Companies and business lobby groups bemoan a lack of qualified workers, even for entry-level or low-skill jobs. At issue is a stated inability to find workers with the right ‘fit’ for the role or business. But what does fit really mean? We draw on human capital theory and labour segmentation theory to examine how perceptions of fit are shaped. We conducted ninety-three interviews with food service workers, managers, and other industry stakeholders and found that employment decisions are shaped by stereotypes, with a particular focus on ‘pretty privilege’ or aesthetic labour, as well as Indigeneity, citizenship, race, and gender. We present implications for research and practice in the food services industry.

Australia’s education system is one of the most developed globally and also one of the most privatised. Despite the substantial expenditure by state governments and the federal government, it is profoundly unequal with respect to access, funding, resources, and results from early childhood education to university. The inequality has class and spatial features, and Indigenous Australians are at the bottom of the rung. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural, social, and economic capital, I show that the education system, whilst certainly allowing for some mobility, facilitates the reproduction of the existing class structure. Children from low-income households are more likely to not attend childcare, to attend a school that lacks resources and where going on to university is viewed as exceptional rather than the rule. In contrast, the economic capital of wealthier households allows them to access childcare and elite private schools. The cultural and social capital of these schools reproduces a born to rule ethos, and progression to an elite university is an assumed path.

In the context of big data, the rise of digital inclusive finance is driving the digital transformation of various industries, which in turn, has a profound impact on labour employment. Based on the panel data of 258 prefecture-level cities in China from 2011 to 2021, this article evaluates the impact of digital financial inclusion on the employment structure of the labour force and investigates its spatial spillover effects by constructing a spatial Durbin model and a mediation model. The study finds that: (1) Digital financial inclusion increases the employment demand for high-skilled and low-skilled labour and decreases the employment demand for middle-skilled labour, that is, the employment structure of the labour force shows a polarisation trend. (2) There is a positive spatial spillover effect of the impact of the development of digital financial inclusion on the demand for high- and low-skilled labour. (3) Financial digitisation plays an intermediary role in the process of digital financial inclusion affecting the employment structure of the labour force. Taking advantage of the dividends brought about by the development of digital inclusive finance and formulating policies according to the actual situation of each region indicate an undeniable choice for achieving full employment.

In this paper, we introduce a unique dataset derived from a survey conducted among 450 Syrian refugee workers and the owners/managers of the firms in which they are employed in Istanbul, Turkey. We utilise this data to investigate the connection between the wage-productivity gap and perceived economic and social discrimination. The findings of the study indicate that individuals facing a wider wage-productivity gap tend to report higher levels of economic and social discrimination. These results remain consistent even after incorporating various variables at both the worker and firm levels into the analysis. These findings imply potential policy recommendations that policymakers should take into account.

Extant research often assumes that the letter of labour codes is an adequate proxy for effective regulation. This paper empirically shows that such an assumption makes little sense for Senegal. We collect new objective measures of private and public labour enforcement, including workers’ awareness of their rights, access to the judiciary, penalties, and labour inspection resources and activities. We document that Senegal, as well as other countries in Francophone West Africa, is characterised by a combination of protective/stringent in-form labour codes and little enforcement efforts. Furthermore, we show that labour inspections target large and registered firms, while labour violations are more prevalent in small and unregistered firms, implying that the problem is substantially more complex than a lack of public inspection funding. We speculate it is mostly about the lack of effective representation of vulnerable workers in the policymaking process.