ILPC 2026

                                                          How do Licensing regimes displace labour law and trade unions?   

Clark, I., Fearnall-Williams, H., Hunter, J., Pickford, R., Reynolds, B.

Nottingham Trent University, UK.

Keywords: Informalization, Worker representation? Collective resistance?, Re-regulation and Licensing regimes?

In the UK employment sites which house informalized work are problematic areas for worker interest representation. Place-based sites for hand car washes, nail bars and parcel delivery and platforms that enable the delivery of take-away meals frequently house informalized low-wage, precarious work. Due to the fragmented nature of work in these areas the UKs dominant mode of interest representation via trade unions can fail to fit. Accordingly new hybrid forms of representation, resistance and worker repression may develop beyond the trade union movement. Hence for labour process theory and industrial relations ‘new’ forms of work and the related informalization of work challenge the embedded interplay between institutions and agency.

The theoretical orientation of this paper centres on the dynamics which enable informalization and the potential for modern slavery in contemporary employment. These dynamics derive from an institutional void following on from de-regulation and the globalization of labour supplies that has enabled informalization as a preferred business model in some areas. Regulators and those who represent the interests of workers are faced with three choices; do nothing, seek to eradicate informalization or make lawful ‘bring-in’ sites of informal employment. The UK’s director of labour market enforcement (DLME) has now conceded that informalization in sectors such as hand car washing and nail bars results from inadequate state intervention and accordingly has set in motion strategies to create licensing regimes in each area.

Our research is on-going; its method and associated findings demonstrate how developments in formalized employment practice such as the growth of short-term employment and zero hours contracts operate in a context of limited social protection and insufficient and variable working hours. By drawing on our own primary research and secondary sources on other sectors we show how these developments are re-produced in informalized employment. Therein our findings suggest that policy choices now privilege casualization-informalization, wage suppression and the ‘fiscalization’ of work. More controversially we find that within a particular social context both owners and workers determine their own social reality where de-regulation has created the space for informalized actors to usurp formalized actors. Therein informal employment practice was until recently tolerated but is now subject to re-regulation by the state.

Our contribution to new knowledge and the representation and resistance special stream addresses and advances three areas of debate cited in the stream’s call for papers. Firstly, in contrast to “car washeroo’s” in the United States there is no collective hybrid from of representation and resistance in hand car washes in the UK. Secondly, car washing, nail bars etc. are sites of low-paid precarious exploitative work which are defined (by some trade unions) as problematic for interest representation. Thirdly, a dialectic for state regulators and trade unions is that the failure of institutionally embedded interest representation has led to the re-purposing of legal institutional instruments. Therein licencing schemes have the potential to displace the application of labour law and collective worker representation in place-based sites of informalized work.