The book provides a collection of cutting-edge, multi-disciplinary research-based chapters on work, workers and the regulation and management of workplace health and safety. Featuring research from Australia, Europe and North America, the chapters traverse important historical examples and place important, emerging contemporary trends, like work in the gig economy, into wider international and historical perspectives. The authors are leading authorities in their fields.

The book contributes to advancing our knowledge – empirical and theoretical – of the ways in which labour market dynamics, management strategies, state regulation and public policy, and union organisation affect outcomes for workers. It features in-depth exploration of, and reflection on, some of the major labour market challenges facing workers, and analysis of strengths and weaknesses of responses to those challenges, whether via management, state regulation or collective employee voice. The chapters highlight shifts in in/equality of outcomes; access to security and flexibility at work; genuine access to workplace voice and decision-making; and the implications of different avenues and mechanisms for regulating work and employment.

The text is aimed at researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students in work and organisational studies, industrial/employment relations and human resource management, workplace (or occupational) health and safety, employment law, and labour history. It will also be of particular interest to policy makers and practitioners working in the field of workplace health and safety.

1. Michael Quinlan intellectual journey of a scholar, teacher and policy expertPeter Sheldon & Sarah Gregson2. Rebellious Workers: Insubordination and democratic mobilisation in Australia in the 1910sTerry Irving3. The West Gate Bridge Collapse: How disaster happensSarah Gregson & Elizabeth Humphrys4. Economic liberalisation of road freight transport in the EU and the USAMichael H. Belzer & Annette Thrnquist5. Precarious employment and the regulation of occupational health and safety: Prevention, compensation and return to workKatherine Lippel & Annie Thbaud-Mony6. Protecting gig economy workers through regulatory innovation: Controlling contract networks within digital networksIgor Nossar7. Representing workers on safety and health: the current challenge?David Walters8. Prosecutions under the Australian Work Health and Safety Acts: New sanctions, old approachesRichard JohnstonePostscript: Inequality, deprivation/resistance and building a sustainable societyMichael Quinlan