The rapid growth of the platform economy has provoked scholarly discussion of its consequences for the nature of work and employment. We identify four major themes in the literature on platform work ...and the underlying metaphors associated with each. Platforms are seen as entrepreneurial incubators, digital cages, accelerants of precarity, and chameleons adapting to their environments. Each of these devices has limitations, which leads us to introduce an alternative image of platforms: as permissive potentates that externalize responsibility and control over economic transactions while still exercising concentrated power. As a consequence, platforms represent a distinct type of governance mechanism, different from markets, hierarchies, or networks, and therefore pose a unique set of problems for regulators, workers, and their competitors in the conventional economy. Reflecting the instability of the platform structure, struggles over regulatory regimes are dynamic and difficult to predict, but they are sure to gain in prominence as the platform economy grows.
Labour geography 1 Strauss, Kendra
Progress in human geography,
08/2018, Volume:
42, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This progress report examines the relationship between continued growth in the sub-field of labour geography, especially in research on migration, and the concept of precarity. An increasingly ...dominant frame in critical studies of labour and the employment relation, and resonant in the political sphere within (and now beyond) Europe, precarity has seen slower uptake by geographers. However, research on migrant labour and emerging work on technological change, flexibilization, restructuring and insecurity is employing precarity as a multi-dimensional conceptual framework. In this sense, I argue that the distinction between notions of precarity grounded in political economy and those grounded in political philosophy is increasingly – and productively – blurred. As I illustrate, this blurring is apparent in labour geography’s ongoing and deepening engagement with precarity, yet our distinctive contribution to a spatialized theorization of precarity remains, I argue, an open question.
This essay represents the collective vision of a group of scholars in vocational psychology who have sought to develop a research agenda in response to the massive global unemployment crisis that has ...been evoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. The research agenda includes exploring how this unemployment crisis may differ from previous unemployment periods; examining the nature of the grief evoked by the parallel loss of work and loss of life; recognizing and addressing the privilege of scholars; examining the inequality that underlies the disproportionate impact of the crisis on poor and working class communities; developing a framework for evidence-based interventions for unemployed individuals; and examining the work-family interface and unemployment among youth.
Alternative work arrangements continue to increase in number and variety. We review the literature on alternative work arrangements published since the most recent major review of nonstandard work by
...Ashford et al. (2007)
. We look across the research findings to identify three dimensions of flexibility that undergird alternative work arrangements: (
a
) flexibility in the employment relationship, (
b
) flexibility in the scheduling of work, and (
c
) flexibility in where work is accomplished. We identify two images of the new world of work-one for high-skill workers who choose alternative work arrangements and the other for low-skill workers who struggle to make a living and are beholden to the needs of the organization. We close with future directions for research and practice for tending to the first image and moving away from the second image of the new world of work.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Automation, digitalisation, the post-industrial ...transition and climate change are creating new social risks which are not adequately supported by established welfare state institutions. In this timely book, Maurizio Ferrera, Joan Miró and Stefano Ronchi propose critical social and institutional policy reform in response to the nation state’s inability to maintain a balanced ecosystem between democracy, the market economy, welfare and the rule of law.
Building on new developments in the psychology of working framework (PWF) and psychology of working theory (PWT), this article proposes a rationale and research agenda for applied psychologists and ...career development professionals to contribute to the many challenges related to human rights and decent work. Recent and ongoing changes in the world are contributing to a significant loss of decent work, including a rise of unemployment, underemployment, and precarious work across the globe. By failing to satisfy human needs for economic survival, social connection, and self-determination, the loss of decent work undermines individual and societal well-being, particularly for marginalized groups and those without highly marketable skills. Informed by innovations in the PWF/PWT, we offer exemplary research agendas that focus on examining the psychological meaning and impact of economic and social protections, balancing caregiving work and market work, making work more just, and enhancing individual capacities for coping and adapting to changes in the world of work. These examples are intended to stimulate new ideas and initiatives for psychological research that will inform and enhance efforts pertaining to work as a human right.
Research on precarious work and its consequences overwhelmingly focuses on the economic dimension of precarity, epitomized by low wages. But the rise in precarious work also involves a major shift in ...its temporal dimension, such that many workers now experience routine instability in their work schedules. This temporal instability represents a fundamental and under-appreciated manifestation of the risk shift from firms to workers. A lack of suitable existing data, however, has precluded investigation of how precarious scheduling practices affect workers’ health and well-being. We use an innovative approach to collect survey data from a large and strategically selected segment of the U.S. workforce: hourly workers in the service sector. These data reveal that exposure to routine instability in work schedules is associated with psychological distress, poor sleep quality, and unhappiness. Low wages are also associated with these outcomes, but unstable and unpredictable schedules are much more strongly associated. Precarious schedules affect worker well-being in part through the mediating influence of household economic insecurity, yet a much larger proportion of the association is driven by work-life conflict. The temporal dimension of work is central to the experience of precarity and an important social determinant of well-being.
En este artículo analizamos los vínculos entre trabajo precario y salud a partir de experiencias laborales de varones adultos de clase popular que viven en el conurbano de Buenos Aires, Argentina. ...Realizamos entrevistas cualitativas semi-estructuradas presenciales entre abril y agosto de 2022, lo que nos permitió indagar sobre sus experiencias de trabajo previas y durante la pandemia COVID-19. Mostramos cómo los trabajos actuales y anteriores, mayormente manuales, de baja calificación y con distintos rasgos de precariedad, los exponen a diversos riesgos psicofísicos, vulnerabilidades y privaciones materiales, y pobreza temporal. Asimismo, cómo limitan su capacidad para realizar prácticas de autocuidado de la salud, y su calidad de vida personal y familiar. Incorporamos en el análisis una perspectiva de género, interseccional y de ciclo de vida que nos permite dimensionar las implicancias de la precariedad laboral en este grupo de trabajadores, contribuyendo al campo de estudios sobre trabajo precario y salud.
BackgroundCurrent evidence suggests that precarious employment is a risk factor for poor mental health. Although the mechanisms underpinning this relationship are unclear, poor sleep has been ...proposed to have a role in this relationship. This study explored the mediating effects of poor sleep quality and duration on the relationship between precarious employment and mental health.MethodsData were obtained from wave 17 of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. A novel precarious employment score (PES) was developed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) in 8127 workers (4195 female, aged 18-65). Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to evaluate the mediating effect of sleep quality and duration on the relationship between precarious employment and mental health (SF-36 mental health subscale).ResultsThe PES identified 650 workers with a high level of precariousness, 2417 with a moderate level of precariousness, and 5060 workers with a low level of precariousness out of 8127 in total. There was a significant direct association between precarious employment and mental health; with higher precarity increasing the likelihood of poor mental health. The SEM results revealed that sleep quality partially mediated the association between precarious employment and mental health (Coefficient = 0.025, 95 % CI 0.015, 0.034, P ≤ 0.001). However, a mediation effect was not found for sleep duration.ConclusionEncouraging precarious employees to improve sleep quality may mitigate the adverse effects of precarious work on their mental health. Further objective measurement of sleep duration warrants a more accurate insight into this mediating effect in this group.
Precarious work is increasingly considered the new ‘norm’ to which employment and social protection systems must adjust. This article explores the contradictions and tensions that arise from ...different processes of normalisation driven by social policies that simultaneously decommodify and recommodify labour. An expanded framework of decommodification is presented that identifies how the standard employment relationship (SER) may be extended and flexibilised to include those in precarious work, drawing examples from a recent study of precarious work across six European countries. These decommodification processes are found to be both partial and, in some cases, coexisting with activation policies that position precarious work as an alternative to unemployment, thereby recommodifying labour. Despite these challenges and contradictions, the article argues that a new vision of SER reform promises greater inclusion than alternative policy scenarios that give up on the regulation of employers and rely on state subsidies to mitigate against precariousness.
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