Unemployment,Labor Market Flexibility,and Absenteeism: A Pan‐European Study

Using micro‐data from the European Union's Labour Force Survey for 28 countries this study investigates the incidence and intensity of individuals' sickness‐absence behavior, and assesses the importance of labor market characteristics like unemployment and the extent of atypical contracts and second job‐holding on individuals' sickness absence. The results identify that unemployment affects sickness absence through different pathways, exerting a negative effect on the probability of being absent and a positive effect on the duration of absence. In addition, the degree of second job‐holding and part‐time contracts in the labor market is found to be negatively related to individuals' sickness absence.     

Long‐Run Patterns of Labour Market Polarization: Evidence from German Micro Data

The past four decades have witnessed dramatic changes in the structure of employment. In particular, the rapid increase in computational power has led to large‐scale reductions in employment in jobs that can be described as intensive in routine tasks. These jobs have been shown to be concentrated in middle‐skill occupations. A large literature on labour market polarization characterizes and measures these processes at an aggregate level. However, to date, there is little information regarding the individual worker adjustment processes related to routine‐biased technological change. Using an administrative panel dataset for Germany, we follow workers over an extended period of time and provide evidence of both the short‐term adjustment process and medium‐run effects of routine task‐intensive job loss at an individual level. We initially demonstrate a marked, and steady, shift in employment away from routine, middle‐skill, occupations. In subsequent analysis, we demonstrate how exposure to jobs with higher routine task content is associated with a reduced likelihood of being in employment in both the short term (after one year) and medium term (five years). This employment penalty to routineness of work has increased over the past four decades. More generally, we demonstrate that routine task work is associated with reduced job stability and more likelihood of experiencing periods of unemployment. However, these negative effects of routine work appear to be concentrated in increased employment to employment, and employment to unemployment transitions rather than longer periods of unemployment.     

The Effect of Minimum Wages on Labour Market Outcomes: County‐Level Estimates from the Restaurant‐and‐Bar Sector

We use US county‐level data on employment and earnings in the restaurant‐and‐bar sector to evaluate the impact of minimum‐wage changes in low‐wage labour markets. Our estimated models are consistent with a simple competitive model in which supply‐and‐demand factors affect both the equilibrium outcome and the probability of the minimum wage being binding. Our evidence does not suggest that minimum wages reduce employment once controls for trends in county‐level sectoral employment are incorporated. Rather, employment appears to exhibit an independent downward trend in states that have increased their minimum wages relative to states that have not, thereby predisposing estimates towards reporting negative outcomes.     

Active Labour Market Policy by a Profit‐Maximizing Firm

This article investigates the effectiveness of an employment programme exclusively run by a private sector firm in order to find out whether such a programme can be beneficial to both the participating individuals and the private firm. To answer these questions, we use a unique dataset on a private employment programme covering 23 years of operations and data on 1,000 participating unemployed individuals. Using conservative estimates, we show that a private employment programme is more effective in reintegrating the unemployed than public efforts, while providing tangible benefits to the firm.     

Regulating the European Labour Market: Prospects and Limitations of a Reflexive Governance Approach

This article reviews developments in European Union employment policy from the perspective of reflexive governance. Reflexive governance instruments have a procedural orientation and provide a structural framework or steering mechanism to facilitate a process of self‐regulation. Recent developments in relation to the Employment Framework Directive, the European Employment Strategy and the Working Time Directive highlight some of the prospects and limitations of this reflexive approach to regulating employment relations and the potential impact on the UK labour market. These developments indicate that the hopes invested in the reflexive approach remain to be fulfilled.     

Labour Market Regimes and Worker Recruitment and Retention in the European Union: Plant Comparisons

We analyse worker recruitment and retention outcomes, contrasting production worker skill profiles in the UK subsidiaries of five multinationals with, in each case, a matched plant in another EU state. From personnel records we build up plant distributions of worker pay, age, schooling, prior experience and tenure. We find evidence of local management discretion, with differences in unit labour costs and in recruitment/retention outcomes between the matched subsidiaries. UK plants have a 'hire and fire' environment and a less skilled worker mix. Such outcomes can be linked to the UK's lower labour costs and less regulated labour market.     

(Re‐)Locating the Local and National in the Global: Multi‐Scalar Political Alignment in Transnational European Dockworker Union Campaigns

Labour activists have called for greater international co‐ordination among trade unions in response to the assault on organized labour by global capital, but such co‐ordination faces many hurdles. Under what conditions can unions overcome those barriers and co‐ordinate effectively to achieve campaign goals? I examine this question through a comparison of European‐level international solidarity with Portuguese, Greek and English affiliates of the International Dockworkers Council involved in labour disputes. The divergent outcomes of otherwise similar cases reveal the critical role of politics and strategy at different scales and sites of union organization in determining the successful exercise of labour internationalism.     

Promoting Labour Market Efficiency and Fairness through a Legal Minimum Wage: The Webbs and the Social Cost of Labour

Neoclassical economists, using a competitive demand/supply model of labour markets, typically conclude a legislated minimum wage is harmful to economic efficiency and social welfare. The major theoretical counter-attack by proponents of a minimum wage is to argue that low-wage labour markets are better modelled as monopsonistic. This article develops and formalizes a second theoretical defence for a legal minimum wage law. This defence rests on the concept of the social cost of labour , as originally popularized by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and then further developed by American institutional economists. This analysis is unique in that it continues to use the competitive demand/supply model but nonetheless demonstrates that a legislated minimum wage often simultaneously increases both economic efficiency and fairness, unlike the neoclassical prediction.     

Living at Work: Management Control and the Dormitory Labour System in China

The paper is based on a review of the literature on the use of dormitory labour, in the past and currently within parts of China, especially the Southern Pearl River Delta. It compares the provision of dormitories by firms with provision of housing under paternalist management practices. It explores the benefits that flow from having labour available on tap, as against the potential disadvantages of having short tenure circulating labour as firms aim to move up the value chain which may require the retention of skilled labour with the firm for longer periods.     

South Korea's Automotive Labour Regime,Hyundai Motors’ Global Production Network and Trade‐Based Integration with the European Union

This article explores the interrelationship between global production networks (GPNs) and free trade agreements (FTAs) in the South Korean auto industry and its employment relations. It focuses on the production network of the Hyundai Motor Group (HMG) — the third biggest automobile manufacturer in the world — and the FTA between the EU and South Korea. This was the first of the EU's ‘new generation’ FTAs, which among other things contained provisions designed to protect and promote labour standards. The article's argument is twofold. First, that HMG's production network and Korea's political economy (of which HMG is a crucial part) limited the possibilities for the FTA's labour provisions to take effect. Second, that the commercial provisions in this same FTA simultaneously eroded HMG's domestic market and corporate profitability, leading to adverse consequences for auto workers in the more insecure and low‐paid jobs. In making this argument, the article advances a multi‐scalar conceptualization of the labour regime as an analytical intermediary between GPNs and FTAs. It also provides one of the first empirical studies of the EU–South Korea FTA in terms of employment relations, drawing on 105 interviews with trade unions, employer associations, automobile companies and state officials across both parties.     

Large‐Scale Buy‐to‐Rent Investors in the Single‐Family Housing Market: The Emergence of a New Asset Class

In 2012, several large firms began purchasing single‐family homes, creating large portfolios of rental property, and securitizing these investments in capital markets. We present the first systematic evidence on this new investor activity in order to shed light on the factors that have supported its emergence. Three key factors were the ample supply of property for sale, tight mortgage financing and a decrease in acquisition and managerial costs brought about by technological advances. In addition, we show that buy‐to‐rent investors appear to have supported house prices in the neighborhoods where they concentrated.     

Flexibility and Fairness in Liberal Market Economies: The Comparative Impact of the Legal Environment and High‐Performance Work Systems

This paper compares management flexibility in employment decision making in the United States and Canada through a cross‐national survey of organizations in representative jurisdictions in each country, Pennsylvania and Ontario, respectively, that investigates the impact of differences in their legal environments. The results indicate that, compared to their Ontario counterparts, organizations in Pennsylvania have a higher degree of flexibility in employment outcomes, such as higher dismissal and discipline rates, yet do not experience any greater flexibility or simplicity in management hiring and firing decisions. One explanation for this result may lie in the finding that organizations in Pennsylvania experience greater legal pressures on decision making, reflecting the generally more intense conflict in the employment law system in the United States. By contrast, high‐performance work systems, which some have looked to as a possible management‐driven mechanism for enhancing fairness in employment, had more modest effects.     

Remaking the World of Chinese Labour: A 30‐Year Retrospective

Over the past 30 years, labour relations, and, indeed, the entirety of working‐class politics in China, have been dramatically altered by economic reforms. In this review, we focus on the two key processes of commodification and casualization and their implications for workers. On the one hand, these processes have resulted in the destruction of the old social contract and the emergence of marketized employment relations. This has implied a loss of the job security and generous benefits enjoyed by workers in the planned economy. On the other hand, commodification and casualization have produced significant but localized resistance from the Chinese working class. Up until now, the activities of labour non‐governmental organizations and of the official trade unions have contributed to the state's effort of individualizing and institutionalizing labour conflict resolution through labour law and arbitration mechanisms. Finally, we provide a brief discussion of the impact of 2008's Labour Contract Law and the outbreak of the economic crisis on labour relations. We conclude that the continual imbalance of power at the point of production presents a real dilemma for the Chinese state as it attempts to shift away from a model of development dependent on exports.     

Task Polarization in the Japanese Labor Market: Evidence of a Long‐Term Trend

By quantifying the various skills required for different occupations, we examine the long‐term trend in labor‐market polarization in Japan in terms of tasks from 1960 to 2005. We find that the input share of nonroutine tasks has consistently and gradually increased, while that of routine tasks has decreased. With regard to nonroutine tasks, we observe an increase in the input shares of both high‐skilled analytical and interactive tasks and low‐skilled manual tasks. While we also find that the polarization depends on the introduction of technology, the progress of polarization is slower and smaller in Japan than in other countries.