ILPC 2025

Together with, despite, and against the state: theorising regulatory conflicts around work and employment

Convenors

  • Luciana Zorzoli (Essex University);
  • Angel Martin Caballero (University of Manchester)
  • Mathew Johnson (University of Manchester)
  • Eleanor Kirk (University of Glasgow)

Outline

This stream seeks to bring together a range of international perspectives that explore the dynamic relationships between regulation, the state and social actors in the ongoing struggle for control over the organisation of work, as well as broader conflicts over the market, political and institutional context within which workers’ activity is located. Drawing on de Souza’s (2006) work, we highlight the multiple ways in which social actors leverage their power resources whether to work with the state, to mobilise against the state, or to maintain independence and autonomy from the state in pursuit of their objectives, and how these actions, in turn, shape the very nature of state intervention in the social realm. In this vein, we aim to focus on two key issues within labour studies and their possible interconnections: first, the relationship between different social actors and the shifting landscape of labour regulation; and second, the increasingly fragmented capacity of the state to influence regulatory processes.

Our proposal also seeks to echo the calls to bring the state back into labour process theory and address the wider 'connectivity gap' (Thompson and Newsome, 2004) between micro-level processes within labour process analysis and broader mobilisation efforts that engage with political economy (Hauptmeier & Vidal, 2014; Hyman, 2008). Ultimately, we hope that the issues raised here will help to reconsider how labour process theory and research provide new insights for studies focused on the relationship between social actors and regulation, as well as the role of the state within these dynamics.

In doing so we build on recent contributions from socio-legal and state theories, to understand the role of law in framing the capital-labour conflict (Adams, 2023), while also recognising that the scope of labour law enforcement by the state has undergone profound changes in the last half-century (Howell, 2021). And while in some cases, state intervention has been decisive in order to deregulate and liberalise markets and to enhance competition, understanding the linkages between the macro and micro levels of regulatory conflicts, and the dynamic interaction of different actors is crucial to move beyond simple dualities of regulation vs. deregulation and coordinated vs. liberal market economies (Martinez Lucio & MacKenzie, 2024). 

For example, on the one hand, employment relations are widely believed to have undergone a period of significant ‘juridification’ in terms of the proliferation of labour laws in the last half century, with law colonising ever new spheres of activity (Bogg, 2019). Similarly, the response of governments to various economic, health and climate crises also reveal a clear role for the state in seeking to protect workers and communities, as well as employers (Aloisi and Stefano, 2022; Das Acevedo, 2020; Lapavitsas, 2023). Changes in national and local government in recent years also point to a potential ‘progressive turn’ in political systems that can improve protections for workers and strengthen mechanisms of inspection and enforcement (Jacobs et al., 2021). 

On the other hand, the disruptions arising from global events may overwhelm state capacities leading to the further fragmentation of institutions and employment standards (Hodder and Martínez Lucio, 2021; Murray et al., 2020). The underfunding and undermining of inspection and enforcement agencies (Mustchin and Martinez-Lucio, 2023) have also contributed to more subtle processes of de-regulation by stealth (Bogg, 2019: 197) and a weakening of individual and collective legal redress (Kirk and Busby, 2017). In response to a stretched state, employers may also seek to exploit regulatory loopholes in order to intensify value extraction in the labour process and transfer social costs back onto the state or more commonly on to workers themselves (Benassi and Kornelakis, 2021; Moore and Newsome, 2018). 

In this context, a diverse range of social actors including formal trade unions, NGOs and social activists, as well as grassroots and self-organised groups, increasingly seek to leverage their power resources in order to ensure that fundamental worker rights are upheld (Atzeni, 2016). And while social actors have long mobilised against state and employer hegemony, strategic repertoires of contention are becoming increasingly complex and muti-faceted, drawing on both elements of conflict and cooperation, thereby sparking growing interest about the interplay of individual and collective legal mobilisations and the role of the law in shaping discourses of resistance (Kirk and Cruz, 2024/forthcoming). The outcome of these struggles is likely to depend on the interaction between social and institutional forces, although social actors are increasingly careful not to sacrifice their autonomy and radical ethos in pursuit of top-down policy and regulatory reforms (de Souza, 2006; Adams, 2023). For this stream we welcome conceptual and empirical contributions that seek to address one or more of the following questions:

  • What is the scope, nature and extent of state intervention in labour market and employment regulation? How have short and long-term neoliberal transformations of the state influenced the approach to disruptive challenges?
  • How does the fragmentation of state intervention contribute to the re-scaling of regulatory conflict across levels ranging from the local to the supranational?
  • How is the state's intervention in worker representation and collective action changing? What are the fundamental contradictions and tensions? What is the scope and challenges that arise from the new ways in which workers’ organisations engage with the law and regulatory processes?
  • What are the implications of the state's fragmented and contradictory responses to managing industrial relations and the labour process? How are managerial strategies and labour processes adapting to exploit those advantages?
  • How should labour process theory bring the state back in (again)? Which processes, actors and phenomena must be attended to?

We invite contributions that respond to these or related questions and would particularly welcome papers that focus on the Global South. By doing so, this stream promises to enhance our understanding of the complex and evolving role of the state in regulating work and employment in a rapidly changing world, and to contribute to the development of progressive alternatives to market liberalisation and institutional fragmentation.

Selected references

  • Adams, Z. (2023). Legal Mobilisations, Trade Unions and Radical Social Change: A Case Study of the IWGB. Industrial Law Journal, 52(3), 560–594. https://doi.org/10.1093/indlaw/dwac031
  • Atzeni, M. (2016). Beyond trade unions’ strategy? The social construction of precarious workers organizing in the city of Buenos Aires. Labor History, 57(2), 193-214.
  • Aloisi, A., & Stefano, V. D. (2022). Your Boss Is an Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour. Bloomsbury Publishing.
  • Benassi, C., & Kornelakis, A. (2021). How Do Employers Choose between Types of Contingent Work? Costs, Control, and Institutional Toying. ILR Review, 74(3), 715–738. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793920944910
  • Bogg, A. (2019) Juridification in Industrial Relations. in Gall, G. (ed) Handbook of the Politics of Labour, Work and Employment. Elgaronline. 
  • Das Acevedo, D. (Ed.). (2020). Beyond the Algorithm: Qualitative Insights for Gig Work Regulation (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  • De Souza, M. L. (2006). Social movements as ‘critical urban planning’ agents. City, 10(3), 327–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604810600982347
  • Hauptmeier, M., & Vidal, M. (Eds.). (2014). Comparative political economy of work. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Hodder, A., & Martínez Lucio, M. (2021). Pandemics, politics, and the resilience of employment relations research. Labour & Industry: A Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work, 31(4), 430–438. https://doi.org/10.1080/10301763.2021.1953225
  • Howell, C. (2021). Rethinking the Role of the State in Employment Relations for a Neoliberal Era. ILR Review, 74(3), 739–772. 
  • Hyman, R. (2008). The State in Industrial Relations. In P. Blyton, N. Bacon, J. Fiorito, & E. Heery (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Industrial Relations (pp. 258–283). SAGE Publications Ltd.
  • Jacobs, K., Smith, R., & McBride, J. (2021). State and Local Policies and Sectoral Labor Standards: From Individual Rights to Collective Power. ILR Review, 74(5), 1132–1154. https://doi.org/10.1177/00197939211020706
  • Kirk, E. and Busby, N. (2017) Led up the tribunal path? Employment disputes, legal consciousness and trust in the protection of law. Oñati Socio-Legal Series, 7(7), pp. 1397-1420.
  • Kirk, E. and Cruz, K. (2024/Forthcoming) Trade Union Legal Mobilisation and Consciousness. Journal of Law & Society. 
  • Lapavitsas, C. (2023). The state of capitalism: Economy, society and hegemony. Verso.
  • Martinez Lucio. M., & MacKenzie, R. (2024). 7: The State and Industrial Relations: Debates, Concerns and Contradictions in the Forging of Regulatory Change in the UK. https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/display/book/9781529236972/ch007.xml
  • Moore, S., & Newsome, K. (2018). Paying for Free Delivery: Dependent Self-Employment as a Measure of Precarity in Parcel Delivery. Work, Employment and Society, 32(3), 475–492. 
  • Murray, G., Lévesque, C., Morgan, G., & Roby, N. (2020). Disruption and re-regulation in work and employment: From organisational to institutional experimentation. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 26(2), 135–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1024258920919346
  • Mustchin, S., & Martínez Lucio, M. (2023). The fragmenting occupation of labour inspection and the degradation of regulatory and enforcement work inside the British state. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 44(2): 526-546
  • Thompson, P., & Newsome, K. (2004). Labour process theory, work and the employment relationship. In B. E. Kaufman & Industrial Relations Research Association (Eds.), Theoretical perspectives on work and the employment relationship (1st ed, pp. 133–162). Industrial Relations Research Association.