This article introduces the first of two international Themed Collections on gender and work, published as, Part A across Volumes 35(4) and 36(2), and as Part B in Volume 36(3) of The Economic and Labour Relations Review. In introducing the 11 Part A articles, we identify three main themes: contexts, impacts, and effects on gender status. Contexts include climate crisis, uncertain gender impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), and ongoing skill under-recognition in feminised ‘ancillary’ occupations. Impacts include increasing care load and violence in traditionally feminised teaching work, LGBTQ+ workers’ intertwined experiences of stigmatisation and job insecurity, and immigrant experience of unregulated care work in private households. Impacts on well-being, safety, and security include restricted access to nutrition, rest, creativity, life cycle, and community participation, and diminished status, agency, voice, and recognition of productivity contribution. An alternative productivity calculus is provided in articles documenting the benefits of Australia’s universal statutory 10 days’ family and domestic violence leave entitlement, a proposed Indian green jobs guarantee programme that could transition millions of women into the formal labour market, and an Australian calculation of the unrecognised GDP contribution of breastmilk. A Sub-Saharan African article shows that legally mandated maternity protections are inaccessible to women in informal labour markets. In the context of the United Nations’ key normative and programme role, and its stocktakes of equality and empowerment milestones, we foreshadow questions of official structure and grassroots agency to be addressed in the Part B exploration in (Volume 36(3)) of informal economy work, community agency, and intersectional voice.

The paper examines job quality in South Korea by applying a novel wellbeing-based approach to defining ‘bad jobs’, extending methodology previously validated in European labour markets. The study analyses Korean Working Conditions Survey (2014–2023) data to investigate the relationship between job quality and worker wellbeing. The analysis reveals a significant discontinuity in the marginal effects of job quality on wellbeing at the bottom decile, where improvements yield distinctly larger wellbeing gains for workers moving above this threshold, providing empirical support for this approach to defining ‘bad jobs’. The prevalence of bad jobs shows a declining trend between 2014 and 2023, reflecting both economic growth and policy interventions. While the sectoral distribution of bad jobs shows similarities with European patterns, distinctive features emerge in South Korea’s labour market structure, characterised by the unique role of large business conglomerates (chaebols) and institutional arrangements. This study represents the first application of a wellbeing-based approach to defining bad jobs in an Asian context, demonstrating both its international applicability and the importance of national context in understanding the patterns of bad jobs. The findings carry significant implications for labour market policy in South Korea’s rapidly evolving economy, particularly for addressing persistent disparities in job quality across different segments of the labour market.

Unlike existing studies on labour and income in the digital era, this paper argues not only that the impact of the digital economy’s intervention in the labour process is fragmented rather than comprehensive, but also that the transformation of job demand and labour supply behaviours is simultaneous and related to the attributes of the industries in which they operate. Drawing on the conventional biased technological progress hypothesis and labour process theory, we argue that the digital economy has generally increased the labour income inequality for migrant workers in China. Using geospatially matched China Labour Dynamics Survey 2018 microdata and provincial digitalisation indices, we uncover a digital ‘upgrading trap’: the development of the digital economy hides the process of inequality formation in the hedging relationship between objective labour demand ‘upgrading’ and subjective labour supply ‘expanding’. The former can be summarised as the risk of ‘no job’ and the latter as the risk of ‘no way back’. Counterintuitively, consumer Internet development demonstrates a greater role in both reducing workers’ inequality in secondary labour markets and promoting a fair primary distribution. These findings reconceptualise digital inequality as coevolutionary outcomes, and offer a tripartite governance way for inclusive growth through portable skill certification, algorithmic accountability mechanisms, and interoperable social security systems.

The incorporation of technology, and more recently AI [Artificial Intelligence], into our everyday lives has been progressing at an unprecedented pace. Siri, Alexa, Cortana and various other digital assistants and chatbots populate our everyday interactions for most service-related matters. Acknowledging that technology, work, and social relations are deeply entangled with each other, this paper combines a literature review of anthropomorphisation of AI and emerging technology with a focus on gender and work, and empirical examples drawn from real-world applications and chatbots in the service industry in India, to critically analyse the gendering of technology. We unpack the tendency to ascribe a feminine identity to assistive technology and argue that gendering of emergent assistive technology is performative and relational. It materialises through particularistic manifestations drawing from the sociocultural context. Furthermore, this gendering of technology is co-constituted by the sexual division of labour and gendered norms of work.

There is consensus that health outcomes are shaped to a considerable extent by social determinants or non-medical factors (Marmot 2005). The World Health Organization (WHO) describes these social determinants as

Emerging labour crises highlight the detrimental impact of overtime work cultures, such as the 996 working system, which violates the Labour Law of China and mirrors modern labour slavery. Simultaneously, despite China’s Three-Children Policy aimed at increasing national labour force growth, the national fertility rate has remained persistently low over the past decade. Workers require family time and financial security to plan for having children. Changes in family structures and fertility expectations, shaped by social pressures and the government’s advocacy, heavily impact labourers’ household financial behaviour. In response to a high-pressure overwork environment, labourers adopt conservative financial strategies to safeguard their families’ well-being and birth plans. This cautious approach often involves avoiding digital financial tools associated with riskier investments. This study examines the intersection of labour overwork, fertility, and the adoption of digital finance in shaping Chinese families’ investments. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, this study analyses the panel data from 7,582 family observations in China between 2018 and 2020. The findings reveal that although digital finance positively influences household financial investment, the 996 work system acts as a moderator to shape this relationship negatively. Moreover, fertility in households further weakens this relationship. These findings provide critical theoretical insights into the dynamics of labour history by portraying a modern slavery picture of overworked labourers and their families in China: too exhausted and financially strained to have babies. It offers practical insights for policymakers aiming to improve labour policies, fertility rates, and household financial resilience.

Both skill-biased and routine-biased technological changes risk disrupting employment in Australia, particularly through persistent effects after an economic downturn. Soft skills are considered valuable for employees to reduce unemployment risk from these technological biases, as these skills contribute to employment in skilled and non-routine jobs that are difficult to automate. We investigate how soft skills affected the risk of unemployment from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) using the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) longitudinal dataset to understand whether these skills could reduce unemployment risk and similar negative employment outcomes for workers during economic disruptions, including the following years during the recovery. We find that the soft skill measures of social capital and low task repetitiveness are associated with lower unemployment, overskilling, and underutilisation risk. The association between social capital and underemployment also strengthened after the downturn. This did not begin immediately after the GFC but instead from 2013 onwards, after the end of the mining boom that had supported Australia during the GFC.

Many conceptions of Just Transition focus narrowly on how to create employment opportunities for those in the so called ‘dirty’ industries who are likely to lose their jobs in the transition to sustainability. However, there is an emerging concept of ‘Transformative Just Transition’ (TJT) which emphasises the need to entirely transform our societies in order to achieve justice in this transition. What a TJT should include is still being debated. In this article, I propose that the fundamental element needs to be a redistribution of income and wealth – globally, nationally and locally. This would mean the wealthier would inevitably have to reduce their ecological footprint while those on low incomes could afford to meet their social and environmental needs (healthy food, water and housing; adequate energy and transport; etc). This paper discusses the why and how (e.g. climate reparations, progressive environmental taxation) of redistributing income and wealth in order to achieve a TJT. It particularly focuses on the role of labour unions in achieving the necessary redistribution.

Global crises have wreaked havoc on the world economy, causing severe instability and retrenchment of employees in many countries. This necessitates interrogating the retrenchment laws that seek to resolve issues and encourage fruitful outcomes throughout the work ecosystem. This article explores stakeholders’ perceptions of Zimbabwe’s retrenchment laws. The research utilised a qualitative approach with 68 participants, including employers, employees, trade unionists, legal practitioners, and labour consultants. The study revealed that employers were not utilising available special measures to avoid retrenchment. Stakeholders faced challenges such as difficulties in interpreting the retrenchment sections in the Labour Act, distance, processes which are lengthy and costly, and compliance. Further, this study underscores the tension between organisational survival and employee rights, framed through proximity justice and organisational justice theories. The primary recommendation is that retrenchments should be carefully planned, well-thought-out, and purposefully carried out in order to prevent legal disputes. Employers should exercise patience to carry out a thorough analysis of the problems before retrenching employees. Although this research sought to increase knowledge of retrenchment laws, such findings call for additional research using longitudinal and cross-sectional field surveys.

This paper describes and analyses the ways in which women are disadvantaged in the Australian apprenticeship system. While women make up 47.9% of the Australian workforce, only 28.0% of apprentices and trainees are women.

‘Traditional trade’ apprenticeships are still predominantly undertaken by men. The newer ‘traineeships’, introduced in the 1980s to provide apprenticed training to more occupations and to allow equal access to women, receive less funding and fewer training resources. The paper traces the developments by analysing government reports, participation data by gender in the apprenticeship system, and apprentice/trainee funding rates for the main occupations. The paper also shows how post-COVID developments in the economy have been harnessed to favour male-dominated occupations in the apprenticeship system. The paper argues that the encouragement of women into trade apprenticeships has moved from an ‘equity’ argument to a ‘national interest’ argument, paralleling the conscription of women to fill the gaps left by men during the Second World War.

The discussion shows that the disadvantaged status of women is largely consistent with existing theories on gender and work, but there are some points of departure. The paper argues that more research into traineeships is needed to inform developments. It would provide a voice for feminised occupations and would assist in countering the monopolisation of the debate by masculinised interest groups.

While the data are Australian, the issues potentially apply to all countries which have apprenticeship systems, but have the most relevance for women in countries where male-dominated occupations are privileged in apprenticeship policy.

Since the early 1950s, national statisticians have regarded unpaid work as non-economic, excluding it from GDP. Feminist scholars argue this exclusion reflects a gender-biased view of progress that renders women’s non-market productivity invisible. As what gets measured drives policy priorities and resource allocation, breastfeeding highlights the need to account for women’s unpaid care work in economic statistics. This paper advances the Beyond GDP agenda by demonstrating how market-derived prices can improve the measurement and recognition of women’s lactation labour. We first trace the historical displacement of breastfeeding by commercial formula and identify key economic drivers. Next, we review critiques of GDP and debates over including non-market household services in the UN’s System of National Accounts. We then present novel estimates of breast milk’s economic value in selected countries. Our analysis shows that existing market prices can robustly proxy for breastfeeding work, correcting GDP’s gender bias and realigning policy priorities. Including human milk production in core economic indicators not only reflects its true contribution but also promotes women’s and children’s rights and supports sustainable development through comprehensive true-cost accounting.

Scholars who have deliberated on trade union density decline have paid scant attention to the diminished importance of organised labour’s capacity to stabilise markets by harmonising wage growth and total factor productivity. We underscore the significance of this omission by documenting how interwar US scientific management theorists and practitioners enhanced unions’ ability to stabilise markets in an era of high productivity growth, and in so doing helped build union numbers and influence. We argue, moreover, that once the productivity wave ended, employers and the US state came to view unions as a source of stagflation, conflict, and inefficiency. This development was particularly pronounced in nations with adversarial pluralist industrial relations regimes rather than the democratic corporatist agenda advocated by Frederick Taylor and his acolytes. We conclude that in an era characterised by revitalised support for knowledge-intensive reindustrialisation, revisiting the scientific managers’ agenda might assist trade union renewal.

The decision to work is an important yet understudied facet of women’s economic empowerment. This study explores the relationship between married women’s agency over the decision to work, workforce participation, and control over financial resources, using cross-sectional survey data collected in 2022 in India’s three most populous states: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra. Employing logistic regression, inverse probability weighting, and partial identification approaches, we demonstrate that married women in all three states are significantly more likely to engage in paid work when they alone have the final say over the decision to work, compared to when their spouse is the primary decision-maker. We also find that sole decision-making about paid work is positively related to married women’s control over money in Bihar and Maharashtra, and with savings and remittances in Maharashtra. In Maharashtra, women who jointly decide about employment with their spouse are also more likely to work than women whose husbands are the sole decision-makers. Joint decision-making is positively associated with women’s control over money in all three states. Our study highlights work-related agency as an important pathway to married women’s economic opportunities and inclusion in India, and is among the first to empirically examine the relationship between women’s work-related decision-making and economic outcomes. These results align with existing evidence on the positive relationship between women’s household bargaining power and health and human capital outcomes, and offer support for designing programmes to promote women’s participation in the workforce.

A common feature of public policy in Australia in recent decades has been use of wage caps to restrain public sector wage growth. In this paper we explore the nature of the relationship between wage growth in public and private sectors, and thereby whether wage caps have also influenced private sector wage growth. Despite the differences in wage setting institutions and mechanisms, analysis presented reveals that private and public sector wage growth are closely entwined at the aggregate level for Australia, and in all states and territories. Naïve Vector Error Correction Models identify the private sector as the long run wage leader for Australia and half the states and territories. However, after controlling for a structural break occurring during the COVID-19 era, our results indicate that joint or bi-directional wage leadership between both sectors is the norm. Findings suggest that wage caps implemented after the GFC to suppress public sector wage growth likely spilled over to the private sector, contributing to widespread wage stagnation experienced throughout the 2010s. More recently, these public sector wage caps stifled the ability of public sector wages to adjust to rapid private sector wage growth. These findings have important policy implications for public sector wage policy as a key contributor to governments’ labour market and macroeconomic management.

Globally, gender equality is the next frontier for social transformation, and women’s economic empowerment is promoted as the pathway to achieve this goal, particularly in countries of the Global South. Women’s economic empowerment is broadly defined as women’s capacity to contribute to, and benefit from, economic activities on terms that recognise the value of their contributions. Advocates for women’s economic empowerment state that it has the potential to be a safeguard against poverty and precarity by enhancing women’s wellbeing. Using a critical-feminist lens, we explore the benefits and risks of the global trend towards women’s economic empowerment. After providing an overview of the evolution of the concept of empowerment, we review the benefits of women’s economic empowerment: economic growth, improved rates of tertiary education and market participation for women, and growth of women’s autonomy. We then examine the risks of the global focus on women’s economic empowerment, which we distil into three key areas: (a) women seen as a country’s ‘natural resource’, used as instruments for economic prosperity and reproduction without considering their wellbeing; (b) a focus on women’s market participation without adequately factoring in current labour market realities; and (c) pushing the women’s economic empowerment agenda forward without fully considering the scope of unpaid reproductive work undertaken by women. We conclude with an analysis of how UN Women (2024) is shifting the agenda by providing a holistic framework for thinking about women’s economic empowerment. We suggest that there is room for cautious optimism if this framework is widely adopted.

While gender-based violence (GBV) is increasingly recognised as a significant social and political issue, its impact on women educators remains underexamined. In the context of growing concerns about violence against educators and the prevalence of GBV in educational institutions, this study investigates gendered patterns of violence against school leaders in Australian schools. Drawing on 18,172 observations from reports by principals and deputy principals, this analysis explores incidents of bullying, threats of violence, and physical violence to identify disparities in the experiences of men and women school leaders. The analysis determined that women school leaders were more likely to experience threats of violence and bullying at work than their male counterparts. Logistic regression analyses revealed that gender, school sector, and role significantly influence the likelihood of experiencing various forms of workplace violence, with women in secondary schools and those in government or Catholic sectors being particularly vulnerable.

The offshoring-fuelled growth of the Central and Eastern European business services sector gave rise to shared service centres (SSCs) – quasi-autonomous entities providing routine-intensive tasks for the central organisation. The advent of technologies such as intelligent process automation, robotic process automation, and artificial intelligence jeopardises SSCs’ employment model, necessitating workers’ skills adaptation. The study challenges the deskilling hypothesis and reveals that automation in the Polish SSCs is conducive to upskilling and worker autonomy. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews, we highlight the negotiated nature of automation processes shaped by interactions between headquarters, SSCs, and their workers. Workers actively participated in automation processes, eliminating the most mundane tasks. This resulted in upskilling, higher job satisfaction, and empowerment. Yet, this phenomenon heavily depends upon the fact that automation is triggered by labour shortages, which limit the expansion of SSCs. This situation encourages companies to leverage the specific expertise entrenched in their existing workforce. The study underscores the importance of fostering employee-driven automation and upskilling initiatives for overall job satisfaction and quality.