This book assesses the role of employers in the development of welfare state and labour market institutions. Building on an in-depth analysis of Germany, a market economy known to often provide economic benefits to firms, this book explores one of the most contested issues in the comparative and historical literature on the welfare state.

In a departure from existing employer-centered explanations, the author applies new empirical data to contend that the variation in acceptance of social reform depends more on changes in the types of political challenges faced by employers, than on changes in the type of institutions considered economically beneficial. Covering major reforms spanning more than a century of institutional development in unemployment insurance, accident insurance, pensions, collective bargaining, and codetermination, this book argues that employers support social policy as a means to contain political outcomes that would have been worse, including labour unrest and more radical reform plans. Using new and controversial findings on the role of employers in welfare state development, this book considers the conditions for a peaceful coexistence of a generous welfare state and the business world.

The Role of Business in the Development of the Welfare State and Labor Markets in Germany will be of interest to students and scholars of welfare and social policy politics, political economy and European politics.

The stagnation of the Japanese economy and the ageing of Japanese society has led to major changes in the labour market in Japan. This comprehensive study looks at how the Japanese employment system is adapting to its new economic environment. Using the latest statistical evidence, the book focusses on the growing use of part-time and other forms of atypical employment relationships and illustrates how this is expressed in several different parts of the labour market. Particular attention is given to the changing situation of women, the decline of the family enterprise, the problems faced by older workers and the poor prospects for recent high school graduates. The recent rise in unemployment, including hidden unemployment is analysed. Relations between management and employees in Japanese corporations are also becoming more individualistic with the introduction of performance-related pay and the declining importance of enterprise unions. As a result of these changes, the future may see rising levels of income inequality. The Japanese labour force is declining with the ageing of the population and Japan's ability to cope is examined with special attention given to immigration policy. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in what is happening today in Japan and what the possibilities are for the future.

This book provides rich and provocative comparative studies of South and Southeast Asian domestic workers who migrate to other parts of Asia. These studies range from Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore, to Yemen, Israel, Jordan, and the UAE. Conceptually and methodologically, this book challenges us to move beyond established regional divides and proposes new ways of mapping inter-Asian connections. The authors view migrant workers within a wider spatial context of intersecting groups and trajectories through time. Keenly attentive to the importance of migrants of diverse nationalities who have labored in multiple regions, this book examines intimate connections and distant divides in the social lives and politics of migrant workers across time and space. Collectively, the authors propose new themes, new comparative frameworks, and new methodologies for considering vastly different degrees of social support structures and political activism, and the varied meanings of citizenship and state responsibility in sending and receiving countries. They highlight the importance of formal institutions that shape and promote migratory labor, advocacy for workers, or curtail workers rights, as well as the social identities and cultural practices and beliefs that may be linked to new inter-ethnic social and political affiliations that traverse and also transform inter-Asian spaces and pathways to mobility. This book was published as a special issue of Critical Asian Studies.

Globalisation, Higher Education, the Labour Market and Inequality addresses the global transformation of higher education in relation to changes in the labour market. It focuses on the relative impact of elements of globalisation on social inequality, and provides insights into the ways in which these general forces of change are transformed into specific policies shaped by global forces and the various national values, institutional structures and politics of the specified societies. The book begins with a theoretical conceptualization for a comparative understanding of globalization, higher education, labour markets and inequality. This is followed by a range of mainstream accounts from an international selection of contributors of the ways in which national systems have responded to the forces of globalisation and the increasing demand for higher education graduates - in Australia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Japan, New Zealand and the UK. Finally, contributors explore more specific concerns such as the transition from higher education to the labour market in China and Sweden, the division of the 'knowledge' workers into traditional social groups in the US, and the role and salience of Doctoral programmes in South Africa in developing a knowledge economy. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education and Work.

In an age of intense economic competition and continual change, the ability to learn is a key factor in survival and prosperity. This book examines the changing interaction of the world economy, Britain 's prospects for prosperity, the connections between different kinds of work and the learning that support them. Focusing on specific areas where changed attitudes and ways of working are long overdue, the authors show the need for a better balance between formal provision in schools, colleges and within employment, and less tangible informal learning at home and in the workplace. These, in turn, open up issues of the curriculum (especially in the formative later years in schools and colleges), guidance for education and work and the qualifications structure.

While recent studies have highlighted the phenomenon and risks of increased inequalities between the top and the bottom of society, little research has so far been carried out on trends relating to the median income range that generally represents the middle class. This volume examines the following questions: what are the main transformations in the world of work over the last 20 years in terms of the labour market, social dialogue and conditions of work, wages and incomes that may have affected the middle class? How has the middle class been shaped by the financial and economic crisis? What are the long-term trends for the middle class in Europe? This volume also investigates the potential risks and effects of the reshuffling, or even weakening, of the middle class. On the social side, it explores the ramifications of further retrenchment of the European Social Model, which to a great extent has traditionally been funded by the middle class. On the economic side, the book investigates whether this process - especially from the perspective of consumption and human capital - is endangering the long-term sustainability of the current economic model. While presenting evidence of a definite erosion of the middle class, this book assesses the specific situation in each individual EU Member State on the basis of detailed statistics and case studies of professional categories that traditionally represent the middle class. This book issues a timely warning about the latest trends and future of the middle class in Europe. On this basis, it presents policy considerations and options that will be useful to policy-makers for ensuring the future of the middle class in Europe. Scholars and researchers of European studies and social policy, especially from its sustainability perspective, will find the volume an invaluable reference. Contributors include: J.I. Anton, D. Anxo, T. Barbieri, G. Bosch, P. Courtioux, C. Erhel, K. Espenberg, A. Figueiredo, H. Figueiredo, S. Giakoumatos, P. Gonzalez, D. Grimshaw, T. Kalina, M. Karamessini, S. Kuypers, B. Maitre, N. Maitre, I. Marx, J. Masso, I. Mierina, R. Munoz-de-Bustillo Llorente, B. Nolan, A. Rafferty, W. Salverda, L.D. Santos, A. Simonazzi, I.G. Toth, D. Vaughan-Whitehead, R. Vazquez-Alvarez

Gender Ideologies and Military Labor Markets in the U.S. offers a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between changes in military gender ideologies and structural changes in U.S. military and society.

By investigating how social and military change have influenced gender ideologies, the author develops an approach that (re-)connects military gender ideologies to the social conditions of their production and distribution and explains their transformation as effects of changing social and political relations and conflicts. Examining the role of different groups of social actors, media debates on women 's military participation and gender ideologies inherent in depictions of military women, the author seeks to contextualise these ideologies are within structural change in the U.S. military and society, relating them to the gender-specific division of labour on civilian and military labor markets.

This work provides a deeper understanding of the nexus between military re-structuring processes, women 's military integration, and changes of gender ideologies in regard to war and the military, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of gender, security studies and American politics.

Labor and Politics in the U.S. Postal Service grew out of concern for the way a large public organization does its work. It reflects my effort to link experience working as a letter carrier and mail collector with subsequent years of study in the field of organizational sociology. The final product is an academic book that certainly reveals great distance from experience in the postal workplace, but I must confess that the book still presents more a view from the bottom than a view from the top of the post office. I hope this view proves beneficial. It turns out that studying the post office has become an ongoing project that has outlived several jobs, relationships, and hairlines. What originated as a historical study of the 1970 reorganization became an analysis of the causes and consequences of an ongoing process of re structuring and technological change in the post office. Fortunately for me, similar restructurings have recently occurred in organizations and industries across the nation and around the world. The competitive pressures, new technologies, and political and class-based conflicts dis cussed in this book are perhaps more relevant today than they were in the late 1970s when I began research on the post office."

This volume extends and deepens our knowledge about cross-border mobility and its role in an enlarged EU. More specifically, its main purpose is to enlighten the growing and yet rather uninformed debate about the role of post-enlargement migration for economic adjustment in the crisis-stricken labor markets of the Eurozone and the EU as a whole. The book addresses the political economy aspects of post-enlargement migration, including its broader political contexts, redistributive impacts, but also nationalization of the enlargement agenda. It also covers the experience of receiving and sending countries with post-enlargement migration and its role during the current crisis. Renowned experts in the field study, whether and how post-enlargement mobility has enabled the EU to absorb asymmetric economic shocks, how it has affected the European welfare systems, and whether it has contributed to the sustainability of the Eurozone. The authors also evaluate brain circulation as a sought-after vehicle of improved allocative efficiency of EU labor markets and propose a policy agenda for mobility in an enlarged EU.

The professions have undergone massive changes in recent decades, as globalization, information technology, bureaucratization and market competition have begun to envelop even the most prestigious occupations in contemporary societies. Ironically, at a time when expert knowledge has grown increasingly important, the 'golden age' of the professions has receded into the past. Professional autonomy, authority, and ethics are all under siege, and even their claims to exclusive control of knowledge face challenges on multiple fronts. Volume 34 of Research in the Sociology of Work explores how the professions are faring in this changed world, shedding new light on a field that has long been at the center of social science thinking about the economy, the state, and social order. Chapters in this volume explore a series of questions that are vital to modern life, such as: How has increased control by employers and clients altered the experience of work for professionals? What are the new bases of professional status? How are underrepresented groups faring within the professions? How do professionals respond to precarity and unemployment?

This book provides the most comprehensive history of German migration to North America for the period 1709 to 1920 than has been done before. Employing state-of-the-art methodological and statistical techniques, the book has two objectives. First he explores how the recruitment and shipping markets for immigrants were set up, determining what the voyage was like in terms of the health outcomes for the passengers, and identifying the characteristics of the immigrants in terms of family, age, and occupational compositions and educational attainments. Secondly he details how immigrant servitude worked, by identifying how important it was to passenger financing, how shippers profited from carrying immigrant servants, how the labor auction treated immigrant servants, and when and why this method of financing passage to America came to an end.

The power of embodied ritual performance to constitute agency and transform subjectivity are increasingly the focus of major debates in the anthropology of Christianity and Islam. They are particularly relevant to understanding the way transnational women migrants from South and South East Asia, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, who migrate to Asia, Europe and the Middle East to work as carers and maids, re-imagine and recreate themselves in moral and ethical terms in the diaspora. This timely collection shows how women international migrants, stereotypically represented as a nation of servants', reclaim sacralised spaces of sociality in their migration destinations, and actively transform themselves from mere workers into pilgrims and tourists on cosmopolitan journeys. Such women struggle for dignity and respect by re-defining themselves in terms of an ethics of care and sacrifice. As co-worshippers they recreate community through fiestas, feasts, protests, and shared conviviality, while subverting established normativities of gender, marriage and conjugality; they renegotiate their moral selfhood through religious conversion and activism. For migrants the place of the church or mosque becomes a gateway to new intellectual and experiential horizons as well as a locus for religious worship and a haven of humanitarian assistance in a strange land. This book was published as a special issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

Alexander Monto looks at how labor migration flows from Mexico to the United States are directed and structured, and what changes they bring in the sending and receiving communities. He places cyclical migration in the context of historical and economic developments in Mexico and the United States, and he concludes that the circulatory movement is an element in the well-established world economic system that has endured for a hundred years. Monto focuses on one Mexican town with high migrancy and on one of its migrants' main destinations, Salinas, California. He describes the network linking the two communities, which migrants use to maximize employment, minimize expenses, and return with the proceeds to Mexico, where they will be able to buy more. Monto finds that although macrosocial factors create the economic polarization that propels migration, the migrants are not merely pawns being pushed and pulled; instead, they use circulatory migration as one of several options selected according to their role in their domestic group and the group's particular needs. He concludes that this labor circulation is not a transitional phase bound to disappear when Mexico's workforce is converted to wage laborers, but a permanent, institutionalized component of Mexico's periphery-core relationship to the United States. In the next few years, predicts Monto, the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement, together with agricultural consolidation already underway in Mexico, will probably augment rather than reduce migration.

European trade unions are among the most influential and powerful institutions within Western economies, in many cases cooperating with the government and employers' associations in socio-economic decision-making processes. Consequently they also play an important role in the formulation of policies relating to immigration and the migrant workers, who are arriving and becoming part of the workforce the unions are representing and protecting against employers and other authorities. However, trade unions have not always fulfilled their role as the most obvious organization to defend the interests of foreign workers to the extent they could be expected. The reasons for this are complex and due to conflicts of interests that arise from their intermediary position between employers, government authorities, and indigenous workers. This volume offers a rich analysis of the situation in seven major European countries but also a comparison of the data found and an attempt to account for the differences established. It ends with some conclusions on the prospects of trade unions within the European Union, and on the lessons to be learned from the present analysis.

First published in 1987, this Routledge Revival reissues the first systematic and integrated analysis of working time and employment, reaching to the core elements of a vital area of labour economics. It offers both a comprehensive analysis of the impact of workweek reductions on employment and hours as well as a thorough coverage of part-time employment, temporary lay-offs, short-time working, labour subsidies, social security funding, mandatory and early retirement and collective bargaining. This book provides the first comprehensive attempt to examine carefully the key economic issues involved in the general policy debate on working time and employment. This reissue will be of serious interest to advanced undergraduates, post-graduates and researchers in labour economics, and will also be relevant to the interests in labour microeconomics, macroeconomics, business economics and management studies.

The start of the European monetary union gave additional impetus to the lively debate on the effects of monetary policy and the appropriate strategy for central banks. This book collects papers and comments by leading academics and central bankers such as Otmar. Issing, Melvin. King, Bennett T.. McCallum, Allan H.. Meltzer, Lars E.O. Svensson, and Hans Tietmeyer. The volume examines methodological questions, the actual role played by the financial sectors, and labor markets in implementing monetary policy in Europe, and the likely future developments in these areas.

The U.S.-Japan bilateral trade relationship is perhaps the most consequential and the most tumultuous in the world. Government and business leaders devote substantial time and effort to resolving the stream of disputes that arise between the two allies and trading partners. Many of the issues are rooted in the perception that Japan's impressive economic success may be due in some degree to anticompetitive practices through which Japan's domestic markets are protected, and that an unfair advantage is granted to Japanese companies as they expand abroad. Regardless of the validity of these opinions, their existence exerts a negative influence upon this important bilateral relationship.

Asia has undergone rapid economic transformation over the past two decades. Despite its constant economic growth, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis and the resulting surge in unemployment highlighted the vulnerability of national systems that base development solely on economic growth.

This book fills a major research gap by exploring the nature, dynamics and functioning of Asian labour markets in eight major Asian economies, including Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Vietnam, India and Malaysia. It examines the type of labour markets that exist in Asia; how they have responded to globalisation; and how flexible they are to changing social and economic conditions. The book analyses how the current transformation has impacted on the key parties, such as employers, employees, trade unions, governments, organisations and society as a whole, and considers the likely future trends and developments in Asian labour markets.

When economists claim that rules are coordinating devices, they do not explain how those rules operate in the reality of organizational life. Rules do not indicate behavior, since their most important characteristic is their remoteness from the solution. Thus, rules are merely frameworks for action requiring constant interpretation. This book is grounded in Wittgenstein's understanding of rules as having significance only in the course of their application. It focuses on the disindexation process and on the consequences of a team productivity bonus in an electronic workshop in the Paris Metro.

This book shows how the Brazilian new unionism has changed the system of labor relations and assertion of workers' citizenship. By analyzing the current state of labor relations in Brazil and the role of the new unionism on the superseding of the corporate institutions inherited from the 1930s, it provides useful information and insights into Brazilian industrial relations and perspectives for change. Finally, by applying regression analysis to data collected in a survey with workers in Recife, a poor northeastern region, the author shows how the proposals advanced by the new unionism have successfully developed a new political culture he terms the "political culture of active citizenship."

In recent years the German economy has grown sluggishly and created few new jobs. These developments have led observers to question the future viability of a model that in the past seemed able to combine economic growth, competitiveness in export markets, and low social inequality. This volume brings together empirical and comparative research from across the social sciences to examine whether or not Germany's system of skill provision is still capable of meeting the economic and social challenges now facing all the advanced capitalist economies. At issue is the question of whether or not the celebrated German training system, an essential element of the high-skill, high-wage equilibrium, can continue to provide the skills necessary for German companies to hold their economic niche in a world characterized by increasing trade and financial interdependence. Combining an examination of the competitiveness of the German training system with an analysis of the robustness of the political institutions that support it, this volume seeks to understand the extent to which the German system for imparting craft skills can adjust to changes in the organization of production in the advanced industrial states.

This volume seeks to re-energise the paradigm of the New International Labour Studies by detailing how struggles over the construction, reproduction, utilisation and restructuring of labour forces are the contested social foundations upon which the global economy stands. Through a combination of theoretical works and a series of case studies, the volume highlights the cutting edge of international labour studies. Its expands on three pivotal areas of study within the discipline:1) the social construction of new labour forces across an expanding international division of labour; 2) the self-organising potential of workers, particularly within non-traditional sectors; and 3) the possibilities for transborder labour movements to help address the asymmetrical power relationships between globalised capital and localised labour. In addressing these themes, the volume helps explain not only how the contemporary international division of labour is produced and reproduced, but also the strengths and limits to current attempts to overcome its unequal and divisive nature. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Throughout the OECD, 30% of the average firm's total labour costs comprises items which are other than direct remuneration. This reissue, first published in 1984, focuses upon these non-wage labour costs, which include; fringe-benefit payments, obligatory social-welfare contributions, holiday entitlements and expenditures on recruitment and training, seeking to make amends for the woeful lack of consideration given to these important factors in previous wage literature. The book focuses on two major areas of enquiry: firstly, the costs for the cyclical behaviour of employment, and secondly, the role of average working hours per employee in the firm's overall allocation of labour services. The author begins with an empirical survey and costs breakdown, followed by extensive data on Japan, the UK, the USA and West Germany. The ensuing analysis considers the question as to why firms incur the various non-wages, and a comparative static factor demand model is constructed, which accommodates the major cost items.

First published in 1987, this Routledge Revival reissues the first systematic and integrated analysis of working time and employment, reaching to the core elements of a vital area of labour economics. It offers both a comprehensive analysis of the impact of workweek reductions on employment and hours as well as a thorough coverage of part-time employment, temporary lay-offs, short-time working, labour subsidies, social security funding, mandatory and early retirement and collective bargaining. This book provides the first comprehensive attempt to examine carefully the key economic issues involved in the general policy debate on working time and employment. This reissue will be of serious interest to advanced undergraduates, post-graduates and researchers in labour economics, and will also be relevant to those interested in labour microeconomics, macroeconomics, business economics and management studies.

"Investigates the transformation of German labour market policy, showing that Germany has departed from the conservative-corporatist path of welfare, especially with the Hartz Legislation of the Red-Green government"--