This article is inspired by feminist decolonial ethnography in the analysis of the Rafiki group, an informal network of domestic workers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It explores their collective efforts to challenge exploitation and promote change, providing insights into a decolonial and feminist approach to prefigurative politics. Using Pedagogies of Unlearning, the analysis focuses on the Rafiki group meetings’ content, form and particularities of locality. The findings highlight the importance of embracing the diversity and complexity of life’s work and prefigurative politics. The research findings support a pluralistic perspective, drawing on studies from diverse cultural and geographical contexts to deepen our understanding of collective unlearning and social transformation.

There is limited analysis of how governing parties enact industrial relations policy change. This gap is particularly significant in liberal market economies where labour market inequality and employer-oriented regimes prevail, leaving open questions about how worker-protective reforms can be achieved. To address this gap, this article analyses the Australian government’s successful recent implementation of multi-employer bargaining reform. It utilises a systematic process analysis involving 14 interviews with elites involved in the policy process, and documentary analysis to examine how the Australian government gained the necessary support for its reforms. We identify four strategies whereby the governing Labor Party harnessed institutional power to mobilise ideational power: evidence-based persuasion, compromise, strategic use of policy legacies and framing ideas to address broader interests. Drawing upon political science concepts on institutional and ideational interaction, we contribute new insights to industrial relations scholarship on how governing parties utilise power resources to achieve policy change.

The length of the working day has traditionally constituted a point of contention between capital and labour. The working day has been a key issue for labour movements, who have imposed limitations on corporations. In the context of neoliberal regulation, such restrictions have been circumvented. In Western countries, the formal working day has been reduced yet working hours have changed. This is evidenced by the increase in night work and the growing expectation of being available for work at short notice. In industrial peripheries around the globe, the 48-hour threshold is frequently exceeded. The coexistence of unemployment, underemployment and overwork represents a significant challenge for the rethinking of work organisation and industrial relations in the contemporary era. This contribution examines the socio-historical evolution of working hours with a view to offering a reinterpretation of selected political texts by William Morris, in order to imagine an alternative for the future.

Organisations in many countries operate employee stock purchase plans. Research has focused on employees’ current employee stock ownership (ESO) enrolment decision but, as plans are often ongoing forms of compensation, employees will likely have made the decision before. Drawing on the theory of habit, we investigate whether experience of enrolment decisions influences the current enrolment choice. We also consider how decision experience affects the decision-making process. Using employee-level data from two Australian companies, we find that the more an employee has made a particular choice in response to repeated company invitations, the more they are likely to repeat it. We also find that employees with prior experience of ESO enrolment decisions make a quicker decision whether to join or not. Those making the decision for the first time take longer and are more reliant on advice from others. The findings show that understanding share plan participation requires a temporal consideration of employee behaviour.

Referring to the Italian context, this article aims to map two examples of class-based trade unions – one mainstream and one grassroots – through an intersectional lens. It explores how class-based unionism responds to the increasing class heterogeneity, shaped by intersecting social relations such as gender, race, age, gender identity and disability. Here, intersectionality is understood as a structural approach to trade union activity that, by focusing on power-shaped social relations rather than individual identities, enables an analysis of how unions recognize the needs of marginalized workers, translate these into collective bargaining, and integrate these workers into their internal structures and decision-making processes, to foster their voice within the union.

Based on desk studies and qualitative interviews with both workers and union representatives at different levels, we explore how Polish temporary migrant workers in the offshore-related industrial services and maintenance sector in Norway experience precarity; their relationship with unions at different levels; and how the unions tackle the challenges of representing them. The distinction between how unions operate to tackle precarity on the strategic level and in everyday practices provides a nuanced picture of what even strong, institutionally embedded unions and temporary workers face in stemming precarity. It underscores how important engagement of the unions is in everyday practices for temporary migrant workers to benefit from the regulatory achievements they make, and yet how challenging measures against precarity are to implement in contexts of sharp competition in labour costs.

Studies of employee ownership (EO) have repeatedly cautioned that selection effects may be in part responsible for the apparent effects of EO on employee attitudes. Favourable attitudes among employee owners may result from individuals with positive views towards EO selecting into the company or the EO plan. Using data from a US employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), this study investigates whether EO as a factor in employment choice influences psychological ownership and preferences for working in EO firms in the future. The findings reveal that joining the company due to EO has a substantial, independent effect on psychological ownership beyond the influence of plan participation. The article quantifies the magnitude of this selection effect. Additionally, joining for this reason strongly impacts preferences for future employment in employee-owned firms.

This paper explores ‘utopia as method’ to envision solid waste and sewage management systems which are equitable and sustainable. Global solid waste management is largely sustained by millions of waste pickers who collect, sort and manage waste. Sanitation workers play a vital role in maintaining sewage systems. These workers are exposed to dangerous, toxic workspaces, and they often belong to marginalised socio-economic groups. Labour market segregation on the basis of gender, racialisation and caste is particularly visible in the case of waste-related occupations as workers face stigmatisation. In South Asia, Dalits (lowest caste groups) are significantly overrepresented as sanitation workers and waste pickers. Thus, this conceptual paper draws upon studies from India, to explore and imagine possibilities of anti-caste futures within visions of sustainable waste management. The paper highlights the need to incorporate worker-centric approaches and anti-caste politics to build ecologically sustainable and socio-economically equitable waste infrastructures.

This study attempts to learn whether there is a link between a company’s ideology and perceived job insecurity drawing on Irene Goll and Gerald Zeitz’s typology of corporate ideology, which consists of progressive decision-making, social responsibility, and participative consensus-seeking decision-making with feedback. The study uses linked employer–employee data from the 2016–2017 REPONSE survey, which includes about 4364 privately-owned firms in France employing individuals with at least 15 months’ tenure. After accounting for individual and workplace-level characteristics using logit models, we found that employees in organizations that embrace progressive and socially responsible ideologies perceive lower levels of job insecurity. This emphasizes the importance of ideological dimensions in informing job insecurity and goes beyond traditional institutional and structural explanations offered by existing literature.

Despite the algorithmic control they face and the individualised nature of their work, platform workers develop connections and form communities to support one another. In academic literature, this solidarity is often viewed as a mode of resistance to platforms. This article challenges that perspective by empirically examining the role of workers’ communities in the platform labour process. Drawing on an exploratory study of food delivery platforms in Chile, which included 43 interviews, five virtual shadowing sessions and 497 surveys, this research argues that solidarity plays a dual role: it fosters a critical collective consciousness that challenges the rules imposed by platforms, while also contributing to the production of consent. By helping workers assimilate the platforms’ rules or accommodate them to cope with the tensions of work, communities can reinforce the platform labour regime. The article suggests viewing labour solidarity as an inherently paradoxical and contested space.