Crowdwork conducted via digital platforms is a young form of work, but a growing part of the gig economy. Typical for crowdwork is low pay, volatile income streams and no social security benefits. Also, crowdworkers have few possibilities for social comparison or negotiation because they work outside of company organisations. This article examines the question of whether these conditions mean that crowdworkers’ expectations about justice in crowdwork arrangements differ in comparison to their expectations regarding justice in conventional employment relationships. This question is addressed empirically on the basis of 36 qualitative interviews and a survey of 230 crowdworkers. The justice expectations of crowdworkers involved in different types of crowdworking platforms in German-speaking countries were examined. In our sample, crowd work typically serves to supplement – not replace – conventional employment. This explorative research shows that crowdworkers use similar standards of justice regarding work performance in their evaluations of work mediated via crowdwork platforms and conventional employment. It shows that crowdworkers perceive injustices in four specific areas: planning insecurity, lack of transparency in performance evaluation, lack of clarity in task briefings and low remuneration. These areas correspond to the theoretical dimensions of distributive and procedural justice on Colquitt’s (2001) organisational justice scale. These findings have implications for future efforts to regulate crowdwork.

Despite growing interest in proposals for a universal basic income, little advance has been made in implementation. Here we explore policy options for an Australian Basic Income. Our analysis responds to concerns that Basic Income is both too expensive and too radical a departure from existing welfare state structures to be a feasible policy option. Drawing on policy and Basic Income scholarship we identify changes to Australia’s current means-tested benefits structures that move substantially towards Basic Income while remaining consistent with historic policy norms, which we call ‘affluence testing’. Using microsimulation we explore fiscal and distributional trade-offs associated with the implementation of an affluence-tested Basic Income. Our results suggest Basic Income has the potential to significantly reduce inequality and poverty while also requiring taxes to rise substantially. Placing these trade-offs in international context we find the policy would reduce inequality to levels similar to Nordic welfare states while increasing overall taxation to approximately the OECD average.

Higher education enrolment and graduation rates have increased rapidly inter-generationally across much of the world, offering employers the promise of more knowledgeable recruits and promising individuals new means of social advancement. In the case of Bolivia, the labour force is becoming more heterogeneous over time, which could imply positive effects induced by a closer match between labour supply and recruiters’ needs. However, we show that this is not the case. We revisit the transition mechanisms from college to the workplace, positing recruiters’ interpretations of educational credentials as a crucial determining factor for employability in the formal sector. In a two-branch correspondence study, 2848 fictitious CVs were sent to 1424 formal firms in the three main urban Bolivian areas. We find a large university reputation premium. Applicants from well-valued universities are around 40% more likely to receive a positive response – a 2.25 percentage point advantage from a 7.87% baseline likelihood. Thus, the increasingly heterogeneous labour force is generating additional informational frictions in the labour market, rather than promoting a more efficient matching process.

Sweden has adopted an Active Labour Market Policy as a means of transitioning out of the economic crisis created by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The approach is to a significant extent reminiscent of that adopted following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The article examines the effectiveness of active labour market policy in Sweden over the period 2007–2012. By analysing these earlier policy outcomes, the aim is to assess the success of active labour market policy more broadly. The hypothesis that greater labour market flexibility allows the labour market policy to be more efficient is evaluated. With a focus on the labour supply, possible reasons for the reduced efficiency of state interventions are outlined using regression models. Conclusions derived from the models point to the failure of earlier Swedish active labour market policy towards the vulnerable groups of the unemployed, unemployed women and men aged 15–19 years and the long-term unemployed.

This article argues that society is not a thing. It is abbreviated and adapted with permission from a public lecture, titled There Is No Such Thing as Society: Margaret Thatcher, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Social Science. The original was presented by Gavin Kitching to the Cuadernos de la Catedra Ludwig Wittgenstein at Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico, in March 2019.