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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

This paper presents an emic approach, which is sensitive to the emergence of new categories of difference, in intersectional study of workforce diversity. The paper first provides a comprehensive review of the literature on diversity at work in the business and management field, identifying that this literature is predominantly etic in nature, as it focuses on pre-established, rather than emergent, categories of difference. Next, an emic approach to researching diversity at work is offered. In offering an emic approach, the key distinction the paper makes is the direction of the investigation. Unlike the dominant etic approach, which adopts pre-established (ex ante) diversity categories, the emic perspective proposed identifies emergent and situated categories of diversity ex post, as embedded in a specific time and place. In order to operationalize the emic approach, the use of the Bourdieuan theory of capitals is suggested, and a five-step research guide is presented.

An Emic Approach to Intersectional Study of Diversity at Work: A Bourdieuan Framing

Gender inequality remains both a pressing social issue and a fruitful area of social science research. This edited volume seeks to examine gender inequality and the production of well-being in Europe from an interdisciplinary perspective that is perhaps more feminist economics than sociology. The chapters draw on historical and contemporary European examples and offer a somewhat different take (both theoretically and methodologically) on what is usually found in American sociology journals. This book takes a broader view on gender inequalities and the production of wellbeing, with the ‘‘capability approach’’ serving as the theoretical connection between the chapters. The chapters reemphasize that social reproduction is more complex than the production of goods. The various authors also call for and (in the empirical chapters) take into account the socio-political and economic context. An entire chapter is dedicated to the introduction of the capability approach (Chapter Two). But the description of the theory remains lacking amidst numerous references that point the reader towards clarification elsewhere. The authors posit that well-being is an important outcome, and that the production of well-being itself needs to be included in the study of gender inequality (Chapter One), while also demanding that women are not just another vulnerable group (Chapter Four). Chapter Three further challenges conventional notions about the evolution of the ‘‘modern family’’ in the wake of the industrialization process, and argues that the fragility of families is not a novel concept. These theoretical chapters call for a more multidimensional assessment of gender inequality, and remind readers of the importance of the concept and production of well-being. The topics covered in the two empirical parts of the book are very diverse in terms of subject, methodology, and historical time period. The first empirical section ‘‘Gender Care and Work’’ is held together by the challenge to the idea of women as passive victims and in need of assistance. Chapter Five demonstrates widows’ relative economic independence in urban Sweden and Finland from 1890 to 1910, and Chapter Six shows the centrality of female relatives in caring for extended family members in times of crisis. Chapter Seven reaffirms the idea that intergenerational support is not one-sided, and those often thought of as needing care due to older age are also givers of care and other forms of support. The findings from the chapters emphasize the importance of non-monetary transfers outside the market system. The theme of caregiving is readdressed in later chapters which illustrate how home caregiving in Belgium is situated between the public/market divide (Chapter Nine) and the problems of combining market work with caregiving, especially for those in the ‘‘sandwich generation’’ (Chapter Ten). In a seeming departure from studies in the capability approach tradition, Chapter Eight is a more typical time-use study that examines the gender asymmetry in unpaid labor in Italy. The results are not novel as women are found to do more unpaid work, especially in couples with children. The second empirical part of the book focuses on the intra-household allocation of resources. Three of the five chapters in this section center primarily on the nineteenth century, examining consumption patterns in Spain (Chapter 11), gender differences in children’s schooling in Switzerland (Chapter 12), and the differences in the treatment of and opportunities for celibate men and women in the Pyrenees (Chapter 13). These chapters illustrate gender differences, but not in

Managing the Margins: Gender, Citizenship, and the International Regulation of Precarious Employment

The structural position of black and minority ethnic workers (BME) and migrant workers in the UK labour market is relatively well known. Many workers in these groups find themselves in low-paid, low-skilled jobs primarily because of their ethnicity and regardless of their skills. This racialization of the labour market has been well documented - particularly since the ‘large-scale’ BME immigration in the post-war period. What is less well known is what it is like to work in these increasingly segmented sections of the economy where white workers have abandoned jobs in favour of (slightly) more lucrative work. Adopting a case-study approach, this article follows a trade union’s attempt to organize a sandwich factory of 500 workers, where most of the workforce was made up of BME migrant workers.

Organizing migrant workers: a case study of working conditions and unionization in a London sandwich factory

This paper analyses the development of the union avoidance industry in the United States during the past half‐century. Focusing on one leading example from each group, it examines the activities of the four main actors that constitute that industry: consultants, law firms, industry psychologists and strike management firms. Although these firms have experienced a fall in business as unions have declined in strength and numbers — a development that the union avoidance industry has contributed to — they continue to play an important role in the US system of industrial relations. Over three‐quarters of employers hire consultants when confronted by organizing campaigns, and large union avoidance firms are increasingly seeking export markets for their expertise.

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The Union Avoidance Industry in the United States

This article explores age as a factor defining the labour market experience of older women. Drawing upon work histories it argues that discrimination on the grounds of age is bound up with gender, race and class. Older women described how all three categories had structured their working lives, with occupational and sectoral segregation underpinning a legacy of disadvantage. Intersectionality provides a tool to explore the interaction of social divisions over the life course, in preference to those privileging the instability and diversity of social identities. Although the testimonies of older women underline the need to situate their experiences within a unified system characterized by capitalist economic relations. The research enables analysis of the workers perceptions of the changing nature of work and the way that age can be constructed in terms of advantage and disadvantage within specific occupations and sectors already defined in terms of gender and race.

‘No matter what I did I would still end up in the same position’: age as a factor defining older women’s experience of labour market participation

Austerity places intense pressures on labour costs in paid care. In the UK, electronic monitoring technology has been introduced to record (and materially reduce) the working time and wages of homecare workers. Based on empirical findings, we show that, in a ‘time of austerity’, care is reductively constructed as a consumption of time. Service users are constructed as needy, greedy, time-consumers and homecare workers as resource-wasting time-takers. We point to austerity as a temporal ideology aimed at persuading populations that individual deprivation in the present moment, self-sacrifice and the suppression of personal need in the here and now is a necessary requirement to underpin a more secure national future. Accordingly, women in low-waged care work are required to eschew a rights-bearing, present-tense identity and are assumed willing to suppress their entitlements to lawful wages as a sacrifice to the future. By transforming our understandings of ‘care’ into those of ‘time consumption’, and by emphasizing the virtue of present-tense deprivation, a politics of austerity appears to justify time-monitoring in care provision and the rationing of homecare workers’ pay.

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Care in a Time of Austerity: the Electronic Monitoring of Homecare Workers’ Time

This article explores supply chain pressures in parcel delivery and how the drive to contain costs to ‘preserve value in motion’, including the costs of failed delivery, underpins contractual diffe...

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Paying for free delivery: dependent self-employment as a measure of precarity in parcel delivery

The protracted dispute (2009–11) between British Airways and BASSA (British Airways Stewards and Stewardesses Association) was notable for the strength of collective action by cabin crew. In-depth interviews reveal collectivism rooted in the labour process and highlight the key agency of BASSA in effectively articulating worker interests. This data emphasizes crews’ relative autonomy, sustained by unionate on-board ‘managers’ who have defended the frontier of control against managerial incursions. Periodic attempts to re-configure the labour process, driven by cost cutting imperatives in an increasingly competitive airline industry, eroded crews’ organizational loyalties. When BA imposed radical changes to contracts and working arrangements, BASSA successfully mobilized its membership. The article contributes to labour process analysis by emphasizing the collective dimensions to emotional labour, restoring the ‘missing subject’, but also articulating the interconnections between labour process and mobilization and the role unions can play in providing the organizational and ideological resources to legitimate worker interest

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Cabin crew collectivism: labour process and the roots of mobilization:

What is the point of industrial relations? Research in the field has existed in Britain for well over a century, and university teaching in the subject dates back to the 1930s. Yet, in recent years, its relevance has been increasingly questioned by policymakers, with moves towards a form of 'disciplinary cleansing'. In this article, we demonstrate why the critical, cross-disciplinary, multilevel analysis that is of central importance to the industrial relations tradition remains both intellectually and ethically essential.

Sian Moore

Papers

‘No matter what I did I would still end up in the same position’: age as a factor defining older women’s experience of labour market participation

Care in a Time of Austerity: the Electronic Monitoring of Homecare Workers’ Time

Paying for free delivery: dependent self-employment as a measure of precarity in parcel delivery

Cabin crew collectivism: labour process and the roots of mobilization:

What's the point of industrial relations?