By the end of the 20th century, there was general agreement that most labour markets were in transition and that employment was becoming less secure. However, official labour market data have not shown a dramatic increase in temporary or casual employment. This article takes a new look at the changing characteristics of employment and offers a new method to measure employment security: the Employment Precarity Index. We use the Employment Precarity Index to assess how insecure employment associated with a ‘gig’ economy might affect well-being and social relations, including health outcomes, household well-being and community involvement.

Globalisation was a fact of life in Europe before 1913, but as trade shares increased, so did wage and employment instability. Faced by growing pressure from workers, national authorities established labour compacts – a packet of labour market regulations and social insurance programmes – that defended workers against the risks they faced in and outside the factory. The labour compact provided workers with insurance because it compressed wage structures. We construct an index of labour market regulations and social insurance schemes for seventeen European countries and find that the extent of the labour compact varied with the level of openness. We conclude that the labour compact gave workers reason to support free trade because it protected them from external risk. Contrary to the received view, globalisation before 1913 was compatible with state intervention. Our findings are consistent with Rodrik's and Agell's for the period after 1945.

This volume is a throwback to an older style of labor history, one based on the leaders of the labor movement. Craig Phelan has produced an intriguing, and in places even inspiring, history of Terence Powderly, the leader of the Knights of Labor from 1879 to 1893. Powderly's story deserves to be retold. His history stands at the cross-roads of an older American set of ideals dating back to the founding of the nation and the emerging corporate values associated with the late-nineteenth-century rise of big business. This is a story of one of the earliest attempts to break from an elitist model of craft unions and replace it with a broad-based labor movement, one that welcomed skilled and unskilled, men and women, and people of all races. This is the story of how this movement was ultimately crushed by larger forces at work in society. It reminds us of what might have been, and perhaps encourages us to think of what still might be.

The introduction of mass production transformed many skilled tasks into repetitive and monotonous jobs. In industries such as automobiles, the workforce remained predominantly male despite contemporary assessments that women could efficiently do many of these jobs. This article explores why. It is argued that employers such as Ford concluded that the conversion of labor time into effort would be more difficult in a mixed-gender workforce. The paper shows how Ford developed a fraternalist labor strategy, a men's club, whose objective was to accommodate men to monotony and maximize labor productivity.

The slowness with which British firms adopted Scientific Management and Fordism has often been noted.The paper argues that in Britain, management had difficulty controlling labor effort norms after 1870. The state intervened to resolve the issue and in the process became a major proponent of industrial democracy. It is argued that the early interest in industrial democracy retarded the adoption of American methods that assumed a greater degree of managerial control over factory organization.