Reassessing the political dimension of the labor market: Power relations, recommodification, and epistemic reflexivity.

The article focuses on the role of power in labor markets, arguing that power relations between employers and workers are central to understanding labor market institutional changes, particularly amid recent neoliberal deregulation trends. It introduces a conceptual framework distinguishing situational, institutional, and structural levels of power, emphasizing the concept of "decommodification"—the degree to which labor relations are insulated from pure market forces—as key to analyzing how institutional arrangements shape and reflect power dynamics. The article critiques mainstream economic and sociological approaches for often overlooking or concealing these power relations, illustrating this with discussions on the insiders–outsiders divide and activation policies. It concludes by linking labor market power relations to normative concerns about workers' freedom as nondomination, suggesting that institutional protections can reduce domination and enhance worker autonomy.