This article examines the impact of the neoliberal restructuring of health services on female nurses in Turkey. It provides a qualitative analysis of work–family conflict, establishing that not only work but also family life has become more precarious. The contours of precariousness of both work and family are analysed through interviews with 50 female nurses working full time in different areas of health service provision. The findings suggest that the neoliberal restructuring of health services has led to staffing deficits along with workload intensification, unpredictable work schedules and poor organisational support. This has increased work–family conflict, defined as a form of precariousness because it heightens the difficulties, risks and insecurities entailed in balancing family-related expectations with increasing work demands for female nurses. This precariousness makes spousal support critical if nurses are to be able to address work–family conflict and leads to nurses’ compliance with unfavourable working conditions as a way to resolve the mutual interference of family and work. The increased subordination of life to work has resulted from the neoliberal managerialisation of health services, creating precarisation in the lives of female nurses.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is an institution, a set of programmes and policies designed to mark a number of important reforms not just in the post-Soviet space but in the wider European political economy. It is committed to developing a competitive business environment, foreign investment and private sector activity in the post-communist space. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is considered to be a key inter-state mechanism enabling member states to negotiate post-communist reforms. The paper reorients analysis of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, claiming that existing framings of the role of the EBRD ignore its tangible neoliberalising pressures. It argues that the EBRD works to fundamentally restructure states in the post-communist space in three ways: (1) the configuration of an ‘appropriately’ neoliberal economic space, (2) the construction of subaltern subjectivities in the regional space, and (3) the persistent dominance of expert knowledge and policy practice external to the state. This restructuring is intended to further neoliberalism in the economic space of the region. By uncoupling the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from a state centric analysis, the paper reveals how the technical aspects of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development activities configure particular neoliberal rationalities and competencies not as a putative superstate, but as a key site for the ever-deeper encroachment of neoliberalisation in peripheral European states.

While traditional labour market estimates indicate that there has been little change in the proportion of workers holding multiple jobs in North America, survey instrument deficiencies may be hiding more substantial growth driven by the gig economy. To address this possibility, I test a broader measure of multiple jobholding to examine its prevalence in the Canadian workforce based on two national studies of workers (2011 Canadian Work Stress and Health Study and 2019 Canadian Quality of Work and Economic Life Study). Almost 20% of workers in 2019 reported multiple jobholding – a rate that is three times higher than Statistics Canada estimates. While multivariate analyses reveal that the multiple jobholding rate in 2019 was 30% higher than in the 2011 Canadian Work Stress and Health Study, multiple jobholders in 2019 were less likely to report longer work hours in secondary employment. Analyses also revealed that having financial difficulties is consistently associated with multiple jobholding in 2011 and 2019. Collectively, these findings suggest that while the spread of short-term work arrangements has facilitated Canadians’ secondary employment decisions, for many workers these decisions may reflect underlying problems in the quality of primary employment in Canada, rather than labour market opportunity. I discuss the potential links between multiple jobholding, the gig economy and employment precariousness.

This article addresses three main issues: the relationship between commute time and sickness absence, the heterogeneity of the commuting–absenteeism effect between rural migrants and urban citizens, and the effect of China’s Hukou system on the commuting–absenteeism effect. It applies a unique set of employer–employee matched data in China and a zero-inflated negative binomial model. We find clear evidence that a longer commuting time contributes to an increase in sickness absence. The heterogeneity of the commuting–absenteeism effect can also be confirmed: longer commuting leads to higher absence rates for urban citizens but not for rural migrants. Furthermore, we explore the effect of commuting on a set of health-related outcomes. The estimations demonstrate that commuting time has a significant impact on health-related outcomes for both migrants and urban citizens, but unequal access to housing provision and to social health insurance in the Hukou system may mean that rural migrants resort to more informal medical services and thus lack access to the official sickness certificate required to seek legal sickness absence. We recommend accelerated reform of the Hukou system to encourage rural workers to seek appropriate and timely medical services, thereby reducing public health risks.

The article examines the commonly shared belief that ‘there was no alternative’ (the TINA hypothesis) regarding the transformation strategy in Poland in 1989–1990. This belief is shown to be incorrect, with evidence that an alternative was contemplated. Following a visit in Stockholm in January 1989 of high-ranking experts of the Consultative Economic Council (a government think-tank established shortly after martial law was introduced on 13 December 1980), the Council produced a report on the Swedish Model. The report was hoped to provide foundations for shifting the still centrally planned Polish economy towards economic efficiency and the social welfare standards of the Nordic countries. After the 1989 parliamentary elections and the appointment of the non-communist government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the political environment changed radically and the priority of the new government was to swiftly establish a truly liberal market economy in Poland. The article shows, however, that notwithstanding those revolutionary changes, a high-level debate took place only a few weeks after the new government came to power to discuss an option of a more gradual strategy of Poland’s economic transformation that at the same time would be of a more social democratic nature. An insider account of that debate and of its external and internal constraints is given in the subsequent sections of the article.

Skills that are difficult to automate are expected to increase in demand and reward according to skill-biased technological change advocates, who have identified high rewards for cognitive and social skills. However, such broad skill categories involve numerous essential competencies that can be differentially rewarded or go simply unrewarded. Using US data, this article analyses the demand for and payment of linguistic competency, a cross-cutting kind of skill that is basic for both cognitive and social work in the new economy and is one of the human capacities that is most difficult to automate. While human capital theory predicts an increase in wages as the demand for linguistic skills rises, from cultural/institutional perspectives, it can be theorised that communicative abilities and foreign-language knowledge are socially undervalued because of their association with feminised activities, ethnicity, and low-status service jobs. We analyse the demand and reward for linguistic skills through a two-step analysis of occupational and individual data derived from two sources: the Occupational Information Network and the Current Population Survey. Results show that while ‘hard’ verbal-reasoning skills are associated with high average salaries, as is predicted by neoclassical theory, the potentially undervalued linguistic skills – interactive and multilingual skills – are unrewarded and even penalised. This evidence requires further political attention, given its implications for large number of workers, especially in feminised, low-status service jobs.

The increase in precarious forms of work has been extensively investigated by scholars. However, the implications of precarity for workers’ education have not been adequately explored. There is a great need for an approach to workers’ education that will advance the social and economic interests of precarious workers and other marginalised communities who are becoming a major segment of the workforce. Based on in-depth interviews, this article identifies education regarding wages, women and work, working conditions, labour laws and practical skills like public speaking, reading and writing as core elements of a curriculum for the education of precarious workers. Given that precarious workers tend not to be organised in formal structures, non-governmental organisations and trade unions will have to reach out to them to make sure that they provide alternative structures able to craft educational programmes that can build the confidence of precarious workers so that they can challenge their precariousness.

This article aims to provide insight into the employment relations in China-based multinational companies internationalising to Europe, a still relatively unexplored topic. We investigate the transfer of work and employment practices from Foxconn’s manufacturing headquarters in mainland China to its subsidiaries in Czechia and the factors that influence the firm’s internationalisation of production. By drawing upon original ethnographic fieldwork, the study makes a two-fold contribution. First, it shows the analytical inadequacy of the ‘latecomer’ model which assumes that the Chinese firm is an asset seeker. Second, it illustrates the relevance of diversity of labour and non-institutionalised forms of workers’ agency for theorisation of internationalisation. These topics are still insufficiently addressed by the literature that favours managerial agency and the model of distinctive and stable national labour forces. The study contributes to the theoretical debates on internationalisation by illustrating the limits of the national institutionalist perspective, the importance of considering a multi-scalar analytical framework and the relevance of labour composition in shaping multinational employment relations.

With economic reform, in China, labour turnover of seafarers became more possible. However, little attention has been paid to its consequences. A limited literature indicates that Chinese seafarers may leave state-owned enterprises to become freelance seafarers, working in the global labour market for better wages and employment conditions. There have been predictions of a substantial increase in seafarer export, with China becoming the top labour supplier to the global maritime industry. However, such expectations have been largely unmet. Through 157 qualitative interviews with seafarers and managers in Chinese ship crewing agencies, we explore some reasons why this may be so. The findings suggest that Chinese seafarers are in fact limited in their willingness and ability to leave their companies. This is due to a complex mixture of organisational, regulatory, infrastructural and personal contexts that are their everyday experience of work in China. Analysis further suggests that the underdevelopment of a national regulatory infrastructure and welfare support mechanism for seafarers, along with poor implementation of the Maritime Labour Convention 2006, combine to limit the extent of the reform of the Chinese seafaring labour market. Together, these factors help to explain why China’s seafaring labour export has been far lower than anticipated.

Human civilisation faces a series of existential threats from the combination of five global and human-engineered challenges, namely climate change, resource depletion, environmental degradation, overpopulation and rising social inequality. These challenges are arguably being manifested in both an increased likelihood and magnified impact of catastrophes like forest fires, prolonged droughts, pandemics and social dislocation/upheaval. This article argues that in understanding and addressing these challenges, important lessons can be drawn from what has repeatedly caused organisational failures. It applies the ‘Ten Pathways to Disaster’ model to a series of disasters/catastrophic events and then argues this model is salient to understanding inadequate responses to the five threats to civilisation. The article argues that because these challenges interact in mutually reinforcing ways, it is critical to address them simultaneously not in isolation.

The purpose of this article is to investigate emerging areas of precarious employment in Sweden. Based on the literature on dimensions of precariousness and neoliberalism, this article will begin with an analysis of the transitioning Swedish welfare state and the contextual environment of precarious employment in Sweden. This will serve as a point of departure for the development of an occupational classification scheme including measures of income and employment security. In an empirical analysis, the occupational classification will be applied to a population-based register material including two birth cohorts of employed Swedish residents aged 28–33, with a registered income. The development of income and employment security will be described and discussed. By applying this newly developed measure of precarious employment, this article will provide a platform for future theoretical and empirical research on precarious employment in a transitioning welfare state.