3) what has been the impact of the EEA on organisational change; (4) what have been the main impacts since the implementation of the EEA?

This type of research enabled the researcher to contribute to the current body of knowledge, influence policy, qualitatively identify current EEA gaps, and quantify the plausibility of the results through numbers, statistical analyses, and graphs.

The findings suggest that the South African Government, through the Department of Employment and Labour needs to look at the impact of the EEA on the broader workforce, especially entities that are regarded as designated employers. Areas of impact should focus on gender, empowerment and change management within these organisations.

Keywords: Employment Equity, Gender, Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment, Change Management.

In light of the millions of workers who are excluded from key worker protections (literally or effectively) or who face severe barriers to organizing, worker groups in the United States have organized to pass legislation and regulations protecting some of the most precarious workers. In the context of labor market changes, workers across low-wage industries have organized to secure essential protections and lift industry standards through federal, state and/or municipal legislation. Yet given the profound limits of the existing regime of labor standards enforcement, it is increasingly recognized that simply passing new laws is insufficient. Our research on the janitorial industry in California, the nail salon industry in New York State and domestic workers in New York State demonstrates that, while these crucial wins have been made through organizing workers, the enforcement of the new regulations falters without channels to support worker organizing after the legislative wins. Drawing on these three examples, this paper will argue that workers themselves must be empowered to advance their rights and protections, and that worker organizations—beyond their role in advocating for the passage of new protections—play a critical role in ensuring new protections are realized by fostering worker organizing and training. Our research documents a peer training program developed in California’s janitorial industry to combat workplace sexual violence; worker organizing amid recent and proposed legislation for regulating the nail salon industry in New York State; and the use of training programs for base-building among domestic workers in New York City after the enactment of New York’s Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. Based on findings from our research, we argue that new forms of organizing are needed to ensure that significant, innovative legislation is actually enforced for the most precarious of workers. In the absence of well-resourced government oversight, collective organizing and training strategies that workers have developed are a crucial ingredient in ensuring stronger protections and higher standards are realized and have meaning.

Multiple pressures and crises impact the world of work, obliging trade unions to reflect and act upon uncertainty and change (Peels and Mwamadzingo, 2022; Ramos et al., forthcoming). Increasingly, trade unions worldwide explore different tools and methods to address uncertainty and change through strategic thinking (Wambeke et al., 2017; Ponce del Castillo, 2019; Peels and Mwamadzingo, 2022; Ramos et al., forthcoming). One method of strategic thinking that can be particularly useful in a trade union context, is strategic foresight, for being not prescriptive; participatory; inclusive; and allowing for complexity and empowerment. The paper is first of its kind, documenting trade union experiences worldwide on doing foresight. Furthermore, it investigates questions about the effectiveness of foresight in a trade union context, examining organisational, institutional and pedagogic factors. Data collection is based on literature review and desk research, mapping trade union practices worldwide; and participant observation during foresight training courses and workshops organized by ILO, ITC and ETUI in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas in the period 2022-23. There is a long history of research on organizational change applied to trade unions, mostly from the angle of trade union revitalization or renewal (Ibsen et al., 2017; Murray, 2017; Visser, 2019). Often power resources are central to this analysis (Schmalz et al., 2018). This paper builds further on this literature, by paying particular attention to the ability of trade unions to think strategically on revitalization, by applying foresight literature to the context of trade unionism (Wambeke et al., 2017; Ponce del Castillo, 2019). Furthermore, whereas research in this field has predominantly focussed on Western Europe and North America, this paper contributes to a better global understanding, incorporating experiences from the Global South (see also FES, 2018).The research contributes to foresight scholarship in bringing a multi-disciplinary view, combining organizational change and foresight studies, political sciences, as well as pedagogics to the context of the trade union movement. It provides concrete examples - with different degrees of formality and comprehensiveness - of trade unions experimenting with strategic thinking and foresight. While assessing the effectiveness of the latter, the paper finds that certain organizational (e.g. political support; research capacity) and institutional factors (e.g. respect for trade unions rights) drive success; together with particular pedagogic choices (e.g. to create trust; target group).

Turkish Labour Code numbered 4857 has a traditional approach towards the basic concepts of labour law, such as the definition of an employee. In legal terms, an employee is a person who performs a work due to an employment contract under the subordination of the employer. All legal instruments regarding labour law is still based on subordination principle. Turkish jurisdiction is also considering “subordination” as a definitive factor for classification of a person as an employee or a self-employed.

This approach was the traditional and valid one whereas the workforce and production methods were traditional as well. The world of work has been changing rapidly due to outsourcing, technological and organizational factors as well as AI. For over a couple of years, labour law is facing a struggle regarding whom to protect. The new concepts like solo self-employed, dependant self-employed, free-lance workers, platform workers are forcing labour law to change. As an example, a growing sector due to Covid-19 pandemic is delivery and courier services. During the shut-down due to pandemic, many workers lost the majority of their income. Although social security system grants unemployment benefits to workers whose employment contracts were suspended they need to work in order to maintain their living costs. Platform work was one of the solutions for these people. Majority of the people involve in these activities as couriers. They are registered as self-employed to Social Security Institution in Turkey. So, they are excluded from labour law and fundamental labour rights. On the condition that, their demand to enjoy the fundamental rights for employees by stating their economic dependence to web-based or location-based platforms a consideration has to be made. Platform workers are organising via social media against infringements regarding health and safety issues as well as benefiting collective rights.

The main axis of the discussions is the criterion for classification of a worker which will clarify the scope of labour law. Hence labour law is aiming to protect the most vulnerable ones, it is needed to specify the modern vulnerable workers. Subordination is not enough for inclusion of the dependent self-employed or platform workers by labour law. Instead of this, economic dependence, vulnerability, imbalance of power between worker and employer are suggested criterions for clarifying who will be covered and protected by labour law.

This paper, aims to focus on idea of work and the changes about that in legal perspective.

The impact of digitalisation on the world of work is leading to a series of transformative changes that challenge the sustainability of existing labour protection and industrial relation systems. Digital workers often no longer resemble the prototype found in classical labour law provisions, consenting de-facto employers to elude basic labour standards (wage, working time, dismissal protection). But it is not only a question of determining the personal scope of labour norms. How, for instance, shall the notions of asset, establishment or undertaking be defined in the context of digitally mediated and remote work and fissured workplaces? And thus, how can labour norms whose scope is determined by these notions (such as the EU directives on collective dismissals or transfers of undertakings, for instance) be properly applied?

This paper engages with the unresolved labour law challenges exacerbated by the digital economy by proposing a conceptual paradigm for expanding the scope of labour rights (individual and collective). The reflection outlined in this contribution is grounded on an emancipatory approach to labour law. The underlying principle is in fact that the rationale of workers’ rights is to compensate for the compression of workers’ ability to negotiate or influence the terms and conditions under which their work is provided to their contractor. Accordingly, workers should be recognized as entitled to labour rights and protection in all situations where they provide labour under contractual terms and conditions that they have little or no opportunity to define. At the same time, labour norms should be refocused to better capture the economic reality in which labour is performed, in view of more effectively allocating employers’ obligations.

In developing this paradigm, the paper provides a cartography of relevant case law and collective bargaining initiatives where national (European) courts and social partners have decoupled the recognition of labour rights from the existence of a (subordinated) employment contract. Consideration is also given to the European Union framework, where interesting developments suggest that a paradigm shift in the approach to labour rights might in fact already be underway (i.e. Commission’s Guidelines of competition law and collective bargaining; the recent TP case of the CJEU, recognising non-discrimination rights to a genuinely self-employed Youtuber).

Finally, the chapter takes a constructive approach, as it explores potentially effective regulatory avenues that, in the context of the current EU legal framework could bring labour rights closer to expressing the proposed normative model.

The varied responses of municipalities to the disruption of ride hailing and food delivery platforms has drawn our attention to both the potential, and limitations, of cities as regulatory spaces. Indeed ‘the Uber question’ goes beyond just employment status and reflects a city’s fundamental right to self-govern across a number of domains including taxation, data protection, consumer safety and labour rights (Adler, 2021; Collier et al., 2018; Wolf, 2022).

In this paper we explore the contested ‘regulatory politics’ around platform work in diverse contexts. By contrasting exploratory case studies of Buenos Aires and Manchester with the vanguard case of New York we seek to understand both the willingness and capacity of embedded actors to engage with and push back against platform capitalism. Our findings suggest few cities have ‘banned’ platform companies nor have they closed the grey zone of ‘independent contractor’ status (including New York). This is due to a combination of the public demand for platform services, the complexities of changing employment law at the local level, and a degree of ambivalence among platform workers towards being re-categorised as ‘employees’ (which could limit their flexibility and earning power).

This, however, is not clear evidence of ‘regulatory capture’ (Adler, 2021) as cities have sought to maintain decent minimum standards across platform operations while also allowing competition in the market. In the case of ride hailing, cities have extended existing regulations developed for taxis such as permits and licensing (Manchester) and to have sought to tighten local traffic rules (Buenos Aires). Nevertheless, there remain problems of non-compliance and these rules cannot prevent platforms ‘flooding’ the market with riders and drivers at peak times which pushes down pay.

In contrast, the response to food delivery platforms has been more uneven. While New York has developed a specific regulatory framework to deal with pay, tips, delivery distances and safety issues, Manchester has largely relied on soft norms of ‘decent work’ and ‘responsible business’ that extend beyond platform companies. In Buenos Aires municipal actors have so far struggled to articulate and enact local rules for food and grocery delivery platforms and have largely allowed market forces to ‘regulate’ the complex transactions between clients, riders and customers. While drivers and riders have sporadically sought to build collective power from the bottom up, the lack of institutional power at the local level is a significant barrier to negotiating directly with platform companies and state actors.

Platform work has been among the most researched themes in labour law for nearly a decade. With the growing number of court cases concerning the employment classification of platform workers, as well as the regulatory and policy initiatives targeting digital labour platforms (DLPs), the judicial and regulatory debate on platform work is unabated. My presentation offers a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of case law and the regulatory/policy initiatives addressing platform work in Europe, until the end of 2022.

The first part of my analysis draws on the database of administrative and judicial decisions created by Professor Hiessl. I first provide a chronological, year-by-year deconstruction of case law showing its evolution and main patterns. Secondly, I examine the distribution of case law per country and sector. I find inter alia that two-thirds of decisions concerned platforms operating in the delivery sector, and almost one-quarter of decisions were issued on platforms in the transport sector. Moreover, while case law on platform work exists in 15 countries in Europe, around 70% of decisions stem from only two countries: France and Spain. Moreover, I compare the reclassification rates across all sectors (transport services, delivery services, household services and on-location microwork). Finally, I identify the criteria that were most commonly referred to when deciding about the employment status of platform workers in all sectors.

The second part is based on my original database comprising platform-specific regulations in the field of labour law, as well as transport and tax law instruments establishing the legal framework for DLPs. Besides the enacted statutory regulation, I also include legislative proposals (both the currently pending and already rejected ones), as well as broader policy documents directly relevant to platform work. Collective agreements and non-binding measures dedicated to platform work are also covered. The goal of this analysis is to show the level of policy activism across countries and the heterogeneity of approaches towards platform work. After providing a general overview of all platform-specific responses in Europe, I examine their personal and substantive scope.

Overall, although significant steps have been made to embed DLPs in the existing legal framework, case law and the dominant approaches towards the regulation of platform work suffer from several salient limitations, which this presentation seeks to uncover.

This study explores the role of early-life education choices in determining gender inequality in labour market outcomes in India. Over the last few decades, female labour force participation rates (FLFPR) and gender-based occupational segregation have varied across countries. India experienced a declining trend in FLFPR that puzzlingly coincided with a significant rise in female education, falling fertility rate, and high economic growth. While the literature has analyzed the relationship between women’s education and employment in this context, the discourse has focused mainly on the level of education rather than the type of education. In this study, using a nationally representative dataset from India, we investigate how stream choice at the school level has a gendered effect on individuals’ employment, occupation, and earnings. We use a household fixed effects model and inverse probability weighted regression adjustment to estimate causal effects. We show that women studying a science or business major in school have a higher likelihood of participating in the labour market, engaging in salaried employment, participating in a male-dominated occupation, and earning higher wages. Our study contributes to the literature on how the under-representation of girls in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) impacts occupational segregation and gender wage gap.

The COVID-19 pandemic harmed the livelihood, safety, and health of employees in the unorganized sector, particularly domestic workers, the majority of whom are female. The precariousness that characterizes this segment has also been further exposed and intensified. This study aims to check how much the pandemic has affected the lives of paid female domestic workers in India. This study addresses two research questions. First, if the pandemic has affected the wages they receive with the number of working hours. Second, if there is an associated relationship between the wages they get with their caste and gender. Using a sub- nationally representative survey, the study shows how many female domestic helpers in cities experienced enhanced control and surveillance at home and increased job and housing insecurity. In addition, many female workers noticed that their bargaining leverage was diminished, their jobs became more ambiguous, and their workloads increased with the partial relaxation of the lockdown. Social and cultural barriers have increased for domestic workers during the pandemic times. Such barriers and their stratum also determine who is getting to do what kind of housework and paid for it and how domestic workers are treated for different domestic tasks. Comparatively speaking, cooks make more money than cleaners and sweepers. Many women from lower caste work as domestic helpers in dominant-caste houses in rural areas without receiving any formal compensation; instead, they merely receive food and clothing. The study's expected findings will highlight the urgent need for a national policy and state assistance that explicitly targets domestic workers who are women; otherwise, the scenario of poverty, health risks, and social exclusion will persist.

Introduction

Self-employment represents a relevant part of the labour markets in the European Union (EU-27) (according to Eurostat, 25.2 million people in 2021, 32% women). In the period 2007 to 2021, the average rate of self-employment reached 14.1%, with clear divergences between Member States and by sex (Solesvik, Iakovleva and Trifilova, 2019; Jafari-Sadeghi, 2020). These figures are determined both by the recent economic situation, and by the structural transformations that have occurred in the last two decades.

However, the different forms that self-employment takes (Skrzek-Lubasinska and Szaban, 2019), its nature as atypical employment (ILO; OECD; Eurofound, 2015), as well as its dissimilar regulatory frameworks in each country (European Commission, 2006), make it a phenomenon complex to analyse, especially when considering the gender perspective.

Research questions

This research tries to identify the determinants of self-employment, distinguishing between women and men, in the EU27 countries since the Great Recession, in the face of two trends: the economic cycle and the socioeconomic transformations. The objective is to determine the importance of the "necessity and opportunity effects" by sex, from 2007 to 2021, considering both trends.

Methodology

Using the Eurostat database, we elaborate a model that, by sex, correlates the variables linked to the economic outlook (GDP, employment, productivity) and those structural variables (self-employment by type, branches of activity, according to technological level and knowledge intensity, occupations, and educational level).

Contribution to the literature

The paper intends to enrich the empirical literature of the developed economies regarding the influence of the economic cycle and the structural transformations in self-employment, from a gender perspective.

Findings

Among the structural elements that determine the behaviour of self-employment are the economic activities, their technological and knowledge intensity (Cuadrado, Iglesias and Llorente, 2005), the occupations, and the educational level, which constitutes one of the decisive factors (García Perea and Román, 2019), especially among women (Cueto, 2018). Besides, the link between self-employment and digitisation can be observed in the development of activities organised on the Internet. This is the case of teleworking accelerated by the pandemic (Eurofound, 2022) and with greater intensity for women (Molina, 2020).

The analysis is completed by incorporating the dimension of policies involving self-employment in Europe. The 2020 crisis served as a boost, in some countries, to introduce improvements in the protection of self-employment, with instruments such as the cessation of activity or self-employment rates (Spasova and Regazzoni, 2022).

The living wage movement and its implications in the Global North have been well-captured in the existing literature. However, within the Global South, a scant number of research on the topic is available. Drawing on in-depth interviews with trade unionists, labour NGO activists, government officials, labour researchers, and through analysis of reports and legal documents, this research aims to fill this gap of knowledge by providing an example of how the living wage campaign earned its footstep in the wage policy debate in Vietnam. Taking a regulatory pluralism approach, this paper explains how a soft regulatory regime like the living wage campaign complements the minimum wage policy in Vietnam. With the endorsement of various actors, particularly the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL), (the only umbrella trade union in Vietnam to date) and its research institutions, labour initiatives such as Fair Labor, and the alliance of labour non-government organisations – researchers, the living wage campaign has gained its popularity in Vietnam. In turn, it has helped to increase the VGCL’s legitimacy. Noticeably, the paper argues that the VGCL’s top-down endorsement of the living wage campaign and minimum wage policy echoes the workers’ bottom-up ‘bargaining by riot’ for better pay, contributing to the sustainability of the living wage campaign.

Introduction

In January 2023, South Africa's National Minimum Wage Commission called for public comment on its draft medium-term minimum wage target. It includes that income through work should provide a decent standard of living that is sufficient to the individual working for pay and their families, thus describing a living wage. A corresponding amount has not yet been set. Typically, living wages are calculated econometrically, based on the cost of a basket of goods determined by a group of ‘experts’, or statistically as a set percentile of the overall income distribution in a geographic area. These approaches are not grounded in theory and strip low-income earners of agency to decide for themselves what constitutes a decent life. Consequently, they follow a colonial approach of imposing onto the working poor what is good for 'them'. We thus developed a bottom-up method to determining living wages. Grounded in Sen's capability approach we assess how capable individuals themselves feel to realize the lives they value. After testing the approach in smaller, regionally confined samples initially, we asked the question:

Research question

What would a subjectively determined living wage range be for South Africa when considering a sample of working individuals across all South African provinces?

Methodology

Research assistants administered N = 1,566 surveys in on-on-one interactions with working individuals (Nov 2022 - Feb 2023). Through items developed by Teng-Calleja et al. (2019) we measured how important participants considered different life domains and as how attainable they saw each. From this data, we calculate capability-gap scores and depict them against individuals' self-reported income. A living wage is the amount of income from which on individuals can realize their capabilities.

Contribution to literature and findings

We will present the results to be analyzed by the end of March. We expect the results to replicate those of our initial studies. That is that it is possible to determine a living wage level drawing on (a) subjective data representing a careful operationalization of Sen's capability approach which (b) takes into account psychological science to measure constructs and that (c) the living wage level thus determined varies little regardless of region (e.g. urban vs rural). While our study seeks to propose a living wage benchmark for South Africa, we also support employers opting into living wages rather than being mandated to. This is as we consider a living wage as necessary, but not sufficient to afford individuals dignity at work.

This study aims to examine the gender disparity in Japan regarding precarious employment and individual well-being under the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic seriously influenced on many business categories in Japan, and as a result, its number of personnel was reduced. The primary target for such a personnel reduction is non-regular workers, and many of whom are females. According to Tokyo Shimbun (2021), as of February 2021, the number of female non-regular workers has decreased by 890,000 compared to the same month of the previous year. According to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (2021), the number of female workers committed suicide in 2020 was 1698, an increase of nearly 30% from the five-year average up to 2019. In addition, as compared from other advanced countries, there is a large gap in the income level between part-time and full-time workers in Japan (The Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (2022))

In this study, we both theoretically and empirically explore the following points. First, as compared from males, female workers are more likely to be the target of personnel reduction during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. Second, the risk of personnel reduction adversely affects to the workers’ well-being, and as compared from males, the effect is more severe for females. Third, as compared from regular workers, non-regular workers are more financially constrained.

This study uses the data provided by ‘Survey on Changes in Life Awareness and Behavior under the Influence of COVID-19 Infection’ (2020; a) (2020; b) conducted by Japan’s Cabinet Office. This survey investigates changes in life consciousness and behavior under the influence of COVID-19. The survey was conducted to May 2020, June 2020 and December 2020. The survey area is nationwide, and appropriate sampling is conducted according to the population ratio. Regarding the analysis of well-being, the survey asked about the six items.

As a preliminary analysis, we performed an empirical analysis by using the data obtained from the survey. As compared from other attributes, female non-regular employees are more likely to be anxious about their work and future life. The policy alternative to mitigating the gap in employment condition between regular and non-regular workers will help to improve the labour market situation in Japan.

It has been documented in the recent literature on the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on gender inequality across the world (Dang & Nguyen, 2021) and even more complicate ones in the developing world and the Global South (Agarwal, 2021). This paper examines the effects on work and labor market outcomes of men and women in rural Vietnam during the period 2019-2021. Although rural areas were less hard hit by the outbreak, the sufferings born by rural workers are not less severe given the majority (over 77%) belongs to the informal or small-scale household farming sectors, with no access to social protection.

In particular, we examine how rural women in the informal economy faced job loss, reduction in labor supply and earnings changes. Using the microdata from the labor force survey of over 26,000 individuals in rural Vietnam in 2021, we employ multinomial logit models on work and income changes. Although among female workers, only 4.1% of women reported a job loss and 41% reported a reduction in hours of work as compared to 5.1% and 38.9% of men respectively, there are significant heterogeneous effects between genders and across sectoral formality while controlling for individual characteristics, human capital (including ICT skills), age groups and household demographic structure. Similarly, self-reported income reduction was found more prevalent among informal workers (80%) as compared to those in the formal sector (64%). To confirm the results of the above models with self-reporting information by workers, we also test a more comprehensive model on the real labor earnings by incorporating the Covid-19 infection

rates across provinces in 2020-2021 to measure the pandemic impact on rural workers through a gender lens and from the sectoral perspective.

Our findings shed light on the possibility of recovery approaches to ascertain more decent work for rural women. By contrasting the econometric results with individual coping strategies through employment adjustment or training, and with the government transfer and support schemes, we contribute to the ongoing policy debate on the efficacy of recovery measures in developing and emerging economies in the Global South in the post-Covid-19 era.

India’s informal labor markets took staggering losses in the Covid-19 pandemic. Women in these markets were particularly vulnerable. Inequalities in access to job opportunities, use of digital technologies, coverage of social protection programs and the responsibilities of child-care have placed them at a considerable disadvantage on what was already an uneven playing field with male workers. This paper explores how affiliation with a local women’s organisation contributed to resilience among informal women workers in 10 states of India in early 2022. Our research focusses on the programs of SEWA Bharat, the national federation of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a member-based trade union and organisation of women workers in the informal economy established in Gujarat in 1972, and its state-level organisations and unions. We focus on ten states: Bihar, Delhi, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Nagaland, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and West Bengal.

Our data comes from a telephonic survey that was conducted by female research assistants using in the 10 program states in February-March 2022. We study a sample of 1308 respondents, sampled from a pool of SEWA members across states. Women were asked about their livelihoods, family life, their engagement with welfare schemes and their physical and mental health. Drawing on this quantitative data, we highlight the challenges faced by women informal workers in four critical areas: mental stress, inadequate entitlements, absence of childcare and disruptions due to Covid19. We find that almost three-quarters of women respondents had at least two of the four types of crises. The crises were deeply interlinked, reinforcing each other regardless of a woman’s age, social status or family structure. Communities with a long history of housing women’s collectives were, however, better able to manage these crises and showed greater resilience in the face of pandemic disruptions. We draw on case studies and examples to illustrate that the solidarity and social protection from such programs contribute to women’s support structures and enable them to recover from the setbacks of the pandemic by addressing these interlinked crises simultaneously.

In times of widespread and multifaceted crisis, informal workers tend to suffer disproportionately due to the precarious nature of their livelihoods and limited access to social protection. Informal worker associations have been shown to be important providers of both informal cushioning, and facilitators of social insurance to protect workers facing idiosyncratic shocks. But what happens to these associations and their ability to cushion informal workers when in addition to various idiosyncratic shocks they also face covariate shocks? During COVID-19 informal workers globally were hit by the combined effects of the virus and the aversion strategies adopted to contain it. In both Kenya and Tanzania, the pandemic presented the informal economy with social and economic shocks and tested the ability of associations to cushion workers. Using data of informal workers in urban areas of Kenya and Tanzania this paper investigates the hypothesis that social protection delivered by associations is more fragile under covariate shocks. The paper examines how associations in the sectors of construction, micro-trade and transport have responded to COVID-19, focusing on the challenges and capacities to provide and uphold social cushioning in times of multiple and covariate crisis. The comparison between Kenya, where restrictions were strictly implemented, with Tanzania, where the existence of COVID-19 was largely downplayed, allows for an assessment of country-level differences in tackling the pandemic. The comparison between sectors, which prior to the pandemic were shown to spur different kinds of worker associations and types of assistance, reveals how sector specific characteristics might influence both the challenges faced and responses to the pandemic. The findings reveal country- and sector-level similarities, but also some differences in crisis responses. In both countries, micro-traders largely continued with their daily activities whilst informal transport workers were significantly affected by the lockdown. Amongst construction workers many lost their jobs or were unable to find work due to restrictions on movement. As for associations, the picture is mixed with some of the more established ones remaining fully operational, especially in the Kenyan transport sector, whilst others restricted their activities and provided limited financial assistance or redirected their focus to other more achievable services such as training on COVID-19 related health and safety measures. Thus, whilst associations respond well to one-off individual shocks, they are often not resilient enough to carry workers through a nationwide crisis, pointing to the need to improve formal social protection systems to better handle covariate type shocks.

Two different air navigation services unions, in Uruguay (ACTAU) and Argentina (ATEPSA), were able to overcome the challenges posed by a history of military control in the industry; deep economic crises in both countries; repressive essential work laws; and the crisis of the Covid pandemic. The power resources approach to union transformation shows that trade unions are not solely at the mercy of major societal trends and crises, but rather they have the option of making strategic choices.

Air traffic control workers are key to the viability and safety of global transport value chains. These workers hold the moment-by-moment responsibility for the protection of human life. They work extremely long hours with heavy workloads, poor conditions and are paid far below other comparable professions. The work of air traffic controllers is highly regulated by national and international laws and requires extensive training. Air traffic controllers are recognized by the ILO as one of the occupational groups with the highest occupational stress. Due to its essential public service nature, labour disputes require mechanisms for self-regulation

During the Covid pandemic, commercial passenger flights declined or stopped, while the number of cargo flights expanded. The workload of air traffic controllers increased as they dealt with massive changes in flight patterns and scheduling. Essential worker laws were used to deny aviation workers of their fundamental right to strike, organise, and bargain.

The three authors have extensive direct knowledge of and participatory research experience with aviation unions in South America. The research was conducted between 2017 and 2022 and includes 560 hours of interviews with workers, trade union, and governmental representatives.

The authors examine how, during these times of crisis, the unions revitalized themselves, increased their organisational power and democratic structures, learned from each other, won groundbreaking improvements in working conditions, and developed a strategy of impacting global value chains using safety regulations to protect the public, flight crew members, and themselves.

Latin America is one of the regions that has been most strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The main aim of this paper is to assess the dynamics of family income inequality and its components since the onset of the pandemic in six Latin American countries -Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru and Uruguay-.

Data coming from national household surveys is employed to estimate inequality indicators and to analyse the effect of different income sources through an econometric decomposition method. The study emphasises the behaviour of informal employment (and of labour incomes coming from informal jobs) as it is one of the major factors associated to the evolution of labour incomes and its distribution during the period under analysis. The distributive effects of cash transfer programmes and policies to support formal employment during the pandemic is particularly assessed.

While there is empirical evidence on the impact of COVID-19 on the labour market, incomes and inequality in Latin America, this paper makes several contributions on this regard. First, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first that looks at the evolution of income distribution until the third quarter of 2021, almost two years since the onset of the pandemic. Second, the use of data for six countries –that account for more than 50% of the total population in the region– provides a broad picture of the impacts of COVID-19 in Latin America, as it makes it possible to consider cases with different occupational and income structures and dynamics during this crisis. Third, unlike some previous studies, in this paper we evaluate the distributive changes observed without resorting to assumptions or simulations. Finally, this study pays particular attention to the dynamics of labour informality and its impacts on inequality, taking into account the atypical behaviour that informal employment has had during this crisis.

The unequalizing impact of the worsening of the labour market during the contraction phase was mainly associated with the significant loss of informal, low-paid, jobs. This effect was partially offset by the equalizing role of cash transfers policies. An opposite impact of these income sources appears during the recovery phase, as most countries gradually reduced or stopped those transfers as employment and, therefore, labour incomes partially recovered. Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic inequality was higher than 2019 in almost all countries studied exacerbating existing high-income gaps in one of the world's most unequal regions.

With the sanitary measures imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, boundaries between work and home blurred; pressure mounted on relationships within the home. Victims of domestic violence (DV) became even more isolated, and work at home gave perpetrators of DV additional ways to interfere with their victims’ lives. It became more complicated to flee DV, considered as “the pandemic within the pandemic”. In Québec, in 2021, 26 women were killed by their intimate partner, a dramatic increase from 2019. This grim death toll helped maintain momentum for a campaign led by women’s groups, supported by the labour movement, for recognition of an obligation for employers to prevent DV in and around places of work. The 2019 ILO Convention on violence and harassment at work (C-190) and the associated Recommendation (R-260) fuelled support for recognition of DV as a work-related hazard. C-190 includes “domestic violence” in its definition of workplace violence and mandates ILO member States to “recognize the effects of domestic violence and, so far as is reasonably practicable, mitigate its impact in the world of work”. R-260 refers to “the inclusion of domestic violence in workplace risk assessments”.

In October 2021, Québec’s Work Health and Safety (WHS) legislation was amended to include an obligation for employers to protect workers from DV. At the time, six Canadian provinces as well as federal law already recognized employers’ obligation to prevent DV under WHS legislation. What lessons can be learned from implementation of such obligations? An empirical study based on interviews with key informants (n=9) conducted in 2020-2021 suggests that implementation by WHS institutions varies greatly from one jurisdiction to another, with generally disappointing results. Workplace policies on DV were the exception not the rule, and women and others fleeing DV did not necessarily benefit from the legislation. Lack of communication and trust between women’s shelters and WHS institutions were identified as factors contributing to implementation breakdowns.

DV at and around places of work can be fatal; conscious of the risk, many victims/survivors abandon their jobs. If decent and safe work for all is the objective, then recognition of the need to prevent DV must translate into structured prevention efforts by employers. This paper looks at the conditions in which such efforts may flourish, identifying cooperation between traditional WHS actors and women’s shelters as a key element to protect all workers at risk, especially those hard to reach through traditional means.

Historically, labour law has turned its main attention to the regulation of a specific type of work: the standard employment relationship (SER). Although it has been recognized as standard, SER was never truly universal and left out (or lately embraced) workers in non-SER, especially informal ones. According to the World Bank (2021), the informal economy accounts for more than 70% of employment. So, informal work is assuming a normality, mainly in developing countries.

Although international labour standards still seem to be more SER-oriented, their scope has gradually expanded over the years. The approval of ILO Convention No. 190 (C190) was one of the biggest and most recent symbols of that. Emphasizing the gender perspective, C190 recognizes that violence and harassment in the world of work is a human rights violation and affects a person's psychological, physical and sexual health. The Convention differs from previous ones by enlarging its coverage: C190 mentions the right of all people to be free from violence and harassment and expressly ensures its application to workers and other people in the world of work irrespective of their contractual status, in the formal economy and informal.

Establishing strategies to promote better working conditions for thousands of workers in the informal economy is essential for the effectiveness of C190 and the promotion of the fundamental right to health as a universal right, especially due to the crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the spread of remote work and work on digital platforms. Thus, the question that guides this study is: how to promote a world of work free of violence and harassment in the informal economy? The objective is to identify possible ways to promote a healthy work environment, free from violence and harassment, for workers in the informal economy. In order to so, the methodology is based on bibliographic research, documentary research to identify the initiatives adopted or planned by the countries that have ratified the C190 and interviews to capture unwritten information.

On the one hand, preliminary results point to a heterogeneity of initiatives, such as the mobilization of public health and safety structures and legislative changes to decriminalize work activities. On the other hand, there is a delay in the implementation of C190 in some countries. At the end of this research, it is expected to highlight good practices and challenges for the implementation of C190 in the informal economy.

Introduction

While claims against workplace sexual harassment and violence re-surfaced just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic highlighted new forms and ways that sexual harassment and violence is occurring. Employment arrangements, work health and safety regulations, employer responsibilities and trade union interventions vary across countries and work settings. Additionally, the regulatory frameworks comprise intersecting layers of legislations and multiple jurisdictions which complicate the prevention and responses to workplace sexual harassment and violence. In general, there are four developments that have complicated the application of sexual harassment legislation. First, there is the ambiguity of employment status. As more workers move onto contracts and into arrangements of self-employment, their status for protection is ambiguous1. Second, the short duration of engagements and the vulnerability of short-term engagement workers makes it difficult to report incidents of harassment. Here, there have been reports and publicity around the vulnerability of backpackers in the agricultural harvesting sector2. Third, there are changes around the concept of the workplace3. Work in isolated locations such as fly-in-fly-out working, or at multiple sites (gig working deliveries) leaves workers vulnerable as they are without direct support mechanisms4. In addition, the rise of online working through the pandemic, has opened up online mediated harassment, abuse, and intimidation5. The fourth complication is the identification of the employer and the organisation that is responsible for ensuring basic rights at work. This is an issue with the rise of sub-contracting and on-line working6.

Research Questions

Since the Australian Human Rights Commission’s survey reported that while 33% of Australian workers experienced sexual harassment, 50% of workers were bystanders to sexual harassment, we use the Australian regulatory framework to address three key questions: 1) How effective is the regulatory framework in preventing workplace sexual harassment? 2) What are the key outcomes from seeking legal recourse? 3) How is the employer’s duty of care to prevent and respond to sexual harassment being implemented?

Method

A two-pronged methodology is employed consisting of analysis and thematic development of legislative changes and in-depth analysis of recent judicial cases of workplace sexual harassment7.

Findings

Despite recent legislative amendments, these are not adequate for protecting vulnerable workers from reprisals, discrimination, and psychosocial injury. There are implications for improving the capacity of employers’ and workers’ organizations, including trade unions to promote compliance with labour laws, gender, work health and safety consultation, endorsing a positive duty of care and ratifying the ILO Convention No.190.

Many nations around the world have legislation that restricts access to employment for people with criminal convictions. Currently, there is little comparative research that empirically investigates the number, content, and cross-national differences of these laws. To contribute to this topic, we describe a study that explored legislative barriers to employment for people with convictions in all 38 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The researchers compiled a new dataset of national legislation (n = 335) restricting access to specific areas of work for the justice impacted in the OECD. Content analysis methods were used for: (1) dataset development and refinement; (2) qualitative coding of categories and themes; and (3) subsequent mixed methods analysis to explore cross-cultural commonalities and differences within relevant legislative restrictions. We present findings describing the proliferation of restrictive legislation in the OECD, including the number of laws passed over time, number of restrictions present in those laws, and their applicability to diverse economic sectors and industries. Findings illustrate that the diffusion and growth of restrictive collateral consequences to employment occurred during periods where incarceration rates were also growing across the OECD. This indicates that the growth in such lawmaking might be tied to punitive ideologies, rather than to public safety objectives and rehabilitative principles. Descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis of themes also illustrate the extent to which collateral consequences to employment are cumulative in nature: civil death by a million cuts. Over time, seemingly minor restrictions in finance, aviation, healthcare, childcare, etc. add up in ways that functionally close off access to large numbers of jobs. Moreover, as particular sectors and industries rise in political or economic importance—or their nexus to governmental function and budgets is realized—seemingly minor prohibitions tied to objectives of professionalization and public safety can result in prolonged barriers to work for people with convictions, who return home to a labor market that is increasingly artificially narrowed by legal regimes.

In China, where workers are classified as employees or independent contractors, the emergence of platform employment raises awkward questions regarding this dichotomy. Although platform companies impose certain controls over the labour process and determine the remuneration standard for each order filled, the platform worker also enjoys increased job flexibility, such as the choice of when and where to work. Due to this flexibility, platform companies tend to treat workers as independent contractors. Consequently, platform workers cannot obtain the rights generally accorded to regular employees, such as minimum wage and worker's compensation benefits.

This article collects all lawsuits filed by food delivery riders regarding their employee status, summarizes how judges analyse the reasons while deciding a case, and investigates what determinants affect the decision using the logistic regression method.

The study results reveal that judgments reflect a combination of legal formalism and pragmatism. Legal formalism indicates judges make decisions according to the rules. Judges usually use a syllogism to adjudicate cases: in this case, the rule is the employee status identification rule, the facts include not only the rider's freedom to decide when and where to work but also details of the control exerted on them, and the legal conclusion is the outcome of applying the rule to the facts. Meanwhile, pragmatism entails that judges must also consider the consequences of their judicial decisions. This study found that, after controlling factors such as the location of the court, judges are more likely to grant injured riders employee status. The reason may be that judges understand injured riders are in greater need of worker compensation benefits than are non-injured riders. Therefore, judges are more likely to grant employee status to this group at their discretion.

From a comparative perspective, the adjudication practice in China can provide a reference for countries that adopt a dichotomy in employment status identification. In particular, judges in China have examined many adjudication factors, which could guide the identification of a platform worker’s employee status.

Actors in the world of work, business and the state are experimenting with new employment regulations to face the challenges of technological disruption (Levesque et al., 2020). Non-state actors have been actively involved in lobbying and framing persuading narratives, opening up questions on how these actors colonise different regulatory spaces within the state.

Drawing on these debates, this study aims to understand how state and non-state actors shape regulation in the case of Chile, the first country in Latin America to enact a new law in 2022 on digital platform work. Act N° 21.431 amends the Labour Code by introducing the figure of the "independent worker", which means that the labour statute can now regulate non-labour contracts. Incumbents can, in theory, freely choose the type of employment arrangement they want to join, although the degree of social protection is lower for self-employed. The new policy is seen by some as a ground-breaking development, while for others it is merely a pro-business regulation, circumventing the problem of employment classification.

This work-in-progress explores these regulatory changes based on a qualitative methodology that draws on various sources: +20 interviews with relevant industrial relations actors plus a large number of documentary sources, from records of public hearings, press, drafts of bills, policy reports, among others.

The analysis so far shows that the regulatory debate takes place in a political context of social turmoil though the collective actors in industrial relations are particularly weakened. This has given rise to a juridified debate that, in turn, restricts the discussion in the political arena. However, as the new regulation is placed within the labour code, it opens up a great opportunity for the Labour Inspection to enforce compliance with minimum standards. In this debate, platforms argue that the Inspection exceeds its powers, while trade unions and government seek to empower the state agency.

Findings indicate that the Chilean case is a clear example of how the state increases regulations over employment, not by changing the core of the standard employment relationship but by redrawing the margins between work and non-work (Howell, 2019). Moreover, the study shows that the state does not intervene in a unitary way, as it also creates the conditions for renewed actors' resilience. This pressure motivates the Labour Inspection to adopt a more aggressive enforcement strategy, although it faces political tensions that threaten to limit inspection activities and ultimately the scope of regulation itself.

The contribution deals with enforcement instruments for data privacy on digital labour platforms. It will present the results of an empirical and legal study on data handling by German, U.S. and Chinese crowdsourcing portals.

Crowdsourcing platforms have grown rapidly worldwide as new marketplaces for labour. Crowdsourcing commonly refers to the outsourcing of corporate tasks that have traditionally been performed by internal employees to an undefined group of Internet users (the „crowdworkers“). The importance of digital work such as crowdwork has further increased in times of the Corona pandemic.

The rise of platforms poses serious challenges to decent work. A major concern in this regard is ensuring data privacy and security. Privacy challenges through crowdsourcing include risks of de-anonymisation attacks, data theft or misuse. In addition, there are specific risks for worker privacy. In particular, platforms collect personal information for the matching of customers, tasks and crowd workers. Furthermore, they employ opaque AI-based managerial algorithms for monitoring and evaluating worker behaviour.

The contribution will address the following research questions: (1) To what extent do platforms from Germany, the USA and China collect, process and transfer personal and sensitive data of crowdworkers? (2) How is data collected and used to monitor and control work processes? (3) To what extent do platforms take self-initiative precautions (e.g. data protection seals, audits) to implement data protection and data security? (4) What legal flanking measures are needed at European and international level to make data protection rights on labour platforms more effective?

The main methodological instrument used to answer the research questions is an evaluation of all privacy policies available on the websites of German, U.S. and Chinese crowdsourcing service providers. The privacy policies provide information on data handling as well as on self-regulatory protection measures of platforms. In the legal section, current legal policy proposals at the EU level that address privacy aspects (European Commission's proposal for a Directive on platform work (2021); EU Artificial Intelligence Act (2021)) are examined against the background of the findings. Furthermore, existing ILO instruments and initiatives on workers' data rights are discussed.

Based on meaningful empirical data, our research proves that platforms from Germany, the USA and China use and monetize personal data on a large scale. As will be shown, a public-private policy mix is the most appropriate instrument to ensure effective data protection for workers in the global platform economy.

Digital platforms are now part of our everyday lives (Uber, Airbnb…). Platform workers have diverse statuses, labour, social protection and collective bargaining rights, which are just starting to be regulated by States and the EU.

This contribution aims at assessing the new EU package on platform work in light of the principle of universality and its application in three countries (Sweden, France and Spain) thanks to a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis.

The EU package includes inter alia the Directive proposal on platform workers’ working conditions and the Guidelines on solo self-employed persons’ collective agreements. These texts must be analysed in light of the principle of universality.

Universality is a concept which pinpoints social protection systems but which must also be applied to labour law rights. Since Bismarck and Beveridge, one wonders if social rights should be attributed to workers on the basis of their work, or to individuals/ citizens because of their belonging to society or simply their Human dignity. Theoretical works (Marshall’s social citizenship, 1950; Marzo, 2022; Ratti, 2023) and regulatory calls in international (ILO) and EU contexts (Recommendation 8/12/19) call for a deeper reflexion. Because of the new digital context, we suggest its transposition beyond social protection to labour law and collective bargaining issues.

Is universality a way to end differences created by legal statuses between workers and specifically digital platform workers? Is it a social citizenship standard or net upon which social differences are admissible? How are statuses to be articulated with universality? What (digital) labour rights can/should be universal?

The method chosen here is based on the crossing of interdisciplinary and comparative research. From a legal perspective, analyses led by legal scholars in Sweden, Spain and France assess the diverse and evolving national labour laws and caselaws to propose a reinterpretation of the EU texts. From a sociological perspective, multi-sited interviews allow a special focus is on domestic platform work, contrasting it with transportation/delivery platform work.

This contribution suggests a new understanding of universality and of its relevance in the contemporary world. It assesses the European texts in light of this philosophical aim, questioning the rationales behind them and proposing a new interpretation. It identifies a need to reregulate EU labour law. It calls for a new structured coherent body of “EU digital labour law”, renewing decent work in the field of digital platforms and Artificial Intelligence. It also presents new data on domestic platform workers.

Introduction

The outbreak of the pandemic has caused a tremendous shock on national socio-economic structures around the world. The suspension of production and the use of telework have put workers, who were asked to adjust quickly to ongoing changes, at the center of the debate. Albeit in a difficult context, an unprecedented opportunity of intervention has opened for social actors, despite the outcome of this process is still unclear today.

Research questions

The aims of the article are to:

i) Understand how national social partners across Europe have framed their interests vis-à-vis their core constituencies to strengthen their role and legitimacy.

ii) Identify which new topics have emerged in the public discourse concerning social regulation and employment relations.

iii) Assess whether socio-institutional differences across European countries are reflected in specific models of social dialogue during the pandemic.

Methodology

The methodology is quite innovative since, for the first time in the literature, the newsletters published by social actors at national and European level represent the main source. In fact, a qualitative and quantitative analysis based on text mining is performed on around 2000 newsletters published between 2020 and 2022. Building on the notion of social partners as key actors in policymaking (Streek, 1992), the paper proposes to interpret country-level findings within the theoretical framework of the welfare regime classification (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Ferrera, 1996; Adascalitei, 2012).

Contributions to the literature

Through the construction of an up-to-date database and the implementation of quantitative techniques, the contribution of the paper is threefold. First, we add novel and original information to explore the impact of the pandemic on the employment policies adopted in EU countries; second, we explore the context and frequency of new topics in the social actors’ agenda, such as care jobs, work-life balance, childcare services, protection of vulnerable workers, and income support schemes. Third, we test if the observed heterogeneity in the social discourse is consistent with the welfare regime classification.

Findings

The analysis shows both patterns of convergence and divergences across countries. From the one hand, topics such as short-time work schemes and measures for non-standard workers are frequently discussed in all the EU countries. On the other hand, the relative importance of issues related to work-life balance and care is highly different across welfare regimes. Moreover, the existence of different power resources endowment of social actors emerges clearly from the texts, particularly concerning their direct involvement in policy making.

Kenya faced turbulent times during the Covid -19 pandemic, a situation worsened by floods, locust invasion and drought. The pandemic illuminated the low coverage of social protection programs in the country. Kenya's tripartite partners namely Ministry of labour and social Protection (MOLSP), Central Organization of Trade Unions in Kenya, COTU (K), and Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE) signed a Memorandum of Understanding to guide labour relations during Covid-19 Period. The MOU was registered under Kenya Gazette no 4246 in support of workers and employers under the labour Relations Act of 2007.

The MOU assisted tripartite partners in mitigating the cost of living and alleviating economic insecurity in Kenya, especially among workers during the tabulent times. The MOU supported organizational solidarity to ease the transition, particularly for the displaced workforce. Proposals in the MOU included skills development and redeployment. Further, the extension of social protection to vulnerable groups such as workers who lost their jobs and social security and support systems for transition into green and digital jobs.

This study's objective was to determine the contribution of the tripartite partners' response to the Covid-19 pandemic toward decent work and universal social protection. Research questions applied included finding out how the responses addressed inequalities at the workplace and responses to changing labour market conditions.

The study applied a mixed method approach while research methods comprised desk analysis and Key Informant Interviews to collect data. Data analysis software SPSS was used in the study to analyze qualitative and quantitative data. Descriptive data analysis was applied while hypotheses were tested through multiple and simple regressions and correlations among the study's variables.

The findings indicate that COVID -19 overhauled labour market systems, and the tripartite partners worked together to increase social protection coverage, lower taxes and promote occupational safety to protect workers and employers. Essential service workers were prioritized through integrated responses. Further, the study findings indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic caused economic insecurities and destroyed workers' support systems.

The study recommends increasing solidarity-based responses to escalate social protection coverage, wage protection, and promotion of decent work. The tripartite partners need to develop policies to protect frontline workers and sustainable programs to promote decent work even in the post Covid-19 recovery period. The study highlights the new policy development processes such as MOU. The study contributes to the body of knowledge on tripartism and new information on increasing social protection in times of uncertainty.

In recent years, subcontracting and the technological replacement of work highlights the necessity to look toward models of trade unionism that alleviates increasing precarity. This paper asks how demographic shifts and state institutions impact industrial unionism, which has been suggested as a solution for precarious work and automation. More specifically, I consider the ways in which transit unions, which have traditionally been militant archetypes of industrial unionism, have evolved over time. I do this through a comparative historical analysis of the Transit Workers’ Union Local-100 in New York and the Seoul Transit Labor Union in Seoul. The United States and South Korea are unlikely comparisons at first blush but share surprisingly similar characteristics regarding labor politics. The two countries have similar trade union density levels that have declined over time, from 15%-10% over the last 50 years (ILO 2020). Additionally, unlike many countries in Europe (Doellgast et al. 2018) and parts of Asia, such as Japan, Taiwan (Lee 2011), and India (Agarwala 2013), established American and Korean trade unions, including those in the public sector, tend to turn to collective bargaining in the workplace rather than to labor law reform to secure workplace-related rights, such as wages and benefits. The divergence between the two cases is that Seoul transit workers have been much more active in their attempts to build an industrial union movement that embraces sector-level policy changes rather than resorting to a model of craft unionism, as has been the case in New York. I make two arguments. First, the dispositions of transit workers in New York and Seoul related to the different changing needs of infrastructural development in the two cities. In New York, deindustrialization and demographic shifts thwarted the vision of industrial unionism when ethno-racial conflicts in the city and disinvestment in infrastructure weakened the labor movement. In Seoul, infrastructural needs were growing, and an absence of ethno-racial conflicts made room for class (and gender) -based solidarity. Second, the style of labor control, through legal and institutional practices in New York compared to physical repression in Seoul, worked favorably for transit workers in Seoul who found more solidarity with urban residents compared to New York.

By now, it has been relatively actively discussed what the inclusive labor markets are and why we need them. Yet, it is still unclear how to build them. Regarding the process of the reform, we can consider whether social dialogue, i.e. a corporatist way of interest intermediation can be effective. Social dialogues and social pacts were actively pursued and discussed during the recent decades, especially from the era when the world stepped into neo-liberalization since the 1980s. However, as they started to turn around towards post-neo-liberalization since the late 2000s, social dialgoues and social pacts have been rarely observable. Instead, the role of the state has been more strongly emphasized and considered to be almost a sole effective means. It seems that a new era of unilateralism or etatism has come. Then, what is the proper ways and means to cope with the necessary reforms towards inclusive labor markets? Is there no room for a corporatist way of policy-making in this context? South Korea is a proper country to test these questions. In 2016-2017, the revolutionary uprising of the mass in the name of the Candle Light demonstration had been followed by the impeachment of the President, Park Keun Hye. After that, the new center-left administration launched and pursued to strengthen inclusiveness in the labor markets such as rapid increases of the minimum wage and massive changes of the non-standard employment into a standard style, etc. As extension of such politics, the government also projected new initiatives to reform the social dialogue body by actively incorporating the KCTU, the relatively radical confederation of labor unions, which has rigidly taken distance to social dialogues for about two decades. However, such attempts could not achieve the ideal goal. Despite the ambitious strengthening of the tripartite social dialogue body, the KCTU failed to officially join in it. Its initiative to conclude grand-scaled social pacts in the middle of the pandemic was not realized either because the tentative form of the pact failed to be officially recognized inside the confederation, which led the leadership of the KCTU to resign. Such experiences contain meaningful sources for understanding the dilemmas and restraints of corporatist style of policy-making when countries attempt to strengthen the inclusiveness of labor markets. This paper analyses and discusses it.

Faced with significant socioeconomic challenges, high unemployment, high poverty rates, and slow economic growth, sub-Saharan Africa remains vulnerable to climate change. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of climate shocks on youth, agricultural, industrial and service employment. For this purpose, we use a difference in difference methodology to estimate the effects on panel data. We found that rising temperatures lead to losses in youth and agricultural employment. The most affected jobs are in countries with weak labor market regulation. We also found that as a consequence of high temperatures, a reallocation of labor from the agricultural sector to the industrial and service sectors. Similarly, we have observed that drought is the cause of significant agricultural and industrial employment job losses. These results demonstrate that adverse weather events are a real threat to jobs. These findings call on African governments to invest in mitigation and adaptation measures to address the multiple employment challenges.

There is a growing interest in decoupling economic growth from further resource use. One aspect of addressing the negative impacts on the environment is through a labor market instrument, namely working time. Although research on working time and environmental developments have evolved independently from each other, there has been a recent interest to look at these issues jointly, which is also the objective of this paper. In particular, this paper will investigate and quantify the empirical relationship between working time and environmental indicators across the EU countries.

Specifically, the paper uses a reformulation of the IPAT model based on Ehrlich and Holdren (1971) and Dietz and Rosa (1994) to estimate the environmental impact of a multiplication of factors such as population, affluence (e.g. economic growth or prosperity) and technological advancement. The reformulation allows to express environmental impacts (e.g. measured as CO2 emissions or ecological footprint) in terms of working hours and a number of other elements that could be relatively easily measured across countries. Compared to similar papers in the related literature, the current paper increases the country and period coverage and proposes an extension of the theoretical framework to include a sectoral perspective additionally.

The paper uses state-of-the-art econometric methods to estimate the impact of working hours on the environment taking into account a number of country-specific control variables within the theoretical framework. The estimated models include aggregate variables such as GDP, population, the share of employed individuals, annual working hours as well as a number of environmental impact indicators such as CO2 emissions, carbon or ecological footprint. The cross-country data is taken from publicly available sources such as Penn World Tables, the World Bank and Eurostat’s environmental statistics. The paper covers the period from 1950 until 2021 (depending on the availability of the dependent variable, this period can decrease to cover 1960-2015) and the EU countries as well as Norway, Switzerland and the UK.

The preliminary results confirm that there is a positive relationship between working hours and environmental pressures across the countries in the EU. In other words, more working hours lead to increased CO2 emissions and carbon footprint ceteris paribus. This might be suggestive of a scenario in which working time reduction, in addition to its positive association with improved well-being and work-life balance, could also be a way to decrease the environmental impacts and potentially slow down a major driver of climate change.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic crises have hamstrung many of the world’s lower-income and smaller economies, bringing along with it an increase in food insecurity among some of the most vulnerable. Financing this recovery will depend in part on the ability of many developing countries to mobilize resources from external sources. Remittances — a proportion of earnings from citizens working abroad and sent home to families — remain a crucial source of foreign financing for countries in Latin America and Caribbean and have served as an important buffer in helping families cope during crises such as those related to the pandemic. Remittances play a key role in meeting the target set forth in goal 10 of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, food security remains a serious concern for these countries where high inflation, amongst other things, have ensured that rising food prices continue to make food less affordable. This study evaluates the impact of workers’ remittances on food insecurity in Latin America and the Caribbean. The paper uses data from a Coronavirus survey of households covering over 200,000 individuals in Latin America and the Caribbean during an intense period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Preliminary estimates from OLS regressions suggest that remittances from abroad are associated with about 1.5 percent points (9.3 percent) decrease in food insecurity. We find heterogeneous effects across gender and region. The impact of remittances is most evident amongst females and individuals residing in Latin America. Our results also reveal that remittances from the USA have a stronger impact on reducing food insecurity than remittances from other parts of the world. Overall, our results are also robust to alternative specifications, such as propensity score matching. This research adds to the small body of literature on the effect of remittances on food insecurity and is consistent with the findings of these studies.

This study explores policy narratives in the case of the repatriation policy of Indonesian Migrant Workers (IMW) using a content analysis and semi-structured interview approach. This research aims to address the challenges and fill the gaps from previous study by providing insight into the dynamics that arose in the return phase of the IMW during the Covid-19 pandemic. The mass return of the migrant workers during the pandemic had the potential to increase the spread of the virus and unemployment in Indonesia, which was supposed to be anticipated by the Government. A content analysis was then conducted to show the public's reactions and opinions on the repatriation of migrant workers during the Covid-19 pandemic in the last four years (2020–2023) through social media, including public conversations about the efforts and policies of the Indonesian government in repatriating the workers. Data was collected by scraping conversations from Twitter using the Twitter Streaming Application Programming Interface (API) and a Python package called Tweepy. Subsequently, semi-structured interviews were conducted by asking questions to several stakeholders who were involved or had an influence in the repatriation to examine the direction of the repatriation policy during the pandemic.

The results of the Twitter analysis show that the public had various opinions about the repatriation of IMW during the pandemic, and that each of these opinions was correlated with the Indonesian Government's policy. Public opinions that emerged ranged from fear of increased Covid-19 spread to potential other impacts generated by the policy. On the other hand, there was a group of people who were worried about the condition of IMW remaining abroad, particularly in places like Wuhan, which was where the virus originated. The results of the semi-structured interviews revealed several issues that arose during the efforts to repatriate IMW, including the challenges posed by undocumented workers and the use of quarantine sites to reduce the likelihood of Covid-19 transmission. An informant from the government sector also stated that public opinions influenced the government's actions and policies regarding the repatriation of migrant workers during the pandemic; in some cases, public conversations on social media also provided information to the government. Research findings have strengthened the theory that discusses policy networks, where advocacy coalitions and integrated vertical government are the most important elements in supporting the success of policy formulation.

This paper examines why India and other South Asian countries require specific macroeconomic and industrial policies so as to reap their demographic dividends. South Asia will account for 30.6% -- and India alone, 16.5% -- of the worldwide increase in working age population over the next three decades (2020-2050). At the same time, there is a possibility that these countries may grow old before ever becoming rich, as their population structures will begin ageing from 2025 onwards. The slowing export demand from western economies and the falling labour intensity of manufacturing add a layer of urgency to the issues facing these countries, which still have very large proportions of their workforce attached to a low value-adding agriculture (40%) and the informal sector (90%)

The crisis relating to economic and employment growth in India and South Asia can be overcome only by widening the sources of demand, by raising the consumption of and investment for the poor and the young. As Stephen Marglin and Amit Bhaduri had argued (1988), wages are an important component of costs to the capitalists, but they are also a source of demand. They had advocated ‘wage-led’ economic growth or policies to raise workers’ wages and incomes, which will help expand the size of the markets and recover the economy from depression.

Increasing the public expenditures on health, education and other social sectors will be crucial for boosting aggregate demand and realizing the demographic dividend. These investments will bring in not only positive outcomes in living standards and future economic growth, but also new employment opportunities -- as teachers, health professionals, and so on. Investments in the social sectors will be particularly helpful for States such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, which have a growing young population. However, as a proportion of all expenditures by the Union government, development expenditures fell from 49.4% in 2013-14 to 42.9% in 2019-20.

Given the problem of ageing population in many parts of the globe, the rising numbers of the young in India as well as in other South Asian countries offer a new and potential source of demand that could revitalize the global economy. However, translating this potential requires policies that help raise wages and incomes of poor workers. These are policies that very often go against the tenets of mainstream economic fundamentals. Clearly, there is need for greater resolve at multiple levels to implement such path breaking measures.

Youth employment is high in the global development agenda, particularly after the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on young people’s jobs, incomes, education and training. This study synthesizes the empirical evidence of the past three decades from impact evaluations of youth-targeted Active Labour Market Programmes to provide recommendations on tailored interventions to boost labour market outcomes of youth. In particular, the study assesses the role that context, youth characteristics, evaluation features, programme design and implementation have in moderating the impact of youth ALMPs on employment, earnings and business performance outcomes.

The study relies on a systematic search and selection process that resulted in 228 studies published between 1990 and 2022, which assessed 220 interventions within 171 ALMPs across 62 countries worldwide. To synthesize the evidence and assess what determines success of ALMPs, standardized mean differences (SMDs) were computed and a meta-analysis was conducted.

We find that youth-focused ALMPs are effective in improving the labour market outcomes of youth, particularly in low- and middle-income countries as compared to high-income countries, on average. Overall, entrepreneurship promotion and skills training interventions report larger impacts than employment services and subsidized employment programmes. This result contrasts with earlier literature suggesting that the most recent evidence captures more clearly the differential effect of certain intervention types. This does not imply, however, that those programs should be strictly preferred to others; much depends on the needs of beneficiaries and programme design. In high-income countries, studies of skills training interventions report the largest impacts, while in the low- and middle-income countries, the largest impacts are reported in studies of entrepreneurship interventions. The study concludes that ALMPs are effective policy measures to improve labour market outcomes of youth, particularly those hardest hit by the COVID-19 recession such as young women and younger youth. The findings support the case for urgent and targeted investments in youth-targeted ALMPs to address the heightened youth employment challenge. Finally, the study offers a deep-dive on Africa, leveraging the growing evidence on youth employment from the region.

Across low- and middle-income countries young people are at an elevated risk of unemployment. The school to work transition is often a time of income vulnerability in the life course, laying the foundation for unfolding work trajectories which are still highly gendered. We explore how early self-employment (as linked to informality) contributes to current and future work quality or supports subsistence for young men and women.

The informal sector varies considerably across countries (Williams and Kedir, 2018), making cross-national studies of value for identifying factors influencing its extent and dynamics (Gërxhani, 2004) and the potential for formalisation of labour markets. In pursuing this possibility, our study compares across the contexts of Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam.

We address three research questions. Firstly, to what extent does self-employment provide work for young people making the transition from education to employment? In addressing this question, we examine the type of work engaged in by young men and women as self-employed and how it compares with work in the formal sector. Secondly, does self-employment lead to employment in the formal economy and, if so, for whom does it serve this function? Thirdly, can self-employment be high-quality work or lead to it for young people (is it a stepping-stone, a trap or an important means of subsisting)?

We use data from the older cohort of Young Lives, a longitudinal cohort study conducted in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam over 6 time points to date. We focus on the surveys conducted at ages 19 and 22. At ages 19 and 22, self-employment rates showed considerable varation across the four countries. At age 19 self-employment accounted for 12% of those in work in Ethiopia; 21% in India, 6% in Peru and 5.5% in Vietnam. By age 22

(when the majority-78 percent- were in paid employment) self-employment levels were un changed in Ethiopia and India; had fallen in Vietnam to 4 percent and risen to 10 percent in Peru. Females were just as likely as males to be self-employed across all the countries. The results show that self-employment provides lower quality work than in the public sector or private companies for young people, in line with Carmichael et al., (2022). Nevertheless, the analysis explores whether self-employment acts as a stepping-stone to formal sector employment for some young people or if it serves as an important source of income support and how the institutional context is relevant.

Introduction

Entering the labour market on a fixed-term contract (FTC) can act as a stepping-stone towards a prosperous career or it can keep individuals trapped in precarious employment. To increase our understanding of how the economic and policy context influences whether FTCs act as a stepping-stone or a trap, we compare the quality of career trajectories of employees who entered the Dutch labour market before a policy change aimed at reducing labour market dualization (cohort 1) with the career trajectories of those who entered after (cohort 2). Because these two cohorts entered the labour market in different economic circumstances, this allowed us to study changes in the economic and policy context simultaneously.

Methodology

We studied employees who entered the labour market on an FTC in either 2009 or 2015. We measured employment quality with the following indicators: contract type, self-employment, receiving benefits and income. The policy context was measured by including data from collective labour agreements on restrictions regarding the use of FTCs and the economic context by including a variable on level of unemployment and economic outlook of employers. We used mixture hidden Markov models to identify employment quality states, and transitions between these states.

Contribution to literature

Previous research on the trap versus stepping-stone literature found mixed results. As of yet, it is largely unclear how changing contextual factors influence whether a stepping-stone or trap scenario is more likely to occur. This study adds to the literature by investigating how changing policy and economic circumstances influence the likelihood of each of the two scenarios occurring. In addition, by using a processual approach and monthly data, we are able to study careers more comprehensively.

Findings

We distinguished eight states, including an inactive state, a state in which the majority of individuals receive benefits and a state in which all individuals have an agency or on-call contract. In the 2009 cohort, transitions to both the inactive and benefits state occur more often and transitions out of these states occur less often. In addition, transitions to the agency/on-call cluster occur more often in the 2009 cohort than in the 2015 cohort. The results indicate that careers of the 2009 cohort, which entered a more dualized labour market and in worse economic conditions, were more precarious.

Strategies for addressing decent work deficits in global value chains include global labor campaigns (Brookes 2019, McCullum 2014), labor reform and enforcement (Anner 2008, Cook 2010), labor clauses in free trade agreements (Polaski, Nolan García and Rioux 2022), and enforceable brand agreements (Blasi and Bair 2019; Donaghey and Reinecke 2018). In this paper, I argue interactions among different mechanisms constitute regulatory innovations that account for the most successful efforts to reduce decent work deficits.

Public governance includes labor law reforms, national institution building, and labor rights clauses in free trade agreements. Enforceable Brand Agreements are negotiated between labor and MNCs. And grassroots labor organizing includes efforts to establish trade unions and bargain collectively. Which combination of regulatory mechanisms matter most and how they interact to ensure innovation outcomes is shaped by national and sector contexts and actor strategies. To explore this argument, the author examines the case studies of textiles in Honduras and auto parts in Mexico.

In Honduras, worker mobilization following a factory closure led to an Enforceable Brand Agreement between labor and Fruit of the Loom (FOTL) that contributed to unionization at multiple FOTL factories. Organizing expanded further following a CAFTA labor complaint, modest labor law reforms, and intense worker mobilizing. By 2021, 44% of garment export workers enjoyed the benefits of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). Based on an original survey of 387 workers administered by the author, findings indicate that, when compared to workers who do not have a CBA, Honduran garment workers with CBAs are significantly more likely to earn better wages, work fewer hours, have lunch subsidies, and enjoy company-provided transportation to work. They are also 20.3% less likely to face verbal abuse and 10.7% less likely to experience sexual harassment.

In Mexico, worker organizing, significant labor reform, and an innovative FTA labor complaint mechanism --which includes a rapid response mechanism and sanctions on individual firms—contributed to favorable outcomes for labor. Fourteen new independent unions were formed between 2019 and 2022. Several of these unions are now bargaining their first collective bargaining agreement. The author will conduct field research in Mexico in March and April 2023 to gather more detailed data on outcomes and be able to present those findings at the June 2023 RDW conference and compare and contrast them with the findings on Honduras.

As an essential component of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, cobalt is a critical raw material that is paramount in technologies for a low-carbon and green economy. The global cobalt market is highly concentrated, with more than half of the cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, more than half of the cobalt refined by Chinese refiners, and most cobalt-containing batteries sourced by large companies in Asia, Europe and North America. A research report released by Amnesty International in 2016 highlighted the severity of the problem of child labour in the artisanal and small-scale mining sector in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Moreover, disruptions caused by COVID-19 further impact the initiatives and processes aiming for responsible mineral supply chains. The refocused international attention on labour and human rights issues in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has triggered a rapid co-evolution of various public and private governance responses to governance deficits on decent work in the global cobalt supply chain.

While increasing literature started to pay attention to the changing dynamics of the global cobalt supply chain, little scholarship has questioned the recent labour governance initiatives’ legitimacy and effectiveness and their implications for decent work in a globalized economy. To address these research gaps, this paper critically examines the co-evolution of various initiatives and their implications for decent work in the global cobalt supply chain. The paper incorporates literature review, legal analysis and qualitative document analysis to verify data and findings. Taking a transnational labour law approach, it examines the development of public and private labour governance initiatives across various levels and sites of law: international, regional, national, and subnational (e.g. the workplace, local communities, and corporations) levels.

The paper identifies an emerging multi-level governance framework initiated to eliminate child labour in the artisanal mining sector at the bottom of the global cobalt supply chain. It finds that the framework is complex, pluralistic, and decentred. The various actors seem hardly coordinated, considering their different mandates, interests, and approaches. The various initiatives and promoted labour norms have been highly diverse and fragmented. Furthermore, this paper identifies three notable limitations that must be addressed carefully for the multi-level governance framework to benefit workers in the global cobalt supply chain: (a) the lack of a coherent approach to ensuring decent work, (b) a worker-centred approach to developing governance initiatives, and (c) the questionable effectiveness and hidden costs of private governance initiatives.

The expansion of domestic and regional value chains (DVCs/RVCs) within the global South is increasingly recognised, with Southern lead firms playing an important role shaping them. Global Value Chain (GVC) research has long analysed private governance by Northern lead firms, and decent work outcomes in sourcing countries. More recently GVC analysis has shifted towards analysing power relations under more diverse forms of private and public governance. However, we have limited understanding of the implications for the relation between public and private governance of decent work within expanding DVCs and RVCs across sectors within the global South. This paper draws on cross-country and sectoral analysis of horticultural and garments DVCs/RVCs in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It focuses on horticultural production in South Africa and Kenya, and garments production in South Africa, Eswatini and Lesotho. The following questions are addressed: What are the implications of expanding DVCs and RVCs in SSA for public-private governance of decent work? Who or what are the drivers of governance across expanding DVCs and RVCs in SSA? We reveal that limited private governance of decent work across all RVCs/DVCs is starting a ‘benign transition’ towards public regulation of value chains involving deeper integration of public-private standards. Whilst this is more pronounced in horticulture (due to health and trade risks), nascent shifts are also occurring in African garments. This emerging trend towards ‘polycentric governance’ in RVCs/DVCs is underpinned by a shift away from northern lead firms’ dyadic and direct power, towards a more diffuse and collective form of power, wherein nation states and national civil society organisations (CSOs) potentially play increasingly significant roles in the governance of decent work across value chains.

The dynamics of capital and labour undergo significant changes as various production processes across sectors are being brought into the fold of digitalisation, particularly at the cost of informal women workers whose work traverse sectors, and who do not self-identify as 'productive' workers. The growing trend of agricultural digitalisation, particularly in the Global South, has solidified existing class precarities, and has modified land relations among several marginalised agricultural workers and farmers. Not just this, with land sovereignty being increasingly pegged to data sovereignty, or the lack thereof, there is also an emerging threat to tenure rights. Against the threat of digitalisation enabling and mutating existing precarities at the cost of women informal agricultural workers from the Global South, this research study, in collaboration with SEWA Cooperative Federation examines two questions: (1) How socio-economic trust, emerging from a cooperative mode of production, can challenge the skewed labour-capital dynamic, and (2) What kind of alternative data systems can be created by imbibing the socio-political phenomenon of trust into SEWA’s current process of building a worker-designed and worker-led data cooperative through democratic co-design, with the aim to resist the extension of Big Tech into Global South food systems. In this paper, we theorise through a Critical Grounded Theory approach (N = 25 women members of SEWA) on the often underexplored concept of economic trust as the socio-political basis for SEWA’s success in executing a cooperative mode of production. Through a follow-up Participatory Action Research of platform co-design, we demonstrate that a successful “physical-digital” data cooperative model - pegged on SEWA’s existing, unique hyperlocal Farmer Facilitation Centres (FFC) - must embed within itself the dynamics of economic trust, and is in fact a necessary exploration in the unique context of uneven digital access found in the Global South in order to challenge emerging digital platform firms (Nicoli & Paltrineri, 2019). The study highlights the need for techno-design to be informed by socio-economic narratives, and the intricate process of executing the often-cited digital commons contextualised by the digitalisation challenges of the Global South. With over 300,000 active women members who are often caste and class-marginalised, SEWA is one of the largest labour-managed cooperatives in India that is completely self-organised and led by informal workers; techno-design blueprints emerging from this collaboration are significant addition to the body of work on executing platform cooperative models.

The concepts of job-security, rights at work and social dialogue but also personal meaning, dignity and purpose lie at the heart of the ILOs call for a sustainable and inclusive post-Covid recovery focused on the concept of Decent-Work (Brill, 2021). However, for vulnerable workers, a reinforced digital-capitalism and the dominance of new forms of platform work has meant experiencing increased flexibilization, technological-unemployment, job-precarity, social insecurity and often a loss of agency and respect. This radical labour-market restructuring and path towards “rationalized unaccountability” (Vesa and Tiernari, 2020), has exposed the limitations of current models of governance and social policy to regulate the negative social-economic consequences resulting from dramatic technology (AI) - driven change and disruption.

A continued embedded institutional inequality however presents a dilemma and area of potential future conflict for HRM as digitalization is now dramatically transforming practices across a wide area of HR operational responsibilities (Strohmeier, 2020). On the other hand, the emergence of the digital-organized phenomena of digital activism and technology-enabled, system-critical, virtual democratic communities (George and Leidner, 2019), shows that the digital revolution (apart from creating negative challenges and disruption), also offers opportunities for collective resistance and positive social change (Young, Selander, Vaast, 2019), particularly for marginalized and vulnerable groups (Stornaiuolo and Thomas, 2017). HRM has however failed to perceive the inherent potential of democratic digital collaboration in the search for more ethical, sustainable and stakeholder-friendly strategies, at least for platform-workers. Our research therefore asks the questions:

What is the role of institutions (organizations and HRM) in addressing digital-reinforced institutional inequalities?

How can different but complementary collectivist organizing theoretical approaches be integrated to develop more democratic and collaborative digital frameworks to enhance the participation and social inclusion of vulnerable workers, especially platform workers?

We examine the role of business institutions (Organizations and HRM), in addressing challenges to decent work and workers agency (through the advancing digitalization of HRM), from a common-good HRM perspective (Aust, Matthews and Muller-Camen, 2020). Specifically, we suggest the integration of Albareda and Sison’s (2020) solidarity-based, collective model of Commons Organizing and the anti-hierarchical concept of Digital Organizing as a comprehensive, sustainable solution. Although the open virtual-spaces of our proposed new pro-welfare, self-organizing framework of “Digital Commons Organizing” cannot be expected to fully replace physical workplace democratic-zones of reciprocal interaction and social dialogue (Rosa, 2022), we argue, they can act as a stepping-stone towards a future more radical organizational structural change.

(Track III. The role of institutions in ensuring decent work and universal social protection)

Collective bargaining has weakened as a regulatory mechanism between organised labour and employers. Nevertheless, collective bargaining remains a recognised institution for managing labour-management interests. Globally, high unemployment and economic insecurity are prominent outcomes and challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in South Africa where new and growing workplace anti-migrant labour concerns intersect with historic socio-economic inequalities and global challenges, the role of collective bargaining in addressing these challenges in this context appears limited. Using this multiple-crisis context, I ask what is the role of collective bargaining in addressing emerging challenges. Thematic and content analysis of semi-structured interviews with unions and employers, newspaper articles and collective agreements are used to explore two main research questions: 1) what role have unions played in addressing emerging socio-economic challenges experienced by labour and employers and 2) what are the responses of collective bargaining in addressing the emerging crisis? Findings suggest that unions can be instrumental in the framing and advancement of non-economic interests of employees and enablers in the establishment of policies and agreements that aim to resolve emerging challenges of employment insecurity and inequality. In addition, the study demonstrates the extension of collective bargaining in addressing challenges emerging from the coalescence of workplace and societal issues both at Sector and plant levels. The study extends the literature on collective bargaining in a multi-crisis context; further provides practical implications for parties and the institution of collective bargaining in a multi-crisis. The study further contributes to the debate on the usefulness of collective bargaining and its relevance in emerging workplace challenges.

The Covid pandemic induced rapid changes in work organisation and generated a debate on how frontline service work should be valued and protected. This paper draws on research on the role of collective bargaining in supporting frontline workers in health, social care and food retail during the pandemic. Twelve case studies, four per sector, from ten countries (the UK, Portugal, Slovakia, Ireland, Norway, Hungary, Canada, New Zealand, Chile and Kenya) drew on interview data and documentary analysis to inform the ILO’s flagship report on collective bargaining.

The cases were chosen as potentially ‘best cases’ of actions to protect or revalue frontline workers. Even so positive outcomes were limited: in some cases collective bargaining did prevent the most negative impacts on frontline workers – eg by addressing unpaid wages in Kenya, absence of support for working parents in Hungary and pay cuts in Chile. Collective bargaining forums also provided a ready-made conduit for productive discussions on managing the pandemic, improving safeguards and support for workers. However, the effectiveness of social dialogue strongly depended upon the generosity of state policies towards sick pay, working parents, PPE provision, and occupational health and safety. Where state support remained limited, collective bargaining could at most provide only partial compensation. In some cases trade unions even had to resist state-imposed undemocratic and coercive powers over labour, including suspending collective bargaining, suspending rights to resign or to protest, extending overtime and working hours without consultation etc.

Some collective bargaining actions to revalue frontline labour were identified, but often the work towards these had begun pre-Covid. The new demands brought on by the pandemic in some cases eased these discussions but in others, they were suspended or delayed. Overall, few changes could be attributed to the rising profile of frontline workers in the pandemic. The exceptions were a rise in hourly pay in one UK food retail company, progress towards sector-level bargaining for social care in Scotland and the nurses’ first collective agreement in Kiambu county in Kenya. Most voluntary actions by employers or the state involved short-term bonuses in only the first COVID wave, with no plans for long-term change. The paper reflects on the role of collective bargaining in protecting and revaluing frontline workers not only in the COVID pandemic crisis but also as in the aftermath a cost-of-living crisis has emerged to threaten these workers’ already precarious working conditions and standards of living.

(in collaboration with Praveen Jha, Bruno De Conti)

This contribution will compare reactions to Covid 19 and the role of trade unions in the Brazilian, German, and Indian automotive sectors. Central dimensions will be: the governance of value chains, national systems of industrial relations, and the impact of these on the conditions of work and industry innovation. The structure of the presentation will be the following: After a theoretical discussion, I will build on analyses from three research projects to examine industry trajectories, over the past twenty years until the present. Methodologically, I do this on the basis of selected case studies and expert interviews.

If we consider the result of end-stage development in Brazil, plant unions were struggling to maintain employment levels during the Covid 19 pandemic despite the former president Bolsonaro's weakening of union rights. In India, falling real wages received an additional blow during the pandemic. The vulnerability of employees is significantly more precarious due to the high share of informal employment, the lack of their employment security and welfare state protection, the weak role of trade unions, and the long-standing market-despotic labor-regulation regime in India. From an overall perspective, neither national sector can be regarded as a winner in the global restructuring wave led by core countries of the automotive industry. This is due to a lack of effective industrial policy in both countries, but also to the strategies of the headquarters and the inability of the local actors to intervene in this global division of technological upgrading.

Technological upgrading of the automobile industry in Germany was done in particular in cooperation with the social partners. This is because the German model of corporatist arrangements of a coordinated market economy with a strong role for the social partners and corresponding formal co-determination rights, organizational strength and institutional power resources, whose structures could be drawn on during the pandemic to cushion negative economic effects for the workforce, came into play here.

The theoretical contribution will be to understand the role of Brazil and India as two emerging economies in light of a set of interrelated factors. These include existing power asymmetries in the value chain, the capacities of national industrial policies, and low-road competition in labor policies, albeit to varying degrees nationally.

The COVID-19 pandemic involved the urgent need to adjust and expand Latin America’s non-contributory social protection systems to respond to the growing need for assistance from poor, vulnerable and middle-income households. Greater demands for the welfare state’s most important reforms triggered social mobilisation in several countries in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Furthermore, a large part of the literature has focused on the short-term impacts of the crisis, but we need to analyse the medium-term impacts of the social policy expansion. Thus, the COVID-19 crisis is an example of plausibility, but there are serious apprehensions about the sustainability of the innovations introduced recently.

From March 2020 to October 2021, ECLAC reported that 33 countries from Latin America and the Caribbean adopted 468 initiatives, of which 378 were non-contributory emergency measures. Nonetheless, 50.2% of the regional population received an emergency transfer which is more than double the regular coverage of conditional cash transfers. According to the ILO, 30 million jobs in the region were lost due to unemployment and hours reductions. However, the starting point was a lack of comprehensive unemployment insurance. This paper addresses the following research question: what are the short and long-term challenges to including outsiders in social protection programmes in the Latin American region? We examine informal employment during the pandemic and how countries in the region implemented different policies that increased either transfers or labour policies to informal workers. We argue that this resulted in the temporal expansion of the welfare state in the region, which could be seen as a new wave of social policy expansion in the region to the one experienced in the early 2000s. However, as the crisis evolved, the focus changed with a reversal of the policies implemented during the pandemic. Consequently, the social protection response showcases the limitation of the fragmented nature of the welfare systems in the region.

This paper systematically analyses cash transfers and labour policies implemented in Latin American countries, focusing on informal workers, to evaluate the short and medium-term impact of social policy expansion during the COVID-19 pandemic. By conducting this research, this paper contributes to valuing how the expansion of the welfare state during the pandemic in the region adopted a temporal illusion or an institutional response. This study also values and foresees the potential conflicts that the reversal/institutionalisation of social policy innovations could have on social cohesion and democracy in the region.

India has a plethora of social protection schemes and programmes that were put to the test when the Central government of India announced a sudden and complete national lockdown to tackle the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. The curfew-like situation thwarted economic and commercial activities resulting in job losses across different sectors; completely restricting the movement of people and social activities leading to heightened panic. Furthermore, access to essential services such as health, transport and education became extremely limited. This paper, ‘Processes of Non-state Relief Work during the Covid-19 Lockdown in Delhi – A Lesson in Inclusive Social Protection’ is based on primary data collected between December 2020 to June 2021 from four informal settlements (slums) in Delhi, inhabited largely by families of workers lacking in social security cover and poor access to social protection. The study makes use of qualitative case study methodology and incorporates a gender-responsive intersectional framework to highlight the various gendered and intersectional vulnerabilities that came to the fore on account of Covid-19 national lockdown, the actors involved, and local collective action by non-state actors in the respective slum areas. In all, 121 semi-structured interviews were conducted in a hybrid mode, whereby interviews were held with participants through an online medium but in the physical presence of a local area facilitator of a civil society organisation.

The study highlights the cruciality of public services such as water, toilets, and sanitation services, as well as adequate housing as a basic right under social protection. Additionally, the need to universalize social protection was ascertained to address the extreme crises faced by especially vulnerable populace living in informal settlements such as inter-state migrant workers. Further, the study emphasises the importance of introducing an employment guarantee programme for the urban poor towards job and income security. Notably, the findings from the study highlight the import of contextual knowledge in identifying specific and intersectional vulnerabilities in providing care and protection, as well as the social capital knitted by the non-state actors to build resilience and social cohesion. Thus, the study challenges the targeted and ‘one size fits all’ approach of social protection by the state suggesting greater state and civil society collaborations for sharing of knowledge and expertise towards a more effective, inclusive, and sustainable social protection and security cover.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the working world was experiencing accelerated changes driven by several factors. Some of the most important being the need of jobs transformation and the development of new technical and soft skills, as well as technological factors, among others. When the pandemic occurred, most of the economic activities stopped due to the lockdown led by the sanitary crisis which boosted the changes that were happening, and the opportunities they brought became more visible.

According to a report published by the International Labor Organization in 2021, during the pandemic, 26 million of workers lost their jobs in the Latin American and Caribbean region. However, formal employment and the economic situation is currently improving in almost of the world. This article aims to analyze whether this improvement is a consequence of the legal actions adopted by governments of Ecuador, Peru and Colombia, -in order to save employments- or just an expected economic reactivation.

The legal labor actions implemented by those countries could fit the term of “flexicurity”, since they provided security for both parties of a labor agreement, as well as flexibility for employers. Some of them were: working hours and salary reduction, special leaves, extraordinary regulations concerning annual leave and remote work, flexible and less stable agreements, among others.

Now that the end of the sanitary emergency was officially declared by the World Health Organization, it is necessary to know the current consequences of the legal measures taken during the pandemic, with special attention to the respect for workers’ rights. Based on that, this article seeks to answer the question: Did the labor laws implemented by the governments of Ecuador, Colombia and Peru achieve their goals related to employment sustainability, social security system straightening and the reduction of the existing gap in the labor market in the Covid-19 pandemic contexts?

The result of the analysis show that in the governments of the countries that were mentioned, the objectives set by governments were partially achieved.

During the 1990s, labor market experts considered the United States a model of job creation, a liberal market economy with low unemployment. During the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic, however, US unemployment peaked at higher levels than most European countries, and labor-force participation has slumped to below-OECD-average levels. Meanwhile, other countries, like Germany, have avoided mass unemployment and seen labor force participation increase.

Given the lack of strong institutions in the US that could “decommodify” the labor power, this may seem puzzling. Incentives to work are indeed strong, since cash benefit levels are low, public benefits cover relatively small shares of the jobless population, and health insurance is normally employer-provided. But it is less puzzling if we keep in mind that the active labor market schemes that could “recommodify” labor power are relatively under-resourced, and that the criminal justice system creates severe barriers to employment for millions of workers, barriers that intersect with race.

This paper examines the regulation of labor market transitions through the eyes of American and German workers who experienced a spell of joblessness during the pandemic. 80 diverse US participants were interviewed up to three times between autumn 2020 and spring 2023, asked about experiences with job loss, job search, employment, accessing government support, and mutual aid during the pandemic. 50 participants in Germany were interviewed once in fall 2021 or spring 2022 about the same issues. Interview transcripts were coded in MaxQDA to identify transitions between employment, unemployment, and “not in labor force”, and develop a categorization. The project seeks to import ideas from European sociological debates into the US discussion of unemployment, which has long been dominated by economists.

A central argument of this paper is that cash assistance is important in enabling unemployed workers to stay in the labor force, perhaps even more so than active labor market schemes. Not only does it help workers survive at a time when they are most vulnerable – during spells of unemployment – it can also make it possible to survive with very low earnings from precarious jobs or self-employment. Contrary to much of the literature on labor market dualization, this paper argues that the German Hartz IV system is far better-calibrated to support workers on the edge of the labor market than its American counterparts. Along with this support, however, comes discipline that makes it difficult for workers to escape poverty.

With the transformation to a green economy and Industry 4.0, many employees will have to change jobs. In the primary segment of the dual German employment model with strong co-determination by works councils, internal change dominates. In the secondary segment without collective bargaining agreements and strong works councils, external change dominates often associated with high income losses and insufficient investment in training. The employees are dependent on the support of public labour market labour market policy, which, since the Hartz laws, has focused on rapid placement ("work first").

Since 2007 there has been an increasing shortage of skilled workers in Germany and, under pressure from the trade unions, there has been a renewed change of policy in labour market policy towards "train first", which will be supplemented in 2023 by further reforms that have already been decided. One can almost speak of a reversal of the Hartz laws in this policy area. Added to this the new government raised the age limit for the means-tested grants and loans for continuing education from the current 30 years to 45 years. These grants and loans can be used to finance school-leaving qualifications, vocational training, master craftsman and technician courses as well as higher education studies.

In this paper, firstly, the risks of involuntary external mobility in the German dual labour market will be demonstrated by analysing wage data. Secondly, a successful internal transformation with strong co-determination is described using a case study from the automotive industry. Thirdly, the gradual establishment of new institutions of an inclusive system of CET is described and its effects on CET participation is analysed. Fourthly, it is shown that it has not yet been possible to stop the decline in collective bargaining coverage. The risks of high wage losses in the event of an involuntary change of company are the Achilles' heel on the path to a just transition. The coalition government has agreed on the introduction of a prevailing wage law for public contracts of the federal government. Also the implementation of the European Minimum Directive offers opportunities here. According to this directive, all countries with less than 80 per cent collective bargaining coverage must carry out consultations to increase collective bargaining coverage.

The Scandinavian countries and Austria were models for the development of an inclusive system of continuing education in Germany. Conversely, other countries can now learn from the German reforms in the transformation process.

Policy debates are placing renewed emphasis on upskilling and reskilling policies as means to improving decent work in an era of rapid transformative phenomena. This is based on the understanding that skills development increases workers’ capability to adapt to changes in the world of work, facilitating workers’ transitions to quality employment, in contexts where these are jeopardized by crises and transformations.

While some knowledge exists regarding the effectiveness of traditional learning policies (e.g., formal TVET), research is scant with regards to less standardized work-based learning measures (Eichhorst et al. 2015). Likewise, the literature is even thinner regarding the effects on work quality and wellbeing, particularly for minority and vulnerable groups (Eichhorst et al. 2012; Hofmann et al. 2022). Filling this gap in research is, however, key to support people who are at a disadvantaged position in the labour market.

This paper helps fill this gap in research by evaluating the Work Based Learning (WBL) initiative, implemented by the ILO Office for Turkey to promote the participation of Syrian refugees and Turkish citizens in the formal labour market. The programme focuses on increasing formal employment of disadvantaged groups, through support to vocational and professional skills development and an employment subsidy for participating firms. We thus study the WBL’s employment and decent work outcomes, as well as the skills gains of participants.

To disentangle the intervention’s causal effects on participants’ outcomes, we employ a regression discontinuity design (RDD), exploiting the fact that individuals are only eligible to participate when they have been without a formal job for at least six months. This allows us to compare similar treatment and control groups. We draw data on all individuals’ (whether they are selected or not) pre-participation situations at the time of registration. Then, we follow selected individuals and a sample of non-selected ones to gather information at the time when individuals join the programme, as well as 7 and 13 months after, to measure post-participation medium-term effects.

Ultimately, we assess the success of the WBL programme in placing people in non-subsidized formal jobs and the sustainability of these jobs. As the impact evaluation is ongoing, the presentation will focus on the mid-evaluation results based on the first two rounds of data collection. Discussing the programme’s implementation, the empirical strategy, and the preliminary data analysis will be key to test and improve the credibility of the approach and ensure the accuracy of policy recommendations.

Introduction

This article intends to analyze the Brazilian New Procurement Law, published in 2021, and its applicability to fight modern slavery and to promote decent work. The study focuses on the efficiency of the new law in prohibiting those condemned for modern slavery from contracting with public institutions. The goal is to make a critical analysis, identifying the probable gaps in the public policy, presenting some possible solutions to guarantee the efficiency of the prohibition. The law has been published during the COVID-19 crisis which increased unemployment and the number of people living under the line of poverty. This situation surely led to the increasing of workers submitted to modern slavery in Brazil. In 2021, 1.959 workers were found and freed from slavery-like working conditions in Brazil, the highest number since 2013.

Research questions

The study pretends to seek the answers to some of the following questions: how potentially efficient can the prohibition imposed by the procurement law, based on the chosen parameters and the time of the judicial and public procurement? What are the possible gaps and solutions to make sure public money won´t be destined for people and companies that submit workers to modern slavery?

Methodology

The study used the oficial datas and numbers provided by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security and the Labor Prosecution Office. The purpose was to analyze the inspection procedures that identified slave labor between 2019 and 2021 and to determine how many of those Labor inspectorate documents culminated in conduct adjustment agreements within the Labor prosecution. We sought to evaluate whether a significant percentage of these agreements would indeed be positive, since, in this way, even when companies expressly recognize the existence of slavery conditions, they can still be part of public procurement, once the law requires a judicial sentence to prohibit their participation. We also analyzed the number of civil actions filed by Labor prosecutors between 2019 and 2021, in order to seek if the convictions in such cases have had the effect intended by law.

Contribution to literature and findings

Analyzing the parameters used by the Labor Inspectorate and the Judiciary system to identify cases of slavery and how the public Procurement new Law uses them to apply its prohibition is key to understanding the effectiveness of this public policy. It is urgent to prevent the public treasury could be used by human rights exploiters.

Introduction: Following reports of forced labour and widespread labour abuses in the Malaysian rubber glove industry during the Covid-19 crisis, over the past three years the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued five import bans on various of Malaysia’s world-leading glove manufacturers. There is however limited evidence on the effectiveness of import bans in addressing forced labour and/or labour rights abuses in global supply chains, with very little research existing on this emerging topic.

Our study asked: What are the consequences of the U.S. forced labour import bans on the working conditions of glove workers in Malaysia? Can import bans be an effective tool for addressing forced labour and/or labour rights abuses in global supply chains?

Methodology: To answer these questions we followed the media content analysis approach developed by Altheide and Schneider (2013) and Patterson et al (2016). A total of 76 quality news articles from countries including the UK, U.S. and Malaysia were collected and analysed between September 2022 and January 2023. Findings were triangulated to enhance validity and reliability.

Contribution and Findings: The U.S. import bans are having intended and unintended consequences able to positively influence debt-bondage remediation and the working and living conditions of glove workers in Malaysia in the short-term, but more research is needed to fully understand the exact short and long-term impacts on workers, on the business models of producers and suppliers, and on Malaysia’s labour governance. Several factors influence the effectiveness of forced labour import bans, such as the market share they affect, and more research is needed to fully understand the precise pathways of impact. Decent work drivers are however complex and multifaceted, and any single regulatory intervention is unlikely, on its own, to effectively eliminate forced labour or strengthen labour standards in a sustainable way. Whilst the recent U.S. import bans have encouraged rubber glove companies and the Malaysian government to temporarily take steps to improve labour standards as strategy to protect exports, achieving long-term decent work in global supply chains requires coordinated multi-country regulatory action. In the Malaysian rubber glove sector this involves, among other, complementing purchasing countries’ import ban regulation with meaningful ethical procurement and supply chain due diligence legislation and enforcement, adequate labour and migrant-worker legislation and enforcement in Malaysia, and effective regulation of the recruitment industry in migrant-worker sending countries.

Introduction: In the last decades the standing of placement firms in enlisting workers for many employment sectors has strengthened significantly. Despite the ascension of placement firms, however, there is a lacuna in the legal and sociological writing that deals with them in general, and with the division of responsibility for preventing discrimination against candidates in acceptance to work.

Purpose: This study focused on an issue that has hardly been researched to date: discrimination processes applying to socially diverse job candidates based on a third factor—placement agencies. Our aim was twofold: to expose the existence of discrimination mechanisms in placement processes by means of placement agencies, and to examine which legal tools can contend with these discrimination mechanisms.

Design: This study combines empirical-qualitative research with an examination of the legal tools can contend with these discrimination mechanisms. Due to the complexity and elusiveness of proving discrimination in hiring processes, we conducted semi-structured in -depth interviews with 25 recruitment managers in business organizations that use the services of placement agencies, and 25 recruiters in placement agencies. The interviews were conducted in a face-to-face meeting with interviewees in their workplaces. Each interview lasted 60-90 minutes. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed. The interviews were analysed using the anchored in field theory method, by means of a cyclical process of identifying content categories and interpreting the relations between the various categories arising from the data.

Findings: Business organizations and placement agencies maintain direct and indirect discrimination mechanisms that harm the placement chances of vulnerable social groups. In addition, there is a significant gap between the severity of the phenomenon and the legal and judicial relief that currently exists for contending with these discrimination mechanisms.

Contribution: This study observes in depth a disturbing phenomenon in the labour market which hasn’t yet been discussed at sufficient length - discrimination mechanisms of socially diverse jobseekers in hiring processes. We suggest possible reliefs for the purpose of constraining discrimination in hiring and its cumulative damage. While our recommendations cannot entirely prevent discrimination, they have the potential to implant more equitable work norms among both organizations and placement agencies, and thereby to change procedures and mutual working methods, as well as deter the use of indirect discrimination mechanisms.

This paper explores institutional experiments to protect work and employment standards in the UK as the country’s employment relations system is grappling with the implications of buyer-driven value chains. Against the context of a decline in collective bargaining, a complex web of labour market enforcement institutions has developed over the last decades, tasked with monitoring and enforcing aspects from the minimum wage, health and safety, to modern slavery. As public agencies’ enforcement capacities and resources remained low, and as social auditors developed a new market in the supply chains of the Global North, the UK’s Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) led public-private protocols (PPPs) in the food, construction, and textile sectors in order to support more effective prevention activities.

This paper focuses on the range of activities in one of these PPPs, the Apparel and General Merchandise public-private protocol (AGM-PPP) which comprised about 80 industry stakeholders before it was wound up earlier this year. Despite its ending, the AGM-PPP offered an important platform to discuss and develop novel elements of labour market regulation, from the proliferation of a robust social auditing methodology, to binding joint liability agreements (between fashion brands and manufacturers), or the establishment of a Garment Trade Adjudicator. All of these initiatives, even if not all of them were implemented, mark stark shifts in the way UK employment relations are regulated in value chains and underscore the rise of (mandatory) human rights due diligence.

The paper explores the effectiveness of different forms of labour market enforcement through two steps. On the one hand, the approaches of public agencies that were combined in the AGM-PPP are compared and evaluated against each other. On the other hand, these approaches are contrasted against data from factory audits that were conducted under a robust social auditing methodology. This allows to a) highlight the shifts amongst multiple auditing standards and enforcement practices across different private and public actors; b) show how private actors often have superior capacity and authority when it comes to monitoring working conditions, auditing suppliers, and enforcing standards; c) evidence the inefficiency of current labour market enforcement governance through the data gaps that emerge across private and public actors’ monitoring and auditing.

The conclusion explores the implications of the AGM-PPPs end for a labour-driven model of labour market enforcement.

The cattle industry employs the most modern slave laborers in Brazil, and Pará is home to the highest concentration of such workers. My study examined the public initiatives (dirty lists and the crime of reduction to a condition analogous to slavery) and supply chain initiatives (Greenpeace and the Federal Prosecutors) to combat modern slave labor in the cattle sector in Pará. The literature argues that there are gaps in how initiatives like these work in practice. My overarching research question is: are public and supply chain initiatives contradictory, substitutive, or complementary? To answer this question, we employed the qualitative process tracing method in my research. We examined forty Ministry of Labor inspection reports, categorized who was dirty listed, and compiled the offenses committed by those cattle ranchers. The cattle rancher is prosecuted in criminal court and may be sentenced to between 2 and 8 years in prison after being dirty-listed. We investigated whether those on the dirty list were acquitted or convicted and on what grounds. To investigate the process and practice of the supply chain initiatives, we read the Socio-Environmental Auditing reports of the slaughterhouses that signed the supply chain initiatives.

We found that the dirty list publication was suspended between 2014 and 2016 due to pressure of some parties of society, and the offenses practiced by those dirty listed primarily violated worker dignity. However, there is no consensus among criminal court judges regarding what constitutes a violation of dignity. Some judges interpreted the cattle rancher's failure to provide the worker with basic needs (e.g. restroom and potable water) as a violation of dignity. Conversely, acquittal decisions held that there is no violation because, on a daily basis, workers do not have access to potable water, beds, or bathrooms in their homes.

Greenpeace's supply chain initiative aims to prevent the four largest slaughterhouses in Brazil from purchasing cattle from dirty-listed ranchers. The Federal Prosecutor supply chain initiative prohibits signatory slaughterhouses from purchasing cattle from ranchers who are on the dirty list and from those who are facing legal action for engaging in modern-day slavery. Consequently, supply chain initiatives rely on public initiatives.

Overall, the initiatives studied complement one another; however, complementation is weakened due to supply chain initiatives' high reliance on (unstable) public initiatives. As a result, traditional law enforcement mechanisms should be strengthened, reinforcing new labor law enforcement strategies, such as supply chain initiatives.

This paper aims to document the evolutionary process of collectivization of a grassroot level workers’ organization called the Indian Federation of App Based Transport Workers (IFAT), which is based on their strategic intervention to protect and promote the rights of platform workers in India. The study uses a comparative evolutionary institutional framework to locate the workers' initiatives in the collectives building process. Unlike any other trade unions, this collective is fostered and nurtured by worker driven initiative to mobilize workers for their own workers’ rights through mobile connectivity, social media and other online platforms that solidify their collective interests. The evolutionary process of collectivization of IFAT is a result of workers’ reaction to exploitative practices of platforms, perilous working conditions and lack of employee entitlements that push their daily struggle to survive into precarious lives. The formation of IFAT was based on seeking collective justice of labour rights through legal recourse of justice seeking at the Supreme Court of India, in 2020. While pursuing legal justice and reclaiming labour rights, the formation of IFAT and its polity was largely shaped by the judicial intervention as well. Hence, this also examines the effects of judicial intervention in shaping the worker’s collectives. In the pretext, when higher rates of unemployment in urban areas and lack of opportunities for work and a low entry barrier in joining app-based work are creating a saturation in work created a necessary condition to reclaim collective rights for collective interest. IFAT is a result of it. It was formed as a federation of ride-sharing and other gig transport workers unions. Main aims of IFAT are to ensure that app-based drivers have social security benefits under the new labour codes through fostering multi-union institutions and shared collectives. It thus puts the demand for regulation of the location-based platform workers. To locate the collective interest and issues of workers, in November 2019 IFAT along with ITF jointly surveyed the health and safety of app-based drivers. Based on this survey a report was published which included findings that a large section of respondents had no form of social security or protection. As drivers, accidental insurance is a minimum requirement that must be provided by the companies. Using focused group discussions and analysis of legal documents this paper tracks IFAT’s discourse development, its negotiation strategies with multi-unions, state-actors and platforms and documents the institutional challenges the organization is facing in currently.

“Breque dos Apps” was a social movement of a “striker” nature, which took place in Brazil in July, 2020. Such movement was organized by workers which provided services to delivery apps (like iFood, Loggi, Uber Eats and Rappi), aiming to give visibility to the precarious working conditions to which these workers were submitted. Although such conditions have been inherent to the provision of this kind of work in its origins, the scenario caused by the pandemic of the new coronavirus, vector of the Covid-19 disease, caused a significant impact and brought this issue to be discussed on the public debate. Considering there is no consensus in Brazil whether or not to qualify digital platform workers as employees or as autonomous workers, they are not able to collectively organize themselves through unions. Thus, they are prevented from obtaining the legal protection conferred to strike movements, since in Brazil unions are the only entities legally authorized to organize strikes. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to analyze how the movement was organized in order to overcome the legal barrier arising from the fact that workers cannot organize themselves around unions. Thereby, in order to investigate what are the lessons left by the strategy adopted by the organizers of “Breque dos Apps”, the following main research question is proposed: is “Breque dos Apps” a representation of new forms of protest and solidarity-based responses oriented towards the protection platform workers, thus able to provide broader lessons to be learned about how to organize platform workers? The referred main research question is supported by secondary research questions, notably aimed at investigating: (i) if there was support from civil society to the workers; (ii) how the companies in the delivery through platform business reacted to the organization of the workers; (iii) what were the worker’s claims. Regarding the methodological approach, the study applies a theoretical qualitative research conducted through documental and bibliographic review techniques, based on the analysis and interpretation of data obtained mainly from literature and documents related to the themes. This study intends to contribute mainly – but not exclusively – to the legal literature by demonstrating how platform workers organized themselves in Brazil demanding better working conditions and, based on the movement they implemented, known as “Breque dos Apps”, showing finds of what lessons can be extracted and reproduced in favor of future movements with the same goals.

The digitally mediated platforms are leading to intense restructuring in labour relations and their micro-political interactions vis-à-vis traditional hierarchical structures. Existing literature depicts that the models dwelling on data and algorithmic programming are not standalone operations that replace or reduce biasness from decision-making; indeed, these are massive networked systems that are embedded in the broader socio-technical assemblages and are relational, contingent, and ontogenetic in nature (Seaver, 2013; Bolin and Schwarz, 2015; Burrell, 2016; Kitchin, 2016). Agency is constrained via different algorithmic and data-centric control and monitoring mechanisms breeding insecurities, and disrupting lateral relations among workers through instilling inter-worker competition (Gandini, 2019; Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2019; Anwar and Graham, 2020; Barratt et al. 2020; Barratt et al. 2020; Pastuh and Geppert, 2020; Stewart and Stanford, 2020).

This research intends to explore how the macro-structural conditions or the individual firm-level configurations influence the lived experiences and agential reactions among workers labouring under similar labour processes in digital platforms. It uses labour process theory through a critical realist perspective to create an integrative approach in reflecting on the linkages between the micro-level relations within the broader macro-context. The research design is built on a comparative case study approach to analyse the similarities and variations in the influence of platform-based technologies on labour relations across distinct tech hubs in India and Italy. In this, 120 platform-to-consumer food delivery workers have been selected across cities of India [Mumbai and Guwahati] and Italy [Milan and Bologna] using stratified purposive sampling. Data has been collected through semi-structured interviews and observations, designed to involve respondents in critical thinking and explore their experiences from both a reflective and experiential perspective. Each interview has been transcribed verbatim and analysed within, and across the cases using the statistical software MAXQDA to store, code and thematically analyse the data.

These findings are considered within the broader labour regimes of both contexts and expect to add to the North-South debates over platform economies. It is expected to address, firstly, understanding how and to what extent institutional or structural conditioning supports, reinforces or restricts workers' organising practices; secondly, analysing whether collective or individual practices enhance their opportunities for gaining access, visibility, and income; thirdly, to examine are some workers more inclined towards appropriating algorithmic practices over conventional class-based collective resistance; and, fourthly, are this structural conditioning and agential reactions further influenced via the local labour control regimes operating within each context.

Different overlapping disruptions of the social order, which generate a range of often unpredictable consequences, are sometimes referred to as 'polycrisis' (Tooze 2021) or 'interlinked crisis' (UN GCRG). The paper analyses the course of a post-pandemic polycrisis in Poland, focusing on the case of public services essential for the reproduction of social life: education, health care and social assistance. The starting point is the assumption that effectiveness in dealing with interlinked crises depends on the institutional context. Studies of the effectiveness of public policies in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic show that central and eastern European (CEE) countries tend to fare worse than western European countries, as demonstrated by the record increase in infections and deaths in the former on a global scale.

In order to analyse the functioning of public services in Poland during the polycrisis, the article refers to debates on the diversity of capitalism in CEE including in particular the concept of 'patchwork capitalism'. Its essence is the historically shaped weakness of the institutional foundations of the socio-economic order, which makes it susceptible to the attachment of elements with diverse institutional logics

Previous analyses of models of capitalism in CEE have mainly focused on economic issues and labour relations. To a lesser extent, transformations within the public service sector have been analysed. Using the concept of patchwork capitalism and treating Poland as one of its characteristic examples, the article aims to fill this gap in the existing state of research. Responses to the crisis are analysed both from the perspective of public policies and the bottom-up perspectives of workers, trade unions and employers in education, health care and social welfare. We are interested in (1) to what extent the listed industries were prepared for the pandemic crisis (and the war, humanitarian and inflation crises that followed); (2) how the conditions and organisation of work in these industries have changed since the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020; (3) to what extent the experience of polycrisis may influence the ways in which the public sector is organised in an order characterised by features of patchwork capitalism.

The empirical material consists of data from 36 biographical narrative interviews, 13 focus group interviews and 18 expert interviews conducted with employees, representatives of trade unions, employers' organisations and local and supralocal authorities operating in the above-mentioned industries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the world of work, displaced already-precarious workers across countries, and raised new questions about the responsibilities of governments and corporations. While it exposed the fragility of socio-economic systems globally, disruptions have been particularly severe at the production end of global supply chains, where brand decisions had cascading negative consequences on employment and livelihoods. At the same time, global supply chains are being reconfigured, as lead firms and suppliers navigate new trade wars, geopolitical tensions, and increased regulatory stringency in some large markets.

Recent studies have documented the supply chain disruptions of the COVID-19 era but little is known about how workers and managers in points of production view these disruptions and the kinds of reforms they perceive as helpful. Under what conditions do they perceive COVID-era disruptions as necessitating government intervention, special accommodations by factory owners, or collective action by workers themselves? Under what conditions do they perceive factory-level reforms as likely to bring about change and buyer behavior as generating serious problems? Do promises of corporate responsibility from distant international buyers bolster or undermine demands for local intervention?

Through a study of the apparel industry in Indonesia, where many export-oriented factories experienced severe disruptions in a climate of increasing labor market flexibilization, including extensive amendments to existing laws protecting labour and the environment, this paper examines workers’ and managers’ views of local reforms and the effects of corporate responsibility on their mobilization. Analyzing data from a survey experiment, we reveal the paradoxical effects that involving brands might have on workers’ interest and activism in sites of production and critically reflect on what policy alternatives are required to respond effectively to situations of interlinked crises.

What is the relationship between certain workers in the offshore wind sector, seasonal agricultural workers, or in tourism and the hotel industry, port workers and rope access workers? Their jobs are affected by interlinked crisis: health, climate energy. One of the effects of these crises is the negotiation under constraints and the development of casual, seasonal, or cyclical jobs. In the energy sector, negotiations are under pressure from the urgency of ensuring energy transition or energy sovereignty. These pressures also contribute to authorizing the use of precarious forms of employment, even at the limit of the informal. The health crisis, during the covid epidemic, has toughened working and housing conditions. In agriculture, seasonal workers in France have not been compensated for partial unemployment. While mobile workers and temporary migrants found themselves stranded at the border or confined. Finally, numerous employees, whose travel bonuses are an essential component of income, such as rope access technicians, saw their income reduced by the restriction of travel. All are also exposed to the consequences of climate change on working conditions. When unions are in difficulty, the role of certain associations is becoming important in supporting these workers, both locally and nationally. This is a way to help move towards multiparty bargaining in global supply-chains. The provision of services, such as public showers, is also an important help, because of the water poverty of these workers, which can be aggravated by droughts. Support for these local or national associations, integrating actors, including those passing through as migrant or posting workers, is a solution in times of transition. It is a way to strengthen democracy for workers in global supply chains. In undertaking this analysis of initiative for enhancing democracy in France , we relied upon both primary and secondary sources. Among primary sources, we consulted data records, written records, including agreements and related memoranda, and interviewed or corresponded with unionists, employers and salary involved in campaigns and negotiations. Use of author’ prior research on the situation of seafarers, seasonal and migrant workers have been made. Among secondary sources, we consulted journal articles, academic reports, reports by International Organizations and news articles.

South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. The global polycrisis since 2020 has had devastating impacts on the population, worsening the extremely high levels of poverty and unemployment. This has placed the question of basic income high on the national agenda. South Africa has now introduced a de facto system of basic income (at an extremely low level) which has the potential to be transformed into a Universal Basic Income Guarantee (UBIG). This is the subject of considerable policy debate and research, in which the authors have substantively participated*. We draw on this experience, alongside our review of experiences in other LMICs*, to probe the potential impacts and challenges of a UBI as a pillar of development policy in the Global South.

*The IEJ research referred to here is available at https://www.iej.org.za/projects/universal-basic-income-guarantee/

While the demand for a UBIG (or UBI) is extremely popular in South Africa there is skepticism in some international quarters about the feasibility and implications of a UBI. Isabel Ortiz et al (ILO 2018) raises critical questions on potential negatives a UBI would need to avoid, including being exclusionary, having a negative impact on public services, regressive financing, inadequate benefits, and a net welfare loss. They conclude that “some models of UBI can be in accordance with ILO standards, while others are not”.

These concerns raised by Ortiz should be seriously addressed. This paper assesses the extent to which UBIG proposals made by government and civil society actors in South Africa meet these concerns. Specifically it will consider proposals in relation to the following criteria: financing, progressive or regressive; design (universality vs targeting); its relationship to other elements of social protection, in particular public services, and the social security system- and their likely impact on poverty, inequality, and social solidarity. It will also consider impacts of various design modalities on gender empowerment, worker rights, and just transition issues.

The paper follows the approach of Ortiz et al in arguing that the UBI/G model South Africa adopts will determine whether it meets the criteria set out in the paper, and elaborates on the elements that need to be addressed to ensure it constitutes a progressive advance. It further argues that an adequate UBIG model is not compatible with macroeconomic austerity.

The Covid-19 pandemic affected economies and labour markets all over the world. Due to containment measures economic activities were strongly reduced, unemployment went up and employment was seriously harmed. In a period of recession, a temporarily shortening of hours is one option to dampen its negative impacts. For employers short hours are an opportunity to maintain permanent employment. Workers would then also benefit from job retention. However, working time reductions generally result in income losses. Against this background, government schemes are aiming at temporarily compensating workers for the loss of income. Such arrangements make it easier for all parties to keep their relationships.

Short-time work compensation schemes were and are heavily used in many countries to combat the Corona crisis. Some countries even implemented the scheme for the first time, whereas others utilised this government programme since decades. One of the latter cases is Germany. The country has a long tradition in this respect. Short-time work compensations were, e.g., used in the aftermath of the reunification as well as during the Great Recession. At the beginning of the present crisis, Germany reached a new record level concerning short-time work. In spring 2020, almost six million short-time workers were registered. This corresponds to about 15 per cent of all dependent employed.

The question, however, how the effectiveness of short-time work compensation schemes can be assessed. Are they sufficient to safe jobs? What are potential side effects? Which factors may influence positive or negative effects?

The contribution is based on analyses on macro indicators as well as on international comparisons. All in all, they indicate that short-term work compensation schemes has helped to maintain employment levels during recessions. However, they can create inefficiency in the labour market, e.g. due to deadweight losses or because of limiting labour market access for less competitive workers. Important issues regarding the employment impacts of short-term work compensation schemes are the generosity of the regulations, the coverage of workers as well as the timing of legal changes. In addition, side effects are of interest such as distributional impacts as well as incentives to combine short-time work and training in a proper way.

During the several lock-down phases in Bangladesh amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, most economic activities were shut down. In a country where the informal economy is dominating the labour force (comprising 86.2% of total employment), these shutdowns have caused taunting impediments to the recovery of small businesses during post-COVID-19. Several studies highlighted the recovery of these small businesses, but the rate of recovery is found to be slow, and the magnitude of the recovery varied among different sectors. Besides, the current global economic turmoil and price hike of essential commodities have added another level of challenge that could hamper the usual growth of informal activities. Under such circumstances, this study using mixed method approaches (with a sample of 1200 informal sector owners) is attempting to understand the recovery statuses of the informal economies while considering the current economic vulnerabilities. This is an urban-centric study, encompassing the capital, Dhaka since most informal economic activities are concentrated in this city. This study explores the coping strategy and changes in their lives because of twin shocks; COVID-19 and the price hike of essential commodities. This study focuses on selected manufacturing and service sectors in the informal economy which is important to achieving poverty reduction by employment generation. The specific objective of this paper is to understand the coping mechanisms used by small business owners during the twin shocks, to explore the well-being of informal sector’s workers/owners affected by these shocks, and to identify how they absorbed or still absorb the shock and the possible policy adaptation to better tackle such economic shocks in the future. It is envisaged that due to COVID-19, informal sectors’ owners’/employees’ coping behavior has been shaped by both external and internal resources. Besides, their behaviour and practices are also shaped by three consequences; physiological, social, and physical. Though a simplified coping strategy model is presented to assess the sample, the study has theoretically taken a leaf out of Sen’s capability approach (1999) and World Bank’s ‘Voices of the poor’ (2000) reports for a comprehensive understanding and evaluation of the sample’s response.

This paper is concerned with the nature of jobs created by the expansion or penetration of digital economic activity in lower income contexts, and what this may mean for economic or structural transformations for countries in the global South. We ask what possibilities new jobs and forms of labour in the digital economy hold for the transformation of economies in ways that contribute to achieving the goals of human, inclusive and sustainable development. The key question thus concerns how digital work or technologically driven changes in the nature of work can be part of or contribute to a productive transformation of low-income economies and thus to economic development. Can a ‘digital transformation’ spur development, and if so how, and to whose benefit? What are the impacts on work and workers in this process? This paper provides a synthesis of literature and debates - conceptual, historical and empirical - linking digital jobs with ideas of ‘structural transformation’ and development. We explore the relevance of these ideas to contemporary development conditions, including how digitalisation is transforming the way countries are integrated in global supply chains, to identify what opportunities digital transformation offers low income countries, and what actions will be needed to shape these towards a sustainable, fair and inclusive social and economic development.

The surge in social media and e-commerce usage during the COVID-19 pandemic increased the demand for business process outsourcing (BPO) services, especially data labelling, in the Global South. Recent literature on BPO firms catering to technology and artificial intelligence (AI) companies has highlighted their employment potential and conditions of work, but little is known about the everyday mechanisms by which such firms generate value and increase productivity.

Indian BPOs in AI data labelling form distinct supply chains with domestic or international data-driven companies at the helm. Within these supply chains, BPO workers are often put into intra-firm, target-based competitions during working hours. BPOs have historically followed similar tactics to increase productivity, yet data labelling as work offers AI supply chain BPOs something different. Partially accurate datasets (produced by workers who do not win competitions) can still be used to train machine learning models for the firm’s clients. As a result, unlike in traditional BPOs, the worker’s skills, strategies, and accuracy are less valuable than speed, as other studies have found. Further, the firms’ use of automated evaluation tools (with human-in-the-loop quality analysts) to ‘judge’ data labelling work constrains the scope for feedback and worker growth.

In this paper, we present primary data with Indian data labellers’ perceptions and experiences of their working conditions, including competitions, reasons for continuing work, choices to leave, internal mobility and skill requirements in the post-pandemic Indian economy. Responses from survey data (120) and in-depth interviews (9) indicate that Indian data labellers do not see their work as particularly helpful for mobility in the labour market, while foregrounding the wage theft that accompanies the seeping in of ‘playbour’ or gamified behavioural design in their work.

This has significance since the current policy environment regards BPOs as drivers of inclusive growth and job generators across urban and rural India, especially for women workers. There are public subsidies for the sector through programmes such as the India BPO Promotion Scheme (IBPS). BPOs in the AI value chain will receive further attention after the announcement of national AI Centres of Excellence in India’s 2023 Budget. Our data highlights how BPO firms with different business models that use competitions and output targets create poor quality and stagnant employment where productivity is not adequately compensated for. This study highlights the need for worker-facing studies to look closely at intra-firm governance and incentive structures to measure socially productive and meaningful employment growth.

Content moderation is a key practice for maintaining the public discourse on social media platforms, but is driven by profit interests of technology firms (lead firms) operating them. For reasons of labor cost arbitrage and to access local skills and knowledge, most of this work is outsourced to the Global South, including to the IT-Services sector in India. Lead firms design the organization of work in manners that allow them direct control over the labor process, so as to ensure quality service delivery, which refers to the accurate and context-sensitive content moderation decisions. Informed by an interdisciplinary study of content moderation value chains using GVC and GPN constructs together with the labor process theory, this paper shows how lead firms use their automated work software for directing tasks to outsourced workers, monitoring them and codifying their knowledge in the software. While lead firms continue to rely on workers for their tacit knowledge, as all labor knowledge cannot be codified, the use of automated technology results in high degrees of work standardization and limited skill development. Automation of certain managerial tasks (as mentioned above) also has implications for the inter-firm governance relationships, which although relying on suppliers for on-floor supervision of workers, allow for limited possibilities for functional upgrading.

The paper focuses on the case of a supplier exit from its project with a large lead firm, and the subsequent project transfer, including workers, to another supplier in India. Taking place during the COVID-19 led lockdown in India, where all moderation work was taking place from home, this case of GVC restructuring shows on one hand, the replaceability of one large supplier firm with another, and on the other, the reliance on experienced workers for supporting the transfer of work and continuing work from home during the lockdown. From this perspective, the study here provides granularity to the existing analyses of labor flexibility in service value chains by showing how direct control of lead firms over the labor process, using automation, has implications for both workers and suppliers. This sheds new light on the competitive dynamics in the global economy and positions the role of public policy in securing the interests of workers and upgrading possibilities for low-end service suppliers. The analysis is informed by a mixed-methods inquiry with 65 interviews and 99 surveys with workers, management at supplier firms, one lead firm, trade union representatives, civil society experts and other experts.

The Kaldor-Verdoorn law is a cornerstone of Keynesian economics. It considers a dynamic relationship between the growth rates of output and labour productivity with a direction of causality from the former to the latter. This relationship has been investigated by several generations of economists from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. The law can be thought of as a stylized fact generally confirmed for developed as well as developing countries. Yet, the structural change from a manufacturing to service economy led scholars to reconsider its overall validity. The lack of economies of scale and the different division of labour in the service sector are believed as key mechanisms behind the detachment between increases of demand and gains in productivity experienced since the Eighties. In this paper we want to investigate if, and in which way, the increasing robotisation experienced by many industries impacts upon the supposed channels through which the Kaldor-Verdoorn law shapes the dynamics of labour-productivity growth and employment. We first offer a simple and evolutionary interpretation of the law that combines both the traditional Kaldorian and Post-Keynesian arguments with the evolutionary literature on innovation and technical change. We then collect data on labour productivity, capital-labour ratio, GDP, and robot adoption for a panel of 17 industries in 25 OECD countries for the period 1990-2018. After checking for the presence of mechanisms à la Kaldor-Verdoorn in the dynamics of productivity and employment, we analyse through a GMM approach in which way the increasing robotisation affects the channels behind the Kaldor-Verdoorn law. The results are contrasting and somewhat puzzling. Industries whose robot density is lower than cross-country sector average still benefit from a cumulative-causation process in their productivity dynamics. Conversely, industries with a robot density higher than the corresponding cross-country sector average suffer from a weakening of the meso-economic channel that links productivity achievements to the growth in mechanisation. At the same time, their higher robot density sustains the macro-level channel that associates changes in labour productivity with GDP growth. The evidence of technological unemployment depends on the specification of the underlying econometric model. This overall evidence agrees with the empirical literature that finds a positive relationship between robots adoption and employment at firm and industry level.

Introduction

After the Second World War, many G20 countries have made significant progress in the extension of social protection coverage, reinforced their social protection systems and established effective Social Protection Floors. Some have achieved universal or near-universal coverage in different branches of social protection through a combination of non-contributory and contributory schemes and programmes. However, other G20 countries are still lagging behind in terms of coverage, especially for essential health services. The COVID-19 outbreak highlighted the strong need for sustainable investment in social protection including, essential health care.

Research questions

The article aims to estimate the financing gap across the G20, namely the additional monetary resources needed for achieving universal social protection coverage for Social Protection Floors. In addition, the article presents which policies were put in place by the G20 to extend the fiscal space for social protection by highlight the emerging threats to the viability of social protection systems (e.g. declining labour income share, austerity). The concluding part presents policy guidance concerning viable options to expand the fiscal space for social protection.

Methodology

The article will use a new methodology to estimate the financing gap to achieve universal social protection coverage. The financing gap calculations encompass five distinct social security guarantees: children, persons with disability, maternity, older persons and the unemployed. In addition, the monetary resources needed to achieve universal coverage for essential health care are also included in the financing gap calculations. The estimate for essential health care is modelled using the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Index and the domestic general government health expenditure.

Contribution to the literature

The methodology used to calculate the financing gap was developed by the authors of this paper and it was peer-reviewed within the ILO and externally (e.g. WHO). We are not aware of any other paper employing such methodology as it is still under strict embargo. In comparison with the existing literature the methodology is innovative because it allows to disaggregate estimations by country and social protection guarantee.

Findings

The financing gap to achieve universal social protection coverage for the Social Protection Floors ranges from as high as 17 per cent of GDP to as low as zero per cent in G20 countries where full coverage is observed. Country experiences regarding national strategies used to fill such gaps with contributory and non-contributory social protection finance will also be presented.

This paper critically assesses the current approach that governs social protection in the United States. Analyzing the income levels and healthcare coverage of childcare workers, this paper challenges the needs-based approach to social protection in a country considered to have high rates of formality and an employer-sponsored social provision model. Criticizing the lack of coverage in the social protection floor (SPF) areas of healthcare and income, this paper finds existing social protection in the country does not reach working populations in need of protection. Ultimately, the paper advocates a rights-based framework is better-suited to govern universal SPFs that support historically disenfranchised, racialized and migrant women, in marginal work.

As much of the social protection focus has been on the informal sector and the Global South, the transformative potential of SPFs on workers in formalized employment in a Global North country characterized by both the highest GDP in the world and significant gaps in social protection coverage, merits exploration. Hence, the research question is as follows: How can the normative argument of a rights-based approach to social protection floors (SPFs) in the United States serve to support marginalized childcare workers?

Kildal and Kuhnle (2008) approach universalism from the normative principles that have been conducive to state arguments for the implementation of universal policies. The following research is concerned with the inverse, examining a country in which the rights-based framework does not guide social protection policies and investigating how the adoption of a rights-based approach to SPFs in the United States can be universal in reach.

Through a literature-based analysis, peer-reviewed journals, books, and some gray literature (ILO, WTO, UN, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, The White House, and the Tax Policy Center documents) provide a policy context of global universal social protection and national social protection policies. I then present the rights-based framework and existing debates around SPFs.

Social protection coverage is assessed using secondary data from the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Treasury data on income assistance programs, the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid and Medicare, and center-based childcare statistics including wage estimates. The Early Childhood Program Participation Survey and National Survey of Early Care and Education, as cited in peer-reviewed journal articles, situate the childcare industry and childcare workers’ socioeconomic situation. The analysis section comprises the thematic SPF areas of Healthcare and Income to examine implications on childcare workers’ access to benefits.

Introduction

The epidemiological emergency has impacted on the entire welfare State, and it has pointed out the inadequacy and insufficiency of social protection measures. In Italy it also affected, though indirectly, the pension system, which was in difficulty for many years. In particular, the pandemic will most likely lead to the worsening of the main factors of the pension system crisis: the instability of labour market and the low birth rate.

This situation will penalise especially the most vulnerable subjects, such as the discontinuous workers, who has a precarious position in labour market and a fragile contributory position. Indeed, the calculation method adopted in the Italian legal framework is particularly disadvantageous for those type of workers who cannot rely on uninterrupted working careers. Moreover, discontinuity in employment is often followed by low wages and it makes more severe the inadequacy of social protection.

Methodology

Starting with an examination of existing legislative measures aimed at remedying contributory vulnerability, the focus will be shifted to the supplementary pension as a possible remedy to protect the pension position of discontinuous workers. Therefore, problems that hinder the adherence to supplementary pension funds in Italy will be analyzed, especially by young people and women, i.e., those who typically populate the category of discontinuous workers. In addition, the role of collective bargaining with respect to strengthening supplementary pension provision will be examined through an analysis of existing collective bargaining on the subject.

Contribution to literature and findings

The current regulatory framework is not sufficient to stimulate a spread of supplementary pension among discontinuous workers. More incisive provisions, such as tax benefits or direct state financing aimed specifically at this type of workers, should be introduced for this purpose. However, an intervention by the legislature requires the achievement of delicate balances. Therefore, a more effective intervention of collective bargaining would be desirable to facilitate, pending legal reform, the access of young people and discontinuous workers in general to the supplementary welfare system, with a view to an integrated public-private welfare system to guarantee the adequate means to meet living needs, provided by article no. 38, paragraph 2 of the Italian Constitution.

From 2019, the Chilean subsidiary of a leading retail multinational has been promoting a socio-technical modernisation plan for supermarkets which, linked to new online inventory systems, digital self-service technologies and e-commerce areas, seeks to reconvert the supermarket workforce, eliminating some specific jobs (e.g. cashiers, stock replenishers) and implementing a single multi-functional job in rotating and flexible shifts. This plan was accelerated during the pandemic and has been criticised by workers, given the increased work intensification and decreased wages compared to previous jobs. Considering their low levels of structural power and the existing fragmentation of union representation, collective bargaining and workers' mobilisations have been insufficient to shape these changes. In this scenario, unions have opted for new strategies to engage state actors in the regulatory space.

This study asks what strategies supermarket unions have developed to engage state actors in regulating the functional flexibility plan. The contribution of this research lies in addressing the regulatory issues involved in socio-technical changes at work, which has been little researched beyond the recent interest in the gig economy. To this end, the literature on technological change at work and the literature on industrial relations and regulatory spaces are brought into dialogue.

This research adopts a qualitative approach. Data collection was based on the review of company, union and legal documents, participant observation at various union meetings and interviews with 45 participants during 2022 and 2023, including managers, union officials, workers, and different state regulators. Qualitative content analysis techniques are then used to organise the findings.

Regarding findings, two main strategies are identified as being carried out by different trade union profiles. With a historic partnership with management, the largest and most institutionalised union has opted for the legal reform route: pushing for a new bill to regulate the functional flexibility scheme. On the other hand, the more adversarial unions have initiated complaints to the Labour Inspectorate through their local trade union networks. This has made it possible to gather evidence on fines and infractions against the company to bring collective complaints to the Labour Court. This strategy has so far been successful in setting a precedent. According to court rulings, flexible functionality plans lack "labour certainty" insofar as the allocation of multitasking depends on the discretion of the store manager. These rulings have enabled the various regulatory actors (i.e. unions, companies and state actors) to move towards more inclusive arrangements to protect supermarket labour.

Psychosocial risks, particularly those exacerbated by the digital era, are a rising occupational health crisis in the workplace. Examples include technostress caused by constant connectivity, frantic work paces set by algorithms and social isolation through telework or crowd-work (Akhtar and Moore, 2016; Todolí-Signes, 2019; EU-OSHA 2022; Vignola et al, 2023). Many have called for specific legislative action to combat these risks (European Parliament, 2019; ETUI, 2021).

As the ILO looks to regulate psychosocial risks, I argue that attention should be given to reinvigorating a pre-existing ILO principle.

‘Adapt work to the worker’ was an innovative ILO principle in the 1950s in response to a disillusioned post-war workforce (Joint ILO/WHO, 1950; 1952; 1957). In the 1970s, the principle was reinvented as the ‘humanisation of work’ principle, which the then ILO Director- General called a ‘radical new approach’ to ‘abate the revolt against work as a dull monotony’ (ILO, 1972, pp. 34-35).

Today, the principle has been elevated to a fundamental principle at work, found in Article 5(b) ILO Convention 155 and other ILO instruments. The question therefore is, can the principle offer an innovative regulatory solution to today’s psychosocial risks – or is it a dated principle, unable to evolve?

Whilst academics in the EU context have highlighted the principle’s ‘potentially revolutionary’ nature (Bercusson, 1996, p. 332), there is currently no existing literature analysing the principle’s origins, evolution and status in international labour law.

My research fills this gap by using doctrinal and comparative law methodology. Through an analysis of ILO preparatory drafts, interdisciplinary literature and case law across multiple jurisdictions, I offer reflections on a reinvigorated interpretive framework of the principle, which can once again evolve to offer an innovative solution to today’s psychosocial risks at work.

Paid sick leave laws allow sick employees to stay at home without losing pay. These laws incentivize workers to stay at home while they or their family members are ill. Such laws in the US differ by state, city, and county. Paid sick leave and its relationship with infectious diseases has been an interest for researchers in various disciplines long before the pandemic, and Covid-19 provides a new opportunity to test this theory on a large scale. Were paid sick leave laws associated with a decrease in the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic? The answer to this question is important for scientific literature as well as for policymaking.

In my research I hypothesized that paid sick leave laws in the state, city, and county level are associated with a decreased number of new daily Covid-19 cases and deaths. I have used ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to compare between US counties in which one or more local paid sick leave laws were in effect in 2020 vis-à-vis counties where no local paid sick leave law was in place. To control for other covariates, I have added control variables such as population density, testing, socio-economic inequalities, Covid-19 mitigation policies, rural/urban divide, self-reported mask usage, public health-related variables, and time-related variables. I have compiled a dataset for this research using publically available data sources; provided primarily by Johns Hopkins University, A Better Balance, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Results show that paid sick leave laws in effect in US counties in 2020 were associated with a decrease of 4.112 new daily cases per 100k residents; and a decrease of 0.465 new daily deaths per 1M residents. These findings contribute to existing literature in several ways. They provide new and large-scale findings that corroborate previous theories about the effectiveness of local paid sick leave laws. My research shows that even while studying Covid-19, a new pathogen that spread quickly throughout the entire United States, the findings nonetheless show that paid sick leave laws are associated with a decrease in infectivity. Additionally, these findings show the relevance of labor and employment law for industrial relations research. Employment law is associated with improved public health outcomes, and it is therefore important for researchers to study its effects on society. My preferred conference track is Track IV: Regulatory Innovation.

The paper estimates the impact of freedom of association and collection bargaining (FACB) rights for workers and democracy on goods exports at the aggregate level and broken down by 17 industries in a bilateral gravity trade model for the years 2000-2017 for a large sample (161 exporting and 209 importing) of countries. The paper uses the Freedom House democracy indicators along with new indicators of FACB rights (Kucera and Sari, 2019) defined according to ILO “fundamental” Conventions 87 and 98, based on the coding of nine publicly available textual sources (including six sources produced by the International Labour Organization and national legislation), and distinguishing between FACB rights in law and in practice. In baseline Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) regressions driven by cross-sectional variation, the paper finds that stronger FACB rights and democracy are associated lower goods exports at the aggregate level. These results are broadly similar for FACB rights in law and in practice and civil liberties and political rights aspects of democracy. These results are sample-sensitive, however, and are overturned with a truncated sample excluding observations with the largest trade values, a difference that is not attributable to the impact of the largest exporting countries. At the industry level, we find that stronger FACB rights and democracy are associated lower exports of such labor-intensive, price-sensitive goods as textiles, apparel and footwear, but also with lower exports of several more capital-intensive industries, in both full and truncated samples. The paper considers several policy options that might be able to overcome such “race to the bottom” scenarios.

It has become a truism that information technology has facilitated transformations in work—what work is done, who does it, where and how it is done; how it is organized, valued, and remunerated; the nature of the workplace; and the relationships between workers and managers. Examples are well-documented in the literature, for example on increasingly complex global value chains; the growth of remote work and algorithmic management; the ‘fissuring’ of workplaces and outsourcing of ‘non-core’ tasks; and the emergence of platform work.

Less exhaustively documented, however, is how information technology facilitates new worker organizing strategies. Existing literature focuses on four main topics in this area: unions using information technology; informal organizing via social media; platform worker organizing; and, recently, the emergence of ‘worker data science.’ These phenomena are in relatively early stages of development, and have received less investment and policy support than the technological innovations being used by managers to transform work. Specifically, there is relatively little research on how workers use specific kinds of information technology to enact specific strategies to build power.

This paper helps fill this gap. It draws on qualitative fieldwork in the United Kingdom to document and classify organizing strategies facilitated by information technology. The paper documents ten cases that fall into five categories or ‘patterns’: (1) informal social media groups become job boards; (2) workers share information via spreadsheets; (3) informal groups formalize; (4) unions cooperate with informal networks without controlling them; and (5) for-profit companies support worker power. The paper documents each pattern with two cases and shows how the use of specific information technologies facilitates specific power-building strategies.

For example, when ‘informal social media groups become job boards,’ workers running the groups often set policies such as wage floors, effectively serving the market function—and reproducing the power structures—of union hiring halls. When ‘workers share information via spreadsheets,’ workers use information technology to aggregate and analyze data from specific labor markets (e.g., publishing), surfacing abusive employers and patterns such as gender pay gaps.

By enabling new strategies and empowering new actors (e.g., informal worker groups), information technology creates new opportunities for building worker power. However, it also creates new challenges and risks for workers and their organizations, such as content moderation and information security.

In addition to presenting the empirical cases and analytical categories (patterns), the paper lists lessons (opportunities, challenges, and risks) for workers, organizations, and policymakers, and questions for future research.

In 2020, Indonesian government introduce labour law reform which sparks protest from majority of workers due to deregulation nature of the new law. The government wants to push investment climate by making Indonesian labour law less strict: easier lay off, more flexible temporary working contract, and more liberty to use outsourcing working arrangement. Unfortunately, the unionisation rate in Indonesia is still low despite rising precarity in the labour market.

Much research shows that majority of workers in Indonesia is having a hard time believing in union due to several factors; such as the politics of big union and advocacy issues that is not relatable with ‘millennial’ workers. Interestingly, in the past few years, independent trade union began to emerge. They are detaching themselves from the ‘traditional’, major trade union. They are declaring themselves as “unions outside the company”, which gives more opportunity for workers in the non-standard relationship such as freelancer and informal workers to join the union. This independent union also use social media to invite people to join, as well as making discussion and informing its reading about labour issues in Indonesia.

This study aims to discuss the opportunity and challenges of Indonesia’s independent union in the fight of mainstreaming trade unions and fight for workers’ right in Indonesia. The research is conducted through in-depth interview towards three independent union in Indonesia that have strong social media persona: SINDIKASI, SEMESTA, and SRAYA.

The paper argues that grassroots organising, protest and campaign through social media, is the way forward for trade union. The union needs to stay relevant with the younger generations so that it can build class solidarity from below and push to ensure decent work for all.

Session Description: With the new EU mandatory due diligence legislation and the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Legislation, there is interest in what corporations would be required to report. The Cornell Global labor Institute has developed outcome based metrics that could be used to assess corporate performance on their efforts to improve labor conditions in their supply chains. Outcome based metrics are more parsimonious and better suited to evaluate labor conditions relative to the input based reporting requirements that is the fashion today.

In Industry 4.0, digital transformation (DT) and societal developments have changed telework over the last 50 years into what is now referred to as working from home (WFH) (López-Igual and Rodríguez-Modroño, 2020). Our research focuses on WFH behaviours and communication technology adoption of micro (less than 10 employees) and small (10-49 employees) enterprises (MSE) as they significantly contribute to the economy. In Switzerland, MSEs, including the self-employed, encompass 98.2% of all companies (FSO, 2020), and worldwide, MSEs account for around 70% of employment (ILO, 2020). Recent research suggests that the DT of work was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Nagel, 2020). Our study examines the question: How does DT impact WFH behaviour relating to communication technology adoption after the first, second and third COVID-19 lockdowns in Switzerland?

Surveying 503 MSE Managing Directors (MD) during the first (2020), 506 MDs after the second (2021), and 504 MDs after the third (2022) lockdown in Switzerland, we investigated WFH arrangements related to technology adoption. Results highlight that technological ‘pioneers’, which lead the technology adoption, implement WFH arrangements to a higher degree than ‘early followers’ and ‘late followers’. Also, MSEs of technology-savvy industries, such as Financials & Services, predict that the highest proportion of their staff will be working remotely. Based on the MDs’ long-term perspectives, it can be assumed that the DT of work, fast-tracked by the pandemic, may lead to structural changes related to technology adoption. In the short term, however, the 2022 survey showed that after lifting all COVID-19 restrictions, employees were frequently returning to their employers’ premises. Nevertheless, adopting and upgrading communication technology has impacted collaboration at work. Online conferencing tools such as Teams and Zoom became established, in addition to other online affordances such as e-commerce, (internal) social media, or collaboration platforms.

Our investigation has led us to make two main recommendations as WFH becomes more prevalent. First, human resources departments, in line with their firm’s technology roadmap, and policymakers need to accelerate the development of remote work policies. Our study discusses such approaches to policy adjustment for MSEs. Second, leaders and employees across the global value chains need digital skills to effectively collaborate in digital settings – and senior management to develop digital strategies. In turn, digital skills development and online collaborations in workplace settings contribute to increasing trust in organisations (Wuersch et al., 2022). Consequently, working in trustful environments helps improve employee engagement and work quality.

The labour market ecosystem in emerging economies is multifaceted and riddled with informality, persistent levels of youth unemployment and growing evidence of skills mismatch despite the proliferation of digital innovation that enhance information exchanges. This paper studies a research question of how does strategic orchestration of digital innovation influence information asymmetries in informal labour markets. This is investigated as a concept for defining business model, processes, and capabilities of a labour market intermediary whose main function is to provide a robust, secure yet open platform for reciprocal interaction and information exchange amongst key players. Due to the socio-economic relationships rife in any information exchanges, this paper adopted a strategic orchestration worldview that strikes a balance between the Resource-Based View and Social Exchange Theory constructs. Consequently, the research suggests a conceptual precision of combining socio-economic ingredients and boundary conditions that are critical for control and governance of Labour Market Information (LMI) exchange relationships.

Since the study of labour markets and information exchanges therein is interdisciplinary and consists of a cocktail of perspectives and concepts ranging from social to economic theories, a mixed-method approach and a qualitative case study of the Kenya’s Labour market information system (KLMIS) was employed. The interdisciplinary approach permitted the construction of comprehensive standpoint by considering varying Information Systems (IS) epistemological assumptions and orientations which recognises societal idiosyncrasies and the economics of labour in information exchanges. This was further measured and validated through an inquiry of an existing LMI system in Kenya, a system that serves as a node for labour market information exchanges.

The paper contributes to literature by extending strategic orchestration theory through a unique empirical test by integrating resource-based theory and social exchange theory in explaining LMI sharing relationships. It also establishes tangible and intangible resources which, when combined through an intermediary, they create capabilities that need to be strategically orchestrated to achieve a near LMI equilibrium. Hence, a fundamental basis for LMI intermediaries in emerging economies is suggested by providing a framework of how to control and govern the design, development, deployment and management of digital products and services on an ongoing basis which in turn aid in narrowing the LMI asymmetries. The paper concludes that societal challenges such as unemployment in developing countries are predominantly social in nature. Policies must recognise drivers of social behaviours and therefore combine and orchestrate them with economic and technological pluralities at their disposal for lasting solutions.

The informal sector in the Indian economy has remained large despite periods of high economic growth. However, between 2000 and 2015, the share of the informal sector in total manufacturing employment and output has declined whereas that of the formal sector has increased. Is this a sign of greater formalization of the economy?

The informal sector debates of 1970s-80s, triggered by the ILO missions (particularly the Kenya mission of 1972), had given rise to two broad views in understanding the relationship between the informal and formal sectors of an economy. While some considered it a feature of pre-capitalist economies having a benign relationship with the capitalist-core, the ‘structuralists’ viewed the informal sector as being subordinated to and exploited by the formal capitalist core (Sathuraman,1976;Tokman,1978;De Soto,1989; Moser,1978;Castells and Portes,1989;Chen, 2005). It is therefore, widely established in the literature that formal sector growth can have two opposing impacts on informality – either modernising informal sector enterprises or sustaining the persistence of informality and both forces appear to be present in the Indian case (Moreno-Monroy et al,2012;Katjuria,2010;Marjit,2009;Bhattacharya & Kesar,2018;Sadhu & Chakrabarti,2021;Basole et al, 2014).

In this backdrop, this paper attempts to understand three inter-related questions associated with the current trends. Between 2000 and 2015, in which industries in each Indian state has the informal sector grown with the formal sector and in which has it not? For industry groups where the informal sector has contracted with formal sector expansion, is it the result of structural transformation of workers and enterprises from informal to formal sector? Can subcontracting linkages explain why in some industries formal and informal sectors have grown together whereas in others they have not?

Using enterprise level data from the Annual Survey of Industries and the National Sample Survey of Unincorporated Enterprises, this paper shows that contracting informal sector and expanding formal sector between 2000-2015, is not associated with greater formalization of informal enterprises but with a transformation of the workforce from informal to formal. This not only reinforces the subsistence nature of the informal manufacturing sector in India but also demonstrations that creating good quality jobs in the formal sector is crucial for reducing informality. The results also show that informal sector contraction in some industries and expansion in others associated with growth in its formal sector counterpart can be explained by strengthening of empowering linkages between formal and informal sectors in one and weakening of it in the other.

Recyclable waste from Western countries is frequently exported to countries with weaker labour and environmental standards. Most of the EU’s exported waste went to Turkey (around 11.4million tonnes in 2021), which was a threefold increase from 2004. While the exported waste needs to be recyclable and, since 2021 also sorted, the waste is usually contaminated. By shipping waste across the globe contamination increases as the conditions of storage are optimal for the growth of harmful bacteria. Consequently, the supposedly ‘recyclable’ waste is not recyclable once it reaches the countries of destination (Das Erste, 20.06.2022) and creates a risk for the overseas workers who are exposed to dangerous substances (Weghmann 2020).

This research traces the processes underpinning the export of plastic waste from Germany - the world's recycling champion - to Turkey, where large proportions of Germany’s recyclable plastic waste end up.

With an aim to address the need of rethinking and restructuring of the Global Value Chain (GVC) model, this research expands the literature ‘to incorporate analysis of post-consumption recycling activities’ as suggested by Wang et al. (2022: 534). When critically examining global recycling waste value chains, the research contributes to the well-established fields of Global Value Chains (GVCs) (Gereffi, 1994, 1996) and Global Production Networks (GPNs) (Coe et. al., 2008, 2019; Coe and Hess, 2013) that to date has solely focused on production, disregarding the dismantling stage of the product cycle. To fill this analytical gap, a Global Destruction Networks (GDNs) framework has been developed to examine the extraction from waste for recycling and re-use (Wang et al., 2022: 534; Herod et al., 2014) to point to the lack of attention on the labour process of waste disassembling as a formal or informal activity. With this theoretical perspective, the study aims to address the following questions:

1. Who are the key actors representing capital and labour in the circular economy supply chain of the plastic waste trade between Germany and Turkey?

2. What are the specific social and environmental consequences of Global Destruction Networks and do these meet the key principles of the circular economy?

3. What control mechanisms and power dynamics underpin the labour process of waste recycling?

Methodologically, this ongoing research utilises ethnographic mapping alongside semi-structured expert and worker interviews to identify the geographic locations and spatiality of formal and informal waste management and the labour process at different points along the waste supply chain.

Private regulatory programs in global value chains seek to motivate suppliers to improve compliance and to build supplier capacity for social upgrading. Buyers and multi-stakeholder initiatives have invested heavily in training programs and international organizations have promoted training as a form of stimulating social upgrading. Can training programs improve social compliance in supply chains? What aspects of social compliance, if any, can they improve? To answer these questions, we analyze data from 24,366 suppliers that participated in a large-scale social compliance training program. Suppliers that participated in the training represent 20 industries, including textiles, electronics and agriculture, and are part of the value chains of 1,848 buyers. The program involved a series of short workshops for factory managers introducing them to the content of standards and diffusing management systems that enable compliance improvements. Taking a difference-in-difference approach, we estimate the overall causal effect of training on social compliance, showing that training programs do improve compliance. However, we show that improvements were limited to specific areas of social compliance that are most closely related to management systems. Our paper contributes key empirical findings regarding the efficacy of one of the central components of governing social compliance in global value chains.

The impact of globalization and industrialization in the last decade has been characterized by a persistence of informality and an increase in precarious jobs increasing workers’ exposure to occupational health risks. Technological advances and the COVID-19 pandemic have also accelerated participation in the gig and platform economy, giving rise to new forms of employment for which neither national social health protection (SHP) systems nor occupational health services (OHS) are adequately adapted. In many LMICs but also high-income countries, OHS remain bound by the employer-employee relationship, often leaving workers engaged in the informal, platform and gig economies without access to OHS. Similarly, this group remains disproportionately excluded from SHP coverage. Recent evidence has also shown the tendency for national SHP systems and workers to absorb the financial burden of occupational disease, despite the existence of workers’ compensation mechanisms. This signals a preponderance of curative care over preventative care with important financial ramifications for national SHP systems but also for workers who face the financial and health risks of preventable diseases and accidents. The extension of SHP and OHS coverage to workers in all forms of employment is thus a joint priority for both OHS and SHP systems. In this paper, we argue that the establishment of robust interinstitutional linkages can strengthen both systems and extend coverage of both SHP and OHS. Limited evidence of such interinstitutional linkages in countries such as Canada and Finland supports this argument. However, limited evidence exists elsewhere, particularly in LMICs.

This scoping review aims to document existing institutional linkages between SHP and OHS systems globally. To do so, it asks: 1) In which countries can we identify interinstitutional linkages? and 2) What is the nature of such linkages?

This study is based on the scoping methodology of Arksey and O’Malley. Relevant databases and grey literature will be searched using a search strategy developed by a librarian at Université de Laval. A double-blind selection of papers will be conducted based on defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Finally, deductive thematic synthesis is used to present the results and a typology of linkages is developed.

To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to provide a systematic mapping of interinstitutional linkages between OHS and SHP systems globally. A better understanding of such linkages will allow for the documentation of best practices that can guide the strengthening of both systems in the face of current global crises.

Ensuring decent work for all, and expanding social protection, are essential goals. But what do these look like in the context of persistently high unemployment, and a crisis of social reproduction caused by widespread joblessness, and low wages? The South African experience of high unemployment, and rural areas disarticulated from key sites of production, is instructive for a global conversation about social protection. Drawing on a mixed-methods study of households in Agincourt, in rural South Africa, I investigate how the highly gendered distribution of paid and unpaid work should inform thinking about social protection and decent work. Following the end of Apartheid, the legal barriers preventing women from working in the main economy were dismantled, and female labour force participation rose rapidly. But this legal equality has not translated into substantive equality, and women in rural areas continue to be significantly worse off in economic terms than men. Furthermore, despite a well-developed literature on South Africa’s political economy, we know little about the productive and socially reproductive lives of rural women in contemporary South Africa. I argue that households in this part of rural South Africa are responding in complex and contradictory ways to the manner in which capitalism in South Africa has changed in the post-Apartheid period. It illuminates the important links between paid work, labour force participation, unpaid work, and livelihood strategies. The research finds large and persistent gendered differences in employment, income and the socioeconomic wellbeing of households. With unemployment for women more than double that for men, this raises important questions of how to design and implement social policy to address these pervasive inequalities. I argue that the scarcity of employment in this rural economy points to the limits of supply-side employment and decent work policies, and reaffirms the central role of social policy as economic policy. Indeed, it is clear that South Africa’s social protection system, particularly in rural areas such as Agincourt, is central to the reproduction of life and labour. The research adds to our knowledge about an area of South Africa which is both important in its own right, and one which is emblematic of the conceptual and methodological challenges of thinking about rural areas and their relationship with the economic heartlands of urban South Africa in a way that does not marginalise the economic lives of women, and highlights the role social protection should play in addressing widespread inequalities.

From early in 2020, COVID-19 generated an unprecedented global demand for medical equipment and supplies. While states and businesses were faced with the practical challenges to secure high volumes of PPE with the right specifications on cost, speed, and quality, it is likely that the human and labour rights risks in the supply chain often took the backseat.

The pandemic also put under increased spotlight the connection between PPE production and forced labour, with both the media and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) publishing a great number of alarming reports on the topic. The two high-risk issues that received considerable public attention were the use of vulnerable migrant workers in Malaysia, which supplied the majority of rubber gloves during the pandemic, and a high dependence on procurement of PPE equipment such as masks and aprons from China, some of which are produced using state-imposed forced labour of Uyghur workers in Xinjiang or other provinces.

This paper explores how states can exercise their leverage to assess, prevent and mitigate human and labour rights risks in their supply chains. Three forms of leverage are analysed, trade import restrictions, transparency in supply chain regulation, and public procurement processes. These tools are explored in relation to three states: the USA, UK and Sweden, although also referencing developments in other states where appropriate.

Research questions:

1) What tools and approaches can states use to address human and labour rights risks in their supply chains?

2) How do these find expression in the USA, UK and Sweden?

3) How did the use of these tools change in face of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Methodology:

This paper presents desk-based research on the normative and regulatory frameworks in three countries (USA, UK and Sweden).

Contribution to the literature: This paper presents a joint analysis of three different regulatory tools which are seldomly studied together: trade/import bans, transparency in supply chains laws and public procurement. It also adds to the emerging literature on how to address human rights in public supply chains.

Findings:

• While each approach has its benefits, none of them was effective in preventing human rights and labour abuses in PPE supply chains during the pandemic.

• Further research is needed to articulate how to combine the three regulatory approaches to make them more effective in addressing human rights and labour abuse in health supply chains, both during a time of crisis and in general.

The world of work has witnessed massive transformations in employment and labour relations. COVID 19 induced pandemic has aggravated job loss; a sharp drop in domestic and international tourism; drop in household demands such as transport, restaurants, tourism, and recreation (Maliszewka et al. 2020) within the existing inflexible business model (Sobieralski 2020) across the globe. In India, it has affected sectors like tourism, service, aviation and manufacturing in terms of employment (Kapoor 2020). The nature of collective bargaining or the domineering capacity of the unions also impacts how business models are revised (Lange et.al .2015). Taking the case of the terminated contractual Indian cabin crew of an international European airline; this study seeks to address key research questions - What are their experiences of becoming and unbecoming global labour? How is collectivism expressed given a situation of employment crisis? An online survey of terminated contractual cabin crew and follow-up through select in-depth interviews, courtroom observations and a review of secondary literature were adopted. Literature reflects that unstable job security among airline employees acts as a new work stressor post-COVID (Seongseop (Sam) Kim et.al. 2022; Görlich and Stadelmann. 2020). The study findings reveal that none of the participants was employed in any form of regular employment. All the participants as plaintiffs were members of their affiliate union. Faction amongst the permanent and contractual employees had created divisiveness and distrust. Interactions and observations within the labour courts and outside reiterate the undeniability of collective bargaining in understanding the processes of cabin crew collectivism (Taylor and Moore 2015) for employment protection, as demonstrated through ongoing litigation under the Industrial Dispute Act (IDA) 1947 in Central Government Industrial Tribunal (CGIT), Delhi with the company is crucial. Institutional mechanisms like these enable collectivism while also creating tensions and frictions as witnessed recently with the Tatas take-over of Air India and the imposition of the Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS) as a redundancy measure. Santanu Sarkar (2020) argues that the need for a bottom-up approach is very much contingent upon the emergent political situation for national labour unions and or organisations towards ‘labour transnationalism or internationalism’. Selective measures and differential treatments globally (Sankey Kaya 2021) were exacerbated where collectivism was weak during the pandemic. International institutions must respond to integrate as transnational labour and guarantee social protection, accountability and dignity of work given the global economy is in its path towards recovery.

The growing trend of digital labour platforms or the rise of the gig economy has been controversial among scholars and policymakers with their advantages and disadvantages. While some claim that they contribute to the efficient labour processes where the customers and service providers meet easily, others argue the rise of precarious work and call for the need to regulate the platform economies. Despite public and academic interest on remote platform work or popular physical platform works like delivery or ride services, platform works undertaken in the client's household such as domestic work is largely unnoticed. In this article, based on a qualitative field study from Turkish experience of domestic and home repair works, discussing the rising platform Armut, the impact of such economies on labour processes will be addressed benefitting from the concepts of control and autonomy in the labour processes, representing two alternative views on the labour platforms or gig economy. Study concerns with the questions of how the control and autonomy of the workers in the digital labour platforms are reproduced and how do these themes differ in domestic and home repair work settings. The data was gathered through 30 in-depth interviews with platform workers and analyzed using grounded theory methodology. The case of Turkey and platforms provided an opportunity to study domestic and home repair platforms in a national setting where there is no regulation concerning platform workers. Such a study provided an opportunity to monitor the implementation of recently adopted laws introducing social protections for domestic workers in Turkey. The results indicate the importance of skill levels for the experience of autonomy and control. Departing from the results, the article presents policy recommendations for government bodies, platforms and worker organizations.

The extant justice literature is sparse in non-standard work settings, including gig/platform work. This paper employed an interpretative phenomenological analysis based on detailed semi-structured interviews to study the expectations, lived experiences, and felt distributive justice perceptions of on-demand workers. We thus extend the justice literature beyond the traditional workplace context, towards conceptualizing a distributive justice framework for on-demand platform-based gig workers, including app-based cab drivers, food delivery and hyperlocal grocery delivery workers based in India. We focus on two questions, including what constitutes “distributive justice-at-work” perceptions, and how is such a “distributive justice-at-work” perception formed. We draw upon the social justice and organizational (distributive) justice literature to build our arguments.

Extant distributive justice literature mainly reasons equity as a fair distribution principle. We find that although workers prefer equity for the distribution of opportunities (to earn), equality is favoured for the distribution of freedom, leisure, and other benefits (like insurance). We posit that the perception of distributive justice for on-demand workers extends beyond the distribution of rewards, and includes the distribution of freedom/autonomy, opportunities, leisure and consideration of risk (asset, safety, and livelihood). Distribution of opportunities occurs at two levels: opportunities at the employment level, wherein on-demand work is seen as an employment opportunity with low skill requirements and entry barriers in the otherwise seemingly distressed job market, and opportunities to earn, that is how the work (orders/rides) is distributed. Freedom/autonomy in the social justice literature is an end in itself as everyone aspires to have more of it. Intra-Industry distribution of Freedom (or autonomy) is driven by equality principles. However, what one does with that freedom (Side-hustling/Surge-pricing) is dependent on what outcomes one desires, making freedom/autonomy an underappreciated element of procedural justice as well. Workers looked at risks in two senses. Risks as an outcome of their work setting and Risks were also considered as input to measure the equity in rewards.

Three perceptive lenses are prominent in establishing the distributive justice perceptions of Indian on-demand platform workers, including identity (shifting between that of an entrepreneur and worker), referent selection (including self as a referent), and locus of control (internal/external). The workers shift their lenses according to the context, i.e., the same person identifies as a worker and entrepreneur under different situations. They also change between multiple referents to facilitate justice perceptions. We thus integrate social and organizational justice literature towards a newer aspect of perceptions of “distributive justice-at-work”.

YouTube is probably the world’s largest digital labour platform. YouTube creators report similar decent work deficits to other platform workers: economic and psychosocial impacts from opaque, error-prone algorithmic management; no collective bargaining; and possible employment misclassification. In major jurisdictions with existing or proposed laws governing digital labour platforms (‘DLP legislation’), however, these laws do not appear to apply to YouTube or other ‘content marketplaces.’

Other laws, however, may apply: California AB 1790 (2019) and EU Regulation 2019/1150 establish rights for ‘marketplace sellers’ and ‘business users of online intermediation services,’ respectively, such as the right to a written explanation for suspensions or terminations. While the protections provided by these ‘marketplace laws’ are weaker than those in DLP legislation, they are underexamined in the literature on regulating labour platforms. To our knowledge they have not been used in any legal action or public dispute against any content marketplace.

This paper uses the case of YouTube to review the regulatory situation of content marketplaces, a category of labour platform defined in the literature but underdiscussed compared to location-based, microtask, and freelance platforms. The paper focuses on YouTube for four reasons. First, YouTube is very large. Second, YouTube’s algorithmic management systems are extremely sophisticated. Third, YouTube creators’ challenges are well-documented, despite limited discussion of content marketplaces in the literature on regulating labour platforms. Finally, YouTube use grew significantly during the pandemic, with users turning to YouTube for health information (especially Covid-19 and mental health), educational content (as schools ‘went online’), guidance with home tasks (e.g., cooking), and ‘uplifting’ content—but creators’ struggles with the platform’s algorithmic management practices continued.

The paper makes five contributions. First, it reviews the literature on YouTube creators’ working experiences and collective action efforts, and concludes that creators on YouTube and other content marketplaces face similar challenges to other platform workers. Second, it reviews major DLP legislation and notes that content marketplaces may be excluded, despite their relevance. Third, it compares the California and EU ‘marketplace laws’ to DLP legislation, concluding that the marketplace laws, while valuable, do not fully address the decent work deficits experienced by content marketplace creators. Fourth, it presents policy options for addressing these deficits: strengthening data protection enforcement; strengthening data protection legislation; including content marketplaces in the scope of DLP legislation; and strengthening marketplace laws. Finally, it sketches how content marketplaces might comply with these steps and how they could improve creators’ working experiences.

The pandemic wave significantly aggravated the labour market structural gap, particularly the correlation between the gender gap and family care work. This kind of work is often invisible, although it is very burdensome constituting one of the main obstacles to overcoming glass ceiling and gender differences. In fact, the time dedicated to family care affects female employment rates, vertical and horizontal segregation in the labour market and the gender pay gap.

The need for specific policies on this issue is crucial also in the post-emergency if the real goal is inclusive, economic, and sustainable growth.

Care work is invisible and is composed of a complex activity that articulates in forms of assistance that are not only direct, personal, and relational, such as breastfeeding a child, but also indirect, like cooking for an elderly parent or doing house cleaning. Considering this is not surprising that the amount of time dedicated to these activities is high in Europe.

Empirical evidence shows that 179 million hours a day are spent on care work, mainly concerning women of working age (between the ages of 25 and 54), who carry out 76.2% of total family care, namely 3.2 times more than men (ILO, 2018). On the other hand, two thirds convergence objective countries' adult population believe that the principal social role of women is the care of the home and family (Eurobarometer 2020).

In Europe, if we sum up paid work time with unpaid care work, the average working day for women would be almost forty minutes longer than men. Moreover, that figure has increased in recent years in many European countries, including Italy (1,2 minutes per day) (ILO, 218).

Academics highlighted that unpaid care work translates in time poverty, which in turn translates into significant hidden poverty in women (Aloe, 2020).

In this paper, we will first analyze European work-life balance policies, thus, by means of statistical and econometrical analysis on EU-LFS data, in particular the ad-hoc module on reconciliation between work and family life, and EU-SILC we will identify the main characteristics of the caregivers and their risk of vulnerability, by country. In the case of Italy, we will also refer to INAPP-PLUS data.

Finally, the research aim is to provide policy recommendations by answering to the following questions: do the European work-life balance policies protect the caregivers from vulnerability risk? What kind of policies could better address this real risk?

Telework can increase flexibility and autonomy and enhance work life balance for some workers. Telework also made it possible for workers to continue to work from home during the pandemic and this ability may prove valuable in the face of climate change disasters such as extreme weather events. However, telework also has disadvantages; it can result in overwork and blurring of boundaries between work and private life with associated detriment to work life balance, and wellbeing. This is compounded by new technologies which extend the possibilities of employer surveillance to all aspects of employees’ lives both during and outside of working hours.

This paper poses two questions: firstly can current and emerging legal rights to limitation of working hours and rights to disconnect adequately protect teleworkers right to a private life, dignity and work life balance? Secondly, should there be a right to freedom from after-hours data extraction?

To answer these questions a range of laws will be evaluated building on and extending on the critiques of authors from a range of jurisdictions. It will be concluded that existing rights to disconnect do not adequately protect workers’ rights and that although all workers are potentially negatively impacted by after-hours surveillance, the risk is particularly high for teleworkers. It is proposed that rather than continuing to rely on the approaches exemplified in existing “right to disconnect” laws, law makers and labour unions should pursue an absolute prohibition on after hours data extraction.

References

De Stefano, V. (2020). ‘Masters and Servers’: Collective Labour Rights and Private Government in the Contemporary World of Work. International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations, 36(Issue 4), pp.425–444. doi:10.54648/ijcl2020022.

Eurofound. (n.d.). The rise in telework: Impact on working conditions and regulations. [online] Available at: https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/publications/report/2022/the-rise-in-telework-impact-on-working-conditions-and-regulations [Accessed 26 Jan. 2023].

Katsabian, T. (2022). The Telework Virus: How COVID-19 has Affected Telework and Exposed Its Implications for Privacy. [online] papers.ssrn.com. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4092787 [Accessed 26 Jan. 2023].

Lerouge, L. and Trujillo Pons, F. (2022). Contribution to the study on the ‘right to disconnect’ from work. Are France and Spain examples for other countries and EU law?. European Labour Law Journal, 13(3), pp.450–465. doi:10.1177/20319525221105102.

McCann, D. and Cruz‐Santiago, A. (2022). Labour/data justice: a new framework for labour/regulatory datafication. Journal of Law and Society, 49(4), pp.658–680. doi:10.1111/jols.12392.

Covid19 crisis has multiple separate and interlinked consequences for labor markets. One of them is the increased number of employees working remotely even after the end of curfews. The revelation of the alternative mode of work made employers consider telework much more feasible and acceptable than before the pandemic. However, the unexpected massive switch to telework as well as the special social policy and protection deficit triggered a certain magnitude that impacted on pre-existing conditions such as a gender gap and inequalities of the labor market. The study seeks implications of an abrupt change of the mode of work for female employment based on the case of Portugal.

The research questions of the study investigate what kind of changes telework brought to women’s employment in Portugal, assesses the transformative effect of recent legislation on telework and looks for the way how the legal regime of telework can be improved to make it more adequate and beneficial for female employment and the Portuguese labor market as a whole.

In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with fifteen Portuguese specialists who professionally deal with issues of labor and gender (trade unionists, researchers, governmental officers) and fifteen women who were exposed to an unexpected change from the in-office mode of work to a remote one. The study included an inquiry on the impact of telework on productivity of women and enterprises as well as its emerging effect - feminization of telework as the growing number of women choose a remote mode of work to an office one in temptation to manage the load of paid and unpaid work (home- and childcare). The collected data was analyzed via MaxQD software.

The study considers recent academic and non-academic research, concludes that it is mostly focused on employment in general and lacks studies on female employment in particular and fills in this gap.

The findings provide an overview that within a Portuguese context growing inclusion of female workers into remote work not only hampers efforts to make the labor market more equal and inclusive but even contributes to a persistent gender gap as Portuguese female teleworkers tend to accept vanishing borders between professional and private life while working remotely. The need of transformative policy towards telework which would consider a positive discrimination of female workers is revealed as in the middle-term and long run female telework is capable of fragilizing even more the position of women on labor markets.

A recent shift towards a new paradigm normalizing remote work (including through hybrid arrangements) in many ways reflects a more general tendency towards workplace fissuring and labour market flexibility and fragmentation. It can accelerate the spread of a ‘platform work’ model for hiring labour, and a use of algorithms to monitor and remotely manage dispersed and precarious workforces. Workers, unions and regulators thus need to be aware of the risks associated with the unregulated and exponential proliferation of remote work practices.

In particular, unions might need to enhance their efforts for organising remote workers. One of the barriers for recruitment is rooted in the prevailing focus on workplace-oriented organising strategies, with physical co-presence crucial for installing and maintaining a social norm of union membership. What kind of strategies then could unions develop for organising a scattered remote workforce?

For tackling this research question and contributing to the literature on union revitalisation, this paper focuses on work-based online communities as fertile grounds for engaging and organising remote workers. Drawing on recent research on online communities in low-unionised industries and the gig or platform economy, with the latter similarly comprising a dispersed, isolated workforce, the main argument is developed that work-based online communities of remote workers could be an entry point for unions to recruit and organise them.

The analysis uses a large-scale micro-level data from the ETUI Internet and Platform Work Survey, carried out in 2021 across 14 European countries, and representative of their working age populations (in total 36,140 respondents).

Applying a nuanced analytical framework based on union norms, this paper makes the following empirical contributions: First, it demonstrates that despite deteriorating the (physical) connection between the workers, remote work is linked to more engagement in online communities. Secondly, the activity of workers in digital spaces is associated with a stronger probability to unionise. This indicates that online communities are more than simply a way of coping with remote work; they can play a supplementary role to unions, adding a ‘virtual workplace’ besides a physical one, thus opening new potential channels for unions in an era of fissuring workplaces. A dispersed workforce due to remote work calls for a diversification of union strategies adapting to occupational, work-based online communities and prevailing union norms for complementing or supplementing traditional workplace-based unionism.

While migrant-sending countries in Southeast Asia are struggling to facilitate and protect their citizens working as precarious labourers abroad, only a few of these countries showed some success. Scholars have explained such failures which point to structural challenges in three interrelated aspects: (1) differences in the state jurisdiction (Ball & Piper, 2002); (2) commercialization of migration facilitation (Lindquist, Xiang, & Yeoh, 2012; Xiang, 2013); and (3) weak migration management (Piper & Foley, 2021). This research will challenge the above argument by contending that despite such structural challenges, an intersubjectivity between governments and workers may trigger the creation of a critical infrastructure of social protection for overseas labourers.

Drawing from the case study of labour migration between Indonesia and Malaysia, this research seeks to explore the government-to-people intersubjective process that emerged between the Indonesian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur and Indonesian worker communities/associations in Malaysia. With an estimate of more than a million Indonesian citizens residing in Malaysia – similar to the population of one large municipal administration in Indonesia – the Indonesian government handles complex migrant labour issues. This paper argues that the intersubjective process between the Indonesian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur and Indonesian migrant workers has co-produced a mutual awareness that is useful in creating a cooperation mechanism for social protection. This cooperation is not only useful in mitigating the impact of the global crisis on migrant workers such as the Covid-19 Pandemic, but also in managing the day-to-day lives of precarious labourers. This cooperation mechanism has also offered an inclusive way to handle labour issues beyond the ‘migration management’ approach.

This paper is written based on a series of fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2020 in Malaysia and Indonesia, as part of a PhD research. The paper has relied on ethnographic information, field notes, and in-depth interviews with both government officials and migrant worker association leaders in Indonesia and Malaysia. The paper will start by reviewing some of the problems faced by Indonesian labourers in Malaysia and highlighting how the Indonesian government responded to those. Then it turns to discuss the intersubjective process between the Indonesian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur and migrant workers that took place during the fieldwork period, which triggered the creation of a government-to-people cooperation mechanism.

Introduction: Social protection as a form of labour regulation is heavily contested terrain which is intrinsically linked to the question of how to expand coverage to workers in the informal economy. Dominant responses to the debate have generally proceeded in two directions. On the one hand, a push towards establishing formal employment relationships which underpin labour law, and which form the basis for the expansion of work-related social protection through employer and employee contributions. On the other hand, a push away from social protection as a form of labour regulation and towards a service funded by the state and/or individuals. Both perspectives have their blindspots; the former not fully addressing the question of who is to contribute on behalf of self-employed informal workers who make up 64% of all informal workers, and the latter relying on questionable assumptions about the capacity of governments to raise consumption taxes in order to finance adequate levels of protection. The impact of delinking social protection from labor regulation on bargaining, conditions and pay is also unclear.

The creative strategies used by organizations of workers in the informal economy to engage with the regulatory environment both within and outside of labour regulation to improve working conditions and resources for the expansion of social and labour protections. We focus on this neglected area of work, highlighting the work of organizations forging an alternative path for the regulation of work beyond both the state and the employer-employee relationship.

Research Questions: How are organizations of informal workers, particularly the self-employed, engaging with the regulatory environment to develop alternative forms of work-related social protection and increase financing for social protection? Outside of labour regulation, where are the possibilities for such workers to make gains? What are the wider lessons for the regulation of work that can be learned from these attempts?

Methods: The paper is based on a series of case studies, based on primary and secondary qualitative research conducted with and through organizations of workers in the informal economy in India and Argentina.

Findings: The case studies highlight the innovative thinking particularly in the waste picking sector around the use of environmental legislation, relationships with municipalities, value chains, as well as India’s Workers Welfare Boards. While many of these examples are nascent, or under threat, they present important examples to expand understanding of the possibilities for supportive regulation in labour markets dominated by self-employment and informality.

The Philippines persistently suffers from a high incidence of severe poverty with about 20 million Filipinos living below the monthly national poverty threshold. Poverty is primarily a problem of lack of income which is largely tied up to the high levels of both unemployment and underemployment in the Philippines that jointly adds up to more than 9 million Filipino labor force for the past two decades, and the pervasive informal sector employment numbering close to 17 million workers in 2021. Street vending is the most visible manifestation of informal sector employment and is a vibrant and ubiquitous phenomenon in large cities such as Metro Manila. The Philippine national government adheres to the target of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 consistent with upholding the constitutional right of every Filipino to life, liberty, and property which includes the “right to choose one’s employment, the right to labor and the right of locomotion”. In contrast, the use of police power to enforce the Metro Manila Council resolutions and ordinances that severely restrict street vending have transgressed the rights of street vendors by subjecting them to physical harm, and confiscation and destruction of their merchandise and vending equipment. Amidst persistently severe decent work deficits indicated by very high levels of unemployment and underemployment, street vending may be the only viable recourse for many of the poorest Filipinos to survive and provide for their families, rendering anti-street vending ordinances as criminalizing the state of penury. The paper examines the Metro Manila Council resolutions on street vending and the practice of police power, and how these conflict with national policies for poverty alleviation and the constitutional rights of street vendors to life, liberty, and property. The paper argues for the decriminalization of street vending and recommends more sustainable alternative programs for street vendors.

'Promised Land' is a short documentary that captures testimonies collected from foreign workers who were brought to Quebec, Canada, to work in the industrial slaughterhouses of the food processing industry. Created within a film-based sociological approach, the documentary emanates from an explorative project that aims to contextualize a recruitment process that has become a Quebec social phenomenon over the past decades. The project also included the input of students who helped raise the interview questions used for the exploration.

We suggest the showing of the documentary in addition to an oral presentation by the researcher, that will contextualize the social phenomenon, highlight the main implications that characterize the recruitment phenomenon and address some of the epistemological, political and methodological challenges that the research project has raised.

Please see the documentary here:

https://vimeo.com/781191079/62508031e9?fbclid=IwAR2d1exiR0esM9KBAKX7O1M-b9JhfUy8BnydpEhpQp1bzGcidQ2FCpRkCm0

The need to consider migrant status in union outreach has been a key issue in academic and policy debates (Alberti et al. 2013; ILO 2006, 2014, 2021a, 2021b; Marino et al. 2017). While migrant workers can share similar experiences to other workers, they can also face distinct challenges. This paper contributes to and builds on a body of research which analyses the interactions between migration and national union dynamics. Despite many advances in union outreach, organizing and advocacy, we find that legal barriers continue to be pervasive challenges to realizing migrant workers’ access to the right of freedom of association.

The data is drawn from the ILO Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining for Migrant Workers Trade Union Survey (TUS) conducted in 2021. It included closed and open-ended questions and received 72 responses covering 66 national union federations from around the world. The questionnaire was offered in six languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Arabic) and responses were translated into English. Quantitative responses were reviewed and analyzed using SPSS software and qualitative responses were reviewed and analyzed with the assistance of Nvivo software.

The results identify key barriers related to trade unions’ behaviors. The results also consider strategies that trade unions have developed to reach migrant workers and indicate that the most common strategy is ‘awareness raising’. The data is also used to identify patterns in behaviors of unions in relation to geographic regions and countries’ income levels.

References:

Alberti, G., Holgate, J., & Tapia, M. (2013). Organising migrants as workers or as migrant workers? Intersectionality, trade unions and precarious work. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 24(22), 4132-4148.

ILO. (2006). LO Multilateral Framework on Labour Migration: Non-Binding Principles and Guidelines for a Rights-Based Approach to Labour Migration. Geneva: International Labour Office.

ILO. (2014). El Rol de Los Sindicatos en el Ámbito de la Migración Laboral. San José: ILO.

ILO. (2021a). Temporary labour migration: Two Studies on Workers’ Perspectives and Actions. Geneva:

ILO. (2021b). Analisis de situaciones laborales de migrantes venezolanos en la ciudad de Bogota. Bogota: ILO and Pontifical Javierian University.

Marino, S., Roosblad, J., & Penninx, R. (2017a). Trade unions and migrant workers: New contexts and challenges in Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

This paper takes stock of the insights and learnings from a COVID-19 Emergency Cash Transfer (ECT) program that was administered to vulnerable informal sector workers in Sierra Leone. The study aims to identify potential impacts of this intervention on a range of outcomes. The paper starts by reviewing relevant examples of cash transfer programs that were instituted in response to the COVID-19 crisis. It then describes the context, the intervention, and data of the ECT program before presenting correlation analysis between the ECT and various measures of economic security and subjective well-being of households with urban informal sector workers in Sierra Leone. The quasi-experimental analysis is conducted by matching administrative data to survey data and using program eligibility criteria and inverse probability weights to identify the short- and medium-term relationship between a one-off US$ 135 cash transfer and various labor market, food security, human capital and subjective wellbeing outcomes for recipient and non-recipient households of the ECT. The results show positive correlations between receiving the transfer and the number of hours worked as well as employment in the medium-term. It also finds that program beneficiaries report higher chances of their main income increasing or staying the same compared to non-beneficiaries. The positive correlation between the transfer and income disappears over the medium-term, perhaps suggesting that one-off transfers work best to cushion vulnerable self-employed households and informal wage workers in the short-term but does not impact medium-term employment or income. The analysis is followed by discussion on limitations of data and suggestions for future work.

The adoption of the Social Protection Floors Recommendation of 2012 (SPFR) is widely recognised as an “historic” (Deacon 2013) and “radical” (Cichon 2013) reorientation of social protection, promising a new “universal and comprehensive” approach. Despite the SPFR’s bold ambitions, however, the adoption of social protection floors at global- and national-level has proven uneven. In practice, the social protection floors initiative has generally been “subordinate” (Seekings 2019) to the Decent Work agenda. Particularly in many lower-income settings in the global South, for instance, vertical expansion of benefits to waged workers through social insurance has taken precedence over the SPFR’s more radical promise to horizontally expand the frontiers of social assistance. In Cambodia, for example, entrenched norms of fiscal and social conservativism entail that policy attention has focused on expanding benefits provided to the 700,000 workers in the country’s largest formal industry – the garment sector – rather than expanding the scope of social protection to include the yet more numerous informal or agricultural sector workforce.

In this paper, we examine the consequences of this lopsided social protection strategy for its apparent beneficiaries: women working within the garment industry. We argue that the focus on extending support for formal workers, at the exclusion of informal workers is, in fact, detrimental to both groups. To illustrate these arguments, we draw on original data from the GCRF-funded ReFashion project, a longitudinal study tracing the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on a cohort of 200 garment workers in Cambodia over 24 months. We show how, in the absence of a robust social protection floor, workers in the garment sector effectively fund a social safety net for family members through remittance transfers. However, garment sector salaries alone are insufficient for this task, leading to a “debtfare” (Green 2023) model, in which workers finance these costs through increasing resort to personal debt. The result is a crisis of over-indebtedness among workers in the garment industry that undermines the achievement of Decent Work in the sector. We suggest that Covid-19 offers a moment for reflection, like that which followed the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and inspired the SPRF itself, to learn from the vulnerabilities exposed by the pandemic and recentre a radical vision of social protection that delivers for all.

The paper addresses social protection for platform workers at the European level and at the level of certain EU Member States.

The European Commission proposal for a Directive on improving working conditions of platform workers, which is currently going through the legislative procedure, seeks to improve social protection for persons performing platform work. The paper investigates the approaches to social protection in the draft Directive as well as in other documents issued during the legislative procedure. The most important questions are the provision of a rebuttal presumption of an employment relationship with binding force also for national social security institutions, the transferability of social security entitlements, voluntarily payments of digital labour platforms for social protection of platform workers and the extension of access to social protection to platform workers. Special attention is paid to social insurance against accidents at work and occupational diseases since safety and health at work were included by the ILO among the fundamental principles and rights at work. Furthermore, regulations and current/planned reforms at the national level in certain EU Member States concerning these issues are analyzed.

Until now, platform workers in the EU Member States generally do not enjoy social security protections. However, in certain cases platform providers voluntarily provide social benefits to platform workers. The paper compares such practices with manifestations of corporate social responsibility concerning social welfare. Changes in the business model of platform work (in relation to social protection) as a result of issued court decisions on employee/worker status of platform workers in certain EU countries are also taken into account. In addition, empirical studies concerning the reasons of platform workers for undertaking this type of work and what form of employment (employee/self-employed person) they would prefer are also investigated.

The paper adopts doctrinal legal research methods and provides a systematic legal comparison which takes into account existing empirical evidence in order to give concrete and detailed examples. The paper should contribute to the literature and the findings on how to extend and improve social protection for platform workers and on how to adapt social security systems to new forms of work and whether it is possible to opt for new regulatory approaches at the European level. The paper analyses the possible positive and negative effects of different solutions in law and practice.

Digital labour platforms are an important source of employment, with over 163 million workers registered on online platforms (Kassi et al., 2021). However, it is increasingly recognized that platforms have built precarious working arrangements, characterised by low pay, poor conditions, irregular contracts, opaque management practices and lack of representation, into their business models (Woodcock and Graham, 2020; De Stefano and Aloisi, 2022). Platform work largely operates outside labour standards, mainly because platform workers are generally classified as self-employed. While individual litigation has had some success in exposing sham self-employment, platforms are adept at reconfiguring relationships to avoid labour standards. This raises two questions. Firstly, how can labour standards be reshaped to meet platform workers’ needs regardless of employment status? Secondly, how can compliance with such standards be achieved? These twin research questions have been addressed by the Fairwork project. Since 2019, Fairwork has developed and applied a set of principles to evaluate the working conditions of platform workers in more than 300 platforms in over 30 countries, from a wide range of sectors, including ride-hailing, delivery, domestic, care and cloudwork. We interviewed thousands of workers and dozens of platform managers and gathered data from policy-makers and unions at local, national and international level. The principles, developed on the basis of wide consultation and extrapolating from existing international and domestic labour standards, have been tested and refined in the light of this data, to be fit for the purpose of regulating platform work. Simultaneously, we have developed alternative means of compliance based on research showing that informal sanctions, including negative publicity, can have as much impact as formal legal sanctions (Braithwaite, 2002; Paternoster and Simpson, 1996). Our project therefore works in two dimensions. First, we appeal to the influence of reputation and consumer power by publicly ranking platforms according to their compliance with our five carefully formulated principles based on fair pay, fair conditions, fair contract, fair management and fair representation. Secondly, we shape appropriate legal standards and explore avenues to achieve their formal adoption (Fredman, Du Toit et al, 2020). This paper presents our findings. We conclude by articulating the importance of regulatory intervention at international level and provide recommendations as to how ILO standards should be extrapolated to provide the right to decent work for platform workers.

Is adopting Data Mining and Machine Learning (DM&ML) methods in identifying labour law violations likely to support labour inspectorates to ensure the enforcement of labour law and keep up with rapidly changing labour relations? Inspection authorities have taken advantage of technological developments in collecting more and better-quality data and a wealth of data with the potential for a better understanding of who violates labour law, how they do it, and why they do it is stored in servers of numerous labour law enforcement institutions. Yet their prospects is rarely exploited towards improving their inspection rationale and strategies.

This paper glosses over why such data is not utilized. It focuses on revealing the superior predictive power of the DM&ML approaches compared to the manually configured red-flag approaches in targeting businesses for inspections and in increasing labour inspection’s efficiency to uncover undeclared work. Unlike manually set red-flag methods, the DM&ML ones increase the prediction accuracy by, first, automatically considering variables, that traditional paradigms of who, why, and how one engages in undeclared work or other labour law violations will omit and, second, identifying changes in behavioural patterns significantly faster than experts or practitioners.

In this study we demonstrate the application of a sophisticated and interpretable machine learning method, the Associative Classification, in the process of planning actions to face undeclared work and other labour law violations of the Albanian State Labour Inspectorate and Social Services. Interpretable machine learning produces ‘white-box’ classifiers presenting their results in explainable terms to humans, improving the users’ domain knowledge and their acceptability and trust in the models’ outputs. In our research application, we use actual data of around 40K onsite inspection visits performed around the country from mid-2019 to mid-2021. We build data mining models used in two ways: first, as an effective prediction tool for classifying risky employers, hence contributing to scheduling targeted onsite visits to deal with specific labour law violations; second, as a knowledge provision tool explaining to users how the predictions are made and revealing the most dominating employers’ feature patterns associated with the various labour law violations, thus enhancing the ability of the inspectors identifying these violations. We present the models’ classification outputs, their prediction assessment metrics, and paradigms of extracted knowledge. We prove that the proposed methodology using DM&ML approaches is highly more effective in several ways than the current inspection visits’ selection methods using red-flag indicators employed by the authority.

Introduction

In response to the growing calls for a just transition towards environmentally sustainable and inclusive economies and societies for all, organisations in the social and solidarity economy (SSE) can play a vital role in ensuring decent work and universal social protection, addressing prevailing inequalities and vulnerabilities, and achieving progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite the potential of the SSE, our understanding of these innovative institutions and their leveraging role in this just transition remains comparatively opaque. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, this paper proposes a conceptual model that identifies how the SSE might effectively contribute to specific SDG targets, particularly those related to decent work and to the informal economy.

Research Question

How can the contribution of social and solidarity economy organisations (SSEOs) to global development frameworks (the SDGs) and the Decent Work

Agenda (DWA) be made more effective, impactful and visible?

Contribution

This paper presents a conceptual model and an accompanying tool to systematically identify and evaluate the synergies and complementarities between the four dimensions of sustainable development (economic, social, environmental and institutional), the four pillars of decent work (jobs, protection, dialogue, rights), and the four functions of the SSE (economic opportunities, social security, societal empowerment, environmental protection). This then helps to identify SSE-pertinent SDG targets, and to determine which types of organizations in the SSE are best suited to contribute to specific SDG targets, in particular those that address decent work deficits in the informal econoimy. This conceptual model and its accompanying tool represent an original contribution to knowledge of theoretical and practical

applicability.

Methodology

This paper is wholly conceptual.

Findings

This paper is based on a wider study that critically examines and assesses the role of the SSE in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Decent Work Agenda. We conclude that the SSE’s potential to contribute to sustainable development and decent work in Africa is far from being fully harnessed, for the reason that most policy-makers, researchers and practitioners lack cognizance of the existence and agency of member-based organizations that constitute the SSE.

This paper examines the experiences and challenges of female social sellers in Nigeria, including how they gain online skills, who they turn to for safety, and how both are regulated. “Social selling” -- informal selling through Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Twitter and other means -- is an increasingly attractive means of income generation for women, given relatively low barriers to access. However, unlike on dedicated digital platforms, such as Jumia or Uber where training is provided and safety intended to some extent, on social media, neither is clear. Many of the skills learned (included on how to protect oneself) are either on the job, or learned through private institutions and individuals (influencers who train others and so on).

The research draws on 50 interviews with experts and female social sellers across Nigeria, as part of research conducted on platform livelihoods and women in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria for Mastercard Foundation. We explore what regulation of social selling, including safety and training, currently looks like and what sellers feel it should cover.

How are courses regulated, in terms of content, method, pricing and so on? Second, how is behaviour online between vendors and customers regulated? Do women sellers find protection from social media platforms? What form does that regulation take? How are payments honoured and sellers protected (and the opposite, how are customers protected from scammers?). We look at the current Nigerian landscape as well as the role of these social media giants to understand what these spaces look like for female sellers.