This article maps the major changes taking place in academic work within the broader context of the neoliberalisation of universities. Recognising the great variability in the form and pace of neoliberalisation across institutions and national contexts, the article identifies a set of features and indicators to aid in the comparative assessment of the extent and effect of neoliberal processes at different institutions. The authors use conceptual tools from labour process theory to highlight the ways that neoliberalisation has resulted in academic work that is fragmented, deskilled, intensified, and made subject to greater levels of surveillance, hierarchy, and precarity. In doing so, the authors also demonstrate the importance of combining political economy and Foucauldian approaches to neoliberalism, to highlight the way that external structural conditions and subjective processes combine to create new labour processes to which participants find themselves consenting and actively reproducing.

The Economy for the Common Good movement proposes an alternative economic model, which promises to offset many of the detrimental effects of the contemporary labour market. Yet, despite its increasing economic and social relevance in Europe, there is little research on Economy for the Common Good firms and the quality of the jobs they offer their employees. We thus, first, introduce the ideas of this movement and then present findings on workplace characteristics and the well-being of workers. Our results are based on our own survey of Economy for the Common Good employees from 2018 and on the sixth wave of the European Working Conditions Survey. Our analyses offer mixed support for the claims of the Economy for the Common Good – while Economy for the Common Good workers can be found in high-quality work settings, their absenteeism and presenteeism, as well as indicators of control, time pressure, direct participation and financial participation do not differ from other workers when controlled in a propensity score matching approach. Based on our findings and feedback from Economy for the Common Good representatives, we conclude that the introduction of Eonomy for the Common Good ideas might be too recent to see any positive effects, but also that Economy for the Common Good companies should place more focus on their employees’ well-being.

We introduce a themed collection of articles on approaches to configuring a Green New Deal as a response to the current capitalist crisis marked by ecological breakdown, economic stagnation and growing inequality. The Green New Deal is a contested political project, with pro-market, right-wing nationalist, Keynesian, democratic socialist and ecosocialist variants. Critiques of the Green New Deal include pragmatic queries as the feasibility of implementation, and theoretical challenges from the right regarding reliance on state forms and from the left regarding efforts to ameliorate capitalism. They also include concerns about technocratic bias and complaints about lack of meaningful consultation with Indigenous peoples on proposals for large-scale shifts in land use. Debates over the ideological orientation, political strategy and implementation of the Green New Deal must now account for the economic and employment impacts of COVID.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s dwellings suddenly became a predominant site of economic activity. We argue that, predictably, policy-makers and employers took the home for granted as a background support of economic life. Acting as if home is a cost-less resource that is free for appropriation in an emergency, ignoring how home functions as a site of gendered relations of care and labour, and assuming home is a largely harmonious site, all shaped the invisibility of the imposition. Taking employee flexibility for granted and presenting work-from-home as a privilege offered by generous employers assumed rapid adaptation. As Australia emerges from lockdown, ‘building back better’ to meet future shocks entails better supporting adaptive capabilities of workers in the care economy, and of homes that have likewise played an unacknowledged role as buffer and shelter for the economy. Investing in infrastructure capable of providing a more equitable basis for future resilience is urgent to reap the benefits that work-from-home offers. This article points to the need for rethinking public investment and infrastructure priorities for economic recovery and reconstruction in the light of a gender perspective on COVID-19 ‘lockdown’ experience.

This article considers a range of legal issues that arise when family and domestic violence impacts upon the workplace. It examines the available data on the costs of family and domestic violence to employers and the community. It discusses the potential for employers to be affected by Australian State and Territory criminal and related laws that are intended to protect a person from family and domestic violence. Recent cases of discrimination arising from family and domestic violence are considered with some speculations as to other possible forms of liability for employers concerning work health and safety and workers compensation laws. The Australian Fair Work Commission’s determination of unpaid family domestic violence leave is also examined, as is the adoption of paid leave by some State and Territory governments and larger Australian employers. The article concludes with some reflections and speculations on how current laws may affect employers and what actions can be taken by employers to adopt supportive measures to protect employees.

A number of important topics, themes and concepts frequently recur in studies of digital labour over the past decade, such as exploitation, precarity, unpaid labour, gig economy and platform labour. The first generation of the critique has drawn on a variety of Marxist, post-structuralist and Weberian sources to question prevailing neo-liberal and centrist models centred on values of efficiency and the supposed empowerment of workers and users. While these topics, themes and concepts have been beneficial in establishing a basis for critique, there is a danger that they may become rather familiar and potentially even a little stale. Therefore, this article suggests a need to renew the critique of digital labour, as the digital realm stabilises around a set of key global players and platforms and as labour activists continue to face serious obstacles to success in an era of authoritarian populism. Here, I concentrate on introducing our themed collection surrounding a renewed critique moving beyond a dichotomy of exploitation and labour agency. I also encourage different disciplines to enrich and renew studies of digital labour.

Proposals for development of ‘green jobs’ emerged when environmentalists, labour organisations and political economists recognised the need for economic restructuring to reduce climate change. Current proposals for a Green New Deal go further by putting additional emphasis on fiscal stimulus, ‘just transition’, reducing socio-economic inequalities, and political empowerment. This article analyses the development of this more comprehensive policy approach, its rationale, the constraints it would face and its prospects in the Australian context.

Using an administrative dataset from the Ontario Ministry of Labour, we investigate three hypotheses about employment standards violations among franchised businesses: (1) franchisees have a higher probability of violating employment standards than other businesses, (2) franchisees have a higher probability of monetary/wage-related ES violations than other businesses, and (3) franchisees have a lower probability of repaying monetary/wage-related violations than other businesses. The results of our statistical models suggest that overall, franchisees are indeed more likely to violate ES, have a higher probability of monetary/wage-related violations, and are less likely to repay such violations. However, the results vary substantially by industry. While franchisees had only marginally higher probabilities of an ES violation in two of the seven industry-groups examined, five of the seven industries showed substantially higher probabilities of a monetary violation. The results also show that franchisees in three industry groups (retail, accommodation and food services, and education, public administration, healthcare and social services) are particularly prone to monetary violations.

Wage theft – the nonpayment of employees’ wages and benefits by employers – is a violation of national, state, and local labour standards, yet it is prevalent in the low-wage labour market of the United States. Building upon the recent increase in attention to the wage theft problem through advocacy, policy, and research efforts, we contextualise the problem within the country’s deregulated neoliberal labour market. We then propose a conceptual framework to demonstrate how the problem occurs when the price of labour standards violation is low due to lax enforcement, and there is a high price of compliance due to ambiguous and increasingly outdated labour standards. We further evaluate extant federal, state, and local policy initiatives designed to curb wage theft by modernising outdated labour standards and strengthening their enforcement. Finally, we propose future research agendas, such as examining the effects of fissured employment relationships and the enforcement efforts of state and local anti-wage theft laws, to guide the development of effective policy interventions.

Most proposed solutions in the Global Green New Deal literature involve finance and technology transfers to address the imbalance between the Global North and Global South, while providing little discussion of the internal socioeconomic structures within countries in the Global South. This article uses China as a case study to show that without addressing the issue of domestic informality, the potential benefits of a Global Green New Deal are less likely to be fully realised in the Global South. We use the Input-Output method and our originally constructed data on formal and informal employment to calculate the informal employment share in two exemplary renewable energy sectors: solar and wind. We find that more than half of the jobs created in the solar and wind energy sectors, with a given level of spending, will be in the informal economy, and hence are associated with low wages and little social welfare protection. The results imply that, without addressing informality, both renewable energy sectors perpetuate the informal structure in the broader economy. We also question the capitalist nature of ‘green jobs’ created by the Green New Deal. Based on the results, we call for a more organic integration of a Global South perspective in the studies of a Global Green New Deal.

This article investigates the practices of precarious playbour on Kuaishou, a short-video platform embracing the idea of ‘recording the lives of ordinary people’ and attracting massive numbers of migrant youth to produce creative content as free labour. It examines how young migrants from rural areas in China engage in Kuaishou as a means of realising upwards socio-economic mobility by producing a tuwei (earthiness) culture which has a large fan base. It also examines the way in which they collaborate to cope with precarious conditions lacking guaranteed working time and income, and labour protection. The article attempts to build a conversation with existing scholarship that addresses the ‘exploitation vs. empowerment’ dialectic of labour production. Instead, we address the complexity of digital labour production characterised by a collaborative and symbiotic relationship between social media platforms and users. Through ‘play’ with their followers that generates profit for the digital platform, migrant youth voluntarily accept the uncertain, unpredictable, and risky conditions of digital labour production. They are, however, not passively subjected to platform exploitation but can instead reclaim agency by actively seeking to collaborate with other users to cope with increasing precariousness.

This article analyses from a Keynesian approach the effect of wage devaluation on the Spanish labour market during the Great Recession post-2008. It challenges the pro-flexibility literature, which attributes to labour relations reforms the prevention of larger job destruction in the recession and a larger reduction in unemployment during the subsequent expansion. Instead, we examine the role of wage devaluation in the operation of Okun’s law and gross domestic product, using an extended version of the Bhaduri–Marglin model. We find that wage devaluation has not significantly modified Okun’s law and that through its impact on income distribution, the unemployment rate rose by 1.9 percentage points. We therefore provide evidence for the negative effect of wage devaluation on gross domestic product and the positive effect on the unemployment rate.

We use Canadian data over the period of 1991Q1 to 2019Q2 to examine the effect of higher minimum wages on consumption, measured as the real retail trade sales per adult population. Such an examination is rare in the extant literature and it is timely given the increasing debate concerning the stimulus versus inflationary effects arising from wage polices because of COVID-19 global pandemic. We apply the autoregressive distributed lag model to determine the causal relationship between these variables. We find one long-run cointegrating relationship that runs from the real minimum wage to the real retail trade sales. In addition, we find that a 1% increase in the minimum wage is associated with almost a 0.5% increase in real retail trade sales in the long run. While our findings rest on several statistical assumptions, there is strong evidence in support of the position that minimum wage strengthens aggregate consumer spending, and thereby the standard of living, economic growth and stability. This is a position that differs from the conclusions drawn from mainstream academic and policy debates on the economic usefulness and efficacy of minimum wage increases.

How is the rise of platform capitalism reinventing the traditional regime of familial production, while at the same time being energized by it? How do the historically informed, lived experiences of rural e-commerce entrepreneurs or workers in China help reconceptualize digital labor and platform studies? Deploying the analytic of platformized family production, this article addresses these questions through a deep description of the experiences of variously positioned platform-based and mediated laborers in an e-commerce village in East China. I argue that the ongoing process of platformizing family production is profoundly contradictory. As an alternative to a model of development based on unevenness and the rural-urban divide, village e-commerce has created opportunities for peasants and marginalized urban youth to achieve social mobility. However, it also shapes a new regime of value that privileges the individualized e-commerce entrepreneur as an ideal subject, and fetishizes and instrumentalizes innovation and creativity in conformity with the global intellectual property regime. These tendencies not only contradict the reality of collective labor organization both on e-commerce platforms and in villages, but also conflict with the indispensable role of manual labor in the production process—reinforcing rather than overcoming existing inequalities and stratification in rural China.

Green New Deals are being widely discussed as both a means to confront climate change and to improve aspects of social well-being. An important facet of the discussion is how they should be financed. The negative impacts of Covid-19 on national budgets and sovereign debt question whether the implementation of Green New Deals is feasible if austerity needs to be introduced to achieve sustainability. This article assesses whether a wealth tax based upon the work of Michal Kalecki could help avoid austerity measures and facilitate the introduction of Green New Deals. While wealth taxes have traditionally been defined on net worth or assets to reduce wealth inequality, the formulation is meant to be equitable by applying to gross wealth or assets. Estimates are calculated for the United States and turn out to be quite modest. The approach not only generates revenue to cover expected net interest outlays on national debt, but additional revenue to pay down portions of it and/or support green initiatives, such as Biden’s de-carbonisation policy. The article concludes with a discussion of challenges for the tax’s effectiveness.

We propose a carbon tax policy for Delhi—the most polluted capital globally—which will fundamentally change the energy mix of Delhi’s economy toward clean, green energy and guarantee universal access to electricity, transport, and food, up to a certain amount. Any carbon mitigation strategy needs to alter our dependence on fossil fuels, requiring a systemic overhaul of its energy mix. Implementing a carbon tax will mitigate emissions and mobilise revenue for our proposed redistributive program: Right to Food, Energy, and Travel (RFET). The policy is designed to advocate for the ‘poor over the rich’ to compensate for the ‘rich hiding behind’ the poor by emitting the majority of carbon and pollutants. Using input–output analysis, we estimate the class-wise distribution of carbon emissions in Delhi. We find that the necessary tax would be US$112.5 per metric ton of carbon dioxide in order for this program to work. The free entitlement of fuel and electricity per household comes out to be 2040 kWh per annum, and there is an annual universal travel pass of US$75 per person for use in public transport and an annual per capita availability of food of US$205.

Under what circumstances can minimum wages increase without adverse effects on employment levels? In 31 Chinese provinces between 2004 and 2015, the employment effect of a minimum wage depended on the minimum wage level, foreign direct investment, per capita gross domestic product and labour productivity. A minimum wage increase reduced hiring as foreign direct investment inflow rose, regardless of the amount of investment. Any positive employment effect of a minimum wage increase was mitigated by per capita gross domestic product growth, except when per capita gross domestic product was above the average. Above-average labour productivity enhancement significantly mitigated the adverse employment effect of the minimum wage. Employers responded to a rising minimum wage by increasing hiring when the geometric growth rates of the minimum wage and foreign direct investment for a particular province within a period of time were above the overall average across provinces. However, they scrutinised both annual and overall economic growth within a time period when making hiring decisions in the face of minimum wage adjustments. An inverted U-shape relationship between minimum wages and employment suggest a maximum threshold value for the minimum wage. Thus, government policy measures should foster short-term and long-term economic growth, to facilitate employment creation when minimum wages increase.

This article examines Chinese immigrant engineers’ navigation in the highly flexible information technology (IT) industry in the United States and their strategies of utilizing the high-velocity labour market to their advantage. Flexible employment has grown both in prevalence and prominence in the study of the American IT industry. What flexibility theorists fail to attend to, however, is the ethnicised demission of the high-velocity labour market in the IT sector. To address this vacancy, the researcher conducted a 13-month ethnography at a leading internet-services firm in the United States and 66 additional interviews with engineers from eight leading tech companies. The ethnographic work showed that inequality that emerged within the tech firms (e.g. ‘bamboo ceilings’) disadvantaged Chinese engineers’ career development. The ‘bamboo ceiling’ stimulated Chinese immigrants to use the high-velocity labour market to normalize their job-hopping practices, in order to circumvent their career disadvantage. To facilitate their job-hopping, Chinese engineers developed university-based networks. This study concludes that, with help of their university network, Chinese immigrants became the most mobile group in the US tech industry, which further preserved the industry’s flexibility.

There is a substantial body of research that recognises the importance of analysing regional characteristics in employment and labour relations that occur in a given geographical context. However, this phenomenon has been scarcely studied from a spatial approach. This article uses a spatio-temporal panel data model to examine the spatial interactions between the gender employment gap and, some labour and socioeconomic characteristics of 727 municipalities of Andalusia, Spain, for the period 2012–2016. The results show that due to spatial diffusion mechanisms, a spatial spillover effect occurs in both the gender gap in employment and in some of the labour and socioeconomic characteristics considered. These findings may be extended to other geographic areas and can be of use for the implementation of regional policies aimed at narrowing the gender employment gap.