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"This essential guide helps trade union reps protect their members from attacks on their terms and conditions by clearly explaining the key features of employment contract law.
Contracts of employment provides reps with the knowledge they need to identify contract breaches, challenge unfair changes to contract terms, and understand their legal rights if changes are imposed. It also includes key recent legal cases to keep reps and workplace activists informed of the latest developments.
This guide also examines:
The position of workers on irregular employment patterns, including zero-hours contracts;
The legal differences between an employee, a worker, and someone who is self-employed; and
Case law on arguing for contractual rights based on custom and practice.
Written in plain English and packed with practical insights, this guide is an indispensable tool for reps who need to defend workplace rights with confidence."

"Do narratives about the causes of inequality influence support for redistribution? Scholarship suggests that information about levels of inequality does not easily shift redistributive attitudes. We embed information about inequality within a commentary article depicting the economy as being rigged to advantage elites, a common populist narrative of both the left and right. Drawing on the media effects and political economy literature, we expect articles employing narratives that portray inequality as the consequence of systemic unfairness to increase demands for redistribution. We test this proposition via an online survey experiment with 7426 respondents in Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our narrative treatment significantly increases attitudes favoring redistribution in five of the countries. In the US the treatment has no effect. We consider several reasons for the non-result in the US – highlighting beliefs about government inefficiency – and conclude by discussing general implications of our findings."
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

"We illustrate the exploitation in the relationship between Uber and its drivers by aligning their work with the characteristics of neo-villeiny. Two different legal developments in response to irregulation (or the lack of effective regulation) in similar institutional contexts emerge. While Uber drivers in the United Kingdom now have worker status, dysregulation (by which we mean regulation that exacerbates the problem it seeks to resolve) in Ontario has established neo-villeiny in law."

"A comprehensive handbook that addresses the relationship between nature and labour from the point of view of workers as social actors against globalising environmental degradation
Provides a wide-ranging account that connects the policies and struggles of workers, peasants, and indigenous populations for a socially and environmentally sustainable form of production and livelihoods across the world
Takes a truly global perspective, incorporating perspectives from the Global North and Global South where critiques of and strategies against environmental degradation are often very different
An interdisciplinary approach to the subject allowing researchers and practitioners to engage and advance the creation of theory about the relationship"

"In this important book, Gallas asks what strikes in non-industrial sectors mean for class formation, a critical question which has been largely unaddressed by the current literature on global labour unrest.
A mapping of strikes around the world and case studies from Germany, Britain and Spain cast new light on class relations, struggles around waged and unwaged work and labour movements in contemporary capitalism to bring class theory back to labour studies."

"This book argues that the changing shape of the class structure (from a ‘big working class' to a ‘big middle class') since 1945 has forced the parties to change, which has both reduced class voting and increased class non-voting. The book develops this argument in three stages. The first shows that there has been enormous social continuity in class divisions. This is done using extensive evidence on class and educational inequality, class identity and awareness, and political attitudes over more than fifty years. The second stage is to show that there has been enormous political change in response to changing class sizes. Party policies, politicians' rhetoric, and the social composition of political elites have radically altered. Parties offer similar policies, appeal less to specific classes, and are populated by people from more similar backgrounds. Equally, the mass media have stopped talking about the politics of class. The third stage is to show that these political changes have had three major consequences. First, as Labour and the Conservatives became more similar, class differences in party preferences disappeared. Second, new parties, most notably UKIP, have taken working class voters from the mainstream parties. Third, and most importantly, the lack of choice offered by the mainstream parties has led to a huge increase in class-based abstention from voting. Working class people have become much less likely to vote. Britain appears to have followed the US down a path of working class political exclusion, ultimately undermining the representativeness of our democracy."

"We study the evolution of the gender wage gap among young adults in Britain between 1972 and 2015 using data from four British cohorts born in 1946, 1958, 1970 and 1989/90 on early life factors, human capital, family formation and job characteristics. We account for non-random selection of men and women into the labour market and compare the gender wage gap among graduates and non-graduates. The raw and covariate-adjusted gender wage gaps at the mean decline over the period among non-graduates, but they rise among young graduates. The gender wage gap across the wage distribution narrows over time for lower wages. Allowing for positive selection into employment increases the size of the gender wage gap in earlier cohorts, but selection is not apparent in the two most recent cohorts. Thus the rate of convergence in the wages of young men and women is understated when estimates do not account for positive selection in earlier cohorts. Differences in traditional human capital variables explain only a very small component of the gender wage gaps among young people in all four cohorts, but occupational gender segregation plays an important role in the later cohorts."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Background
Occupational exposure to solar ultraviolet (UV) is known to cause malignant melanoma (MM) and non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC). However, knowledge of the causal associations has developed erratically.
Aims
This review aims to identify when it was accepted that workplace solar UV exposure could cause skin cancer and when it was recognized that there was a risk for outdoor workers in Britain, identifying the steps employers should have taken to protect their workers.
Methods
Informative reviews, published since 1974, were located through a systematic literature search. These were used to chart changes in summative knowledge of the role of occupational solar UV exposure in causing skin cancer. An assessment was made of the identified hazards of skin cancer and the recognition of risks for outdoor workers in Britain.
Results
From at least 1975, it has been accepted that occupational solar UV exposure could cause squamous cell carcinoma, and from around 2011 for MM and basal cell carcinoma. From 2004, repeated sunburn at work was identified as a likely cause of MM. From 1999, it was accepted that occupational solar UV exposure causes NMSC amongst British workers, and from 2012 there was limited evidence for an MM risk for outdoor workers in northern European countries.
Conclusions
Skin cancer risks for British outdoor workers should be actively managed and they should have health surveillance. Outdoor workers who have skin cancer should be eligible for compensation."

This article is available under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license and permits non-commercial use of the work as published, without adaptation or alteration provided the work is fully attributed.