Ratio Working Paper No. 339: Broken commitments and unfulfilled expectations: An explorative study of Swedish Labor Court cases

PublikationWorking paper
Durkheim, implicit duties and norms, Industrial relations, Labor Court decisions, Linda Weidenstedt, Lotta Stern, psychological contracts, text analysis

Sammanfattning

Little is known about what lies behind serious relational conflicts in the workplace. In this paper, we analyze conflicts emanating from perceptions of broken commitments and unfulfilled expectations as they appear in the Swedish Labor Court. Sweden is a highly regulated and formalized labor market, with high levels of unionization and collective agreement coverage. Yet in a social setting ripe with formal rules and regulation such as this, what role do informal promises and expectations have? The empirical material for this study consists of a sub-set of two years of Labor Court decisions dealing with situations where mutual consent of what has been agreed upon or what is to be expected from each other has broken down. We describe who, when and what causes workplace conflicts and provide examples of typical situations where relations break down to such an extent that the cases are taken to court. The results show some variation between employers and employees, men and women, as well as insiders and outsiders of the Swedish labor market model. Our exploration into court cases in a highly regulated and formalized labor market suggests that regardless of the amount of regulations, people build relationships that go beyond formal rules. And when they interpret and judge their social relations, they will sometimes do so differently – and sometimes the differences will cause severe conflicts. Even in Sweden.

Stern, C. & Weidenstedt, L. (2020). Broken commitments and unfulfilled expectations: An explorative study of Swedish Labor Court cases. Ratio Working Paper No 339. Stockholm: Ratio.


Liknande innehåll

Betwixt and between: Triple liminality and liminal agency in the Swedish gig economy. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.
Artikel (med peer review)Publikation
Weidenstedt, L., Geissinger, A., Leick, B., & Nazeer, N.
Publiceringsår

2023

Publicerat i

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231172984

Sammanfattning

In this paper, we identify when and why migrant gig workers experience liminality in the socio-spatial context of food delivery in the Swedish gig economy. We analyse qualitative interviews and informal conversations with food delivery workers in Stockholm through the lens of the territory-place-scale-network (TPSN) framework as developed by Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner and Martin Jones. We find that workers are challenged to deal with triple liminality regarding their work identities, workplaces and work organisation through platforms. Focusing on liminality as a central aspect of gig work, we further find that despite having little worker agency, some of the study participants engage in what we call liminal agency, that is actively pursuing possibilities for progress in uncertain states of in-betweenness. By unpacking the liminal dynamics that especially migrant food delivery riders are confronted with in their daily working lives, this study contributes to the debate on the migrant gig economy, the spatial turn in organisation studies and efforts from human geography to understand agency in precarious gig work.

Working from home during lockdown: the association between rest breaks and well-being
Artikel (med peer review)Publikation
L., Leick, B., Weidenstedt, L. & Sütterlin, S. (2022).
Publiceringsår

2022

Publicerat i

Ergonomics, 1-11.

Sammanfattning

One of the challenges with working from home (WFH) is the question of its effect on health and well-being. The impact of home working on health has so far not been studied extensively. We address this gap by investigating the association between internal recovery, operationalised as rest break frequency (low, medium, and high) during the working day, on self-reported musculoskeletal pain, and post-work recovery symptoms in WFH knowledge workers (n = 382). The analysis showed that failing to take frequent breaks was associated with a dose-response increased risk of reporting headaches. For post-work recovery symptoms, failing to take rest breaks throughout the day was associated with an increased risk of reporting psychological fatigue, physical fatigue, and sleep problems, and a decreased risk of psychologically detaching from work and experiencing adequate rest. Our findings emphasise the importance of remote workers taking recovery breaks from work demands in the maintenance of health and well-being.

Managers on balancing employment protection and what’s good for the company: Intended and unintended consequences of a semi-coercive institution
Artikel (in press)Publikation
Stern, C., & Weidenstedt, L.
Publiceringsår

2022

Publicerat i

Economic and Industrial Democracy.

Sammanfattning

Sweden’s institutionalized employment protection legislation, ‘LAS’, is interesting theoretically because parts of it are semi-coercive. The semi-coerciveness makes it possible for firms and unions under collective agreements to negotiate departures from the law. Thus, the law is more flexible than the legal text suggests. The present study explores intended and unintended consequences of LAS as experienced by managers of smaller manufacturing companies. The results suggest that managers support the idea of employment protection in principle but face a difficult balancing act in dealing with LAS. From their point of view, the legislation’s institutional legitimacy is low, producing local cultures of hypocrisy and pretense. The article gives insights into how institutions aimed at specific, intended behavior sometimes end up producing unintended consequences fostering the opposite.

The article in total can be read here.

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