Sociology of Work is one of the main journals in Spanish that specifically addresses labor problems, with special attention to dialogue with other disciplines and ongoing social changes. Among the main topics are the forms of work organization, labor legislation, human resources, labor relations, qualifications or social history of work. It publishes empirical research results, theoretical papers, and multidisciplinary thematic issues. It is aimed at researchers, students and academics, but also at a broader audience, such as professionals, trade unionists, managers or political leaders.
In order to support the global exchange of knowledge, the journal Sociología del Trabajo is allowing unrestricted access to its content as from its publication in this electronic edition, and as such it is an open-access journal. The originals published in this journal are the property of the Complutense University of Madrid and any reproduction thereof in full or in part must cite the source. All content is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 use and distribution licence (CC BY 4.0). This circumstance must be expressly stated in these terms where necessary. You can view the summary and the complete legal text of the licence.
The Asturian and Galician diasporas of unskilled workers in pre-industrial Madrid (1700-1840)
This article approximates to the informal practices that arose within the Asturian and Galician diasporas in Madrid at the end of Old Regime as an example of the network forged by the poor or “unskilled” labor immigrants, who have been traditionally studied many times from the historiography of poverty, without paying attention to their relationship with their families and countrymen’s . In order to know about part of our protagonist’s social life and practices we analyze 5370 testaments and declarations of poverty left in the Real Hospital General y de la Pasión of Madrid
Copyright (c) 2021 Sociología del Trabajo
Underrepresentation and distortion of identity in mass media during labour dispute: The case of the Bershka workers’
News in mass media is still a battlefield during labour conflicts, even if social media has an increasing role because media are a pressure strategy and conflict socialization space. Workers usually fight against silence and distortion. This paper analyzes media coverage on the larger strike developed against Inditex, that has been organized by Pontevedra Bershka women workers in 2017.These workers had to break media silence –a complicated situations due to Inditex influence– and they had to overcome prejudices based on their youth and sex. In order to achieve their objectives, they applied traditional trade union strategies (as demonstrations and picket lines) and new strategies to reach the media setting (social media, comment on digital news, video pamphlets…). This paper combines different methodologies: it analyzes the conflict storytelling built by media and the counter-storytelling developed by the workers through news content analysis (Framing theory), through the analyses of the materials developed by the workers and through the content study of in-depth interviews conducted by the researchers to workers and journalists.
Copyright (c) 2019 Sociología del Trabajo
Entre debates, resonancias y horizontes: una reflexión analítica y vivida sobre el VII Encuentro Intercongresual de Sociología del Trabajo (UCLM, 25–26 de septiembre)
Copyright (c) 2025 Sociología del Trabajo
Del script a lo ágil: el trabajo en los call centers y la industria del desarrollo de software en Brasil
This article examines the prevalence of Taylorization and self-Taylorization in software industries and call centers. Call centers emerged from precarization, rooted in Taylor-Fordist principles. In contrast, software development seemed to embody autonomy and creativity, representing the 'high-end' of ICT-related work. Through empirical research and worker interviews in Brazil and France, we analyzed management and control mechanisms in both sectors. The findings reveal a radicalization of Taylorist practices in call centers, featuring monitoring software and Toyota production system adoption. Conversely, software programmers face agile methodologies and objective control through management software, enabling work partialization and metrification. The authors suggest that, on the horizon of ICT work, there is a tendency marked by standardization and prescription, where even seemingly intellectualized professions, such as software programming, are affected.
Labour organization Artisans’ wages and working days in eighteenth-century Madrid
This essay focuses on artisans’ payments placing them within the framework of the labour relations, the family cycle, the amount of working days, the means of wage regulation –including labour conflicts-, and the composition of wages themselves with a special attention to their non-monetary component. Its main purpose is to integrate a balanced approach on wages in the historical analysis, which includes qualitative aspects that have been hardly considered by both contemporary and current “econometric” studies. This approach is applied to the case study of eighteenth-and first decades of nineteenth-century Madrid. It takes as a locus of the analysis the family units, the budgets of which were made up not just by the contribution of the male head of the family but by the rest of their members alike.
Lisa Herzog (2025). La salvación del trabajo. Un llamamiento político. Barcelona: Ed. Herder.
Recensiones, actividades y crítica de libros
An approximation to the control of labor process in big auditing firms in Colombia
This paper examines how the labour process is organised and controlled in large auditing firms in Colombia from the perspective of workers’ own experiences. Drawing on Labour Process Theory and supported by tools from Critical Discourse Analysis, the study analyses 17 interviews conducted with employees from different service lines and hierarchical levels in audit firms in the city of Bogotá. The findings reveal the coexistence of structural and normative controls that, rather than resolving the tensions inherent in the production process, reinforce and reproduce labour conflict. This conflict is manifested in the intensification of instrumental work when recruiting personnel with technical training, the failure to meet expectations in terms of professional career development within the firm, the transfer of operations outside the firm to clients' locations or workers' homes, and work overload combined with extended working hours that are invisible in performance measurements and/or economic and emotional incentives. The conflict is interpreted unevenly according to hierarchical level, and is often legitimized at the management level of firms.
Supermarket work, a stereotypical question? A study on working conditions, gender and age, in supermarkets in the city of Santa Fe, Argentina. (2022-2023)
This article focuses on labor conditions and their relationship with gender and age in the Supermarket Sector of the city of Santa Fe, Argentina. Starting from the hypothesis of the predominance of young people in the sector, combined with strategies and planning that follow an exclusive and stereotyped guideline. From this, the question arises: Do gender and age influence working conditions in supermarkets in the city of Santa Fe? To answer this question, a descriptive, correlational, and explanatory study was designed. Methodologies were integrated through the combination of both quantitative and qualitative methods. In conclusion, the supermarket work appears stereotyped in terms of gender and age, the work-life balance factor plays a central role in labor conditions, and the absence of management policies addressing gender diversity is noted.
Miguel A.V. Ferreira, Las metamorfosis de la racionalidad capitalista: egoísmo, sufrimiento y beneficio. Catarata, 2025, 288 páginas”
Superexplotation, Precarization y Subordination of Musical Work in Chiapas
The objective of this article is to analyze the situation of musical work in Mexico/Chiapas from the Marxist Theory of Dependency and the Theory of Social Reproduction. The categories of superexploitation of the labor-force and generational reproduction of the labor-force. The methodology employed was a combination of data. The results indicate the mechanisms of the superexploitation of the musical workforce that condition the precariousness processes reflected in musical employment. These processes are articulated with the crisis in cultural public policies, the absence of labor legislation in favor of artists, and the various forms of subordination to capital. Concurrently, the structural conditions that had previously been obscured became evident. At the same time, the gendered inequalities that had existed prior to the onset of the Covid-19 syndemic became more pronounced and have persisted to the present day.
Summary of the expert report "Work and Mental health: A ROADMAP FOR HEALTH ADMINISTRATIONS IN SPAIN." Mental Health Commissioner of the Spanish Ministry of Health
This is a summary of the report of the expert group on work and mental health established by the Mental Health Commissioner of the Spanish Ministry of Health in June 2024. This group was tasked with developing an Intervention Guide for health authorities that would, first, allow for the detection of work-related mental health problems in primary care, and second, develop intervention protocols to address the problem at different levels (labor inspection, social security, medical-psychiatric treatment, etc.).
Polyvalence and work intensification: ‘you can do everything’. An analysis of the work done at bank branch level in Spain
This article deals with the changes that have taken place in the financial sector in recent years and their impact on the labor market in Spain. For this purpose, through the analysis of the discourses emitted by bank branch employees in our country, the work performed by these individuals is investigated. The results point to an increase in polyvalence, complexity and intensity in the daily development of their functions within a context marked by the reduction in the number of branches and employees, implying a lengthening of working hours and the blurring between work and leisure.
Global south´s health Denmark? Some keys from the health labor market and its care in Mexico
The analysis of the health and care labor market is a tension between professional fields that translates into unequal segments in health and care services. This work addresses the Mexican case based on the National Occupation and Employment Survey from the theoretical perspective of the segmentation of labor markets. For the analysis, a statistical approach was used from Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and Hierarchical Classification Analysis by the Ward Method. The results found were five segments within this service sector in which their performance in the labor market is configured in different ways by different factors and actors, including public policy as a transversal axis. Among the factors, we find: the disciplinary field of the profession, type of economic unit, its position within the unit and income; These make up a heterogeneous labor insertion network for groups of health professionals: medicine, nursing, dentistry, nutrition, physical health and sports, and psychology. The sector with the best performance was the public sector, which offers better quality jobs, followed by the private sector, dominated mainly by lower quality jobs, and, on the other hand, self-employment and informality, the latter two closer to precariousness.
“Ramírez Melgarejo, A. J. (2024): Estrategias de reproducción social de las clases populares. Trabajo, crisis y reconocimiento en el sureste español. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas”.
“MercadoLibre's 'B-side'” in Argentina: Labour Exploitation Strategies in the Tech Giant's Logistics Services
Digitalisation, automation, and globalisation of supply chains –coupled with increasingly flexible, customised, outsourced, and sustainable processes– have profoundly reconfigured the logistics sector. These shifts have precipitated significant changes in labour dynamics, regulatory frameworks, and industry competitiveness. Moreover, the ascent of e‐commerce giants such as Amazon, Alibaba, and, in Latin America, MercadoLibre, has further accelerated these developments. This article examines, through a case study, the strategies adopted by MercadoLibre Argentina in developing its logistics operations while assessing their implications for employment and working conditions. The findings indicate that these processes are underpinned by the integration of diverse contractual modalities, which blend varying degrees of contractual and organisational dependency, ultimately resulting in the recruitment of a vast, low‐skilled workforce exposed to intensifying workloads and heightened precarisation.
The importance of job training to reduce structural unemployment in Chile
The article aims to examine the importance of job training policies as an essential element to improve the employability possibilities of workers, especially those who are unemployed. From a sociological point of view, structural unemployment refers to when certain groups of people lack the job skills required to fill the jobs demanded by industry, generating in society a structural inequality in access to job opportunities and the emergence of long-term unemployment. In a labor market in constant transformation due to the phenomenon of globalization and technological advances, job training policies are essential to contribute to closing gaps and mismatches between supply and demand, especially in those people who are most vulnerable in an increasingly segmented labor market. In this research, the quantitative method was used by applying surveys to a sample of unemployed people who attended the Municipal Labor Information Offices (OMIL) in the Atacama region, Chile.
Uneasines sregarding industrial past. Memory, nostalgia, heritage, history
The article explores the relationship between history, heritage and memory, together with their respective treatments of the past, in the face of deindustrialization phenomena in Spain over the last half century. Focusing mainly on the working population of those regions of industrial tradition, it examines some knowledge gaps and raises the possibility of arguing for the recognition of the working class as a whole as an intangible industrial heritage.
The definite decline of the German model?
Germany has been for decades the benchmark society for the combination of a buoyant economy and a stable political system with an integrated institutional order capable of leading a European Union in its process of progressive integration. The coherence of its political-institutional order and its economic structure with its cooperative culture of social dialogue and its confederal model of the Länder have motivated its consideration as a model. Germany has been for decades the benchmark society for the combination of a buoyant economy and a stable political system with an integrated institutional order capable of leading a European Union in its process of progressive integration. The coherence of its political-institutional order and its economic structure with its cooperative culture of social dialogue and its confederal model of the Länder have motivated its consideration as a model. This article aims to analyze the crisis of the German model from a dynamic perspective in its interrelated economic, political and cultural dimensions. For this purpose, the concept of the German model is first defined. In a second step, its historical development is reconstructed from the Fordist era to the present day with special attention to the institutional base and its recent erosion. We conclude with some final reflections on the risks of this crisis for the future of a democratic and inclusive Europe.
Social policies, justice and solidarity. Upholding contributory principles in expansive phases of protection in Argentina
The relationship between work and social protection has taken on renewed complexity since the close of the 20th century, a matter that directly concerns the validity of the contributory principle as a foundation of justice and a framework for the solidarities that underpin distributive acts. This article contributes to the reflection on this issue by examining the controversies sparked in Argentina surrounding the implementation of the "pension moratorium" during an expansive phase of socio-labor policies (2003–2015). Through archival research on political and specialized debates, we reconstruct critiques of this policy arising from distributive injustices generated by the relaxation of the contributive principle. These critiques can be interpreted as "defenses" of a strict conception of this principle, a finding that broadens the discussion on the legitimacy of substantive transformations in the inherited protection structure. Furthermore, it invites an examination of the influence of an unequalizing perspective within protection systems.
Freedom Utopia in the Era of Platform Capitalism. The case of Workana in Argentina
What does it mean to be free? What does it mean to have the liberty to define our own vital itinerary? This article examines the emerging utopia of liberty and autonomy in the platform environment, focusing on Workana, one of the most representative platforms of this new conception of labour. Together with other platforms such as UpWork, Fiverr and Freelancer, Workana is integrated within a global ecosystem that connects workers and clients from all over the world. In this context, we analyze three key dimensions of the kind of liberty and autonomy provided by the platform: temporal and geographical flexibility in the workday, allowing for a better balance with other activities; financial liberty; and autonomy in the negotiation within labour-capital relations. This article presents the developments of an ongoing research project that combines traditional social research methods with innovative approaches, such as “digital ethnography” (Di Prospero & Daza Prado, 2019).
Digitalization on the farm: Transformations of the production process in the pig sector
The objective of this research is to analyze the role of digitalization in the evolution of the production model of the pork sector. Based on their uses, implications and the discourses surrounding the phenomenon, we study how ICTs relate to workers, pigs and other natures, which, from the interpretive framework of Jason Moore's World-Ecology, have been put to work in favor of capital accumulation. To this end, semi-structured interviews have been carried out with workers involved in the different phases of production: livestock farming, meat processing factories and digitalizing companies in the sector. Among the main results we can consider the use of digitalization and automation as fundamental elements to homogenize, intensify and have greater control over workers and production, linked to global food chains.
Scope and contradictions of the policies of “formalization” of street vendors in the city of Lima
The study aims to show the complexity of the proposed transition from informality to formality. The case of street vendors is studied, who are characterized as informal in several senses, including the dimension of employment and that of occupants of public spaces. It analyzes the reality of street vendors in the city of Lima and the policies deployed by municipal administrations, especially in the Historic Center and surrounding areas over the last decades. Academic literature on this sector has been reviewed, as well as archives and documents of the municipality of Lima; likewise, field observation work has been carried out during the years 2021-2023. We identified the limits of municipal policies aimed at getting street vendors to leave the streets, eventually setting as an objective to achieve their formalization..
Copyright (c) 2024 Sociología del Trabajo
Capital differences between French physiotherapy students in France and Spain: what does Bourdieusian sociology have to say about the professions?
Physiotherapy studies are accessible in France as long as you pass a tough university entrance examination. Some young French people prefer to go to private universities in Spain, where there is no academic examination, before returning to work in France. This creates tensions within the French professional group because it creates competition on the job market. But more than that, this article postulates that the tensions can be explained by the differences in social characteristics between the two groups of students, trained in France or Spain. The research is based on an analysis of the results of a questionnaire administered to students in the two countries. On many indicators, students educated in Spain have lower levels of cultural capital than their French counterparts.
Conflicts in the Implementation of the 2019 Mexican Labor Reform in the Automotive Industry
The article examines the process of implementing the 2019 Labor Reform through five union conflicts in the automotive sector. Through participant observation and documentary sources, the tensions generated during the four years of the Labor Reform implementation process were reconstructed. As a result of the research, we found the resistance of the different actors to job change. However, the Labor Reform and the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism (MLRR) triggered processes whose effects are yet to be observed and can potentially produce changes in the structure of union power in Mexico.
Labor insertion of technical high school graduates in the construction industry
Education-work transitions are a key phenomenon for the future of our societies. Labor insertion represents a central element for the configuration of the life of young people. This work aimed to characterize and analyze the job placement of young graduates of technical secondary schools in the construction sector in Argentina from statistical information sources, seeking to answer questions about the job and educational insertions of a particular group of young people, to find out if the trends generally observed in the group of young people are verified within this specific group of graduates of this type of secondary school and to analyze their particularities. The main findings of the work are linked to the identification of three effects of technical education on the education-work transitions of its graduates. These effects are: the modality effect, the degree effect and the branch effect.
Perspectives of Labor Leaders on Digital Platform Work Regulations in Spain and Chile
This qualitative study explores the perceptions of leaders from digital platform worker organizations in Chile and Spain regarding the legislation governing work on mobile applications: Spain's 2021 Rider Law and Chile's 2022 Law 21.431. The research reveals that in Spain, the Rider Law is perceived as a step forward with limitations, whereas in Chile there is significant dissatisfaction due to the lack of inclusion of labor demands. It is argued that digital platforms leverage the novelty of their business model to evade responsibilities and deny the existence of an employment relationship. Despite the new legislation, platforms in both countries continue to seek ways to circumvent their legal obligations and maintain the false autonomy of workers.
Employment models and welfare regimens. Trends in Europe and Latin America
The aims of these pages are to compare employment patterns and welfare regimes in Europe and Latin America between 2008 and 2022. We underline three issues. First, distributional institutions have regressed in all welfare regimes. Income inequalities increased in Europe and decreased in some Latin American countries. Second, models of coordinated economies have been better at sustaining income redistribution than liberal market economies. And third, the main dimensions associated with the reduction of inequalities are occupational institutions, tripartite governance, activation for employment and employment protection against dismissal..
Presentación del número ST 105 Emigración Laboral y Derecho a la Ciudad
Migration policies or the production of an over-exploited labour force. The uses of migrant labour in France and Canada
What are the social and historical conditions that make possible the overexploitation of the labor force of these women and men who cross borders to sell their hands, their bodies? In other words, how is migrant labor historically constituted as a specific labor force? To answer these questions, the article examines how the successive statuses of subordination conferred on migrants become the main spring of greater labor exploitation within the different segments of the labor market. In an era of globalized capitalism and internationalization of value chains, migrant labor is therefore deployed in at least two different ways: either through the confrontation of labor rights and social protection systems, or through the denial of the right of residence and, therefore, of full inclusion in common law. In the first case, we find displaced labour in Europe and, more broadly, the whole range of so-called "off-shore" labour management practices in a deterritorialized framework in which national rights can be legally circumvented. In the second case, it is the figure of the undocumented immigrant that appears emblematic of exclusion from common law as a springboard for overexploitation.
Care work and the Covid-19 pandemic: a comparison between France and Brazil
This article analyses the experiences of care workers during the pandemic. More specifically, it examines the experience of those working in care homes for older and dependent people in France and Brazil, and those working as home helpers in Brazil. Through a qualitative methodology using semi-structured interviews. The research led us to focus our observations on the fear. In this way, the routines of the workers in both countries are analysed, taking into account the public policies implemented during the pandemic in the different contexts, highlighting their similarities and differences. This is ongoing research that highlights the contributions of international comparison.