Collection: Work in the Global Economy Editors’ Choice

 

Enjoy free access to our journal Editors’ top articles from recent issues. Access these articles for free until 31 July 2025.

Editors' Choice Collection Work in the Global Economy

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Workers at Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey, US, have formed the Coalition of Rutgers Unions (CRU). This workplace-based union coalition engages in wall-to-wall organizing, which seeks to include every Rutgers worker, irrespective of occupation, status, or union affiliation. This form of coalition creatively retains the benefits of certified unions while navigating the sectionalism encouraged by American labour laws. CRU’s recovery of traditional organizing principles amid neoliberal conditions is a new industrial unionism. It is thereby an example of the union renewal affirmed by proponents of social movement unionism. CRU is also an organizational model for workers in large, complex, heterogeneous workplaces with multiple existing unions. This article draws from qualitative interviews with CRU activists to discuss its participants, structure, activities, and its role in a victorious 2023 strike at Rutgers University.

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This article sets out to explore whether the amendment to the ILO’s 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work which, in June 2022, added a ‘safe and healthy work environment’ to the principles and rights already included, might help to address conditions leading to the disproportionate burden of work-related death, injury and disease estimated to occur in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). It does so by drawing on the findings of an extensive review of the literature to examine evidence for the influence and operation of (a) global and national regulatory standards and interventions; and (b) private standards and their role in influencing practices in export-oriented work. It situates its examination of this evidence in relation to the economic, social and regulatory contexts in which work and its poor outcomes for safety and health are experienced in many LMICs, and hence in relation to the challenges that confront the effective utilisation of regulatory action. The article argues that these contextual challenges are formidable, and evidence of the operational means of securing sustainable improvements to work health and safety in the face of them remains incomplete. But it concludes that the 2022 amendment could contribute a useful driver for the considerable strategic orchestration and leadership required to achieve such effective utilisation if, within the ILO, there were a tripartite consensus concerning its desirability.

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Labour platforms such as UBER, PeoplePerHour and Rappi have become a global phenomenon. Their business model is affecting global labour markets and disrupting service industries such as ride hailing, cognitive work and food delivery. Labour platforms not only rely on a flexible labour supply but are also at the forefront of utilising new technologies such as algorithms to control labour. For this reason, scholarly analyses of labour platforms are increasingly employing an integrated approach that accounts for the different layers of control intersecting at the point of production. Following such an approach, an ethnographic case study in platform food delivery was conducted, aided by semi-structured interviews and digital artifacts. This case study shows that algorithmic control is able to reduce effort indeterminacy but is less equipped to cope with indeterminacy of mobility induced by flexible labour supply. As such, algorithmic control was integrated with two additional control mechanisms: first, core workers were put into a position of controlling peripheral workers; and second, attempts were made to craft a community that offered strategic managerial avenues. Altogether, given the interplay between effort and mobility power, the study contributes to an understanding of technological control internal to social and institutional relations.

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In the years following Qatar’s successful 2010 bid to host the FIFA World Cup 2022, there has been a significant shift in its engagement with the migrant labour rights discourse, and subsequent embarkment on significant reforms as the result of intense international scrutiny and advocacy action. The core feature of Qatar’s historically evolved transnational labour management system, Kafala, has become a key focal point of international advocacy efforts. The objective of this article is to assess the extent to which the reforms constitute a break in Qatar’s historical (that is, pre-FIFA 2022) labour management system, and thus a meaningful disruption to the social reproduction regime that allowed the Kafala system to persist. We do so by probing the institutionalisation of those reforms, with a particular focus on the agency of labour through collective worker empowerment. Drawing on interviews with key transnational actors involved in the reform process in situ, we employ the ‘established-outsider’ relations concept in our analysis of the reforms, while highlighting the remaining challenges. Our ultimate argument is that although the reforms in Qatar seek to provide more labour rights and protections, they fall short of loosening the absolute control of sponsors (kafeels) over their employees. This is due to two main reasons: the absence of strong and effective institutions to convert the legal reforms into rights in practice; and the fact that laws outside of the labour ministry, that fall under the jurisdiction of the interior ministry, are the foundation of the relationship between citizens and migrants and remain largely untouched. These double-edged limitations guarantee the social reproduction of the highly unequal labour mobility system by firmly keeping in place ‘established-outsider’ relations.

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Mobility (and control over it) is partially mediated by migrant capital and how it is evaluated across time and space. This study draws on the concept of multiple migration – wherein migration is viewed as potentially multidirectional and open-ended over the life course – to examine the plight of male, Mexican hospitality staff globally on the move. These participants are unique in that they had experience working as hospitality staff in different countries under different legal classifications. In the US they were undocumented, in Mexico they were deported nationals, and in Canada they were received as temporary migrant workers. Their accounts bring different mobilities – illegal, forced, contract, and returned – under one analytical frame to illuminate how mobilities are spatially and geographically regulated. As the article details, their mobility depended on the resources they accrued during migration and whether these resources could be converted into relevant capital, with class, gender and race significant mediating factors. When contextualised, their accounts offer unique insights into immigration controls, transnational labour regimes, political economy and how access to capital shapes gendered identities and hierarchies. Their evaluations vis-à-vis other (global) workers also mediated their legal incorporation, governed by normative ideals that shape prospects and life outcomes in the current economy.

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This article aims to demonstrate how gender, class, and race are intertwined at the micro level, addressing the interaction of lived life and social policy, through biographical interviews, in Brazil. Less interested in the analysis of inequalities per se, this article focuses on the way black, elderly, poor, female heads of families, living in urban neighbourhoods, manage to subjectively resignify objective domination. The in-depth biographical approach reveals the (re)construction of their subjectivity, defining personal sacrifice as a form of protagonism (agency) and empowerment. This process of resignification occurs by exchanging the unit of experience they relate to, from the individual to the family unit. It engages with social policies (social assistance, public health, and social housing) implemented by the latest Labour Party’s term of office (2003–2016). These policies are based on the role of women as responsible for the family unit. The focus on subjectivity, in different Brazilian metropoles, challenges the production of conformed neoliberal selves, in this case of women, within a specific Global South context, marked by historically high levels of inequality and informal work, since the formal end of slavery.

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