Is the current Power Resources Approach (PRA) of trade unions capable enough to cope with the global socio-economic and geopolitical structural transformation resulting from automation, pandemic-induced economic fallout, and the Russia-Ukraine war? If so, then why are millions of workers living in extreme poverty, and why do we have a double-digit rate of global job gaps? To survive in this challenging period of the global labour market, trade unions have to trigger the fifth power’s resources, denoted as ‘ethical power’. This new dimension of PRA might facilitate the trade unions’ efforts to secure decent industrial relations and social justice in the workplace. Historically, gaining ‘institutional power’ and ‘societal power’ was subject to ethical confrontation, which is rightly omitted while defining the PRA. Therefore, this study coined the term ‘ethical power’ as a supplement to existing power resources theory and found that the application of ethics to the attainment and exercise of PRA is not something new but rather unrecognised.

This article is part of an internationally coordinated themed collection on ‘labour conflict, forms of organisation, and class’ exploring important questions. How can we explain the interplay of capital, the state, and the international order, in defining the persistence of labour conflict in changing historical and political-economic contexts? How have the economic, social, and technological transformations precipitated by the recent pandemic shaped the expression of work-related conflict? As part of a response to these main questions, the author and contributors of this collection conceptualise labour conflict and collective action in broader class analysis and examine the combined effect of state policies, migration, and digital innovation on contemporary labour politics. This article, drawing on insights from Marxist-oriented interdisciplinary approaches and feminist theories, seeks to suggest approaches to future studies on class, labour conflict, and workers’ organisation.

Digital platform businesses primarily utilise on-call contingent workers, using their own tools and equipment, to perform the productive work associated with the supplied service. The expansion of this business model has led some to proclaim that traditional ‘jobs’ will come to an end. Some welcome this development, others fear its consequences for the stability and quality of work – but most see it as driven primarily by technology, and therefore largely ‘inevitable’. This article provides historical and theoretical perspective on the expansion of digitally mediated work, to better understand the range of forces (technological, economic and socio-political) at work. It shows that the major features of platform work were all visible in earlier periods of capitalism, but they became less prominent with the rise of the ‘standard employment relationship’ in the 20th century. The rise and fall of the standard employment relationship is described with reference to the changing context for the labour extraction effort of private employers. A better understanding of the complete range of forces driving changes in work organisation, and a rejection of the assumption that they are technologically determined and hence inevitable, can inform regulatory and political responses to the rise of platform work.

The 2008 economic crisis has had significant impacts on labour markets around the world. In Europe, in particular, the need for internal devaluation within European Union nations in financial difficulty precipitated a wave of labour market reforms alongside the reform of welfare systems struggling to cope with high levels of unemployment. Various analyses have explored the nature of these changes separately for the labour market and welfare systems. Using a conceptual framework rooted in a political economy understanding the social nature of labour, this article takes an inclusive approach to understanding regulatory changes for both employed and unemployed labour. We do this using the case of Ireland, a country that went through a severe economic crisis, was subject to a European Union/European Central Bank/International Monetary Fund bailout in 2010 and witnessed one of the most significant labour market crises in Europe. The Irish case is instructive because it highlights both the range and depth of regulatory interventions utilised by the state during periods of crisis to deal with the social nature of labour and its role under advanced capitalism.

The neoclassical theory of labour supply cannot unambiguously explain the decision of highly-skilled high-wage male workers to work longer and harder than their counterparts in the 1980s. We investigate the labour supply elasticities of these workers, over time, and across countries, within a ceteris paribus condition. The estimates reveal a shift rather than a movement along the supply curve. We find that ambiguities are due to the absence, in the theory, of a clear distinction between a change in consumption that is partly due to changes in the wage rate and partly due to changes in purchasing power. We apply a new pluralist approach to the standard income-leisure choice framework and provide for a more systematic and consistent method of measuring variations in labour supply, with policy implications.

This paper examines the privatisation of Sydney Airport and the regime of ‘light-handed’ monitoring of service quality and airport charges that followed the sale in 2002. The arguments for privatisation are reviewed, in particular the need for increased competition and/or appropriate regulation where a former public monopoly, such as Sydney Airport, is sold. The aftermath of the privatisation of the airport has led to complaints by the major airlines and consumers of ever increasing charges for use of the airfield and for car parking and other services. This highlights that the ‘light-handed’ monitoring regime has not constrained the airport’s ability to charge monopoly rents. The aftermath of privatisation has resulted in labour shedding, outsourcing and a focus on cost minimisation by the airport’s management.

Labour markets in Australia have long been segmented by gender and race. This study compares two highly gendered and racially segmented labour markets, home-based family day care workers and garment homeworkers. The comparative cases examine the broader trends of migration, production and consumption that reinforce gender and racial stereotypes, and discourses that underpin representations that women workers are ideally suited to such work. We theorise the gender and racialised inequalities of homework based on the literature on invisibilisation and social reproduction to explore the vulnerable position of migrant women and the consequences of having limited options, such as legal and social protections and any capacity to collectively organise. Our analysis examines the roles and responses of institutions and conceptualises the socio-political factors that affect the characterisation of homework as non-work or as self-employed entrepreneurial activities. By mapping the differing regulatory trajectories of these two groups of homeworkers in terms of regulation and representation, we find both similarities and differences. While garment homeworkers have achieved recognition through legislation and social mobilisation, their circumstances leave them less likely to access such rights. By contrast, the failure to recognise family day care homeworkers, has left them to market forces.

The process of financialisation has been cast as a major contributor to increasing inequality of wealth and income in a number of advanced industrialised economies, but the nature of the link requires precise clarification. In this article, we argue that financialisation in Australia has advanced inequality, but in a particular way. Charting several features of ‘financialisation of the macroeconomy’, we accept that this process has contributed to increased inequality in the sense that the wealthy have increased their wealth faster than households and individuals at the lower end of the wealth distribution. However, there is limited Australian evidence to suggest that income redistribution has occurred as a result of the ‘financialisation of the firm’. At the level of the firm, increased inequality of wealth can be attributed directly to financialisation if firm practices are oriented to increasing shareholder value at the expense of returns to other stakeholders such as workers or suppliers, and increased income inequality can be linked specifically to financialisation through increases in earnings to financial agents. We suggest several reasons for the relative absence of a firm-level dimension of financialisation but caution that such a trend remains possible, particularly if regulation of the labour market is weakened.

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.

This article analyzes the effect of international migration on the wage gap between women and men who remain in Mexico. We use historical distance to the U.S. border over early twentieth-century railroad networks as an exogenous factor causing changes in the relative supply of men and women, due to predominately male migration. A 10% decrease in the relative labor supply of men tends to increase the wage gap between women and men by approximately 1.1 percentage points, suggesting that they are not perfect substitutes. However, the results imply a greater elasticity of substitution between men and women than that suggested by previous studies.

We examine the impact of participation in sport at secondary school on post-school pathways using a survey of Irish school-leavers, distinguishing between those who dropped out of sport during their secondary school years and those who continued playing in their final school years. We find that members of this latter group are, on completion of secondary schooling, significantly and substantially more likely to continue their education rather than to join the labour market. This effect survives controlling for individual background traits, school characteristics, attachment to the school and academic achievement. Our results are also robust to the use of propensity score matching to control for selection into participation in sport based on observable characteristics. We relate our findings to previous work on the potential labour market benefits of participation in sport and to the emerging literature on the role of consumption value in educational choice.

This paper addresses the issue of underemployment in the UK labour market – the demand for hours of work is less than workers’ willingness to supply extra hours. Workers would like to work more hours, but there is insufficient product demand to justify additional hours. This phenomenon has been evident in the UK labour market for some time, but has grown significantly during the Great Recession. In this paper, we develop a new index of underemployment which is intended to combine indicators of excess capacity on the extensive (jobs) and intensive (hours) margins of the labour market. This index continued to increase during 2012, though unemployment was stable. The paper also investigates the microeconomic determinants of underemployment, finding that it is particularly prevalent among the young and unqualified.