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This volume brings together established scholars and early-career researchers to foreground African contributions to labour studies. Spanning historical and contemporary developments, it examines youth employment, gendered labour, migration, informality, labour politics and emerging forms of work across the continent.

Through rich case studies and comparative analysis, contributors interrogate how concepts such as class, labour market segmentation, power resources and worker agency have been deployed and contested in African contexts. In doing so, the book demonstrates how African empirical realities invite a rethinking of labour studies and its theoretical foundations.

The Great Disconnect: The Paradox of India's Economic Growth and Employment Crisis, examines the paradox of India's remarkable economic growth alongside persistent employment challenges, revealing the complex dynamics of what the author terms "the great disconnect" between development and suitable work opportunities.

Drawing on extensive research and policy experience, Professor K.P. Kannan explores how India's economic reforms have created a troubling divergence between GDP growth and quality employment generation. The book provides critical insights into jobless growth patterns, the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on workers, persistent wage inequalities, and the marginalisation of women and less-educated workers in rural areas. Through detailed analysis of employment elasticity, informal sector dynamics, and social security gaps, Kannan demonstrates how the majority of India's workforce remains trapped in precarious employment without basic protections. The study extends beyond national boundaries to examine similar challenges across the Global South, particularly within BRICS countries, whilst proposing strategies for organising informal workers and achieving inclusive development.

This authoritative work will be essential reading for development economists, labour specialists, policy makers, and researchers examining employment challenges in emerging economies in the Global South. It provides valuable insights for international development agencies, government officials, labour organisations, and academics studying the intersection of economic growth and social development in contemporary India and the broader developing world.

Can trade unions be reconceptualised as human rights organisations? This groundbreaking study explores the untapped potential of labour movements in human rights advocacy, drawing on extensive interviews with representatives of union confederations worldwide.

Evans provides both theoretical foundations and empirical evidence for viewing trade unions through a human rights lens, examining existing partnerships with NGOs and identifying opportunities for enhanced collaboration. Through detailed analysis of concrete political campaigns, this book reveals how union-based advocacy networks operate in practice.

Essential reading for scholars of labour relations, human rights and political advocacy, this innovative work opens new pathways for understanding and strengthening human rights movements globally.

Muslims face barriers in labour markets across Western democracies, but how severe are these penalties and do they vary by national or local context?

Comparing the latest census data across Muslim communities, majority populations and other religious minorities from the UK, Australia and Canada, Barriers of Belief reveals the stark patterns of inequality in hiring, unemployment, earnings and overqualification associated with Muslim identity. It exposes how inequality is compounded by race and gender, creating distinct disadvantages, particularly for Muslim women.

This book is essential, timely reading for policy makers, researchers and practitioners committed to understanding and dismantling labour market discrimination in diverse societies.

How sex workers and activists engage in non-capitalist care practices to manage precarity, stigma, and criminalization

In Sex Worker Solidarity, Lauren Levitt argues that because of their marginalized status, which makes them outsiders in legal, labor, medical, and social networks, sex workers inevitably care for one another in distinct ways that are outside of traditional material and emotional support structures. Through participant observation and interviews with sex workers and sex worker activists at the Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOP-LA) and Dungeon X, a large commercial dungeon in New York City, Levitt illustrates how sex workers create forms of value for one another that go beyond the value they create for bosses and clients, providing a model for broader social change in the face of increasing wealth inequality.

Drawing on Marxist and women of color feminisms and queer theory, Levitt reveals how sex workers' non-biological kinship structures enable them to circulate both material resources and knowledge according to a moral economy distinct from capitalism's economy of competition, cementing bonds between workers. Ultimately, Sex Worker Solidarity illustrates the limits and possibilities of extending the informal networks of care emerging in sex work workplaces to a broader group of people through sex worker organizing, and shows how other informal workers can resist capitalist exploitation through alternative forms of labor organizing.

The Sage Handbook of Digital Labour is a comprehensive exploration of the multifaceted and evolving concept of digital labour. Originally coined in Marxist analyses to explain the exploitation of user data in the digital economy, the term has since expanded to encompass a wide range of paid work influenced by digital technologies. This includes traditional jobs transformed by platforms, new roles emerging in today's digital society, and cultural producers like influencers and online creators. The handbook also addresses the material aspects of digital labour, highlighting its dependence on traditional manufacturing and manual labour.

This volume brings together leading scholars from diverse disciplines to examine the intersections of labour and digital technologies. It approaches digital labour as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, exploring the material and ideological conditions of work in contemporary society. The handbook aims to chart the extensive territory of digital labour studies, covering theoretical traditions, key concepts, emblematic sites of production, normative cultures, and worker subjectivities. It also showcases the spectrum of worker organizing repertoires and tactics across the world.

The handbook is organized into seven sections. Section 1 highlights major theoretical traditions, while Section 2 focuses on the material sites along production chains. Sections 3 and 4 delve into key concepts and sites of production, and Section 5 explores normative cultures and worker subjectivities. Section 6 examines worker organizing tactics, and Section 7 introduces research methods for scholars in the field. The volume concludes with discussions on how digital labour studies can provide unique perspectives to imagine digital futures.

The Sage Handbook of Digital Labour is an essential resource for scholars, practitioners, and students seeking to understand the complexities of digital labour. It provides a comprehensive and nuanced exploration of the field, equipping readers to engage with the theoretical and practical aspects of digital labour in a rapidly changing world.

Part 1: Theoretical Traditions
Part 2: Material Sites of Production
Part 3: Key Concepts in Digital Labour
Part 4: Emblematic Sites of Production
Part 5: Normative Cultures and Worker Subjectivities
Part 6: Worker Organizing Repertoires and Tactics
Part 7: Research Methods in Digital Labour Studies

The invisible relationship between the ultra-rich and their domestic workers

Behind the facades of luxurious Parisian buildings, the immense gates of chateaux, and the bay windows of vast villas on the Cote d'Azur, live the invisible workers who serve the ultra-wealthy of France. Housekeepers, butlers, maids and cleaners, laundresses, nannies, cooks, and chauffeurs work from morning to night-and often through the night-to satisfy the needs of the rich families who employ them. In Serving the Wealthy, Alizee Delpierre offers an inside view of this unlikely cohabitation.

Drawing on extensive immersive research, Delpierre calls the relationship between ultra-rich French employers and their domestic help "golden exploitation": workers see the potential for social advancement, and the wealthy will do anything to preserve their class privilege, enjoying the fruits of their capital while outsourcing daily drudgery to others. The need for round-the-clock serving, however, does not compel the rich to pay their domestic workers a fair wage; some earn less than minimum wage-and off-the-books gifts of designer handbags don't necessarily fill the gap. Most of these domestic workers are women, many of whom are immigrants, and Delpierre notes that it is considered perfectly normal for a wealthy employer to hire on the basis of ethnicity-to state explicitly a preference for Black and Arab maids, for example, or a distaste for Muslim workers.

The world inhabited by servants and their ultra-rich employers might seem archaic and absurd; but Delpierre's account sheds light not only on these particular power relations but also on the extreme inequality of our current era.

This book situates the transformation in the world of work and employment relations in Central Asia within broader and uneven processes of labour precarisation in the global political economy during the past decades. Contributions show how a region that has largely remained marginal to the discipline of political economy can inform the theorisation of labour precarity and its gender-differentiated dynamics in rural, urban, and migrant contexts in and beyond the post-socialist world. The chapter authors illustrate this through different case studies from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, using data gathered from several rounds of fieldwork up to 2025.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Rethinking Labour, Gender, and Precarity in Central Asia is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The European Union (EU) is marked by historical connections, socio-economic interdependencies, and shared challenges in labour market development. Despite these commonalities, the region is also characterised by significant diversity in economic structures, demographic trends, political contexts, and educational systems.

This volume responds to the urgent need for a nuanced, comparative understanding of employability across the EU - in the face of digital transformation, demographic shifts, and post-pandemic economic recovery.

The purpose of this publication is to provide a multidisciplinary and evidence-based exploration of the key factors shaping employability across the EU. It critically engages with issues such as skills mismatches, youth unemployment, gender disparities, informal work, and migration, offering insights into both persistent challenges and emerging opportunities. By drawing on case studies, policy reviews, and regional data, the book presents a rich mosaic of experiences and diverse approaches to workforce development.

Contemporary Studies in Economic and Financial Analysis publishes a series of current and policy-relevant themed volumes within the fields of economics and finance. Both disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies are welcome.

This book advances scholarship on the infrastructural turn in migration studies by foregrounding the underexplored role of migration brokers from receiving countries and catering to foreign professionals. While existing research has predominantly focused on brokerage in migrants' countries of origin, this monograph conceptualises migration brokerage in the host society as a key institutional infrastructure shaping contemporary cross-border labour markets. It conceptually contributes by integrating insights from economic sociology and international migration studies, introducing a transnational lens into the market-making framework.

Drawing on qualitative data from ethnographic fieldwork, the book examines the role of brokers not only in facilitating and regulating workers' mobility, but also in actively "making" an emerging cross-border labour market between Japan and Vietnam. It also provides a nuanced analysis of the experiences of skilled Vietnamese migrants as they navigate entry into and participation in Japan's labour market.

Focusing on Japan as an emerging immigration country, the analysis is situated within a context characterised by acute labour shortages alongside a persistently restrictive migration regime. Over the past decade, the number of foreign-particularly skilled-migrant workers, including Vietnamese nationals, has increased substantially. In the absence of a comprehensive immigration policy, private intermediaries have become crucial in facilitating, mobilising and controlling the mobility of both migrant workers and labour users. Despite Asia's importance as a major host region of international migrants, Japan remains comparatively under-researched. Addressing this gap, the book will appeal to scholars, students, and policymakers working in migration studies, economic sociology, Asian studies, and migration and labour policy.

This book explores the everyday lives of religious and spiritual sex workers in the United Kingdom and the United States. Challenging dominant assumptions that religiosity and sex work are inherently incompatible, it centres the voices of those whose experiences are routinely marginalised within dominant religious and secular discourse. Drawing on qualitative research, including participant-driven photographs, diaries, and in-depth interviews, the book examines how sex workers navigate belief, identity, stigma, intimacy, and belonging in their everyday lives. It reveals the complex ways religious and spiritual sex workers negotiate their occupational, religious, spiritual, familial, and personal identities, offering a nuanced account of lived religion and sex work. By focusing on micro-level experiences, the book moves beyond moral debates to illustrate how both religiosity and sex work are practised in ordinary moments and intimate spaces. In doing so, it challenges reductive portrayals of sex workers as either victims or sinners. Bridging sex work scholarship and the sociology of religion, this book will be of interest to academics, sex work support organisations, and policy makers seeking a more inclusive understanding of sex work and religiosity.

This open access book presents an interdisciplinary perspective on the study of well-being at work. Written by experts from various disciplines, it integrates organizational behavior, sociology, economics, economic history, and entrepreneurship to probe two central themes: the causes and consequences of work meaningfulness and work motivations, and their implications for workers and organizations. It comprehensively explores why people find meaning in their work, what motivates them to work, and how this perception shapes individual, organizational, and economic outcomes. The respective chapters investigate how these central topics manifest in various contexts, from psychological and organizational frameworks to the impact of economic theories and technological change, offering new perspectives on the interplay between work, individual fulfillment, and societal development.

The edited volume promises to be a distinctive contribution to the field, sharing provocative insights and summaries of the state-of-the-art in the growing body of literature on meaningful work and work orientations, raising pivotal questions and providing informed answers that will shape future studies and practices.

A behind-the-scenes look at why Latinos-the largest immigrant group in the United States-make up a staggeringly low percentage of the elite US labor force.

Carla, Douglas, and Isabel each migrated to the United States from Latin American countries before they were teenagers. Each had big dreams-in medicine, business, and government-and each did what they were told to do to achieve their goals: work hard, stay in school, and follow the rules. Yet none of them reached the top of the labor market, and they are far from alone. Only one out of one hundred Latino immigrants who arrive in the United States as children will ever secure a job that requires a college degree and pays high wages.

To better understand why Latinos are more likely to have difficulty finding success in the labor market, sociologist A. Nicole Kreisberg's 1 in 100 shares stories directly from Latino immigrants experiencing this exclusion. Kreisberg argues that despite increasing access to higher education, Latino immigrant youth seldom land high-paying jobs. But contrary to what Americans might think, this is not the result of individual failure. Instead, these slim odds are the result of immigration laws, schools, and workplaces that interact in ways that systematically disadvantage so many Latinos. Kreisberg finds that stereotypes about Latino immigrants are activated in US schools, exacerbated in US colleges, and reinforced by employers' hiring decisions. And because most Americans cannot tell who is and who isn't an immigrant, the stereotypes harming immigrants often spill over to the 68 million Latinos living in the United States, including those born here as US citizens.

By tracing the school-to-work trajectories of child-arriving Latino immigrants and native-born Latinos, alongside the gatekeepers who structure their opportunities, 1 in 100 shows that the 99 who struggle are not the exception-they are the unfortunate norm.

This book offers an original, critical analysis of the governance of sexual labour in Greece, tracing how state regulationism and feminist interventions have systematically separated sex work from other forms of women's labour, constructing it as an exceptional field requiring heightened surveillance, discipline, and control. By analysing how feminist currents in Greece have at times aligned with state agendas-embracing punitive approaches under the banner of gender justice-it challenges dominant narratives that obscure class dynamics, migration realities, and the broader political economy of reproductive and intimate labour. At the same time, the book foregrounds sex workers' strategies of resistance, community-building, and collective action.

The author wishes to dedicate this book to the memory of Paola Revenioti, who passed away shortly before publication.

Negotiating the Future focuses on US labor and the just transition. Fossil fuel workers are currently at risk for losing their jobs should the US curtail coal, natural gas and oil use. A just transition would support these workers and avoid imposing disproportionate shares of the costs of decarbonization on the poor, the working class, or people of color. While some unions are debating how a just low-carbon energy transition can be enacted, others are questioning whether a transition needs to take place at all.

Diane Sicotte provides a detailed understanding of the role of labor in environmental change, beyond the "jobs vs. environment" framing. Negotiating the Future also contributes to ongoing debates in labor studies: about the best ways for labor unions to address conflicts between their members' long-term interests in environmental stability and their short-term material interests; how far solidarity should go when it means abetting obstacles to lowering carbon emissions, and how to ensure that the developing renewable energy industries enhance labor unions' power resources instead of diminishing them.

This book addresses how to assess pay equity for faculty and staff in colleges and universities. This book begins with a discussion of how postsecondary institutions compensate their employees, and how this can result in pay differences between groups of employees such as men and women. From there, the notion of pay equity is discussed, and methods are reviewed that could used to determine if pay is in fact equitable between these groups. This book also describes how pay equity studies can be conducted for three groups of employees: tenure-eligible faculty, non-tenure-eligible faculty, and staff. Following these chapters, this book explores the different ways that pay may be adjusted for designated employees in response to the findings from a pay equity study. This book concludes with some guidance for institutions and researchers who embark on pay equity studies in higher education. This book provides a comprehensive view on conducting pay equity studies in higher education. While most of the work to date on pay equity has focused on tenure-eligible faculty, increasingly, institutions are seeking to determine whether all of their employees are being paid in a fair and equitable manner. It is emphasized throughout the book that there are a number of methods and options that can be used in pay equity studies and seeks to explain the advantages and disadvantages of each option so that readers make an informed decision as to how to proceed with their own study. An important feature of the book is that data on employees are used to illustrate how the various methods work and compare to each other.

How race, class, gender, and place shape the ways working-class young people in Britain envision their transition from education to work

How do the effects of deindustrialisation and neoliberalism influence young people's perceptions of work and education? In Cancelled Futures, Amit Singh examines how experiences of class-based inequality work through race, place, and gender in different ways. Moving beyond the usual framing of race versus class and the populist fixation with the white working class, Singh shows the intractable challenges that Black, Asian, and white young people share when they envision their futures in changing labour market conditions. Drawing on extensive interviews with sixty-two young working-class Britons, he describes the range of strategies they employ in the absence of viable economic opportunities-and the uneven results that follow.

Singh offers a vivid nationwide portrait, bringing together seemingly divergent locations and their youth-those living in proximity to the extraordinary wealth and perceived opportunity of the City of London, in the former northern mill town of Rochdale, and in the forgotten seaside town of Morecambe Bay-and captures the empathetic sense of struggle that many cultivate. Singh reveals that although the unique features of place raise distinctive racial and gendered reckonings with their circumstances and hopes, these young people have in common an increasingly fading sense of the future. Singh shows that they do not cling to the illusion that hard work pays off or the myth of meritocracy, but seek only to realise some sense of dignity and meaning amid a future that feels not just confusing but altogether absent.

This book offers a deeply grounded ethnographic account of the women coal workers in Jharia-known locally as Kamins-whose labor sustains one of India's most hazardous extractive frontiers. Moving beyond narratives of victimhood or romanticized resilience, the study situates their lives within the historical evolution of India's coal economy, from colonial expansion and post-independence nationalization to contemporary regimes of subcontracting, informalization, and ecological degradation. It reveals how women's apparent "disappearance" from formal mining work is not a simple retreat but the outcome of institutional reclassification, managerial practices, and gendered-caste hierarchies that reorganize labor, risk, and recognition in the coal industry. The Kamins' experiences illuminate how extraction is governed through everyday bureaucratic and political mechanisms that are deeply shaped by the intersection of gender, caste, and class, structuring who is seen as a legitimate worker, whose injuries are acknowledged, and whose labor remains invisible. Foregrounding these layered exclusions, the book demonstrates that mining ecologies are not only environmental but also social and institutional terrains where toxicity, precarity, and dispossession are unevenly distributed. Rather than presenting the coalfields as an isolated site of exploitation, the book situates Jharia within broader national and global energy regimes, showing how the demand for cheap coal is sustained through institutionalized invisibility and differential exposure to harm. By centering the knowledge, strategies, and political insights of the Kamins, the study rethinks labor politics in extractive economies and offers a critical account of how survival itself becomes a mode of analysis and resistance. This book will be of interest to researchers in gender studies, sociology of labor, feminist political economy, feminist ecology, and development studies.

This book brings together perspectives on privileged migration and highly skilled migration, illustrating how these concepts intersect with gender, ethnicity, and life course. Highly skilled migrants are often defined as those who have tertiary education, while privileged migrants possess agency and a relative position of power compared to local communities. Despite their relatively privileged status due to their occupations, these migrants face various barriers in their daily lives. Thus, experiences of privilege and precarity can coexist. Highly skilled migrants can encounter discrimination and employ cultural repertoires to navigate and mitigate these challenges. Drawing on over 70 interviews with highly skilled migrants in Czechia conducted in 2024, this book aims to uncover their lived experiences and coping strategies. This book will appeal to researchers and scholars in sociology and the social sciences more broadly. It will also be of interest to students in migration studies as well as to policymakers in Central and Eastern Europe.

Positive and healthy work environments enhance job satisfaction and workplace engagement and play a significant role in the healthy functioning of library organizations. Higher levels of workplace satisfaction and engagement also contribute to increased productivity, creativity, and performance, and by extension improved services and organizational culture. But how do we define, cultivate, and sustain positive and healthy work environments, particularly in libraries, which are often under-resourced, unappreciated or devalued, or even toxic?

Building and Sustaining Positive and Healthy Work Environments examines the opportunities, challenges, and successes of fostering and nurturing workplace environments that enhance job satisfaction, engagement, and success.

Automation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence draws on historical and contemporary debates to examine the future of work in the age of artificial intelligence.

While automation is often portrayed as an inevitable technological force driving economic progress or job loss, this book reframes it as a socially constructed discourse that is shaped by competing beliefs, interests and narratives about human labor, progress and value. It situates current anxieties about AI within a longer trajectory of industrial transformation by identifying four distinct ways of understanding automation: the activist, resigned, status quo and
futurist discourses. By analyzing how these discourses emerge in policy debates, media coverage and academic research, this book reveals how language and ideology influence the adoption and governance of new technologies.

This book offers conceptual framework for scholars in sociology, political economy and science and technology studies, as well as for policymakers and labor advocates seeking to navigate automation's social impacts. In doing so,
it moves beyond deterministic narratives of job loss to uncover the deeper cultural meanings attached to technological change and the uncertain future of work.