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A growing body of social science literature has examined the organizational innovations and staffing practices comprising new flexible forms of work. Researchers have investigated the depth and scope of these changes and questioned how they affect diverse groups of workers in the United States. Reviewing the research on this transformation reveals a model of combined and uneven flexibility, characterized by the opening of opportunities that are differentially distributed across different groups of American workers, emerging under conditions in which effort is intensified, control is decentered, and employment is destabilized. The essay concludes by suggesting additional areas of inquiry for sociologists concerned with new forms of work organization.

I have always admired labor organizers, in part because their long hours and incredible ability to listen, engage, and sympathize with people from every political persuasion make it possible for the labor movement to survive. I do not envy them, however, particularly at this moment in history. They often find themselves in untenable situations, faced with impossible moral and political dilemmas. As one Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Worker organizer from the Tufts University campaign—where the union recently lost an election—explained to me in January 2010, "You can't win an election without employer neutrality. Yet you can't get neutrality without making concessions you don't want to make."

Es wird versucht, einige Elemente in der Entwicklung neuer Formen von Arbeitsorganisation deutlich zu machen und die sozioökonomischen Faktoren herauszustellen, die diese Entwicklung bedingten. Aus vier wichtigen Gründen sind Alternativen zu tayloristischen Arbeitsformen von Interesse; es sind dies: die Arbeitszufriedenheit, Demokratie am Arbeitsplatz, Produktivität und Arbeitsbedingungen. (IAB2)

One of the Canadian government's planned measures for the reform of industrial relations, announced in Oct 1976, was a program to improve the quality of working life through worker participation. Reasons for the introduction of such proposals, & their consequences, are explored. These measures are best understood as a strategy for motivating workers to show greater concern for employers' interests. Unions were not included in the proposals of the human relations movement, but are now included in current worker participation proposals. Full employment, since World War II, has proven detrimental to capital's interests by reducing the utility of fear of unemployment as a basis for discipline. Both wage controls & worker participation were introduced as a response to falling corporate profits. Job enrichment & similar proposals actually serve capital's interests by producing a more flexible & smaller labor force, which is also more compatible with current technical innovations. Union participation in management decisions is best viewed as a strategy for subordinating organized labor to the interests of capital in situations where organized worker resistance has been present. The case of the Canadian postal service, Post Canada, illustrates this. Work reform in the actual interests of workers ultimately implies a socialist revolution. W. H. Stoddard.

Ensuring social protection for people having lost their jobs is an important part of the social protection system. Although health insurance and pension insurance have traditionally been the most important social protection systems, then social guarantees (both passive and active measures) for the unemployed cannot be underestimated in the changed forms of employment. New forms of work necessitate attention to whether and how people working under new forms of employment, e.g. platform workers, can register as unemployed and whether short-term employment may worsen their standing compared to other unemployed. This article analyses the Estonian social protection system for the unemployed and the planned changes in connection with platform work.