The concept of work–life balance has recently established itself as a key component on route maps drawn up in the pursuit of social sustainability, both on a local scale, represented by individual organizations, and on a more general one, represented by global institutions such as the United Nations. Our article analyzes telework’s use as a political tool within organizations that either boost or hinder the development of social sustainability. Additionally, we propose the notion of “life sustainability” to analyze how female teleworkers describe the link between specific work cultures and the possibility of fulfilling social sustainability goals in local work environments through the achievement of a good work–life balance. Our research was performed following a qualitative approach, drawing from a sample of 24 individual interviews and 10 focus groups with a total of 48 participants, all of which are female teleworkers with family responsibilities. Our main findings allow us to summarize the interviewees’ social perceptions into two categories, which we have dubbed ‘life sustainability ecologies’ and ‘presence-based ecologies’. We conclude by discussing female teleworkers’ claim that work–life balance is directly linked to social sustainability and that the latter goal will remain out of reach as long as the issue of balance goes unresolved.

‘Social movement unionism’ (SMU) has been suggested as a suitable strategy for union renewal in Spain, yet the literature on union renewal and SMU has two major shortcomings: (1) a lack of bottom‐up studies, and (2) a lack of dialogue between industrial relations and social movement research. To redress these shortcomings, we make three contributions in this article: first, we provide evidence on the current opportunities for SMU in Spain's feminized precarious service sector; second, we apply a bottom‐up intersectional approach to the study of SMU; and third, we bridge the research on industrial relations and on social movements by adopting a relational framework that looks at both union and non‐union actors as key actors for union renewal. Our results show a landscape of co‐existence, conflict, cooperation and competition between union and non‐union actors, including established unions, radical grassroots unions and emerging forms of collective representation; however, if we are to develop SMU as a strategy for union renewal in post‐Great Recession Spain, then there is still room for promoting deep coalition building between unions and novel forms of worker collectivism, as well as developing intersectional politics to reach non‐traditional membership groups.

This must be a previous version of the The last version of the abstract was: The literature on labour conflict in the field of paid care work deals primarily with highly feminized occupations that fit in with the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) characterization of the care workforce, such as nurses, domestic workers and childcare providers. We focus instead on room attendants: a highly feminized occupational group that lies beyond the scope of the care economy defined by the ILO. Our analysis draws upon Briskin’s ‘politicization of caring’ through which care workers demand professional recognition, decent working conditions and fair wages, as well as call for the acknowledgement of caring as a collective responsibility. Following this thread, we look into the politicization of hotel housekeeping by Las Kellys, a Spanish movement of room attendants that frames hotel housekeeping as care work with the aim of subverting low social standing and improving precarious working conditions. Such a framing relies on two axes of meaning-making: (1) room attendant as provider of customer well-being, and (2) (hotel) cleaning as undervalued feminized basic care. This article expands the scope of the ‘politicization of caring’ beyond the limits of the care economy.

This article analyses the forms of dividuation workers undergo when they are linked to technologies, such as algorithms or artificial intelligence. It examines functionalities and operations deployed by certain types of Talent Management software and apps—UKG, Tribepad, Afiniti, RetailNext and Textio. Specifically, it analyses how talented workers materialise in relation to the profiles and the statistical models generated by such artificial intelligence machines. It argues that these operate as a nooscope that allows the transindividual plane to be quantified through a process known as dividuation. Finally, by way of conclusion, the notion of the dividual is presented as the logic that characterises the human–machine relationship in the case of artificial intelligence and as the horizon of what Felix Guattari called “machinic capitalism”.