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Research on the growth of the precarious economy is of signifi cant interest as the economy increasingly becomes dependent on gig work. However, as platform and automated service work has grown, there remains a chasm in understanding the key aspects of digital labour.This handbook presents comprehensive theoretical, empirical, and historical accounts of the political economy of informal work from the late 20th century to the present.It examines the rich and varied analysis and critique of the informalisation of work, focusing on its most signifi cant theories, intellectual traditions, and authors. It highlights the political, social, cultural, and developmental impact of the deterioration of employment in the Global North and Global South, as well as the extreme threat posed to the planet by the growth of contingent work, poverty, and enduring and increasing inequalities produced and reproduced by the reformation of capitalism in the contemporary age of neoliberal capitalism. The period from the 1980s to the present is marked by the expanded extraction of surplus value from workers through the creation of non-standard jobs and the restructuring of work. A central component of the restructuring of work is the extension of gig employment through the development of algorithmic platforms which direct labourers to perform discrete tasks.This is a definitive collection, representing the primary reference work, contributing to our understanding of the subject.The book is written and presented in a clear manner, accessible to scholars and researchers of international political economy, labour economics, and sociology who are eager for new research examining this phenomenon, as well as specialists in the field of labour relations.Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Funded by the University of Amsterdam.

From Deliveroo to Amazon, digital platforms have drastically transformed the way we work. But how are these transformations being received and challenged by workers? This book provides a radical interpretation of the changing nature of worker movements in the digital age, developing an invaluable approach that combines social movement studies and industrial relations. Using case studies taken from Europe and North America, it offers a comparative perspective on the mobilizing trajectories of different platform workers and their distinct organizational forms and action repertoires. This is an innovative book that offers a complete view of the new labour conflicts in the platform economy.

This timely book addresses the key debates and challenges surrounding the future of work, covering the macro, meso and micro levels of gig work. It provides a consideration of the ways in which technology is shaping the lives of those working in the gig and digital platform economy within the 21st century.Written by leading experts in their respective fields, chapters cover a range of global issues concerning not only technology but the social relationships of gig work, management by algorithm, and how to regulate individual and collective voice in the remote gig economy. Utilising leading research and case studies from companies such as Uber and Deliveroo, the book considers what governments and the law can do to shape a better future for the worker voices and employment conditions of atypical and non-standard workers which, in turn, can help to better impact society.Missing Voice? will be a key resource for scholars and students researching employment conditions, worker and human rights, employment, and labour relations in the fields of business and human resource management, industrial relations and sociology. It will also be of interest to policy-makers, trade unions and think tanks who are interested in labour market changes and issues of worker voice and management practice in the gig economy more broadly.

The words ‘precarity'and ‘precariousness'are widely used when discussing work, social conditions and experiences. However, there is no consensus on their meaning or how best to use them to explore social changes. This book shows how scholars have mapped out these notions, offering substantive analyses of issues such as the relationships between precariousness, debt, migration, health and workers'mobilizations, and how these relationships have changed in the context of COVID-19. Bringing together an international group of authors from diverse fields, this book offers a distinctive critical perspective on the processes of precarization, focusing in particular on the European context. The Introduction, Chapters 3 and 8, and the Afterword are available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

An in-depth look at how employers today perceive and evaluate job applicants with nonstandard or precarious employment historiesMillions of workers today labor in nontraditional situations involving part-time work, temporary agency employment, and skills underutilization or face the precariousness of long-term unemployment. To date, research has largely focused on how these experiences shape workers'well-being, rather than how hiring agents perceive and treat job applicants who have moved through these positions. Shifting the focus from workers to hiring agents, Making the Cut explores how key gatekeepers—HR managers, recruiters, and talent acquisition specialists—evaluate workers with nonstandard, mismatched, or precarious employment experience. Factoring in the social groups to which workers belong—such as their race and gender—David Pedulla shows how workers get jobs, how the hiring process unfolds, who makes the cut, and who does not.Drawing on a field experiment examining hiring decisions in four occupational groups and in-depth interviews with hiring agents in the United States, Pedulla documents and unpacks three important discoveries. Hiring professionals extract distinct meanings from different types of employment experiences; the effects of nonstandard, mismatched, and precarious employment histories for workers'job outcomes are not all the same; and the race and gender of workers intersect with their employment histories to shape which workers get called back for jobs. Indeed, hiring professionals use group-based stereotypes to weave divergent narratives or “stratified stories” about workers with similar employment experiences. The result is a complex set of inequalities in the labor market.Looking at bias and discrimination, social exclusion in the workplace, and the changing nature of work, Making the Cut probes the hiring process and offers a clearer picture of the underpinnings of getting a job in the new economy.

Artificial intelligence will not necessarily create a super-intelligent “human robot”; however, it is very probable that intelligent robots and intelligent informats will bring about a form of super-globalization, in which money and goods are prioritized over people and democracy and where the widespread use of casual labour – that is, short-term contracts – will become the most common form of employment relationship. It is also very likely that artificial intelligence will bring about what is known as singularity. This term is used to describe a situation where intelligent robots, from a rational and logical perspective, are smarter than humans, i.e. the development of AI. This book explores the impact that these intelligent robots and intelligent informats will have on social and societal development. The author tackles the question of singularity from three distinct standpoints: technological singularity – the intelligence of machines compared to that of humans – which he argues will bring about a qualitatively new labour market; economic singularity – the consequences for work relationships, value creation and employment – which he asserts will promote full automation, result in precarious contracts with low salaries, and, in some countries, possibly lead to the introduction of a universal basic income; and social singularity – the consequences of technological and economic singularity for democratic processes, bureaucratic procedures for exercising authority and control, and the direction in which society will develop, in addition to the emergence of new social institutions – which Johannessen says will promote a transition from representative democracy to genuine democracy. The book will appeal to academics, researchers and students of economic sociology and political economy, as well as those focusing upon the emerging innovation economy. It will also find an audience among professionals and policymakers keen to understand the impact the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have on organizations, individuals and society at large.

El objetivo de este libro es dar a conocer la problemática del municipio de Jerez de la Frontera en materia de precariedad laboral desde el punto de vista del diagnóstico multidisciplinar y ofrecer posibles propuestas de actuación y mejora.Para alcanzar este objetivo, se parte del establecimiento de un marco teórico en el que se conceptualiza el término de precariedad laboral y se presenta una descripción del territorio de estudio, Jerez de la Frontera, realizando especial mención a la situación actual de su mercado de trabajo. Posteriormente, se profundiza en este último mediante el diseño y aplicación de un Índice de Precariedad Laboral y el análisis del impacto de la precariedad laboral en la salud de la población trabajadora. Finalmente, se aborda la percepción y opinión tanto de los trabajadores y trabajadoras del municipio en diferentes sectores, como de los representantes sindicales locales y del empresariado, aportando diferentes medidas y propuestas de actuación.Esta obra no sólo aporta una visión de la precariedad laboral desde un punto de vista multidisciplinar, abordando la temática enfoques (jurídico-criminológico, económico, estadístico y sociológico), sino que también lo hace a partir de una metodología mixta, combinando herramientas cuantitativas y cualitativas, así como diferentes técnicas de recopilación de información, como encuestas o grupos de discusión, entre otros. Todo ello hace del presente trabajo una interesante aportación al ámbito académico, tratando un tema tan complejo como importante y de suma actualidad, innovando sobre todo en su aplicación concreta al estudio de caso, el territorio de Jerez de la Frontera.

Choose your hours, choose your work, be your own boss, control your own income. Welcome to the sharing economy, a nebulous collection of online platforms and apps that promise to transcend capitalism. Supporters argue that the gig economy will reverse economic inequality, enhance worker rights, and bring entrepreneurship to the masses. But does it? In Hustle and Gig, Alexandrea J. Ravenelle shares the personal stories of nearly eighty predominantly millennial workers from Airbnb, Uber, TaskRabbit, and Kitchensurfing. Their stories underline the volatility of working in the gig economy: the autonomy these young workers expected has been usurped by the need to maintain algorithm-approved acceptance and response rates. The sharing economy upends generations of workplace protections such as worker safety; workplace protections around discrimination and sexual harassment; the right to unionize; and the right to redress for injuries. Discerning three types of gig economy workers—Success Stories, who have used the gig economy to create the life they want; Strugglers, who can't make ends meet; and Strivers, who have stable jobs and use the sharing economy for extra cash—Ravenelle examines the costs, benefits, and societal impact of this new economic movement. Poignant and evocative, Hustle and Gig exposes how the gig economy is the millennial's version of minimum-wage precarious work.

This edited collection provides a series of accounts of workers'local experiences that reflect the ubiquity of work's digitalisation. Precarious gig economy workers ride bikes and drive taxis in China and Britain; call centre workers in India experience invasive tracking; warehouse workers discover that hidden data has been used for layoffs; and academic researchers see their labour obscured by a ‘data foam'that does not benefit them. These cases are couched in historical accounts of identity and selfhood experiments seen in the Hawthorne experiments and the lineage of automation. This book will appeal to scholars in the Sociology of Work and Digital Labour Studies and anyone interested in learning about monitoring and surveillance, automation, the gig economy and the quantified self in the workplace.

The book deals with precarity within the digital age and focuses on media change and social insecurity. Change arising from digital developments takes place on micro-, meso- and meta-levels and have always social implications. Concepts such as Social Media, eHealth and Digital Capitalism, Informational Capitalism and Social Exclusion, Digital Globalization and Motility frame the social dynamics and implications of changes in digital media. These changes evoke a double precarity or stable unstability: Social practices throughout the diverse societal fields are questioned through the media change which leads to a digital age. The ongoing media change requires new social practices – what evokes precarity as an ongoing insecurity how to face the `new digital world´.As a socio-economic phenomenon and effect of neoliberal policy precarity changes life planning and self-narrations of the affected individuals. Precarity and neoliberal subjection-processes manifest in the digital age and are performatively re-produced by the way new media are used.

In The Poverty of Work, Van Arsdale goes inside the world of temping and discovers a type of work dreadfully insecure yet growing rapidly. Furthermore, through a comprehensive historiography, he illustrates how employment agencies moved from England to North America during the colonial period, where they sold workers into many deprived employment statuses, including indentured servitude and slavery. Van Arsdale contends that had the history of employment agencies been better understood, they would have likely been abolished with slavery, or at the very least, more tightly controlled by government. Today, left largely unregulated, employment agencies are powerful corporations generating astonishing revenue by selling flexible, on-demand temporary workers. Unfortunately, this labor is trapping millions in a cycle of unemployment, despair, and poverty.

In this thought-provoking and innovative book, Kendra Coulter examines the diversity of work done with, by, and for animals. Interweaving human-animal studies, labor theories and research, and feminist political economy, Coulter develops a unique analysis of the accomplishments, complexities, problems, and possibilities of multispecies and interspecies labor. She fosters a nuanced, multi-faceted approach to labor that takes human and animal well-being seriously, and that challenges readers to not only think deeply and differently about animals and work, but to reflect on the potential for interspecies solidarity. The result is an engaging, expansive, and path-making text.

Je nach historischer Epoche, räumlichem Kontext und gesellschaftlicher Schicht variiert die Verteilung von Arbeit und Nicht-Arbeit im Lebenslauf. Dieser Band relativiert gängige Vorstellungen von der Normalität des Arbeitens, indem er danach fragt, wie Individuen und Gruppen mit diesen Maßstäben, aber auch mit den Veränderungen in der gesellschaftlichen und ökonomischen Organisation von Arbeit umgehen: Wie reagieren sie, wenn sie den Standards von Normalitätskonzepten oder -fiktionen nicht genügen? Wie kommt es zu Abweichungen, Konkurrenzen und Wandel? Die Beiträger_innen ermöglichen einen multidisziplinär ausgerichteten Blick auf die aktuellen Debatten über Arbeit, Prekarität und sozialen Wandel.

The papers presented here originated at a wonderful conference held at Middlesex University in London attended by experts on the subject of vulnerable workers and precarious work from all over the world. The aim here is to examine different aspects of these topics, showing the need for developing further research in connection with these areas of study.

Precarious employment presents a monumental challenge to the social, economic, and political stability of labour markets in industrialized societies and there is widespread consensus that its growth is contributing to a series of common social inequalities, especially along the lines of gender and citizenship. The editors argue that these inequalities are evident at the national level across industrialized countries, as well as at the regional level within federal societies, such as Canada, Germany, the United States, and Australia and in the European Union. This book brings together contributions addressing this issue which include case studies exploring the size, nature, and dynamics of precarious employment in different industrialized countries and chapters examining conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of precarious employment in comparative perspective. The collection aims to yield new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, measuring, and responding, via public policy and other means – such as new forms of union organization and community organizing at multiple scales – to the forces driving labour market insecurity.