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Despite significant interest in the changing nature of employment as a critical social and economic challenge facing society—especially the decline in the so-called Standard Employment Relationship (SER) and rise in more insecure, precarious forms of employment—scholars have struggled to operationalize the multifaceted and heterogeneous nature of contemporary worker-employer relationships within empirical analyses. Here we investigate the character and distribution of employment relationships in the U.S., drawing on a representative sample of wage-earners and self-employed from the General Social Survey (2002–2018). We use the multidimensional construct of employment quality, which includes both contractual (e.g., wages, contract type) and relational (e.g., employee representation and participation) aspects of employment. We further employ a typological measurement approach, using latent class analysis, to explicitly examine how the multiple aspects of employment cluster together in modern labor markets. We present eight distinct employment types in the U.S., including one resembling the historical conception of the SER model (24% of the total workforce), and others representing various constellations of favorable and adverse employment features. These employment types are unevenly distributed across society, in terms of who works these jobs and where they are found in the labor market. Importantly, women, those with lower education, and younger workers are more likely to be in precarious forms of employment. More generally, our typology reveals limitations associated with binary conceptions of standard vs. non-standard employment, or insider–outsider dichotomies envisioned within dual labor market theories.

Immigration controls are often presented by government as a means of ensuring 'British jobs for British workers' and protecting migrants from exploitation. However, in practice they can undermine labour protections. As well as a tap regulating the flow of labour, immigration controls function as a mould, helping to form types of labour with particular relations to employers and the labour market. In particular, the construction of institutionalised uncertainty, together with less formalised migratory processes, help produce 'precarious workers' over whom employers and labour users have particular mechanisms of control.

Deregulation through temporary employment has generated important inequalities in the Spanish labour market. The article presents a theoretical model as well as empirical evidence to explain this process. The main thrust of the model is seeing labour market structures as always being the result of micro-level strategies of employers and employees over employment rents. The employment-rent approach focuses on the impact of deregulation through temporary employment on the employment-rent optimization strategies of both employers and employees at the micro-level. Drawing on recent developments in labour economics, two main micro-level effects of deregulation are identified, the so-called 'incentive' and 'buffer' mechanisms. These two mechanisms are expected to reinforce each other until an equilibrium state in the segmentation process is reached. The employment-rent model is tested using data from the Spanish Labour Force Survey for the period 1987-1997, as well as data on wages drawn from the Survey on Class Structure, Class Consciousness and Class Biography (1991). The evidence proves consistent with the predictions of the model.

Drawing on case studies in the German metal and chemical sectors, this article addresses trade unions’ behavior toward employers’ labor market segmentation strategies and, in particular, their use of outsourcing. Findings illustrate that, contrary to the expectations of the dualization literature, trade unions do not always give priority to their core constituency over the interests of temporary or peripheral workers. Union actions are not solely determined by the aim of defending the interests of their current members but depend instead on the interrelationship between unions’ identity and their members’ and organizational interests.

The concept of reproductive labor is central to an analysis of gender inequality, including understanding the devaluation of cleaning, cooking, child care, and other \"women's work\" in the paid labor force. This article presents historical census data that detail transformations of paid reproductive labor during the twentieth century. Changes in the organization of cooking and cleaning tasks in the paid labor market have led to shifts in the demographics of workers engaged in these tasks. As the context for cleaning and cooking work shifted from the dominance of private household servants to include more institutional forms, the gender balance of this reproductive labor workforce has been transformed, while racial-ethnic hierarchies have remained entrenched. This article highlights the challenges to understanding occupational segregation and the devaluation of reproductive labor in a way that analyzes gender and race-ethnicity in an intersectional way and integrates cultural and structural explanations of occupational degradation.

Since 1980, studies of the wage labor process have been centered mostly on three topics: the new international division of labor, control over the labor process, and \"flexibilization\" of production. Anthropologists have contributed rich studies about modes of control and about how these modes are linked to social relations within the work place and workers' communities of origin. They have explained how and why market segmentation can be a powerful tool of control some of the time, whereas at other times it can enhance tensions. Anthropologists have also contributed by transforming stylized models into models centered on actors with social and class identities and with ambivalent expectations and aspirations. However, they have neglected to integrate their findings with those from the literature on labor migrations and job search. They also have neglected to consistently examine contracts and hiring practices, two major tools of labor control. Although anthropologists have been attentive to paradigms about global restructuring of industries, they have often disregarded an intermediate level of analysis: the relationship of producers and industries to relevant actors in their respective regional labor markets, and how producers and industries structure local labor markets. A spatial portrayal of labor markets will facilitate comparative studies about the impact of industrial restructuring and correct possible biases.

PurposeThis paper tests if there exists a subjective well-being gap between informal workers in the informal and formal sectors in urban China, and explores the mechanisms behind such differences.Design/methodology/approachThe author develops a simple theoretical model to analyze the effects of the employment sector and work time flexibility on workers' happiness and conducts a descriptive study to examine the relationship between employment type and subjective well-being using the China General Social Survey (CGSS) 2010, 2013, 2015 and 2017 datasets, a nationally representative sample.FindingsThe results show that only dependent informal work in the formal sector impairs workers' happiness, while the effect of independent informal work is not statistically significant. The potential mechanisms suggest that independent informal workers have higher working time flexibility and can work more hours to increase their earnings, which increases their subjective well-being. However, it is difficult for dependent informal workers to earn more by working more hours due to poor working time flexibility.Originality/valueThis study indicates that informal workers in the formal sector have lower subjective well-being in urban China and deserve more attention from policymakers. The author also suggests that increasing working time flexibility and encouraging self-employment can contribute to the welfare of informal workers.

We propose a new approach to study the structure of occupational labor markets that relies on social network analysis techniques. Highly detailed transition matrices are constructed based on changes in individual workers' occupations over successive months of the Current Population Survey rotating panels. The resulting short-term transition matrices provide snapshots of all occupational movements in the U.S. labor market at different points in time and for different sociodemographic groups. We find a significant increase in occupational mobility and in the diversity of occupational destinations for working men over the past two decades. The occupational networks for black and Hispanic men exhibit a high overall density of ties resulting from a high probability of movement among a limited set of occupations. Upward status mobility also increased during the time period studied, although there are large differences by race and ethnicity and educational attainment. Finally, factional analysis is proposed as a novel way to explore labor market segmentation. Results reveal a highly segmented occupational network in which movement is concentrated within a limited number of occupations with markedly different levels of occupational status.

Like all migration, skilled migration depends on intermediary operators providing services that assist the mobility, labour market entry and integration of migrant workers. However, within what is a relatively disparate body of literature on migrant work, there is often either a complete neglect, or only fragmented acknowledgement and analysis of how migration intermediaries influence migrants’ access to destination labour markets. By re-engaging with the literature on skilled migration, the authors highlight the importance of new theorizing and empirical investigations into the labour market implications of intermediary activities, which at present remain poorly understood. Most particularly, this article highlights how migration intermediaries shape recruitment, selection and placement, thereby in part determining labour market outcomes for particular groups of migrant workers.

This review investigates scholarship on the intersection of race and gender, with a particular focus on the U.S. labor market. We ask the following questions: What assumptions underlie intersectional perspectives in sociology? Is there any evidence to demonstrate that race and gender intersect in the labor market? We begin by discussing the core assumptions within Black and multiracial feminist theories, which represent the most fully articulated treatments of \"intersectionality.\" We then broaden our theoretical overview by identifying fundamental differences in the way that sociologists conceptualize intersectionality. We look for evidence of intersectionality in three central domains of research on labor market inequality: (a) wage inequality, (b) discrimination and stereotyping, and (c) immigration and domestic labor. We find that race and gender do intersect in the labor market under certain conditions. Finally, we consider how an intersectional approach enriches labor market research and theorizing about economic inequality.