From Normative Standards to Employment Security Configurations: Human Rights at Work across Territorial Contexts

Human rights at work are often discussed through formal principles, regulatory standards, and duties of compliance. Yet their organizational meaning depends on how rights are translated into concrete employment arrangements. This paper examines employment security as a key dimension of decent work and as a domain in which worker protection becomes observable through organizational practices. We distinguish between arrangements aligned with regulatory baselines and arrangements that extend beyond those baselines. Using an original regional-level database, we examine how these two dimensions combine across regions in four selected European countries and how their distribution changes under different territorial conditions. Using preliminary regional evidence from Italy, Germany, Spain, and Poland, we show that territorial rootedness plays different roles depending on the structural context: it stabilizes employment security patterns in robust contexts, makes them more homogeneous in intermediate ones, and reorients them in weaker contexts. The paper contributes to debates on human rights at work and organizational legitimacy by showing that worker protection is not only a matter of formal compliance. It also depends on how employment arrangements are combined, distributed, and territorially configured.