In light of the individualisation, dispersal and pervasive monitoring that characterise work in the ‘gig economy’, the development of solidarity among gig workers could be expected to be unlikely. However, numerous recent episodes of gig workers’ mobilisation require reconsideration of these assumptions. This article contributes to the debate about potentials and obstacles for solidarity in the changing world of work by showing the processes through which workplace solidarity among gig workers developed in two cases of mobilisation of food delivery platform couriers in the UK and Italy. Through the framework of labour process theory, the article identifies the sources of antagonism in the app-mediated model of work organisation and the factors that facilitated and hindered the consolidation of active solidarity and the emergence of collective action among gig workers. The article emphasises the centrality of workers’ agential practices in overcoming constraints to solidarity and collective action, and the diversity of forms through which solidarity can be expressed in hostile work contexts.

Since 2016, mobilizations of gig workers across European countries have become increasingly common within location-based services, such as food delivery. Despite remarkable similarities in workers’ mobilization dynamics, their organizational forms have varied considerably, ranging from self-organization, to work councils, to unionization through rank-and-file or longstanding unions. To start making sense of this diversity in organizing practices, we compare two cases of mobilization in the food delivery sector: in Italy, where workers have initially opted for self-organization, and in the UK, where they have organized through rank-and-file unions. Drawing on interview and observational data gathered between 2016 and 2018, we find that the diversity of organizational forms across the two cases derives from the interaction between agential and contextual factors, namely: the capabilities of rank-and-file unions and the political tradition of militant organizing of the environment within which gig workers are embedded. These findings contribute to the emerging debate on labour relations in the gig economy by showing the central role that factors external to the labour process and to the institutional context play in shaping the structuring of labour antagonism in a still lowly institutionalized sector characterized by transnationally homogenous challenges.

In response to the last recession, the European Union (EU) adopted a new economic governance (NEG) regime. An influential stream of EU social policy literature argues that there has been more emphasis on social objectives in the NEG regime in more recent years. This article shows that this is not the case. It does so through an in‐depth analysis of NEG prescriptions on wage, employment protection and collective bargaining policy in Germany, Italy, Ireland and Romania between 2009 and 2019. Our main conclusion is that the EU's interventions in these three industrial relations policy areas continue to be dominated by a liberalization agenda that is commodifying labour, albeit to a different degree across the uneven but nonetheless integrated European political economy. This finding is important, as countervailing transnational trade union action is the more likely, the more there is a common threat. Even so, our contextualized analysis also enables us to detect contradictions that could provide European labour movements opportunities to pursue countervailing action.

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This article investigates employment and occupational transitions that are behind structural changes in European labour markets before, during and after the Great Recession. The study introduces a new methodological approach for studying labour market flows considering the quality of the jobs from and into which the flows are taking place by differentiating them into wage quintiles. The analysis compares six European countries that are usually associated with different institutional clusters – France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK. It tracks the transitions of their working age populations into and out of inactivity, unemployment and employment (in five wage categories). The findings show the extent to which employment and occupational mobility patterns differ across European countries, resulting in very different outcomes in terms of employment opportunities and life chances. Results also suggest that the countries studied fall into three distinct categories based on the degree of occupational mobility characterising their economies.

This paper contributes to the literature on changes in the employment structure, focusing on the job quality created and destroyed in Italy and in its regions in the years 2011-17. To do so, we apply a 'jobs-based' approach methodology similar to the one developed by Eurofound re-searchers and we use Labour Force Survey data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). Our findings suggest that in the period, Italy experienced a polarisation pattern skewed towards lower-paid jobs, whereas we observe an upgrading trend at the average EU level. This pattern is the result of diverging trends across Italy: while the central and northern regions are responsible for the growth not only in the share of workers in low quality occupations but also in higher quality ones, southern Italy contributed exclusively to the increase in low-paid jobs. The latter area is the only one experiencing a clear downgrading trend over the years 2011-17. Sectoral trends are partially responsible for these patterns. Furthermore, we find that in recent years, the economic divide between northerncentral and southern regions has widened. Within each macro-area, the contribution of different regions to the total trends was heterogeneous, in particular in the South of Italy, where some regions contributed positively to employment growth in higher paid jobs too, although their role was overshadowed by those that performed worse.

In the debates over European integration, class is often an overlooked variable. This reflects the fact that the concept has been increasingly marginalised within social sciences over the last decades. But the limited use of class in the assessment of the effects of European Union (EU) integration is also the result of a certain methodological nationalism of socio-political disciplines -that is, the tendency to employ "an approach that conflates the society with the state and national territory and takes it as the unit of analysis" (Pradella, 2014: 181). Methodological nationalism is also incentivised by the fact that statistical indicators are usually collected "at and for the national level" (Erne, 2019: 366).In Social Class in Europe three sociologists bring a refreshing perspective to the debate. The authors start from the view that "in the context of financialisation of the economy and the triumph of free trade, relations between social classes are largely determined at the European level and no longer simply within a national framework" (p. 181). Therefore, they propose an analysis of class relations from a European perspective, using various EU statistical surveys.Inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the authors define class not only in broad economic terms, but according to a multidimensional approach which considers "the combination of economic and cultural capitals that construct both the socially and economically dominated positions of certain social groups and the forms of separation, distinction and cultural boundaries between them" (p. 13). Three main social groups are then identified: the working class, the middle class and the dominant class. These three classes are of course characterised by a degree of within-group heterogeneity; in fact, in the French edition of the book the authors employ the plural to describe them (les classes populaires; les classes moyennes; les classes supérieures). Classes are then further operationalised through occupational status, information which is usually available in the main EU statistical surveys, albeit only for those who are in employment. Thus, for instance, unskilled white-collar workers and manual workers are assigned to the working class, while occupations like teachers and nurses are placed in the middle class. Finally, most of the intellectual and scientific professions are allocated to the dominant class, which also includes senior managers and chief executive officers (CEOs) of companies.The authors then analyse in three separate chapters the picture emerging for each social class. The analysis highlights the similarities emerging within each class, regardless of the country of residence. The working class clearly emerges as the class which has been the most negatively affected by the market-driven process of European integration, and which has suffered the most throughout the Great Recession. Across the EU, those belonging to this class are the most likely

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