This article investigates the time allocation choices of US workers between farm work and other job alternatives. Results indicate that green card farm workers tend to allocate fewer workweeks to farm employment than citizens and undocumented workers, in favour of better opportunities in the non-farm sector. There is evidence of an assimilation effect, whereby undocumented workers also tend to re-allocate their time from farm to non-farm employment as their residence tenure increases, even though they experience constrained mobility and visibility during periods of strict immigration control. In the context of employers’ violations of the existing labour laws that currently protect even the rights of undocumented workers, such turnover decisions seem justified. The findings raise concerns about whether any governmental effort to legalise the immigration status of such workers would reduce farm job turnover rates and increase farm employment retention, so long as labour standards are not enforced. Moreover, external economic shocks could more easily induce citizen and green card farm workers to abandon farm employment, whereas undocumented workers tend to remain in their farm jobs during such difficult times.

The ‘gig economy’ uses digital platforms to bypass many of the regular responsibilities and costs of employment. Ambiguity as to whether gig-economy workers are independent contractors, dependent contractors or employees allows the undermining of traditional labour standards governing minimum wages and other legislated employment conditions. Labour law and institutions need to catch up to the new reality of this form of work and develop new tools to protect and enhance minimum standards for workers in digital platform businesses. Unions, business and government all have a role to play in the long term. Meanwhile, direct engagement between these new firms and workers’ advocates can also help to mitigate the risks posed to labour standards by digital business models, by addressing regulatory gaps. This article is a case study of innovative negotiations between one platform business (Airtasker) and Unions New South Wales, a peak trade unions body in New South Wales, Australia, in order to establish agreed minimum standards for engagements negotiated through this platform.

During the past quarter century of neoliberal social, economic and political upheaval in Poland, the structure of workplaces has changed, and so have changes in worker attitudes to workplace and social solidarity. This article explores the links between changes to organisational and employment structures and shifts in worker attitudes, focusing on the implications of attitudinal shifts for the capacity for organised workplace resistance. It documents a loss of collective identity and a growth of individualism and social distrust. The analysis is based on publicly available economic and social statistics and the author’s own qualitative and quantitative research, drawn in part from computer-aided interviews in de-industrialising Lower Silesia. Evidence is provided that the extent and intensity of attitudinal shifts have varied according to changed workplace structures, based on privatisation and organisational size, and especially on the accompanying changes in workplace culture and climate. Increased individualism, based on formal decollectivisation, has been accompanied by attitudinal individualism and distrust of other people and social institutions. As a result, declining capacity for workplace resistance and an increased sense of powerlessness have increased workers’ susceptibility to right-wing propaganda.

In the context of the working-class backlash against free trade represented by Brexit, the recent surge of right-wing political parties in Europe and the 2016 US presidential election, it is timely to take stock of the threats to jobs and wages posed by recent negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The European Commission selectively relied on econometric analyses, predicting a positive impact of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Its proposed legal text on ‘Trade and sustainable development’ fell short of the European Parliament’s negotiating guidelines, which themselves failed to ensure protection of labour standards. The activities of corporate lobbies threatened the effective protection of workers’ rights. Major risks to workers’ rights are posed by discrepancies between US and European Union labour and social law and labour standards. The most recent legal text lacks compliance monitoring provisions and sanction mechanisms against member states failing to ratify core labour conventions. The investment court system does not resolve the problems of the discredited investor-state dispute settlement mechanism for which it is the proposed replacement. The year 2016 has provided a foretaste of the dislocation likely from trade and investment regulation that sees social and environmental standards and labour rights simply as barriers to corporate profits.

This article uses empirical evidence, based on labour market indicators, to analyse the factors influencing the incidence of child labour in Pakistan, from both supply and demand sides. The level of demand for child labour is shown to be linked mainly to adult wage levels, the adult unemployment rate in an area, and the size of the informal and agriculture sectors. The supply of child labour is seen to be positively linked to the proportion of adult unemployment in the household. Unlike previous studies, the article analyses both demand and supply side factors in a context of poverty and takes account of the co-existence of formal and informal labour markets. Furthermore, to generalise the issue for a longer span of time (which previous studies fail to do), it adopts the methodology of a pseudo-panel approach based on that proposed by Deaton. This approach makes it possible to pinpoint more accurately the factors, and their interaction, that need to be considered in any effective policy approach to the issue of child labour. To prevent unintended consequences, a multi-faceted development approach is required.

Chinese employers practise extensive personal screening of applicants during the recruitment process. This study identifies four motives for these practices – statistical, customer taste, employer taste and regulatory. It discusses their distinctive roles in the Chinese labour market and in regard to labour-market regulations. Using a convenience sample of large Chinese employers, the study evaluates the economic and institutional determinants of screening approaches and implications for firms’ performance. Statistical screening, based on the assumption that social group membership is an indicator of productivity or loyalty, is found to be related positively to employers’ capitalisation, labour-market power and private ownership, and negatively to skill supply in provincial markets. Customer-taste screening is prevalent in the services and sales sectors, and interestingly in wealthy first-tier cities. Employer-taste screening endures in privately owned firms, and in skill-intensive industries and first-tier cities, and appears linked to customer-taste screening. Some forms of screening breach anti-discrimination laws and persist because of lax enforcement of such laws, but requests for personal data on job applications forms may also reflect compliance with equity indicators. Regulatory compliance-based screening is related positively to firms’ market power, capitalisation and state ownership. The implications of the different screening practices for public policy and corporate strategy are examined.

Despite its greatly weakened condition, could organised labour again be counter-hegemonic to and ultimately transformative of capitalism? Or is the current crisis, a crisis of collapse of manufacturing and wages and under-consumption due to the loss of redistributive power by key socio-political agents, possibly the final crisis of unionism, as argued by Wolfgang Streeck? Some on the political left, such as Streeck, argue that a new phase has been reached where redistributive and oppositional power of organised labour has been not just defeated but destroyed, with enormous consequences for the future of workers and capitalism itself. This article rejects such an overly pessimistic interpretation and asks what the possibility is of the labour movement’s again playing its historic role of transforming capitalism. It explores the potential role of organised labour in re-embedding the economy within democratic society, as Karl Polanyi argued, and building a socio-economic structure that is both stable and enhancing of social and environmental health. This problem is approached through a critique of the theories of Polanyi and Streeck and an examination of the unfortunate embrace of labourism and accommodation to neo-liberalism in the Australian labour movement.

The aim of this study is to examine whether the prevalent and fairly long unemployment spell of young Macedonians, Serbians and Montenegrins early in their career has negative effects on their subsequent labour-market performance: the so-called employment scarring. We first model unemployment spell as a function of individual and household characteristics and work attitudes and preferences using a discrete-time duration method. Then, we estimate the survival probabilities to examine the potential existence of employment scarring. The results provide some evidence for the potential presence of employment scarring in the three countries. The scars are largest in Serbia for all durations of the unemployment spell followed by Macedonia; they are weakest in Montenegro.

This review article discusses Leonard’s (2016) study of the ideas of an elite group of Progressive economists who flourished in the United States of America between 1885 and the late 1920s. Advising governments through think tanks and regulatory commissions, they advocated labour market policies that combined a racialized approach to immigration, eugenics, Taylorist labour market efficiency and a living wage. Their interest in women’s employment conditions was based on a Darwinian concern to protect mothers of the ‘white’ race. Parallels are drawn with Australia, where, from the turn of the 20th century, industrial tribunals established a male minimum wage designed to support the maternal role, based on similar racial preoccupations and a view that women’s ‘inefficiency’ as workers would protect men from low-wage competitors. United States Progressives, in rejecting laissez-faire economics, espoused instead a role for the state based on a holistic Darwinian sociology of racial contest: an economics of hate. It was not till the 1930s that Keynesianism emerged as an alternative macroeconomic project.

When viewed against its ostensibly successful management of the global economic crisis between 2008 and 2013, growing electoral disenchantment with the Australian Labor Party government during that time defied standard explanations and calls for further analysis. A major reason for the party’s electoral loss in 2013 was arguably popular disappointment with its eschewal of social democratic principles. Notwithstanding some progressive measures initiated between 2008 and 2013, successive Australian Labor Party governments were constrained by neoliberal strictures, even when they chose to implement progressive policies. Whatever other reasons exist for its decline in popularity between 2007 and 2013, the Australian Labor Party’s unwillingness or inability to mark out a clear alternative to neoliberalism was fundamental. In making this case, this article uses the conceptual framework of ‘depoliticisation’, defined as the displacement of policy decisions from the sphere of democratic accountability and public debate, making them matters for regulation by technocratic experts operating according to supposed edicts of the market.

Much theoretical and empirical work by economists and psychologists has shown that the neo-classical approach is defective, and economists are now looking for an alternative. Evolutionary economics is the answer. It starts from the realistic premise that society and the economy are shaped by competition, but unlike neo-classical economics, it proceeds empirically by observing and analysing what has been happening to the economy and society. It does so on the premise that a process of social selection is taking place, analogous but not identical to that of biological selection. This dynamic approach requires a revival of economic history. By reporting on, and inviting debate over, what is happening and its implications, the adoption of an evolutionary approach should help restore the moral content of economics and the surrounding social sciences. Such a change in approach would be a paradigm shift, and will take time. That it will happen is likely: in the end facts kick.