This essay argues that the notion of there being a decline in collectivism does not adequately engage with a whole new set of initiatives within labour process theory on collectivism in its various forms. These debates demonstrate how diverse social influences and experiences, and the memory of previous experiences and collective endeavours, are essential features that must be acknowledged in terms of their implications. There are series of interventions on occupational identity, the everyday lives of workers, gender and ethnic relations and the experience of work that nourish our understanding of collectivism as a more complex and broader concept. Furthermore, how features and relations are mobilized, linked and developed is becoming a vital feature of how collectivism should be understood. It is argued that the nature of these relations needs to be a greater focus of the debate if we are to develop a more dynamic view of collectivism, and a more relevant one.

This article argues, through a study of cleaning workers, a need to reconsider the changing nature of unskilled work. In particular, how it has, ironically, become more complex and challenging in some cases due to economic and political developments. For example, in relation to questions of dirty work, stigma and issues of dignity, aspects of this literature recognise the difficulty of the work and its ‘distribution’. However, we argue a need to draw further attention to the ‘mechanics’, processes and complexities of this work and the way it is subject to significant contextual changes (e.g. the role of austerity) that create new complexities and challenges just as that work is being undermined and intensified. We use the voices of cleaning workers to reflect, in a rich detailed manner, the changes to their working environment and focus on the broader social perceptions of the work – from the public, employers and the workers themselves. Our analysis demonstrates a clear recognition of the complexity of that work through four dimensions – the changing spatial isolation of work; the growing context of violence due to the changing operational features of the job; the ongoing impact of state led austerity policies and limited resources, and the ongoing role of social stigma. We end the article discussing how workers’ control emerges as an important issue in a curious manner within this changing context.

This article critically examines how low-paid workers, who need to work in more than one legitimate job to make ends meet, attempt to reconcile work and life. The concept of work–life articulation is utilised to investigate the experiences, strategies and practicalities of combining multiple employment with domestic and care duties. Based on detailed qualitative research, the findings reveal workers with two, three, four, five and even seven different jobs due to low-pay, limited working hours and employment instability. The study highlights the increasing variability of working hours, together with the dual fragmentation of working time and employment. It identifies unique dimensions of work extensification, as these workers have an amalgamation of jobs dispersed across fragmented, expansive and complex temporalities and spatialities. This research makes explicit the interconnected economic and temporal challenges of low-pay, insufficient hours and precarious employment, which creates significant challenges of juggling multiple jobs with familial responsibilities.

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This paper focuses on constraints on the effectiveness of high performance work techniques deriving from the traditions of craft-based trade unionism and long-established structures and cultures within sector-based employment relationships.The findings question the fundamentally managerialist nature of HPW accounts that assume labour's position in the high-performance equation to be simply one of recipient of managerial initiatives.