Labour Policies, Labour Law and the Polarisation of Politics: Experiencing and Deregulating Rights, Industrial Relations, Jobs, Careers and the Life Course

Over the past decades, labour policies and the legal frameworks regulating employment have undergone profound transformations in many countries. Despite alternating phases of stronger or weaker regulation, a persistent trend has emerged: increased flexibilization of employment relations, weakening of social protections, expansion of precarious work, and reconfiguration of industrial relations under neoliberal economic systems and the rise of the extreme right governments. Added to this is the rapid, often weakly regulated digitalization of work, and which further reshapes employment statuses, rights, and working conditions. Moreover, although work remains a central pillar of social integration and identity, shifts in the regulatory frameworks governing it produce unequal effects reshaping life-course trajectories, living conditions, subsistence opportunities, and the meanings individuals attach to work, across social groups, sectors, and national contexts.

This session aims to bring to the forefront the analysis of labour policies, employment laws, and institutional frameworks. Although often treated as a background dimension in sociology of work debates, these regulatory mechanisms are essential for understanding contemporary dynamics of precarization, vulnerability, flexibilization, or, conversely, protection and the securing of life-course trajectories.

We welcome contributions on: the evolution of labour and employment policies in different countries or regions; reforms of labour law and their effects on industrial relations, employment statuses, and social protections; transformations driven by digitalization and new forms of work organization; the impacts of regulatory changes on professional trajectories, living conditions, social inequalities, or meanings of work; and comparative or transnational analyses highlighting convergences, divergences, or emerging models.