The world of work is facing extraordinary challenges.Globalisation and digitisation of the economy, as well as corporate restructuring, have accelerated automation, fragmentation of employment forms and the development of new organisational forms (e.g. work through digital platforms). These trends have made employment more precarious and working conditions less favourable: temporary and on-call work, inadequate legal cover, low pay are just a few examples. These phenomena increase health risks, in particular through work intensification.

Demographic developments (e.g. changes in migration patterns), technological changes (e.g. artificial intelligence) and environmental degradation (e.g. extreme temperatures) have also created new risks for workers.

In this context of increasing vulnerability, regulatory institutions such as the labour inspectorate play a crucial role in ensuring compliance with health, safety, pay and employment standards for workers, especially the most precarious and vulnerable ones. Not always an easy role.

In order to discuss these issues, the Annual Congress of the Swiss Sociological Society was held from 9 to 11 September in Basel at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW). The Congress was also attended by Nicolas Pons-Vignon, Professor in Labour Transformation and Social Innovation at SUPSI's Competence Centre for Labour, Welfare and Social Research (CLWS), who, together with his colleagues from the Haute école de travail social et de la santé Lausanne (HETSL) Alessandro Pelizzari and Aris Martinelli, organised two panels on the topic of ‘Labour inspection and worker vulnerability’. The panels provided an opportunity to interface with international scholars from Switzerland, France, Germany and Portugal with the aim of developing new projects within this nascent network of researchers interested in the institutional mechanisms of protection of increasingly vulnerable workers.
Nicolas Pons-Vignon also recently conducted, on behalf of SECO, a review of the international literature on the responses of labour inspectorates to labour transformations. This research showed how inspectorates, in addition to internal restructuring, have combined different approaches to enforcement and strengthened cooperation with a range of external partners. Faced with the dual challenge of lack of resources and the increasing complexity of missions, the data collected underline the importance of the strategic nature of responses. The effectiveness of the interventions depends, in fact, on the way they are coordinated and the thinking behind them, which must be based as much on scientific research as on the exploitation of the knowledge generated by the inspection activity itself, but also on the involvement of the workers whose rights the inspection protects.