Buying into the ‘good worker’ rhetoric or being as good as they need to be? The effort bargaining process of new migrant workers

A great deal of attention in the literature has focused upon employers' stereotypical perceptions of Central and Eastern European workers as ‘good workers’, and the impact such views have on hiring processes in low‐skilled employment. Drawing on multiple case studies, this paper examines the good worker rhetoric through the lens of the effort bargaining process and hard HRM strategies that target marginalised workers in the labour market. In particular, the extent to which migrant workers buy into the rhetoric is explored. It is argued that migrant workers do not fully buy in to the good worker rhetoric because of issues such as high levels of education and personal aspirations and importantly, issues related to employers' strategies, bullying, discrimination, and the segmentation of migrant workers in each organisation.     

A firm level perspective on migration: the role of extra-EU workers in Italian manufacturing

A production-theory approach to migration is adopted in this paper to address the role of migrant workers from extra-EU countries in Italian manufacturing firms. The adoption of flexible functional forms to model firm-level technology lets us directly derive different measures of elasticity from the coefficients of the estimated production and cost functions. The use of foreign labour is shown to affect the industry composition in favour of low skill intensive sectors and the estimated cross demand elasticities confirm the complementarity between migrant and native workers found in previous studies. However, the two labour inputs prove to be substitutes in terms of the Morishima elasticity of substitution: in general, firms tend to increase the foreign labour intensity of production in response to a decline in migrants’ wage, while the migrant to domestic labour ratio responds to changes in the domestic workers’ wage only for firms in low skill intensive sectors.     

‘Taking on almost everyone?’ Migrant and employer recruitment strategies in a booming labour market

This paper explores the recruitment strategies of employers in the Irish Celtic Tiger boom labour market. It explores Irish employers' turn towards immigrants rather than pursuing other strategies such as raising productivity or mobilising alternative sources of labour. It demonstrates that during the boom years a more casualised approach to recruitment was favoured, privileging soft skills and competencies above credentialised skills. Immigrants became the employees of choice, not least because of issues of costs and obedience, but also because they brought new skills, in particular soft skills. Indeed, employers in some sectors developed a categorical preference for migrant workers as they recruited for attitude, work ethic and potential.     

Migration and gender differences in the home labour market: Evidence from Albania

This paper examines the role of migration in affecting the labour market opportunities of male and female household members left behind. We address this question by analyzing the impact of international migration flows from Albania, where migration is a massive and male-dominated phenomenon. We find that the labour supply of men and women responds differently to current and past migration. Controlling for the potential endogeneity of migration, estimates show that having a migrant abroad decreases female paid labour supply while increasing unpaid work. On the other hand, women with past family migration experience are significantly more likely to engage in self-employment and less likely to supply unpaid work. The same relationships do not hold for men. These results suggest that while left-behind women in Albania may take on the extra burden associated with the migration of male family members, they gain employment opportunities upon their return.     

The operation and management of agency workers in conditions of vulnerability

This article focuses on the operation and management of agency labour by employers and observes that there are strong contradictions between the employers' stated reasons for using agency labour and the employment agencies' perceptions of why such labour is utilised. While discussing agency labour generally, the article also takes account of the position of migrant workers within the agency sector, since agencies have represented a significant route into employment for migrant labour. It draws primarily on 22 in‐depth interviews with employers and employment agencies mainly in the food processing, cleaning and care sectors. The research revealed that while some employers were using agency staff to cover for specific peaks in production, others had used it as an alternative method of dealing with vacancies that otherwise might have resulted in permanent employment.     

The economic impact of migration: productivity analysis for Spain and the UK

Over the past 20?years labour has become increasingly mobile and whilst employment and earnings effects in host countries have been extensively analysed, the implications for firm and industry performance have received far less attention. This paper explores the direct economic consequences of immigration on host nations?? productivity performance at a sectoral level in two very different European countries, Spain and the UK. Whilst the UK has traditionally seen substantial immigration, for Spain the phenomenon is much more recent. Our findings from a growth accounting analysis show that migration has made a negative contribution to labour productivity growth in Spain and a negative but negligible contribution in the UK. This difference is driven by a positive impact from migrant labour quality in the UK. This finding broadly holds across all sectors, but we note considerable variation in magnitudes. Labour productivity growth has a neutral contribution from migrant labour in construction and personal services in the UK, whilst in every case in Spain the effect is negative, most strongly in agriculture. Using an econometric approach to production function estimation we observe a positive long term effect on total factor productivity from migrant workers in the UK and a negative effect in Spain. Our findings suggest that either the UK is better at assimilating migrants or is more selective in terms of who is permitted to migrate.     

对农民工社会保障问题的思考

在科学发展下努力建设社会主义和谐社会的今天,农民工日益成为我国劳动力市场的一大主力军,一个发展国民经济不可或缺的部分,但农民工群体存在的问题特别是社会保障问题很不尽人意,正视农民工社会保障问题并积极探讨解决对策势在必行。文中从我国农民工社会保障的必要性和现状分析,提出了一些建设性对策。     

Cultural diversity in hospitality work: the Northern Ireland experience

International workers are a growing category of employees in the hospitality industry of Northern Ireland (NI). The retention and skills shortages of the industry are significant factors in facilitating this increase. Thus, international workers could be an invaluable new source of labour for the hospitality industry, provided that they are properly looked after and managed. However, little is known about the number of people moving to Northern Ireland to take up work in the hospitality industry. This paper sets out to answer some of the ‘unknowns’ – including nationality, demographic characteristics, educational, employment and economic background. The paper draws on data collected through a survey of migrant workers in nine hotels in Northern Ireland and focus groups with migrant employees in all of the survey establishments. Issues of social integration within the workforce and the wider community as well as the future that migrant workers see for themselves are discussed from a human resource perspective.     

‘Good when they want to be’: migrant workers in the supermarket supply chain

Despite the increased attention paid to the role and effects of migrant labour in the contemporary economy, there has been insufficient attention to the role of employers and the employment relationship. Recent studies have highlighted distinctive labour power characteristics of new labour migrants from Central and Eastern Europe that make them ‘good workers’ in the eyes of employers. Drawing on multiple case studies across the supermarket supply chain, this article explores what kind of human resource migrant labour is perceived to be, particularly by employers, and what happens in practice as the dynamic tensions of the employment relationship unfolds in particular sector contexts. It argues that utilisation is conditioned more by the requirements of temporal flexibility – framed by the dynamics of employment within the supply chain – than any essential features of migrant labour power.     

我国农村劳动力转移法律问题研究——以“民工荒”现象为例

我国一向被认为廉价劳动力"无限供给",经过20多年的发展,却出人意料地大范围出现"民工荒",农村劳动力转移已经成为危及当代中国经济发展前景的关键问题.这需要从管理学、经济学、社会学等多学科角度进行分析和探讨,特别需要在法学视野下对农村劳动力转移进行研究.以利益为理论基点,在对"民工荒"现象有所诠释和成因剖析,并进而构建完善农村劳动力转移的路径选择.     

Immigrants’ Wage Growth and Selective Out‐Migration

This paper examines immigrant wage growth taking selective out‐migration into account using administrative data from the Netherlands. Addressing a limitation in the previous literature, we address the potential endogeneity of immigrants’ labour supply and out‐migration decisions on their earning profiles using a correlated competing risk model. We distinguish between labour and family migrants, given their different labour market and out‐migration behaviours. Our findings show that accounting for selective labour supply is as important as accounting for selective out‐migration. Controlling only for out‐migration selectivity would underestimate immigrants’ wage growth, whilst controlling only for labour market selectivity would overestimate their wage growth. This shows that different selections are important for different types of migrants.     

Informal hierarchies among workers in low‐skill food manufacturing jobs

This article examines the creation of informal workplace hierarchies in the context of recent changes in the UK labour market. Previous studies have identified that deskilling of jobs has removed formal hierarchies among many production workers, and that informal hierarchies based upon factors such as contractual status have formed in their place. The aim of this article is to examine how changes in the labour force mean that new informal hierarchies have developed among migrant and immigrant workers who take these jobs through an agency. Research consisted of 50 semi‐structured interviews, coupled with lengthy observation of both work and social settings, at three food manufacturers. The article finds that language and cultural issues create a complex informal hierarchy not only between directly employed and agency workers, but also among and within different groups of migrant and immigrant agency workers.     

农民工住房问题研究述评

对农民工住房问题的研究,首先基于对农民工概念的界定,界定的关键点应在于农村户籍身份和所从事工作的非农业生产性质,不宜加入在劳动关系中所处的地位、收入来源等判定标准。国外的研究中,没有与农民工完全相同的概念,研究成果中具有参考意义的是对移民工人、城市贫民住房问题的研究,因而可借鉴性有限。国内的研究中,多侧重于农民工住房及住房政策的现存问题分析与对策研究;研究方法以个别城市的定量分析,以及逻辑推演的定性分析为主;结论建议集中于将农民工的住房保障纳入城镇住房保障体系,尚欠缺从统筹城乡的视角对农民工住房问题的深入研究。     

Return Migration,Self‐selection and Entrepreneurship

Are return migrants more entrepreneurial? Existing literature has not addressed how estimating the impact of return migration on entrepreneurship is affected by double unobservable migrant self‐selection, both at the initial outward migration and at the final inward return migration stages. This paper exploits exogenous variation provided by the civil war and the incidence of agricultural plagues in Mozambique, as well as social unrest and other shocks in migrant destination countries. The results lend support to overall negative unobservable return migrant self‐selection, which results in an under‐estimation of the effects of return migration on entrepreneurial outcomes when using a ‘naïve’ estimator that does not control for self‐selection at both the initial migration and at the final return migration stages.     

INSTITUTIONS AND PERFORMANCE IN EUROPEAN LABOUR MARKETS: TAKING A FRESH LOOK AT EVIDENCE

Abstract This paper presents a selective survey of the recent literature on labour market institutions and offers new empirical EU‐based evidence on the impact of labour market reforms on employment and labour market adjustment. Although the literature traditionally treats labour market institutions as exogenous, attention shifted recently towards understanding the underlying causes of specific institutional arrangements. As a consequence, the literature highlights the great importance of an efficient policy design exploiting these interactions wisely and identifies general principles for achieving an efficient policy design at both macro and micro levels. Although empirical evidence does not show a major change in terms of intensity of labour market reform after the setting of the Economic and Monetary Union and the creation of the euro, the reforms aiming at strengthening the labour market attachment of vulnerable groups tend to have been successful both in raising their employment and increasing labour market adjustment.     

The welfare cost of taxation in a labour market with unemployment and non-participation

The standard public economics analysis of the welfare cost of labour income taxation is based on the estimation of labour supply functions that treat unemployed individuals as non-participants. This paper applies econometric models of multinomial discrete choice to the labour market, explicitly allowing individuals to be in any of three possible states (employment, unemployment and non-participation). Based on these estimates, we present calculations of the dead-weight loss (DWL) of taxes, which turn out to be larger than those suggested by the literature.     

Combating the English language deficit: the labour market experiences of migrant women in Australia

This article takes a multilevel perspective on the labour market issues and challenges that migrant women from non‐English speaking backgrounds (NESB) encounter in Australia. The article is based on two main arguments: (1) a much more complex picture emerges when we look at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and migration, and its implications for the labour market experiences of NESB women and (2) single level conceptualisations of diversity management within the domain of organisational or legal policies are inadequate to address the multilevel challenges faced by NESB women. The article presents a qualitative study in which we theorise our findings through a multilevel construct, examining the macro‐national, meso‐organisational, and micro‐individual challenges that NESB women, originating from Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, face in the Australian labour market.     

Working hours in Chinese enterprises: evidence from matched employer–employee data

The purpose of this article is to explore the factors that are correlated with hours worked in China. A distinguishing feature of the study is that we used representative‐matched employer and employee data. Hence, in addition to the usual worker characteristics examined in conventional economic models of labour supply, we also took into account the influence of firm characteristics and policies on the number of hours worked. The results suggested that in addition to the hourly wage rate, labour supply characteristics and human capital characteristics of the individual, firm‐level differences are important in explaining variation in weekly hours worked in Chinese firms. In particular, our results suggested that there is a norm of longer working hours in firms that employ a high proportion of female and migrant workers, that hours worked are less in firms which pay overtime and that hours worked are less in firms in which labour disputes have disrupted production. The policy implications of Chinese firms reducing hours worked were discussed.     

农民工住房问题研究述评

对农民工住房问题的研究,首先基于对农民工概念的界定,界定的关键点应在于农村户籍身份和所从事工作的非农业生产性质,不宜加入在劳动关系中所处的地位、收入来源等判定标准。国外的研究中,没有与农民工完全相同的概念,研究成果中具有参考意义的是对移民工人、城市贫民住房问题的研究,因而可借鉴性有限。国内的研究中,多侧重于农民工住房及住房政策的现存问题分析与对策研究;研究方法以个别城市的定量分析,以及逻辑推演的定性分析为主;结论建议集中于将农民工的住房保障纳入城镇住房保障体系,尚欠缺从统筹城乡的视角对农民工住房问题的深入研究。     

Balancing family and work: The effect of cash benefits for working mothers

The aim of this paper is to measure the potential effect of a family policy introduced in Spain in 2003 that provides working mothers with a monthly cash benefit of 100 euros per child aged under 3 years. We explore the effect of the policy on eligible women's labour market participation. In the tradition of the policy evaluation literature we use a difference-in-differences-in-differences (DDD) estimation approach. Our results support a small but significant positive effect of the policy. We find that since the implementation of the policy the labour market participation rate for mothers of children aged under 3 has risen by 3 percentage points compared to the rate for non-policy-eligible females. This represents 5% of their average labour market participation in 2002, the year before the policy was implemented. This overall policy effect is dominated by the effect of the policy among high school educated females.