Labor market theory often functions as a descriptive framework, subordinated to other theoretical models, failing to explain the capitalist nature and internal logic of the labor market. The crisis of neoliberal capitalism and its reaction, paradoxically, highlights the importance of the labor market, which has been long neglected and overshadowed by Marxist labor studies. To remedy this, we propose integrating labor market theory within the Marxist tradition, unveiling its capitalist logic and underlying economic forces. Central to this inquiry is the historical formation of the labor market, the commodification of labor intermediation, and the fabrication of labor power into the labor process. We contend that the labor market has now entered a new stage – the ‘indebted labor market’, in which labor is deeply intertwined with debt and financialization, reflecting a shift from a simple wage-for-labor exchange to a system where debt mechanisms and financial instruments are integral to labor relations.
AuerbachPGreenF (2024) Reformulating the critique of human capital theory. Journal of Economic Surveys. Epub ahead of print 10 December. DOI: 10.1111/joes.12675.
2.
AutorDH (2015) Why are there still so many jobs? The history and future of workplace automation. Journal of Economic Perspectives29(3): 3–30.
3.
AutorDHKatzLFKearneyMS (2006) The polarization of the US labor market. American Economic Review96(2): 189–194.
4.
BaccaroLHowellC (2017) Trajectories of Neoliberal Transformation: European Industrial Relations in the Global Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5.
BeckU (2000) Risk society: Towards a new modernity (trans. RitterM.). London: Sage (Original Work Published 1986).
6.
BeckerGS (1964) Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
7.
BergJ (2016) Income security in the on-demand economy: Findings and policy implications from a survey of Uber drivers. International Labour Review155(4): 523–541.
8.
BetchermanG (2012) Labor Market Institutions: A Review of the Literature. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
9.
BohnenbergerK (2022) Greening work: Labor market policies for the environment. Empirica49(2): 347–368.
10.
BonoliG (2010) The political economy of active labor-market policy. Politics & Society38(4): 435–457.
11.
BowlesSGintisH (1975) Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books.
12.
BrennerR (2006) The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005. New York: Verso Books.
13.
BrynjolfssonEMcAfeeA (2014) The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
14.
BurawoyM (1990) The Politics of Production. New York: Verso Books.
15.
ClarnoA (2017) Neoliberal apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
16.
CréponBVan Den BergGJ (2016) Active labor market policies. Annual Review of Economics1: 10321.
17.
DanielsGEJrSmytheA (2019) Student debt and labor market outcomes. AEA Papers and Proceedings109: 171–175.
18.
De StefanoV (2016) The rise of the ’just-in-time workforce’: On-demand work, crowdwork, and labour protection in the ’gig-economy’. Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal37(3): 471–504.
19.
DoeringerPBPioreMJ (1971) Internal Labour Markets and Manpower Analysis. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.
20.
DubofskyM (1994) The State and Labor in Modern America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
21.
EdwardsR (1979) Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books.
22.
Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
23.
FonerE (1980) History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Volume IV: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–1917. New York: International Publishers.
24.
FuchsC (2014) Digital prosumption labour on social media in the context of the capitalist regime of time. Time & Society23(1): 97–123.
25.
GindinS (2021) The Canadian Auto Workers: The Birth and Transformation of a Union. Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
26.
GraeberD (2014) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.
27.
HaidarJKeuneM (eds) (2021) Work and Labour Relations in Global Platform Capitalism. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
28.
HallS (1978) Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state, and law and order. London: Macmillan.
29.
HarveyD (2005) A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
30.
HayekFA (1944) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
31.
HuwsU (2014) Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age. New York: Monthly Review Press.
32.
JessopB (2002) The future of the capitalist state. Cambridge: Polity Press.
33.
JohnsonMRWoodcockJ (2017) Fighting games and go: Exploring the aesthetics of play in professional gaming. Thesis Eleven138(1): 26–45.
34.
KahnemanDTverskyA (2000) Choices, Values, and Frames. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
35.
KallebergAL (2009) Precarious work, insecure workers: Employment relations in transition. American Sociological Review74(1): 1–22.
36.
KallebergAL (2011) Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970S–2000s. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
37.
KatzLFKruegerAB (2016) The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015 (Industrial Relations Section). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.
38.
LeBaronG (2014) The global business of forced labour: Report of findings. Canadian Review of Sociology/revue Canadienne De Sociologie51(3): 379–405.
39.
LevensonZ (2022) Delivery as Dispossession: Land, Race, and Colonial Capitalism in South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
40.
LichtensteinN (2013) The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business and Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books.
41.
MacDonaldRGiazitzogluA (2019) Youth, enterprise, and precarity: Or, what is, and what is wrong with, the ‘gig economy’?Journal of Sociology55(4): 724–740.
42.
MaddisonA (2008) The west and the rest in the World Economy: 1000–2030. World Economics9(4): 75–100.
43.
MandelE (1975) Late capitalism. London: Verso Books.
44.
MarginsonS (2019) Limitations of human capital theory. Studies in Higher Education44(2): 287–301.
MarxK (1993 [1857]) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin Books.
47.
NorthDC (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
48.
NoviantoAWulansariADKebanY (2023) Searching for a better job: Indonesian gig workers and the limits of decent work agendas. Work Organisation Labour & Globalisation17(2): 71–90.
49.
PioreMJSabelCF (1984) The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity. New York: Basic Books.
50.
PolanyiK (2001) The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press
51.
ReichMGordonDMEdwardsRC (1973) A theory of labor market segmentation. American Economic Review63(2): 359–365.
52.
ReskinBFRoosP (1990) Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Entry into Male-Dominated Occupations. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
53.
RobinsonCJ (1983) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
54.
SabelCFZeitlinJ (1985) Historical alternatives to mass production: Politics, markets, and technology in nineteenth-century industrialization. Past & Present108: 133–176.
55.
SassenS (2007) A sociology of globalization. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
56.
ScholzT (2017) Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
57.
SchultzTW (1961) Investment in human capital. American Economic Review51(1): 1–17.
StandingG (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
60.
TanE (2014) Human capital theory: A holistic criticism. Review of Educational Research84(3): 411–445.
61.
ThompsonEP (1963) The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz.
62.
ThompsonP (2010) The capitalist labour process: Concepts and connections. Capital & Class34(1): 7–14.
63.
TillyC (1992) Short hours, short shrift. New Policies for the Part-time and Contingent Workforce, Working Paper 15.
64.
Van DoornNChenJY (2021) Odds stacked against workers: Datafied gamification on Chinese and American food delivery platforms. Socio-economic Review19(4): 1345–1367.
65.
WebsterE (2008) Recasting labor studies in the twenty-first century. Labor Studies Journal33(3): 249–254.
66.
WilliamsonOE (1998) Transaction cost economics: How it works; where it is headed. De Economist146(1): 23–58.
67.
WoodALehdonvirtaV (2021) Platform precarity: Surviving algorithmic insecurity in the gig economy. Sociology53(3): 531–546.
68.
WoodAGrahamMLehdonvirtaV, et al. (2019a) Networked but commodified: The (Dis)Embeddedness of digital labour in the gig economy. Sociology53(3): 531–546.
69.
WoodAGrahamMLehdonvirtaV, et al. (2019b) Good gig, bad gig: Autonomy and algorithmic control in the global gig economy. Work, Employment and Society33(1): 56–75.
70.
WoodcockJ (2017) The gig economy: A critical introduction. London: Pluto Press.
71.
WoodcockJGrahamM (2019) Workers inquiry and the experience of work: Using ethnographic accounts of the gig economy. In: ArolesJde VaujanyFXDaleK (eds) Experiencing the New World of Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–23.
72.
YoshidaM (2021) The indebted and silent worker: Paternalistic labor management in foreign labor policy in Japan. Critical Sociology47(1): 73–89.
73.
ZuboffS (1988) In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. New York: Basic Books.
