Contingent Workers' Voice in Southern Europe investigates the manifold challenges posed by the continued expansion of the platform economy, the rise of non-standard forms of employment, and the diversification of work identities. Leading authors explore the potentialities and barriers for collective protection and representation of contingent workers in the platform economy, based on the experiences, needs, and aspirations of workers in Italy and Spain. Chapters undertake in-depth analyses of a diverse and innovative variety of initiatives for the protection, organization, and representation of contingent workers. The book ultimately constructs a framework to interpret the evolution of contingent workers' experiences, allowing trade unions, social movements, and cooperatives to develop organizational and representative practices that better respond to their needs. This incisive book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of sociology, international relations, political science, and labour law. Its practical insights will also enable trade unionists, activists, and policymakers in the field of labour relations to make informed decisions and identify possible avenues for development.

Japan, South Korea, Mexico, France, and Spain once exercised significant control over the allocation of credit, and used that control to facilitate economic adjustment and industrial development. In the 1980s all that changed. Why and how these states dismantled their activist credit policies is the subject of Capital Ungoverned. The volume brings together five specialists in the economics and politics of these various states to assess the internal and global changes that prompted them to adopt financial liberalization.Comparison reveals the distinctive political and institutional logic that guided liberalization in each country from the role of a newly dominant capitalist class in Korea to the replacement of state financing by private financing and self-financing in Japan, from the maneuvers of the banking establishment in Spain to attempts to attract foreign capital in Mexico. At the same time, these cases clarify the importance of international factors, in particular the shifts that occurred in U.S. policy as it sought to respond to the effects of uneven growth in the world economy."