The fissured workplace connotes restructuring motivated by capital market demands that major businesses focus on the core competencies that provide value to customers and investors and concomitantly shed activities to other entities to carry out those efforts (Appelbaum and Batt 2014; Davis 2013).

Here, David Weil argues that an important contributing factor is the growth of the “fissured workplace”. His term captures changes in the organisation of employment, whereby large firms with recognised brands devolve responsibility for their workers to increasingly complex networks of suppliers and franchisees.

Taken together, the fissured workplace makes the workplace for many workers a more challenging and risk place to earn a living. Workers have faced decades of flat real earnings and deteriorating labor conditions and a widening of income inequality for the economy as a whole.