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Essential or excluded? Union pressures and state responses to platform work in three liberal market economies
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic led to renewed discussion of decent work for people at the margins of the labour market. This article explores public policy on platform workers across three liberal market economies, namely the United Kingdom, Canada and Ireland, taking the pandemic as a focal point. Liberal market economies are generally difficult environments for unions, and we examine the nature of union political pressure on the state to enhance protections for platform workers and the extent to which policy has changed in each state. We find uneven levels of such union pressure, with the most limited attention afforded by Irish unions. In the United Kingdom, the unions did exert some influence through strategic litigation, creating a policy problem for the government. More progressive policies are evident in Canada, where the government recognises that platform workers’ precarious position has undesirable consequences for the state.
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Using the concept of regulatory space, this article asks how both the state and non-state actors influence employment regulations particular to the gig-economy. To address this question a mixed method approach is used, including interviews with strategically placed informants involved in policy formation at national and international levels, content analysis of legal cases, parliamentary inquiry transcripts and policy reports. The analysis contributes to an understanding of employment regulation by the state in two ways. First, it reports distinct ‘levers’, which lead to a particular state role of ‘ceding and seizing’ regulatory power. Second, it argues that these levers ultimately serve the accumulation interests of capital over the legitimacy of employment rights for labour. The findings have wider societal implications for issues of equity, justice and employment regulation applicable to the gig-economy.
The COVID pandemic has demonstrated the weakness of neoliberalism by showing the importance of public services, workers’ need for security, and a heightened awareness of collective interdependence. Economic theory recognises the deficiencies of depending on market forces by accepting certain grounds for public intervention, including public and collective goods and negative externalities. Acceptance of the human contribution to climate change has massively increased their importance. The pandemic has had similar effects. The very rich may be able to escape to safe places, but the great mass of us are dependent on the support of each other, often through a mobilisation of resources that only states can organise. While much of the community that was rediscovered during the pandemic was highly local, damage to the climate and the spread of disease cannot be contained within national boundaries; cooperation has to be cross-national. It is therefore incompatible with an obsession with national sovereignty. For Europeans the institutions of the EU are central.
Since 2016, mobilizations of gig workers across European countries have become increasingly common within location-based services, such as food delivery. Despite remarkable similarities in workers’ mobilization dynamics, their organizational forms have varied considerably, ranging from self-organization, to work councils, to unionization through rank-and-file or longstanding unions. To start making sense of this diversity in organizing practices, we compare two cases of mobilization in the food delivery sector: in Italy, where workers have initially opted for self-organization, and in the UK, where they have organized through rank-and-file unions. Drawing on interview and observational data gathered between 2016 and 2018, we find that the diversity of organizational forms across the two cases derives from the interaction between agential and contextual factors, namely: the capabilities of rank-and-file unions and the political tradition of militant organizing of the environment within which gig workers are embedded. These findings contribute to the emerging debate on labour relations in the gig economy by showing the central role that factors external to the labour process and to the institutional context play in shaping the structuring of labour antagonism in a still lowly institutionalized sector characterized by transnationally homogenous challenges.
Drawing on a series of interviews with key actors including representatives of the main trade unions, this paper considers the response of unions in the UK to the emergence and growth of platform work. Comparing the partly different strategies adopted by traditional and alternative unions in respect of the representation of platform workers’ interests, it demonstrates that the unions’ choices have been shaped by the characteristics and resources of the unions themselves, by prevailing political conditions and, perhaps above all, by the restrictive legal framework that excludes many platform workers from the scope of employment legislation. Without recourse to either a legally protected freedom to take industrial action or the statutory recognition procedure, unions have only exceptionally been able to negotiate collective agreements on behalf of platform workers. Instead, traditional unions have focussed on broader political strategies to fight precariousness, including wielding an influence on policymaking, especially through their relations with the Labour Party. Alternative unions have channelled resources into organising and mobilising platform workers and supporting them in campaigning, protesting and bringing strategic litigation.
The decline in the prevalence of the Standard Employment Relationship in Canada has created challenges for Canadian unions. This article reviews the available estimates of the prevalence of precarious employment and gig work in Canada. Using data from the Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario (PEPSO) research group it evaluates both the success of unions in organising workers in precarious employment and bargaining for them. The last section reviews recent union strategies to organise workers in precarious employment with a focus on the subset of precarious employment referred to as gig work. Organising gig workers presents unique challenges for unions as many are deemed by their employers as independent contractors and as a result not covered by existing Canadian labour legislation and hence not eligible for union membership. The paper concludes by arguing that organising precarious workers is a work in progress, whose ultimate outcome remains uncertain.
Although recent studies indicate that multiple jobholding is widespread in the digital platform economy, the interaction between people’s engagement with digital platforms and the conventional labour market is rarely explored. This article brings new insights into this interaction, exploring the income of individuals combining paid work in the conventional labour market with income from distinct digital platforms. Based on two large-scale representative surveys of a random sample of 18,000 people in 2017 and 2019 in combination with administrative register data, we demonstrate how labour and capital platforms attract different income groups. We also find that online income in combination with non-platform income sources such as traditional jobs exacerbate the segmentation tendencies found in the conventional labour market. An increasing share of rich and poor seem to use different platforms, indicating a potential hierarchy of labour market segments in both the online and the conventional labour markets.
Current understanding of what constitutes work in the growing gig economy is heavily conflated, ranging from conceptualisations of independent contracting to other forms of contingent labour. This article calls for a move away from problematic aggregations by proposing a classification of gig work into three variants, all based strongly upon key technological features: app‐work, crowdwork, and capital platform work. Focusing specifically on the app‐work variant, this article's more delineated focus on the textured dimensions of this work proposes new lines of enquiry into employment relationships and human resource management. Examining the crucial role of algorithmic management, we critically discuss the impact of this novel mediation tool used by gig organisations for the nature of employment relations within app‐work, work assignment processes, and performance management. In so doing, we propose a series of research questions that can serve as a guide for future research in this increasingly important field.
Zero hours work typifies work where there are no guaranteed hours offered by the employer. This article examines the relationship between the state and the emergence of zero hours work in an atypical liberal market economy, Ireland. Based on interviews with informed stakeholders with a focus on four sectors – retail, health, education and accommodation/food – the article concludes that the actions of the state have created a weak regulatory environment that has facilitated the emergence of zero hours work. The findings are discussed with a theoretical frame using the concepts of accumulation and legitimation.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to advance a conceptual analytical framework to help explain employment regulation as a dynamic process shaped by institutions and actors. The paper builds on and advances regulatory space theory.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper analyses the literature on regulatory theory and engages with its theoretical development.
Findings
The paper advances the case for a broader and more inclusive regulatory approach to better capture the complex reality of employment regulation. Further, the paper engages in debates about the complexity of employment regulation by adopting a multi-level perspective.
Research limitations/implications
The research proposes an analytical framework and invites future empirical investigation.
Originality/value
The paper contends that existing literature affords too much attention to a (false) regulation vs deregulation dichotomy, with insufficient analysis of other “spaces” in which labour policy and regulation are formed and re-formed. In particular, the proposed framework analyses four different regulatory dimensions, combining the legal aspects of regulation with self-regulatory dimensions of employment regulation.
This paper suggests how the 'grey literature', the diverse and heterogeneous body of material that is made public outside, and not subject to, traditional academic peer-review processes, can be used to increase the relevance and impact of management and organization studies (MOS). The authors clarify the possibilities by reviewing 140 systematic reviews published in academic and practitioner outlets to answer the following three questions: (i) Why is grey literature excluded from/included in systematic reviews in MOS? (ii) What types of grey material have been included in systematic reviews since guidelines for practice were first established in this discipline? (iii) How is the grey literature treated currently to advance management and organization scholarship and knowledge? This investigation updates previous guidelines for more inclusive systematic reviews that respond to criticisms of current review practices and the needs of evidence-based management. © 2016 British Academy of Management and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This article considers the direct impact of political parties, interest groups, and social movement organizations (SMOs) on policy, providing evidence for a "core" hypothesis and three others that refine or qualify it. The core hypothesis: all three types of organizations have substantial impacts on policy. The other three: (1) when public opinion is taken into account, the political organizations do not have such an impact; (2) parties have a greater impact than interest groups and SMOs; and (3) interest groups and SMOs will affect policy only to the extent that their activities provide elected officials with information and resources relevant to their election campaigns. The source of data is articles published in major sociology and political science journals from 1990 to 2000, systematically coded to record the impact of organizations on policy. The major findings include: political organizations affect policy no more than half the time; parties and nonparty organizations affect policy about equally often; there is some evidence that organizational activities that respond to the electoral concerns of elected officials are especially likely to have an impact.
Interest groups' many and varied attempts to influence EU public policy are well documented. Research on EU interest politics has made considerable progress in the analysis of both the access and voice strategies they use as they seek to influence the policy process. Other scholars have focused on the legal strategies that private actors deploy when they endeavour to shape public policy by bringing cases before the ECJ. Although both lobbying and litigation strategies have been well studied in the context of European integration and are, in principle, available to most business interest groups, few scholars have asked what determines actors' selec- tion of one or the other in their pursuit of policy change. This paper attempts to bridge these two strands of research and theory by offering a framework in which private actors' choice between lobbying and litigation can be understood and hypotheses about their behaviour derived.
Government reports and documents claim that building a knowledge economy and innovative society are key goals in Canada. In this paper, we draw on critical policy analysis to examine 10 Canadian federal government training and employment policies in relation to the government's espoused priorities of innovation and developing a high skills society and economy. Our findings highlight three areas of contradiction: a tension between high skills and low skills policy, a contradictory focus on the socially and economically excluded and included, and the paradox of both an active and passive federal government. Drawing on state theories such as inclusive liberalism and the social investment state, we argue that while a ‘highly skilled knowledge economy’ may form part of the overall skills discourse, these contradictions raise doubts that it is to become a reality in Canada in the near future.
Interest groups are a major channel through which citizens can express their opinions to decision-makers. Their participation in policymaking may improve decision-making processes by supporting policies that are in line with citizen preferences and blocking policies that solely reflect the interests of the governing elite. At the same time, however, intense interest group pressures may make it difficult for policy-makers to implement the most efficient policies since such policies often impose costs on parts of the public. Competition among interest groups over the distribution of economic gains may also slow down the rate of economic growth (Olson 1982). Finally, if some groups constantly win, interest group politics may undermine the legitmacy of electorally accountable decision making in a democracy.
In regular cycles, studies of lobbying try to determine the influence and power of non-governmental actors on public policy. Although influence is very difficult to measure empirically, many continue to push for better research design to solve the problem. Through the examination of several case studies of business-government relations in the United States and the European Union, this article argues that the difficulties with power and influence concern not only their operationalisation, they also reflect conceptual confusions. Trying to determine the "winners" and "losers" of a policy issue can be misleading, since power also structures apparently harmonious exchange relationships. The perceived success of business lobbying in the cases studied depended on the governments' receptiveness to their demands, which in turn depended on strategic advantages they saw for themselves in international negotiations. Even when business appears to lead the dance, it is more promising to look at resource distribution and the mutual dependencies of both sides, instead of announcing the assent of business power over policy outcomes.
The European Commission proposed a Directive on Platform Work at the end of 2021. While much attention has been placed on its effort to address misclassification of the employed as self-employed, it also contains ambitious provisions for the regulation of the algorithmic management prevalent on these platforms. Overall, these provisions are well-drafted, yet they require extra scrutiny in light of the fierce lobbying and resistance they will likely encounter in the legislative process, in implementation and in enforcement. In this article, we place the proposal in its sociotechnical context, drawing upon wide cross-disciplinary scholarship to identify a range of tensions, potential misinterpretations, and perversions that should be pre-empted and guarded against at the earliest possible stage. These include improvements to ex ante and ex post algorithmic transparency; identifying and strengthening the standard against which human reviewers of algorithmic decisions review; anticipating challenges of representation and organising in complex platform contexts; creating realistic ambitions for digital worker communication channels; and accountably monitoring and evaluating impacts on workers while limiting data collection. We encourage legislators and regulators at both European and national levels to act to fortify these provisions in the negotiation of the Directive, its potential transposition, and in its enforcement.
Europe has been faced with multiple challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the problem of how to secure jobs and earnings. In our comparative analysis, we explore to what degree European welfare states were capable of responding to this crisis by stabilising employment and workers’ incomes. While short-time work was a policy tool already partly used in the 2008/2009 Great Recession, job retention policies were further expanded or newly introduced across Europe in 2020 in the wake of the pandemic. However, cross-national variations persist in the way in which these schemes were designed and implemented across European welfare states, aiming more or less to hoard labour and thereby avoid mass dismissals throughout the employment crisis. We distinguish between business support and labour support logics in explaining the variation in job retention policies across Europe. Our finding is that Continental, Mediterranean and liberal welfare states did more to foster labour hoarding using short-time work than Nordic or Central and Eastern European countries.
A rapidly growing literature on informal work increasingly turns to administrative data to document changes in the size of informal economy and to learn more about the characteristics of freelancers, on‐demand/platform workers and similar types of workers commonly referred to as “gig workers.” These studies have established a conceptual link between the work arrangements of gig workers and how these are reported in tax data. We contribute to this literature by introducing a method of identifying gig workers specific to the way work arrangements are reported in the Canadian tax system and estimating the size of the gig economy in Canada using administrative data. Based on our definition, the share of gig workers among all workers rose from 5.5% in 2005 to 8.2% in 2016. Some of this increase coincided with the introduction and proliferation of online platforms. Our analysis highlights gender differences in the trends and characteristics of gig workers. By linking administrative data to 2016 census microdata, we are also able to examine educational and occupational differences in the prevalence of gig workers.
This article summarizes and reviews research on union responses to precarious work in Europe, based on a systematic coding of 56 case study-based articles published between 2008 and 2019. Analyses of these cases suggest two paths to labour market dualism, with the first involving institutional fragmentation and union division, and the second a combination of weak structural power and partnership-oriented union identities. The authors also identify two paths to solidarity, with the result of reduced precarity for peripheral workers: a conflict-based path and a social partnership-based path. Campaigns to organize migrant workers present distinctive institutional and structural challenges to unions, with studies involving migrants most often finding ‘failed solidarity’, in which inclusive organizing fails to reduce precarity. The article integrates these findings with past frameworks on union responses to precarious work and concludes with recommendations for future research.
This article is an attempt to take stock and critically reflect on the UK’s decade of austerity and social policy hostility over the past decade. It distinguishes between economic and political austerity and digs deeper into the data on expenditure in order to examine the impact of austerity on British public expenditure and politics. It argues that the decade of austerity was a hostile one for British social policy which not only undermined the financial base of key parts of the welfare state, it reshaped it and redefined its priorities, setting in train a series of subsequent events that would further change, not just British social policies, but British economics, polity and politics. And, as subsequent crises – notably Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic – testify, crisis events tend to be linked, and each one shapes and influences the ability of the state to respond to the next.
1. INTRODUCTION
For the most part of the twentieth century, work in many European countries and the US became characterised by what has been termed the standard employment relationship (or SER). The SER has been described as one whereby a worker would be employed full time by a particular employer at the employer’s place of work and have opportunities to progress upwards within an internal labour market.¹ Jobs were of indefinite duration and many employees had the prospect of working until their retirement within one firm.² Part-time and casual work was marginalised and labelled non-standard. Significantly, much of the statutory regulation of the individual employment relationship during that period was premised on workers being employed on a ‘standard’ basis under a contract of employment³ and many of the statutes introduced with respect to employment were designed to protect expectations of job security (for example, protection from unfair dismissals and redundancy). Thus, the SER was mirrored in regulation based on a standard employment contract or SEC⁴ with other non-standard types of worker being largely excluded from protective legislation.
We set out to explore how precarious workers, particularly those employed in the gig economy, balance financial uncertainty, health risks, and mental well-being. We surveyed and interviewed precarious workers in France during the COVID-19 crisis, in March and April 2020. We oversampled gig economy workers, in particular in driving and food delivery occupations (hereafter drivers and bikers), residing in metropolitan areas. These workers cannot rely on stable incomes and are excluded from the labor protections offered to employees, features which have been exacerbated by the crisis. We analyzed outcomes for precarious workers during the mandatory lockdown in France as an extreme case to better understand how financial precarity relates to health risks and mental well-being. Our analysis revealed that 3 weeks into the lockdown, 56% of our overall sample had stopped working and respondents had experienced a 28% income drop on average. Gig economy drivers reported a significant 20 percentage point larger income decrease than other workers in our sample. Bikers were significantly more likely to have continued working outside the home during the lockdown. Yet our quantitative analysis also revealed that stress and anxiety levels were not higher for these groups and that bikers in fact reported significantly lower stress levels during the lockdown. While this positive association between being a biker and mental health may be interpreted in different ways, our qualitative data led to a nuanced understanding of the effect of gig work on mental well-being in this population group.
This paper analyzes the uneven processes underpinning industrial relations policy liberalization in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and Ireland. Drawing upon 140 elite interviews and building upon ideational comparative political theories, the paper highlights the role of ideas in the policy change process. It identifies how particular ideas can be used to construct policy problems, how these ideas can gain legitimacy through battles with competing ideas, and how policy legacies can influence whether ideas take root. The findings from the comparative case analysis expose a critical difference between “positive legacies” and “negative legacies” to account for different liberalization trajectories.
In July 2017, the Taylor Review on 'Modern Working Practices' was published. Led by Matthew Taylor, the Review aimed to consider the implications of new emerging business models for both worker rights and employer obligations. Its recommendations seem ill-informed, methodologically unsound and, ultimately, unlikely to address the widespread deprivation of workers' rights within the 'gig' economy and contemporary workplace. We shape our critique of the Taylor approach by reference to the constructions of 'choice' used in the Review and the limited scope permitted for worker 'voice'. In particular, we observe an evasion of international labour standards relevant to 'decent work' and a lack of attention to fundamental human rights. Identifying methodological flaws in the Report and focusing on three central areas of reform: employment status; zero-hours contracts (ZHCs); and workers' voice and representation, this article critically analyses a number of the proposals put forward, concluding that many of the Taylor Review recommendations are not only problematic, but dangerous, with potentially serious deregulatory repercussions for UK workers if actioned upon and implemented by the current Government.
This research explores links between tertiary education institutions and between tertiary education and the labour market as determinants of provincial and national transition patterns in Canada. The study consists of a provincial analysis that maps the typology of transition systems across Canada’s devolved federated tertiary education structure. The results show that, nationally: the links between education and work are relatively loose aside from regulated occupations; there is an emphasis on general education; and qualifications are used as a screen for entry to the labour market. However, while Canada can be broadly understood as a liberal market economy, there is provincial diversity within the nation; and there are varying logics for the development of skill, deployment of labour, and relations between institutions. The institutional and policy frameworks, structure of jobs, and formation of skill in Canada’s largest provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec reveal diverse characteristics of transition systems. However, despite internal differentiation in the value of vocational education, variations at the provincial level have not been enough to shift the federal pattern as a whole. Instead, in Canada vocational education is generally stigmatised and viewed as signalling low ability and motivation.
Drawing on three decades of research on union renewal, this article asks what we can learn from these studies. It covers successively the modernisation of union strategy, the re-engineering of union structures and organising techniques, the renewal of collective action repertoires, and the search to bridge the gap between labour market insiders and outsiders. While the research on these four themes yields few easy answers, it does highlight a continuing search for trade union renewal from which real understanding emerges. The overarching argument is that this long process of democratic experimentalism in union purpose and practice needs to be understood in exactly those terms. It also highlights the critical role of strategic capabilities and the need to develop these capabilities in order to experiment with innovations likely to reveal new sources of vigour for worker organisations.
In this paper, the varieties of capitalism (VoC) approach by Hall and Soskice (2001) is tested with longitudinal data and with measures covering all four institutional spheres differentiated in this approach. Among 26 OECD countries, we find various institutional configurations including a group of liberal market economies (LMEs) and of coordinated market economies (CMEs). However, these configurations are not stable. From 1990 to 2005, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden all moved from the CME model closer to the LME model. Capitalist variety is strongly linked to sector-specific comparative advantages, as predicted by Hall and Soskice-CMEs export more heavily in medium high-tech industries, and LMEs in high-tech industries. In addition, the economies that have moved towards the LME model have also specialized more strongly in high-tech over time. In sum, we find mixed evidence for the claims made by Hall and Soskice. Comparative advantages develop as predicted in the VoC approach, but the types of capitalism are more varied and more dynamic than the VoC approach suggests. © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. All rights reserved.
What aspects of national trade-union movements systematically affect national policy making and economic performance? While there is general agreement that union density, the proportion of the workforce organized in unions, is an important element of union strength, social scientists are only beginning to identify the other critical elements. That union density is not the whole story can quickly be appreciated by comparing the influence of unions in Britain and Germany. For much of the post-war period, union density has been higher in Britain than Germany, although German unions have sustained at least as important a political and economic role as British unions. An influential theory of group-government relations directed our attention to the degree of hierarchy and monopoly present in an interest structure and to the degree of institutionalized access to policy-making circles, wrapping these characteristics together in the concept of corporatism. Yet there is a developing interest, particularly in the analysis of labour movements, in disaggregating corporatism as part of an effort to understand the specific characteristics that produce political and economic influence.
Trade unions have a number of functions, some of which have been more prominent than others at different periods in history. But over the course of time trade unions have developed five principal functions. These are respectively: a service function; a representation function; a regulatory function; a government function; and a public administration function. This paper examines these different functions and argues that the balance is shifting, with more emphasis being placed on service, governmental and public administration functions. We are witnessing the emergence of a new `supply side trade unionism` with a corresponding dilution of their representative and regulatory functions. These developments-engineered by governments of both parties in recent years-are assessed in the context of the Warwick agreement in 2004 where the trade unions and the Labour Party concluded a deal on the shape of a possible third term Labour government.
This article draws on the new institutionalism in economics, sociology, and political studies in order to establish a foundation for analyzing how states shape employer human resource management and union relations. It then reviews and extends the available literature on this topic, establishing how, in addition to legal regulation, states help to shape the cognitive and normative rules that undergird employer decision processes, the social and economic environment within which employers act, and ultimately, the relations of authority constituting the employment relation itself and hence employer policy orientations. The article concludes with a discussion of the prospects for state policy initiatives in view of established employer paradigms, institutional logics, and state traditions, and identifies possibilities for further work in this area.
A neoclassical world would be a jungle, and no society would be viable. Douglas North (1981:11)
This paper consolidates the state of academic research on "innovation". Based on a systematic review of literature published over the past 27 years, we synthesize various research perspectives into a comprehensive multi-dimensional framework of organizational innovation - linking leadership, innovation as a process, and innovation as an outcome. We also suggest measures of determinants of organizational innovation and present implications for both research and managerial practice. Copyright (c) 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies.
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Coronavirus: Low paid, gig economy workers to be hardest hit, warns union. The Irish Times
- M Wall
Uber, Canadian union reach deal to support gig worker benefits, flexibility. Reuters
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With election looming, Doug Ford’s PCs pitch themselves as a party on the side of workers
- M Crawley
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Bringing the state back into the varieties of capitalism and discourse back into the explanation of change. Centre for European Studies Program for the Study of Germany and Europe Working Paper Series
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