Non-standard work has long been central to debates on labour market segmentation and inequality. Yet, many workers remain only weakly covered by traditional industrial relations institutions and established channels of social dialogue. This exclusion may stem from legal definitions of employment status, limits on representational rights, gaps in bargaining structures, and uneven organisational priorities and capacities among social partners. New divisions of labour are making solidarity harder to construct, and strategies may have to be adopted to counteract this.

This stream examines how worker voice, representation, and social dialogue are being reconfigured in labour markets shaped by platform intermediation, fissured workplaces, subcontracting, temporary agency work, and dependent self-employment. We invite contributions that analyse and discuss the barriers non-standard workers face in accessing representation and collective regulation, as well as the strategies and institutional innovations that seek to overcome these barriers.

Across Europe, industrial relations and social dialogue have returned to the center of policy debates. After decades in which multi-employer bargaining and associated collective institutions were often described as being in long-term decline, recent developments, like the Directive on adequate minimum wage, have refocused attention on the capacity of collective actors and institutions to confront widening inequalities, labour market fragmentation, and new forms of risk and insecurity.

Increased emphasis on the need for securing minimum standards may also mean a reconfiguration of the role for states in shaping labour markets.

This stream welcomes contributions that critically examine how actors, industrial relations institutions and social dialogue can confront inequality—within and across countries, sectors, firms, and groups of workers—and how collective institutions are being reshaped in a changing political economy.

Labour market mobility, job quality and social protection are key to understanding inequalities and transformations in contemporary labour markets. Recent developments, such as digitalisation, AI, globalisation and green transitions, are providing employers with new opportunities to reshape job structures, working conditions and access to rights. Combined with persistent wage and income disparities, these trends drive mobility and contribute to segmentation and dualization.

This stream invites papers examining how these transformative dynamics affect workers, working conditions, labour markets and regulatory frameworks, as well as how these tendencies are shaped and conditioned by institutional arrangements.