The evolution of post-Soviet labour processes: a case study of the hollowing out of paternalism in Moldova

During the Soviet era, directors and workers derived mutual benefits from concealing true capacity, hoarding labour and just fulfilling an enterprise's plan. In an environment of labour shortages and guaranteed markets, managers used informal mechanisms to reward and retain good workers given the absence of unemployment and meaningful wage differentials as mechanisms to discipline workers. This cultivated a paternalistic set of relations between enterprise managers and workers, which, it is argued, are being hollowed out in the post-communist era. This is explored in a case study of evolving labour relations in Moldova. Casualization of the workforce has been used as a buffer against greater instability in both the supply of raw materials and demand. Such a strategy has become feasible as enterprises, such as the case-study firm, now have a large pool of external surplus labour on which they can draw. However, paternalism has not been hollowed out completely but rather a split-level realignment is identified.     

Cementing skills: training and labour use in UK construction

This article explores questions of labour reproduction and skill development under different contract arrangements within the UK construction and civil engineering industry. The central concerns of the article relate to the impact skills shortages within the sector have had on recruitment practices, training provision and the use of contract alternatives in terms of both direct and non‐standard labour. The argument primarily draws on data from a national postal survey conducted in 2002, covering firms of all sizes within this key economic sector. The article reveals some interesting findings regarding recruitment and training practices which, despite encouraging headline figures on the existence of training, reveal an over‐dependency on contingent labour and low levels of apprenticeships – particularly among small firms, which are predominant in the industry. This suggests that the recognised problems of labour shortages within the sector are ongoing, and that the aim of attracting new workers into the industry remains unrealised.     

Teacher shortages and the business cycle

The ability of the public sector to recruit skilled workers is important for the quality of public sector services. Centralized and rigid pay systems in the public sector might reduce labour supply and lead to shortages of qualified personnel in areas and periods with strong outside labour markets. This paper shows that teacher shortages measured by the share of teachers without approved education are strongly procyclical in Norway. Using a large panel of Norwegian local governments for 1981–2002 and exploiting the rigid wage system, we find a sizeable negative relationship between teacher shortages and the regional unemployment rate.     

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.     

‘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.     

Can consumers continue to lean against the real wage squeeze?

This has been no ‘normal’ consumer recovery. The emphasis on rising employment levels, rather than wage growth, to drive the improvement in real incomes means that while the collective spending power of UK households has strengthened, many individual households continue to feel squeezed. A tightening labour market and emerging skills shortages will improve workers' wage bargaining power, but progress will be gradual and, for many workers, limited by the impact of further strong growth in the labour supply. Therefore, with little scope for households to further reduce the share of income saved, consumer spending growth is likely to remain relatively subdued, lagging well behind the growth rates achieved over the decade prior to the financial crisis.     

Progressive Taxes and the Labour Market: Is the Trade–off Between Equality and Efficiency Inevitable?

Does an income tax harm economic efficiency more the more progressive it is? Public economics provides a strong case for a definite ‘yes’. But at least three forces may pull in the other direction. First, low–wage workers may on average have more elastic labour supply schedules than high–wage workers, in which case progressive taxes contribute to a more efficient allocation of the total tax burden. Second, in non–competitive labour markets, progressive taxes may encourage wage moderation, and hence reduce the equilibrium level of unemployment. And third, if wage setters have egalitarian objectives, progressive taxes may reduce the need for redistribution in pre–tax wages, and hence increase the demand for low–skilled workers. This paper surveys the theoretical, as well as the empirical literature about labour supply, taxes and wage setting. We conclude that in a second best world, the trade–off between equality and efficiency is not always inevitable.     

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.     

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.     

An ill-informed choice: empirical evidence of the link between employers’ part-time or temporary employment strategies and workplace performance in Canada

Many employers seek flexibility through part-time or temporary employment to achieve improved competitiveness and success. Using strategic choice theory, this study is a longitudinal examination of employers’ strategic decisions of reducing labour costs and using part-time or temporary workers on workplace performance. Workplace performance is measured through profitability, productivity and change in net operating revenue. Statistics Canada’s Workplace and Employee Survey longitudinal workplace data are used for the analysis. Results show that reducing labour costs strategy has no effect on profitability, productivity or change in net operating revenue, and using part-time or temporary workers strategy shows decreased profitability and productivity, and that there is no effect on the change in net operating revenue in Canadian workplaces studied. Based on these findings, we recommend that employers, in Canada and elsewhere, not only carefully weigh reducing labour costs and employing part-time or temporary workers strategies for workplace performance, but also reconsider such strategies and instead seek alternative means of improving workplace performance.     

Multiplant manufacturing strategies among the fortune 500

This paper identifies and examines four distinct multiplant strategies prevailing within the nation's largest manufacturing companies. These multiplant strategies govern the charters under which plants operate, thus helping to insure focused factory operations. Using detailed data drawn from over 300 plants, the paper reports on the apparent attractiveness of different strategies to different industry groups and singles out those specific plant characteristics which Fortune 500 plants attribute most often to each strategy. This information can aid in the assignment of plant charters, within company operating divisions.     

Partnerships and the private recruitment industry

This article, based on a postal survey and qualitative interview‐based research, examines the relationship between major private recruitment bureaux and their clients in the UK, with particular attention to the recruitment and selection of temporary workers. The private recruitment industry is growing and large bureaux are seeking closer partnership arrangements with clients. Contracts for labour services are being developed on a 'preferred' supplier basis – similar in type to the approach taken for the purchase or supply of goods or components. However, formal preferred supplier contracts with temporary work bureaux were used by only a minority of clients, usually larger organisations or those having projects or workplaces with high volume demand. While such bureaux seek models of relational contracting or partnering, many clients prefer less fully engaged or 'semi‐distanced' relations facilitated by the informal dimensions of inter‐organisational contacts.     

Matching processes in the labour market an econometric study

This paper presents empirical results on matching in the labour market in Marseilles (France). Using a sample of meetings between employers and workers organized by a local employment office, we infer from estimation results that selection among applicants is on the basis of their level of education. The strength of this selection bias is substantially caused by the poor quality of the screening performed by the employment office. Employers appear also to discriminate against the youngest applicants, the long-term unemployed and applicants of North-African extraction. These effects are alleviated when employers face a labour supply constraint in the labour market.     

Reshaping internal labour markets in the National Health Service: new prospects for pay and training for lower skilled service workers?

This article considers how two new strategies for improving pay and skills development have been used in the UK National Health Service (NHS) to develop labour capacity and capability by stimulating the development of relatively coherent internal labour markets for workers at the lower end of the occupational hierarchy. Drawing on data from 13 NHS trusts, we scrutinise the implications of the new national pay system, Agenda for Change, for healthcare assistants and cleaners and find substantial one‐off improvements in pay for these groups as a direct result of the new national pay framework. However, the detailed case‐study data reveal there is considerable uncertainty regarding the extent, depth and durability of pay improvements. In particular, opportunities for pay progression in reward for acquisition of new skills and qualifications were more variable as a result of the stronger role of management choice and strategy at the organisational level in implementing the new national strategy for skills development, the Skills Escalator. Moreover, management strategy shaped the demand for, and distribution of, intermediate‐level skills (through new job design, for example), which was critical to the effectiveness of trusts in pulling lower grade employees up through an internal career trajectory.     

Young people living as couples: How women's labour supply is adapting to the crisis. Spain as a case study

In this paper, we focus on the effects of the Great Recession on the decisions of young women regarding their labour supply. Considering the profound effect of the economic recession on the Spanish labour market, and in particular on the labour supply of young people, the focus of the empirical part of this paper is on Spain. Using EU-SILC 2007 and 2012 micro data for Spain, the labour supply models of women are estimated by age group, with a particular focus on the 20 to 29 and 30 to 39 age bands, in order to establish how young women living in couples exhibit different labour supply propensities according to their partner's labour market status. Correction is made for the non-random selection of women living in couples in the younger age groups. This first analytical step reveals a negative effect on the likelihood of forming a new household in the context of precarious employment conditions. Analytical results regarding the labour supply of women by age group confirmed a discouraging effect of young children on the labour supply of the youngest mothers, as well as a positive effect from being the owner of a house purchased under mortgage.The literature shows that different effects can be at work within the crisis: an added worker effect (AWE), which is countercyclical labour supply behaviour involving an increase in individual labour supply in response to transitory shocks in the partner's earnings, and a procyclical discouraged worker effect. The resulting estimations of the present study suggest an AWE in 2012 for young women living in couples. While in 2012 the discouragement effect was only prevalent for women over 40, in 2007 it was also prevalent among younger women. Women's higher propensity to enter the labour market when their partner becomes unemployed or is persistently unemployed, coupled with their likelihood to be inactive in the presence of young children, would suggest a need for labour market policies targeted towards young women. Childcare facilities could mitigate the latter effect and produce a more continuous work profile, avoiding the negative effects of work experience interruptions on labour supply during the female lifecycle.     

Work models in the Central Eastern European car industry: towards the high road?

The integration of the Central Eastern European (CEE) countries into the European Union (EU) has provoked debates about the danger of a ‘race to the bottom’ in Europe caused by the low wages and weak labour regulation and labour standards in CEE. This article examines the evolution of work models in the CEE automotive industry. It argues that the work models in CEE did not take the low‐road trajectory. Rather, a limited high‐road model emerged in the 1990s, which combined skilled labour and secure employment for the core workforce with a broad margin of precarious employment, low wages and limited employee voice. In the context of labour shortages after the accession to the EU of the CEEs, companies faced recruitment problems and labour conflicts, which threatened to destabilise this model. The first reactions of firms pointed towards the strengthening of the high‐road orientation, but the development remains unstable, not least of all because of the economic crisis beginning in 2009.     

Do Low‐Wage Workers React Less to Longer Unemployment Benefits? Quasi‐Experimental Evidence*

The fact that unemployed workers have different abilities to smooth consumption entails heterogeneous responses to extended unemployment benefits. Our empirical exercise explores a quasi‐experimental setting generated by an increase in the benefits entitlement period. The results suggest a hump‐shape response of unemployment duration over the one‐year pre‐unemployment wage distribution; individuals at the bottom and top of the wage distribution reacted less than those in the interquartile range. This behaviour of job searchers is consistent with labour supply models with unemployment insurance and savings. It questions the optimality of very long entitlement periods to target the unemployment experiences of low‐wage workers.     

The strategic use of contingent workers in Hong Kong's economic upheaval

This research examines strategy in the use and purposes of contingent employment in four retail firms under different economic conditions in Hong Kong. Data from in‐depth qualitative case studies found that the four firms – three Japanese and one British – had different organisational responses to the economic conditions caused by the increase of sales before the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the shrinkage of sales afterwards. One such response concerned the companies' employment policies, especially in their use of contingent workers. Some tended to have an ad hoc opportunistic approach to the use of contingent workers, while others were more strategic and incorporate long‐term planning in their labour utilisation strategy. Implications are drawn relating to companies' use of contingent employment to changes in the contextual environment regarding their long‐term development.     

Immigration policy and market institutions in liberal market economies

This article examines how the regulatory character of market institutions shapes government responses to labour shortages, with particular reference to immigration policy. The period between the late 1990s and the late 2000s saw many advanced economies relax entry controls on select categories of foreign workers. This trend was most pronounced among states with liberal market institutions. The underlying reasons for these trends are analysed through an examination of the motivations for reform in Australia and the UK, two states that oversaw significant liberalisations of their labour immigration policies. It argues that the liberal character of key market institutions encouraged firms in these states to look to external rather than internal solutions for meeting their labour requirements. These findings suggest that perspectives from the comparative political economy scholarship, most notably the varieties of capitalism literature, may provide insights into the way that different modes of market regulation shape immigration policy preferences.     

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.