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A key meta-narrative of Employment Relations in the UK over recent decades has been that of labour market deregulation. However, governments have simultaneously introduced workplace rights legislation that juridified individual employment relationships. Within this process, employers and their representatives, Employers’ Organizations (EOs), are generally depicted as opposing the introduction of employment law or attempting to weaken its application. Contrary to this belief, our research identified a range of other responses to ask: how and why have EO responses varied?

This article draws on primary qualitative and quantitative data from three projects; one examined the totality of EOs in the UK while the others examined topic-specific behaviour of EOs and other actors. The main source is the first project and its 98 interviews with representatives of EOs and related organisations between 2013 and 2017.

We demonstrate that opposition is not the only EO response to individual employment law by identifying three others: compliance, advocating for law and going beyond legally stipulated requirements by promoting voluntary standards/best practice. The article argues that there are two explanations for this pattern. One is that individual EOs possess different sets of member interests, the other relates to differences in their organizational characteristics.

The article makes two contributions to the literature. One is that our identification of varying responses challenges more unitary accounts emphasising neoliberal and deregulatory patterns. The other lies in our identification of causal forces not previously identified. Both combine to illustrate how the neo-liberal order is not characterised by employer consensus as to regulation.

Multiple jobholding (MJH) is assumed to be a growing phenomenon due to working life changes. This study presents new knowledge on the MJH career paths, from the perspectives of both employers and employees.

The qualitative interview study was focused on retail trade and restaurant and food service industries in Finland, where MJH is a quite common work arrangement compared to other European countries. The data were analyzed with the concepts of the chaos theory of careers and with an abductive thematic content analysis.

According to the results, several events and intertwined factors may lead individual careers gradually to MJH. Changing personal and family situations and leisure time needs attracted the careers towards MJH. MJH was not only a financial necessity to employees, but it also served their flexibility interests. The interviewed employers applied flexible non-standard employment arrangements mainly due to rapidly varying labor needs established in the industries. It was important for them to strengthen the non-standard core employees' sense of belonging to the work community. However, employees with work ability challenges were in risk to end up in peripheral positions at the labor market.

Previous research on multiple jobholding has not combined employers’ perspectives of MJH to employees’ experiences of career paths.

This paper identifies how the operations of labour market intermediaries (LMIs) transform dyadic employment relationships into triadic ones. It reveals the change dynamics that LMIs engage in to bring about this transformation and that contribute to the projectification of work.

Drawing on an institutional-work lens and using interview data from both TempX, a German-based staffing service provider, and its client organizations, the analytical framework details the dynamics by which LMIs appropriate various HR tasks and different labour-market-organizing roles and thus create these triadic employment relationships.

TempX assumes a powerful position between its client organizations and workers by increasingly taking over HR tasks from its client organizations, alternating between profiting from market transactions and engaging as a buyer and seller of labour. This powerful position, gradually created through four distinct, sequential, institutional work dynamics, allows it to transform dyadic employment relationships into triadic ones and to promote project-based work.

By showing how LMIs capitalize on the multiple services they offer, and how they use these services to establish a powerful position in both the labour market and in their relations with client organizations, this paper contributes to research on how LMIs change their institutional environment. Second, by showing that LMIs switch between different labour-market organizing roles and HR tasks, this paper reveals how essential this switching is for LMIs to establish triadic employment relationships and to drive the projectification of work, and thus it also contributes to research on LMIs’ role in the projectification of work.

The purpose of this study is to provide a detailed demonstration of how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to potentially generate valuable insights and recommendations regarding the role of accounting in addressing key sustainability-related issues.

The study offers a novel method for leveraging AI tools to augment traditional scoping study techniques. The method was used to show how the authors can produce recommendations for potentially enhancing organisational accountability pertaining to seasonal workers.

Through the use of AI and informed by the knowledge base that the authors created, the authors have developed prescriptions that have the potential to advance the interests of seasonal workers. In doing so, the authors have focussed on developing a useful and detailed guide to assist their colleagues to apply AI to various research questions.

This study demonstrates the ability of AI to assist researchers in efficiently finding solutions to social problems. By augmenting traditional scoping study techniques with AI tools, the authors present a framework to assist future research in such areas as accounting and accountability.

Publicly available datasets in the USA present data suppression issues that limit the ability to investigate entrepreneurial subgroups like military veterans, which account for about one in ten entrepreneurs in the USA. Thus, despite public desire to support veteran entrepreneurs (“vetrepreneurs”), there is a limited descriptive understanding on the relationship between veteran business owner demographics, such as gender and race, and their business survival and growth. We address this limited understanding in this article by providing descriptive evidence on veteran-owned business survival and growth, emphasizing variation across race and gender.

We use limited-access longitudinal microdata to provide descriptive evidence on the survival and growth of veteran-owned firms across race and gender.

Findings indicate statistically significant variation across demographic subgroups’ business survival and employment growth. For example, veteran-owned firms have high women ownership rates, greater employment, revenues and payrolls, but also lower employment and revenue growth. More generally we provide descriptive evidence that military experience or the military community help women overcome the gender gap in small business survival.

This type of descriptive research is common among entrepreneurial researchers, however, peer-reviewed research specific to US veterans is very limited. These descriptive results are useful for policymakers and for spurring future policy research related to veteran entrepreneurs.

This study aims to explore the spatial impact of an increase in the minimum wage on the labor productivity of star-rated hotels in China.

The impact is analyzed by using the dynamic spatial Durbin model.

The authors find a U-shaped link between the increase in minimum wage and labor productivity of star-rated hotels. The long-term impact of a minimum wage increase has a greater influence on labor productivity than its short-term effects. While there is no notable spatial spillover impact observed in the sample of 31 provinces in China, the authors do identify a spatial spillover effect of the minimum wage rises on the labor productivity of star-rated hotels in the central area. Furthermore, they observe heterogeneity across China. The eastern and western regions exhibit a U-shaped relationship, whereas the central region exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship.

The findings of this study allow government agencies to get a more comprehensive comprehension of the actual consequences of minimum wage hikes on the tourism and hospitality sector, thereby establishing a solid basis for them to develop appropriate policies. Moreover, it offers a variety of suggestions aimed at enhancing the quality and efficiency of hotel management.

Research on the effects of minimum wage standards is scant in the hospitality industry. Based on human capital investment theory, this study examines the effect of the minimum wage standard hikes on labor productivity of star-rated hotels from the spatial perspective, filling the existing research gap.

To examine objective measures of economic job quality for a broad sample of workers in the US spectator sports industry and compare job quality in spectator sports to other industries.

Logistic and linear regressions are performed on American Community Survey (ACS) data collected from 2015 to 2019. Earnings and employer provision of health insurance are the outcomes.

Earnings and employer-provided health insurance are lower in the spectator sports industry than in other industries after controlling for relevant factors. Differences are partly explained by the occupational composition of the industry and the higher incidence of part-time work. Many but not all occupational groups have lower earnings and less employer-provided health insurance in sports.

ACS data only reports one job, so the results likely underestimate the prevalence of part-time work in the US spectator sports industry. The study finds support for a micro-class occupational composition effect and a pulsating organization effect. Some support is also found for a sports industry compensating wage differential, but the effect is not industry wide, counter to some depictions.

This is the first study to examine objective, economic measures of job quality across all occupational sub-groups in the sports industry. This is the first study to propose theoretical explanations for poor economic job quality in sport.

In this chapter, we introduce the topic of essentiality of work, exploring its implications for workers, labour markets, and public policy. The essentiality of work often corresponds in a dialectical way with the precarity of work, raising pressing questions about how societies value and, more pertinently, devalue various types of labour, thereby influencing life chances and societal integration. What we see in the contributions to this volume and the wider evidence is that essential work is typically performed by workers who are treated as expendable, or inessential. We proceed to outline the various contributions from the studies compiled in this volume. These present diverse perspectives on ‘essentiality’ and the experiences of essential workers. Offering a range of new empirical insights, the volume underlines the vitality and lasting relevance of essentiality – both as a concept and in the experience of workers – beyond the pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic appears to have engendered heterogeneous effects on individuals’ labour market prospects. This paper focuses on two possible sources of a heterogeneous exposition to labour market risks associated with the pandemic outbreak: the routine task content of the job and the teleworkability. To evaluate whether these dimensions played a crucial role in amplifying employment and wage gaps among workers, we focus on the case of Italy, the first EU country hit by Covid-19.

Investigating the actual effect of the pandemic on workers employed in jobs with a different degree of teleworkability and routinization, using real microdata, is currently unfeasible. This is because longitudinal datasets collecting annual earnings and the detailed information about occupations needed to capture a job’s routine task content and teleworkability are not presently available. To simulate changes in the wage distribution for the year 2020, we have employed a static microsimulation model. This model is built on data from the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (IT-SILC) survey, which has been enriched with administrative data and aligned with monthly observed labour market dynamics by industries and regions.

We measure the degree of job teleworkability and routinization with the teleworkability index (TWA) built by Sostero et al. (2020) and the routine-task-intensity index (RTI) developed by Cirillo et al. (2021), respectively. We find that RTI and TWA are negatively and positively associated with wages, respectively, and they are correlated with higher (respectively lower) risks of a large labour income drop due to the pandemic. Our evidence suggests that labour market risks related to the pandemic – and the associated new types of earnings inequality that may derive – are shaped by various factors (including TWA and RTI) instead of by a single dimension. However, differences in income drop risks for workers in jobs with varying degrees of teleworkability and routinization largely reduce when income support measures are considered, thus suggesting that the redistributive effect of the emergency measures implemented by the Italian government was rather effective.

No studies have so far investigated the effect of the pandemic on workers employed in jobs with a different degree of routinization and teleworkability in Italy. We thus investigate whether income drop risks in Italy in 2020 – before and after income support measures – differed among workers whose jobs are characterized by a different degree of RTI and TWA.

This study applies Garfinkel’s (1967) concept of ‘breaching experiment’ to explore the impact of COVID-19-induced disruptions on the ‘emotion management’ practices of residential care workers in the United Kingdom and Germany. It examines the influence of professional feeling rules on workers, emphasizing the prescribed importance of displaying affective, empathetic concern for residents’ health and well-being. Findings demonstrate that authenticity and adherence to professional feeling rules in relation to emotional management are not mutually exclusive. The authors underscore how adherence to professional feeling rules upholds authentic care by reinforcing a professional ethos, which acts as a cornerstone motivating residential care workers. Ultimately, the study showcases how a professional ethos substantiates altruistic motivations, guiding proficient emotion management practices among care workers. It highlights how these workers drew upon their personal understanding and experiences to determine the appropriate emotions to express while providing care for residents amid the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic.