Timely Reminders: Pulignano and Domecka’s The Politics of Unpaid Labour: How the Study of Unpaid Labour Can Help Address Inequality in Precarious Work

Valeria Pulignano and Markieta Domecka’s new book (2025) marks, I argue, a turning point in employment relations literature for two main reasons. First, it shows that comprehensive analysis in the discipline was long overdue. Second, this timely publication reminds scholars whose research somehow touches on work and employment of the extent to which precarity is socially constructed and therefore requires repeated examination, over time, of outcomes generated by the co-construction of actors and institutions (Kristensen & Morgan, 2012). A major strength is that this book unpacks political and social dynamics enshrined in macro-level work and employment structures, while providing individuals with significant space for their stories. It thus highlights structurally defined, embodied experiences of inequality and precarity. In fact, it sheds light on the critical connections between unpaid labour and precarity by showing us how contemporary shapes of work are also premised on the meaning that workers come to give their jobs. For instance, specific rationales lead workers in the creative industries or in care work to normalize their precarious conditions. With its comprehensive approach, the book provides a framework that helps address the variegated realities of industries, as well as the systemic impact of different institutional foundations, and calls for more situated analyses of precarity and inequality. It also fleshes out Laaser and Karlsson’s 2023 meaning-of-work postulate by comparing specific industries and thus highlighting unspoken challenges due to ideological assumptions that can no longer be taken for granted about work as an activity. In addition to helping imagine new avenues for work at the macro-level and addressing the principles of the decent work agenda (ILO, 2025; Murray et al., 2023), the authors also provide a framework for rethinking solidarities and imagining how to build upon a more assertive conceptual equilibrium between macro-level and micro-level understandings. Over the past decade, seasoned scholars have stressed the need to better conceptualize solidarity by considering the extent to which workers differ from their representatives, despite legitimated assumptions of common identities in groups negatively affected by power relations in the workplace (Gumbrell-McCormick & Hyman, 2015). Employment relations scholarship has tended to navigate across a spectrum of research interests whereby research projects run the risk of focusing monolithically on macro-oriented political economics, to the detriment of making space for micro-focused analyses and ethnographies that would better capture workers’ subjective experiences in situated institutional settings. This risk is addressed by Pulignano and Domecka when they analyze present-day work and employment. Their fine-grained understanding of individuals’ experiences becomes equally important and helps flesh out warnings against normalizing certain practices that have caused precarity to persist in specific industries and work settings. Their book helps us imagine an inclusive solidarity that dares to transcend and decry the inadequately spoken absence of regulation for certain forms of work, such as those involving unpaid labour, which differentially affect certain groups of workers (Doellgast, 2022). The reader should reflect on the importance of consciously and explicitly including—in both scholarly analysis and social-actor solidarity-building—the voices of those silenced by socially induced acceptance of unpaid labour and precarity. The authors’ empirical focus is meaningful. For instance, their book warns against the way precarity in creative industries is normalized through class-based discourses on cultural capital and through avoidance of genuine assessments of creative labour’s economic value. In a similar vein, by doing justice to what care workers really “do” at times in the most invisible manner, it supports both managerial and scholarly understanding of how precarity is internalized in the workplace. This book is especially about how unpaid labour is socially reproduced—through passion for work, devotion to the job or constrained agency. It challenges …