Trade Union Power and the Quality of Working Life Under Industry 4.0: Bargaining Outcomes in Truck and Car Components Plants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article examines how labour shapes the relationship between Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and the quality of working life (QWL) via a 2‐by‐2 comparative study in the truck and car components sub‐sectors in Belgium and the Netherlands. We conceptualize labour as a strategic agent that frames QWL challenges, mobilizes power resources and shapes bargaining outcomes. Distinct production regimes—flexibility‐driven in trucks and automation‐based in car components—generate specific discontents. Labour mobilizes associational and structural power by framing these discontents and leveraging institutional and coalition‐based resources to articulate them as actionable grievances. These processes vary by sub‐sector and country, shaping how integrative and distributive bargaining trade‐offs between QWL dimensions, including job insecurity, are negotiated in each case. By highlighting the dynamic, context‐dependent negotiations, we update labour process debates for the I4.0 context and advance power resource research by shifting focus from static capital–labour configurations of power to context‐dependent, labour‐led processes of change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".