For decades, direct employment relationships have been increasingly displaced by indirect employment relationships through networks of firms and layers of managerial control. The firm strategies driving these changes are organizational, geographic, and technological in nature and are facilitated by state policies. The resulting weakening of traditional forms of collective bargaining and worker power have led workers to counter by organizing broader alliances and complementing structural and associational power with symbolic power and state-oriented strategies through what the authors term “network bargaining.” These dynamics point to the limitations of dominant theories and frameworks for understanding employment relations and suggest a new approach that focuses on a range of direct and indirect work relationships, evolving forms of worker power, and networked patterns of worker–employer interactions.

几十年来，通过公司网络和管理控制层之间的间接雇佣关系，直接雇佣关系越来越被取代。推动这些变化的公司策略本质上是组织，地理和技术，并受国家政策的推动。结果导致传统形式的集体谈判和工人权力的削弱，导致工人通过组织更广泛的联盟并通过作者称之为“网络谈判”的象征性权力和以国家为导向的战略补充结构性和协会性权力来进行反击。这些动态指出了主流理论和理解雇佣关系的框架的局限性，并提出了一种新方法，该方法着重于一系列直接和间接的工作关系，不断发展的工人权力形式，