The gendered dimensions of an ‘herbicide revolution’: a feminist analysis of herbicide adoption in central India

China’s trade union federation counts 84 million workers in ‘new forms of employment’, most of them organised through digital labour platforms. Their legal protection has become one of the largest open questions in Chinese industrial relations. This review essay takes stock of what English-language research and official sources show about that question. It proceeds in three steps. First, it synthesises the empirical record. Algorithmic management intensifies work; layered outsourcing detaches riders from the platforms they serve; most platform workers sit outside employment-based social insurance; collective voice runs through informal networks rather than institutions. Second, it examines the institutional response built since 2021: the eight-ministry Guiding Opinions, the new category of workers who do not fully meet the conditions of a labour relationship, the occupational injury insurance pilot, and algorithm regulation. Third, it compares this response with the presumption-of-employment route taken in the European Union, Spain, and the United Kingdom, with California’s reversal, and with Australian and ILO developments. The essay closes by identifying four institutional gaps and the reform pathways that follow from them.

ABSTRACT This paper is interested in one mode by which the NCAA discursively manages its population of student-athletes in response to the legal and cultural shifts of the contemporary Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) landscape: namely NIL Assist, the NCAA’s mediated support platform created to aid student-athletes in navigating the NIL environment. I argue that through the NIL Assist platform, the NCAA continues to evade employer-employee labor relations by positioning student-athletes within neoliberal economic subjectivities. Mobilizing discourses of personal brand and opportunity, the materials of NIL Assist invite student-athletes to become entrepreneurs of the self. Ulitamtely, I characterize and addresse the critical moment of shifting labor relations in college sport as a signpost of increasingly neoliberal understandings of value, labor, and the self.

The coupled effect of worsening climatic conditions and persistent energy crises is driving a steady evolution of green energy sources across the developing world. Preference for hydropower is higher for its affordability and efficient energy storage, conversion rate, and electricity production. However, dams, which facilitate hydropower production, always involve painful tradeoffs between satisfying a national demand and safeguarding rural agrarian livelihoods which characterize most host communities. Multiple studies exist on the livelihood implications of dams; yet little is known about the societal transformations often triggered by the usual large-scale land-takes, including the reconfigurations of laborscapes in rural agrarian host communities. With empirical evidence from Ghana’s Bui Hydropower Dam, this paper discusses how the massive land-take has redefined land governance and restructured preexisting agrarian labor regimes in three host communities. The study approach is qualitative and involves multiple data collection instruments including semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and observations. Data is analyzed qualitatively using thematic analysis and abduction to describe and conceptualize identified patterns about the central phenomena. The paper highlights the complex web of changes in power and power relations regarding gender, class, and ethnicity toward elaborating the implications of hydropower dams for rural labor and agrarian relations.

Healthcare consolidation has transformed physician employment, with 74% now working for health systems or corporate entities. While physicians increasingly consider collective bargaining to address these changes, the legal frameworks and practical pathways remain unclear, particularly for highly specialized fields like neurosurgery. We conducted a policy analysis synthesizing federal labor statutes, National Labor Relations Board rulings, judicial decisions, and comparative frameworks from international healthcare systems and US industries with similar characteristics. Analysis focused on private sector physicians covered under the National Labor Relations Act. Recent legal developments have created new possibilities within persistent constraints. The 2022 Piedmont Health Services decision clarified that employed physicians focused on patient care may unionize under the National Labor Relations Act. However, private practice physicians remain excluded as independent contractors, and antitrust law prohibits collective negotiation without structural integration. The 2023 withdrawal of antitrust "safety zones" eliminated predictable compliance pathways while allowing case-by-case innovation. Available options include messenger model networks for information sharing, Independent Practice Associations with genuine financial integration, and fully integrated cooperatives. Professional societies can advocate but cannot bargain collectively. International models and US industries demonstrate that collective frameworks can preserve individual contract flexibility and merit-based compensation. Neurosurgery's unique characteristics-small specialty size, high revenue generation, emergency obligations, and practice diversity-require tailored approaches to collective representation. While legal barriers persist, viable pathways exist within current frameworks. Success depends on matching organizational models to regional market conditions and practice characteristics. As healthcare consolidation continues, understanding these options becomes essential for neurosurgeons seeking to preserve professional autonomy and economic sustainability, whether through collective action, individual negotiation, or hybrid approaches.

This article examines the phenomenon of uberization of labor relations in Brazil, focusing on the legal challenges arising from the expansion of work mediated by digital platforms. The research begins with a historical contextualization of the industrial revolutions and the emergence of Industry 4.0 to understand how digital platforms have profoundly transformed the organization of contemporary work. The general objective is to assess the legal challenges of platform-mediated work in Brazil under Labor Law and constitutional principles, investigating the configuration of the employment relationship in these contexts and proposing parameters for an adequate regulatory solution. A qualitative methodology of bibliographic and documentary nature was adopted, examining relevant legislation, particularly the Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT), applicable constitutional foundations, and the case law of the Superior Labor Court (TST) and the Federal Supreme Court (STF). The results demonstrate that algorithmic subordination, exercised through automated systems of control, evaluation, and task distribution, may constitute legal subordination within the meaning of Article 3 of the CLT, even if in an indirect and technologically mediated form. It is concluded that any specific regulation for this sector must function as a minimum floor of protection, without precluding the application of the CLT in cases where the requirements of an employment relationship are concretely present.

ABSTRACT Throughout the history of industrial labour relations, workers have used the scraps of production to make useful things to take home. This essay gathers stories of such ‘self-made’ things from many different places and times: from early modern England to Fordist, state-socialist, and present day factories. Across these disparate settings, people tell similar stories: downplaying private profit and market sake, they speak not of resistance and justified theft, but of their right to the material scraps by virtue of social belonging. Drawing on Marx’s thoughts on the ‘Theft of Wood’ I argue that such narratives open a sort of commons, bringing speakers out of liberal property relations into a form of ownership that – as EP Thompson writes of the parish – is also a form of belonging. A right to the scraps entails a stake in the enterprise.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the rise of financial capitalism and the development of digital infrastructures have had a profound and still insufficiently theorized effect on the political economy of attention in the cultural industries. Specifically, attention has become an asset for technological platforms through the quantification and management of user-generated data. This is a significant shift from previous conceptualizations of attention as (a) a commodity waiting to be exchanged or (b) a form of nontransferable capital held by well-known brands or people. Drawing on literature about the assetization of data, I argue that the economy of attention can also be understood through logics of accumulation and the creation of future income streams. At the same time, attention data is different from other data assets considering the unique labor relations through which it is produced. Furthermore, the economization of attention has already been shown to have deep sociocultural consequences. The financial and technological move toward attention assetization also has important symbolic and moral ramifications. The final part of the article explores some of these implications, like the increased cultural value of popularity and the delegitimation of other forms of worth in contemporary societies.

ABSTRACT This paper draws on theories of lived citizenship and everyday multiculturalism to explore everyday racialised and interethnic relations of belonging, identification and exclusion amongst migrant young people in service workplaces. Drawing on interviews with ethnic minority migrant workers conducted in Australia, the paper explores service workplaces as sites of routine inter-ethnic encounter and identification, enacted through precarious employment structures and service labour relations. These interviews show that service workplaces are important sites for everyday multiculturalism and racism because they make routine inter-ethnic contact compulsory, either through interactions between co-workers or with customers. This creates inter-ethnic solidarity, belonging, competition and exclusion, enacted informally as part of the service labour process and the structural relations of precarious work. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role that concepts of lived citizenship and everyday multiculturalism can play in understanding how migrant workers are constituted as vulnerable sources of labour.

This article examines the model of relations that arise between a digital platform operator and an implementing partner who is an individual, as set out in Federal Law No. 289-FZ dated 07/31/2025 «On Certain Issues of Regulating the Platform Economy in the Russian Federation» (hereinafter referred to as the Platform Economy Law). Despite the inclusion in the Law on the Platform Economy of an indication of the civil law nature of these relations, the author found a relationship between some provisions of the law in question and the provisions of labor legislation. The author argues for a position on the similarity of relations arising within the framework of platform employment and labor relations. In conclusion, the author draws conclusions about the possible extension of labor legislation to the relationship between the owner and (or) operator of a digital platform and an individual, which could be implemented by including a separate chapter in the Labor Code of the Russian Federation containing the specifics of labor regulation for platform employees (in terms of their working hours, rest time, labor protection, etc.).

The article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the institution of local regulations in the system of sources of labor law of the Russian Federation, using the example of civil servants and other types of public service. The theoretical and practical aspects of local rule-making in the sphere of labor relations are studied, and problems of legal regulation and law enforcement are identified. The authors analyze the relationship between centralized and decentralized regulation of labor relations, consider issues of the hierarchy of regulatory acts and the limits of local law-making competence of the employer. A detailed analysis of judicial practice on the application of local regulations is carried out. Based on the conducted research, specific proposals are formulated for improving legislation and law enforcement practice. It is the local (contractual) method of regulating working conditions that, at its core, allows for a greater implementation of the basic principles of labor law and meets modern conditions of economic development.

This study examines how international economic sanctions reshape women's work and livelihoods in Iran's tourism sector through the theoretical lens of feminist political economy. Drawing on interviews conducted in two phases around 2018 and again in 2024, the study unveils how sanction pressures operate across macro, meso , and micro levels, giving rise to three interrelated processes: gendered economic scarring , whereby sanctions deepen women's labour exclusion; sanction-driven informalisation , through which economic risk is shifted from institutions to women's insecure work; and a political economy of survival , in which women's adaptive labour sustains households without producing empowerment. By reconceptualising sanctions as long-term pressures on tourism economies, the study extends research on tourism crises, labour relations, and gendered inequality in crisis-ridden destinations. • Examines women's tourism work under sustained international economic sanctions • Applies a feminist political economy lens to tourism in sanctioned economies • Defines gendered economic scarring and sanction-driven informalisation • Conceptualises women's survival work as part of a political economy of crisis • Shows women's resilience reflects constrained agency not empowerment

During the Vietnam War, the US military and associated contractors employed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and third country nationals. The U.S. Office of Civilian Personnel (OCP), charged with overseeing labor relations in Vietnam, introduced grievance processes, labor-employer councils, training programs, union-friendly policies, and other reforms—with the goal of serving U.S. war aims and modernizing the Vietnamese workforce. The results were mixed. Work stoppages, in particular, presented serious challenges, as did the U.S. demobilization completed in 1973. Still, U.S. labor policies in Vietnam hardly resembled the oppressive, racialized imperialism depicted by some scholars. The OCP’s story adds yet another level to our understanding of the complex American mission in Southeast Asia and the equally involved debates among South Vietnamese about democracy and modernization.

This article analyzes how labour relations in the Swedish cleaning industry were affected by the commercialization of domestic cleaning in 2007. It theorizes commercialized domestic cleaning as a specific labour regime (Baglioni et al, 2022) and, based on ethnography, identifies several inherent attributes of domestic cleaning – the labour-intensive nature of work, that the work takes place in private people’s homes, and that there are difficulties of rationalizing working tasks – as essential for understanding how capital disciplines labour in commercial domestic cleaning. By drawing on recent theorizations of the informalization of labour relations in labour process theory (Bagnardi, 2023), the article conceptualizes two forms of informalization in commercial domestic cleaning in Sweden – ‘unrestricted informalization’ and ‘partially-restricted informalization’ – to explain in what way labour exploitation is aggravated. It argues that both smaller and larger, well-established companies with collective agreements partake in the informalization of labour relations, albeit in different ways. Smaller companies engage primarily in unrestricted informalization and ignore collective agreements, while larger ones engage in partially-restricted informalization by demanding labour flexibility, ignoring the necessity of reimbursing travel time and other forms of work intensification. The article concludes that the commercialization of domestic cleaning is an instrument in a wider political endeavour of labour flexibilization in the Swedish labour market, and highlights how such flexibilization poses new challenges for the influence of workers and trade unions in the workplace as labour relations come under increasing pressure from processes of informalization.

The digitalization of the economy has given rise to fundamentally new forms of labor and employment organization, among that are platform employment and self-employment. The lack of legislative definitions and full-fledged regulation of these phenomena actualize distinguishing of labor and civil law relations. Also the consideration of the legal status of platform employees and self-employed individuals, determination of the need to provide them with social and labor rights and guarantees. Especially considering the existence of different types of platforms and special regulation in certain areas of activity. The article examines these issues on the example of regulating passenger and baggage transportation by passenger taxi. The authors analyze the directions of regulation of non-standard forms of employment and models of regulation of platform employment and self-employment that have developed in world practice. Also, the regulation of non-standard forms of employment proposed by the Russian legislator and the existing regulation of the platform economy and passenger and baggage transportation by passenger taxi. The authors come to several conclusions. First, the legislator’s choice of a model for the existing regulation based on the entrepreneurial nature of the activities of self-employed carriers and other platform employees. Secondly, the legislator’s awareness of the need to provide these and other individuals with non-standard employment with certain social and labor rights and guarantees. Thirdly, about the possibility of future differentiation of regulation by introducing the category of «dependent self-employed».

It is substantiated that an important management task in the personnel management system is currently to reassess and rethink approaches to staff motivation in wartime realities in order to combine in motivational strategies tools and ways to satisfy the interests of different categories of stakeholders in the sphere of labour relations and personnel management of organizations. The purpose of the study was to specify and generalize the personnel, financial and legal aspects of implementing motivational strategies for personnel management of enterprises in wartime realities. To achieve the set goal, the methods of content analysis of professional economic literature, the monographic method, and the generalization method were used. As a result of the study, the influence of war, wartime risks and military actions on staff motivation was outlined, the legal risks and financial consequences for the enterprise from ineffective motivational strategies were specified, proposals were made for adapting classical forms of motivation to wartime realities, and innovative forms of staff motivation were generalized. A list of personnel aspects of motivational strategies for personnel management of enterprises in wartime realities is proposed, which includes: the need to prevent personnel risks by integrating risk management tools into the enterprise’s management system; the formation of clear guidelines for the quantity and quality of personnel necessary for the enterprise to achieve strategic goals, taking into account various scenarios of changes in external environmental trends in wartime realities; the distribution of motivational tools in accordance with the stage of personnel management: planning of personnel indicators, employee onboarding, increasing intellectual capital, developing human resources potential, monitoring personnel work, ensuring personnel reliability, and dismissing employees. The legal aspects of motivational strategies for personnel management of enterprises include: compliance with the working time regime; ensuring proper working conditions in accordance with the legislation; compliance with minimum social guarantees and maintaining the level of wages within regulatory and legal limits; fixing forms of employee motivation in the collective agreement, labour agreements and other documents; ensuring opportunities for employees to rest; guaranteeing occupational safety while at the workplace and on the territory of the enterprise; official employment and transparent remuneration. The financial aspects of motivational strategies of personnel management include: giving preference to non-material forms of motivation, taking into account the resource limitations of enterprises in wartime; developing budgets for financing motivational measures and monitoring their compliance; finding sources of financing for the use of motivational tools; introducing a system of minor but stable periodic revision and increase in the level of remuneration; ranking bonuses and other forms of material motivation depending on the rating of employees’ achievements (monthly and annual).

This study examines the status of workers’ rights in the era of digital transformation in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Digital transformation has shifted labor relations from traditional patterns to more modern forms, while the Saudi regulator has shown clear concern for safeguarding workers’ rights, given that workers are generally the weaker party in contractual relationships. The study addresses a central question concerning the extent to which digital transformation has affected workers’ rights in Saudi Arabia, through clarifying the concept of digital transformation and analyzing the most prominent recent developments introduced in line with the digital transformation strategy under the Saudi Labor Law. The study is divided into two sections. The first examines the concept of digital transformation, its origins, characteristics, and resulting challenges. The second discusses the contributions of digital transformation to strengthening guarantees for workers’ rights, while also highlighting the main issues related to workers’ rights in the digital environment. The study aims to define digital transformation, explain its role in regulating labor practices, and identify the most prominent digital initiatives that have contributed to strengthening workers’ rights. It also seeks to demonstrate the extent to which digital transformation is consistent with the fundamental principles of the Saudi Labor Law, and to explain the challenges created by the digital environment, particularly those related to workers’ data and privacy. The study finds that digital transformation in the labor sector has introduced new tools for protecting workers’ rights and promoting transparency, such as the Qiwa platform, the Wage Protection Program, and the requirement to authenticate employment contracts so that they may serve as enforceable instruments for claiming wages in the event of non-payment by the employer. The study concludes by recommending that the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development organize periodic training courses for employers and workers on digital transformation, its tools, and workers’ rights.

Abstract Liberal electoral democracies face serious intrinsic as well as external problems that threaten their viability. Associative democracy (AD) holds the promise of alleviating them. I argue that a long but currently strangely ignored tradition of (neo-)corporatism has demonstrated the feasibility of associative governance arrangements. Nothing prevents governments to push corporatism into domains other than labor relations, such as education, health, housing, or climate change. I propose a two-tiered structure of AD in which extended classic corporatism forms Tier 1 and a layer of commons Tier 2. To maintain their creative, authentic organization, which collides with the organization of state bureaucracies, commons must not be integrated into state structures. Instead, they must be institutionally represented through confederate bodies which are mandatorily consulted by Tier 1 actors.

Purpose There is very minimal published research on Upwork as a platform; this article seeks to fill that gap. It also builds on the growing body of (auto)ethnographic scholarship about the gig economy and platform capitalism. The research was motivated by a desire to understand labour relations within informal academia: research and teaching that happens adjacent to formal institutions, mediated by the platform economy. This came about because of a period of unemployment and financial precarity for the researcher. Design/methodology/approach The researcher conducted a three-month autoethnography of the “freelancer marketplace” Upwork. This followed previous longer-term use of the platform. The three-month period included participant observation (of the self), discussions with colleagues and reflexive consideration of positionality and ethics. Findings The empirical findings suggest that large numbers of students and academics use platform services for the production of essays and articles. There exists a global Anglophone platform economy around formal academia on a large scale. The technical design and functionality of platforms mediate the worker experience in distinct ways, with implications for how we understand academia as an industry and as an endeavour. Originality/value There are two contributions. First, the article presents platform academia as intrinsic to institutional academia, rather than parasitic to it. Second, it reveals that the primary product of the academy is reputational, as in the recognition of expertise, rather than knowledge.

Capital and the disposable nature of the manufacturing industry drive the expropriation of artisanal labor, reshaping production relations tied to technique and the development of craftsmanship. These relations are transformed into fragmented technical roles, where workers lack holistic knowledge of what they produce. Against this backdrop, this study examines the process of labor expropriation among carpenters over recent decades. It identifies shifts in labor relations, manufacturing practices, and urban craftwork, as well as how these processes manifest in the city of Muzambinho, Minas Gerais. The analysis highlights the role of planned obsolescence and the erosion of artisanal worker identity, ultimately degrading the profession within a techno-scientific framework.