With a combined population larger than that of the EU or NAFTA, economic integration of the ASEAN states will have a massive impact on both the Asian and global economies. This book examines the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) and its opportunities and challenges. It looks at the impacts of economic integration, trade structure and economic interlinkage among these countries through case studies. The book also utilizes theories to further examine areas such as trade, cross-border infrastructure, border management, and the regional development in terms of trade liberalization and foreign labor. This book also provides insight and analysis to developing policies for "ASEAN Connectivity". Given the challenges faced and huge potential impacts of the AEC's cross-border project, this book will be of interest to policy makers, business leaders and researchers in the ASEAN region and throughout the world.

From the beet fields of North Dakota to the campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce programme in Texas, American employers have discovered a new, low-cost labour pool, made up largely of transient older adults. These invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in RVs and modified vans, forming a growing community of nomads. Nomadland tells a revelatory tale of the dark underbelly of the American economy-one which foreshadows the precarious future that may await many more of us. At the same time, it celebrates the exceptional resilience and creativity of these Americans who have given up ordinary rootedness to survive but have not given up hope. "Nomadland", Chloe Zhao's film, based on the book and starring Frances McDormand, is released on 5 December 2020

This book discusses the transformation of labour movements and trade unionism in post-liberalised India. It looks at emerging collectivism, both in formal and informal sectors, and relates it to changing political and industrial relations. Bringing together studies of resistance, struggles and new forms of negotiations from different industries -agriculture, fisheries, brick kiln, plantations, IT, domestic workers, shipbreakers, sex workers, and miners -this book exposes the myths, realities and challenges that the present generation of workers in India face and struggle with. With contributions from leading thinkers in the field, the work deepens the understanding of the current Indian labour spaces, possibilities for contestations and articulations from below. The volume will be useful to students and researchers of labour studies, economics, sociology, development studies and public policy. It will be an invaluable resource to those engaged with industrial relations, trade unions, human rights, social exclusion as well as labour organisations and research institutions.

Organizing Matters demonstrates the interplay between two distinct logics of labour's collective action: on the one hand, workers coming together, usually at their place of work, entrusting the union to represent their interests and, on the other hand, social bargaining in which the trade union constructs labour's interests from the top down. The book investigates the tensions and potential complementarities between the two logics through the combination of a strong theoretical framework and an extensive qualitative case study of trade union organizing and recruitment in four countries - Austria, Germany, Israel and the Netherlands. These countries still utilize social-wide bargaining but find it necessary to draw and develop strategies transposed from Anglo-American countries in response to continuously declining membership. Trade unionists and scholars will find this a compelling story of organizing, narrated in the voice of organizers, trade union officials and local observers. This is a source for reflection on the daily hardship and strategic goals of organizing. Theorists will be able to utilize the two logics for explaining ongoing challenges for trade unions' revitalization worldwide.

Inequality has dramatically increased in America, with few solutions on the horizon. Serious social inequalities persist. For example, the 14 richest Americans earned enough money from their investments in 2015 to hire two million preschool teachers (while the USA ranks low among developed countries in preschool enrollment). Following the Great Recession, the richest one percent took 116 percent of the new income gains, a statistic caused by so many middle-class Americans moving backward, many losing investments in property and experiencing interruptions in work. Author Paul Buchheit looks hopefully to solutions in a book that vividly portrays the rapidly changing inequality of American society. More Americans have become "disposable" as middle-class jobs have disappeared at an alarming rate. Buchheit presents innovative proposals that could quickly begin to reverse these trends, including a guaranteed basic income drawn from new revenues, such as a Financial Speculation Tax and a Carbon Tax. Discussing the challenges and obstacles to such measures, he finds optimism in past successes in American history. Ideal for classroom assignment, the book uniquely pairs historical events with current, real-life struggles faced by citizens, pointing to measures that can improve personal and social well-being and trust in government.

A considerable number of higher educational institutions in North America, Oceania, and Europe, offer what are known as cooperative education, work-integrated learning, work placements, sandwich courses, or internships, to provide pragmatic experience to students, and its popularity is spreading to many higher educational institutions in the world. Alongside such development, the rising needs for theoretical research and objective assessment are felt among those academics and practitioners involved in these programmes. The book offers a rigorous theoretical framework based on the human capital theory of labour economics and econometric analysis, which are well-established concepts in the field of economics, with an objective quantitative methodology to analyze and assess cooperative education programmes.

Collective bargaining between employers and trade unions has profoundly changed working conditions in companies around the globe. But why do we start work at the age of 10, 16, 18 or 24? Why do we work 6, 8, 10 or more hours a day? These questions are becoming increasingly pertinent as working norms are fractured and fragmented by country. This book brings an entirely new perspective to our understanding of changes in working time. In both the UK and the US, effective legal or collectively-bargained regulation of working time has been limited over the last 20 years, to the extent that its disappearance is seen as almost unproblematic. Here author Jens Thoemmes sheds light on this transition and its economic implications with a fully evidenced sociological account, based particularly on original research into cases of working time standards in France and Germany. This book addresses the whole process of working time regulation over the last twenty years, evaluating the activities of trade unions, employers, and the State. While theories of industrial relations have already addressed the issue of markets in the context of collective bargaining, this book draws connections between time and markets, places these transitions in their historical contexts, and illustrates the importance of this movement crossing borders and cultures.

In the years Bbetween the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the beginning of the war mobilization boom in 1930, collieries in Europe and America embraced new technologies and had long since been excluded women from working underground. In Japan, however, mining women witnessed no significant changes in working practices over this period. The availability of the cheap and abundant labor of these women allowed the captains of the coal industry in Japan to avoid expensive investments in new machinery and sophisticated mining methods;, instead, they continued to intensely exploit workers and markets intensively, making substantial profits without the burdens of extensive mechanization. This unique book explores the lives of the thousands of women who labored underground in Japan's coal mines in the years 1868 to 1930. It examines their working lives, their family lives, their aspirations, achievements and disappointments. Drawing heavily on interview material with the miners themselves, W. Donald Burton combines translations of their stories with features of Japanese society at the time and coal mining technology. In doing so, he presents a complex account of the women's lives, as well as providing a keen insight intoon gender relations and the industrial and labor history of Japan. Coal Mining Women in Japan will be welcomed by students and scholars of Japanese history, gender studies and industrial history.

In this book Max Koch develops a theoretical model to understand the restructuring of labour markets and social structures of advanced capitalist countries on the basis of the 'regulation approach'. This approach is then applied to comparative analysis of the national trajectories of the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. Against the background of the classical sociological theories of Marx and Weber, he examines whether there are general links between inclusion, exclusion and capitalism. This is followed by an outline of key concepts of the regulation approach and a discussion of the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism which leads to empirically verifiable hypotheses about long-term trends in labour markets and social structures in Western Europe. These hypotheses serve as the theoretical basis for the subsequent country studies that are founded on an evaluation of international labour statistics.

International mobility is not a new concept as people have moved throughout history, voluntarily and forcibly, for personal, familial, economic, political, and professional reasons. Yet, the mobility of technical talent in the global economy is relatively new, largely voluntary, structurally determined by market forces, and influenced by immigration policies. With over a decade's worth of extensive research in India, Japan, Finland, and Singapore, this book provides an alternative understanding of how capitalism functions at the global level by specifically analyzing the international movement of technical professionals between India and Japan. There are three factors that inform this study: the services transition away from manufacturing, the movement of technical professionals in the world economy, and the demographic crisis facing Japan. The dynamics of changing capitalism are examined by theorizing the emergence of the services sector in the USA and Japan, analyzing the pronounced social inequality in India that is the basis for the global supply of highly skilled technical professionals, and providing considerable empirical data on the flows of professionals to these two countries to indicate Japan's institutional inflexibility in accommodating foreign talent. The author anticipates that Japanese industry will shed some of its institutional rigidity due to the pressures of competition and the scarcity of technical professionals. Providing a wealth of information on the topic of international mobility, this book is an essential addition for scholars and students in the field of International Development, Business Studies, Asian Studies, Migration Studies, and Political Economy.

This book builds on the Marx-Keynes-Schumpeter (MKS) approach to understanding the evolution of capitalism. It does so by focusing on current frameworks that study macro-dynamical systems in the tradition of the Classical, the Neoclassical and the Keynesian interpretation of the working of modern capitalist economies, and of the societies that are built upon them. The distinguished authors concentrate on different paradigms of economic conjecture in terms of their applicability to labor market problems and their implications for growing capitalist economies. They present material clearly related to current macroeconomic research which goes beyond the New Consensus macroeconomics, and which can also be related to the discussion between practitioners and politicians on the reform of both financial and labor markets. A Future for Capitalism will prove a challenging and thought provoking read for heterodox economists and broad-minded mainstream macroeconomists with a special interest in alternatives to general equilibrium macroeconomics. Contents: Introduction Part I: Stabilizing an Unstable Economy: The Challenge in Place 1. Real Financial Market Interactions and the Choice of Policy Measures Part II: Classical Unbalanced Growth and Social Evolution 2. Income Security within the Bounds of the Reserve Army Mechanism 3. Segmented Labor Markets and Low Income Work 4. Atypical Employment and Smooth Factor Substitution Part III: Unemployment and Welfare Issues in Models of Endogenous Growth 5. Economic Growth with an Employer of Last Resort: A Simple Model of Flexicurity Capitalism 6. Economic Policy in a Growth Model with Human Capital, Heterogenous Agents and Unemployment 7. Public Debt, Public Expenditures and Endogenous Growth with Real Wage Rigidities Part IV: The Road to Full-Employment Capitalism 8. Flexicurity: A Baseline Supply Side Model 9. Factor Substitution, Okun s Law and Gradual Wage Adjustments 10. Skill Formation, Heterogeneous Labor and Investment-driven Business Fluctuations 11. Leashing Capitalism: Monetary Fiscal Policy Measures and Labor Market Reforms Some Useful Stability Theorems References Index

From Deliveroo to Amazon, digital platforms have drastically transformed the way we work. But how are these transformations being received and challenged by workers? This book provides a radical interpretation of the changing nature of worker movements in the digital age, developing an invaluable approach that combines social movement studies and industrial relations. Using case studies taken from Europe and North America, it offers a comparative perspective on the mobilizing trajectories of different platform workers and their distinct organizational forms and action repertoires. This is an innovative book that offers a complete view of the new labour conflicts in the platform economy.

A candid assessment of why the job market is not as healthy as we think Don't trust low unemployment numbers as proof that the labor market is doing fine-it isn't. Not Working is about those who can't find full-time work at a decent wage-the underemployed-and how their plight is contributing to widespread despair, a worsening drug epidemic, and the unchecked rise of right-wing populism. In this revelatory and outspoken book, David Blanchflower draws on his acclaimed work in the economics of labor and well-being to explain why today's postrecession economy is vastly different from what came before. He calls out our leaders and policymakers for failing to see the Great Recession coming, and for their continued failure to address one of the most unacknowledged social catastrophes of our time. Blanchflower shows how many workers are underemployed or have simply given up trying to find a well-paying job, how wage growth has not returned to prerecession levels despite rosy employment indicators, and how general prosperity has not returned since the crash of 2008. Standard economic measures are often blind to these forgotten workers, which is why Blanchflower practices the "economics of walking about"-seeing for himself how ordinary people are faring under the recovery, and taking seriously what they say and do. Not Working is his candid report on how the young and the less skilled are among the worst casualties of underemployment, how immigrants are taking the blame, and how the epidemic of unhappiness and self-destruction will continue to spread unless we deal with it.

This title was first published in 2000: Contemporary academic studies on economic activity and South Asians in Britain have tended to concentrate on self-employment and entrepreneurial business success, and it may be possible to forget that many South Asians came to Britain to work in declining manufacturing industries. The phrase "from textile mills to taxi ranks" is not only a metonym for the movement to a service sector economy, but also presents a shift in place of work for many (Azad) Kahmiri/Pakistani men. The author explores the way in which issues of employment, work, income generation and economic status affect, and are affected by, a section of the Mirpuri/Pakistani "community" based in Oldham. The men discussed have strong emotional, spiritual and material ties to the geographical district of Mirpur and stories of workers and industry, home and aborad, dreams and realities, merge and entwine with the practices of everyday life. The book is both an in-depth study of a specific, racialized group in the North West of England, and a history of the demise of the textile industry and structural changes in the economy of the region and of Britain as a whole.

Free market capitalism has created a divided American society. Conservative economic and social policy thinking drove the Right's Project from 1980 to its collapse in 2008, leaving the world in ruins and fascism on the march. The Vision of a Real Free Market Society challenges the Left to create new forms of the market economy that promote efficiency and equality while permanently thwarting concentrated power. Many recent commentators have offered policy recommendations based on existing economic institutions. By contrast, this book calls for root-and-branch changes to the inherent structure of American capitalism. The Vision of a Real Free Market Society: Re-Imagining American Freedom presents a Left-egalitarian case for limited government that overcomes the failures of conservatism while rescuing economic justice from the weaknesses of tax and transfer liberalism. The book explains why the system fails so many Americans in so many different ways, and outlines how we can build a better economy that simultaneously promotes freedom and social justice while crippling the powers of America's oligarchs. Exploring the idea of a left-wing case for strong but small government, the book makes the case for fundamental reforms that will lead to a truly free and fair society. This provocative book will be of great relevance to anyone with an interest in politics, philosophy or economics, and will challenge readers to rethink their assumptions concerning the prospects for combining justice with fairness in the modern world.

Work, so fundamental to well-being, has its darker and more costly side. Work can adversely affect our health, well beyond the usual counts of injuries that we think of as 'occupational health'. The ways in which work is organized - its pace and intensity, degree of control over the work process, sense of justice, and employment security, among other things - can be as toxic to the health of workers as the chemicals in the air. These work characteristics can be detrimental not only to mental well-being but to physical health. Scientists refer to these features of work as 'hazards' of the 'psychosocial' work environment. One key pathway from the work environment to illness is through the mechanism of stress; thus we speak of 'stressors' in the work environment, or 'work stress'. This is in contrast to the popular psychological understandings of 'stress', which locate many of the problems with the individual rather than the environment. In this book we advance a social environmental understanding of the workplace and health. The book addresses this topic in three parts: the important changes taking place in the world of work in the context of the global economy (Part I); scientific findings on the effects of particular forms of work organization and work stressors on employees' health, 'unhealthy work' as a major public health problem, and estimates of costs to employers and society (Part II); and, case studies and various approaches to improve working conditions, prevent disease, and improve health (Part III).

Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff's now classic 1984 book What Do Unions Do? stimulated an enormous theoretical and empirical literature on the economic impact of trade unions. Trade unions continue to be a significant feature of many labor markets, particularly in developing countries, and issues of labor market regulations and labor institutions remain critically important to researchers and policy makers. The relations between unions and management can range between cooperation and conflict; unions have powerful offsetting wage and non-wage effects that economists and other social scientists have long debated. Do the benefits of unionism exceed the costs to the economy and society writ large, or do the costs exceed the benefits? The Economics of Trade Unions offers the first comprehensive review, analysis and evaluation of the empirical literature on the microeconomic effects of trade unions using the tools of meta-regression analysis to identify and quantify the economic impact of trade unions, as well as to correct research design faults, the effects of selection bias and model misspecification. This volume makes use of a unique dataset of hundreds of empirical studies and their reported estimates of the microeconomic impact of trade unions. Written by three authors who have been at the forefront of this research field (including the co-author of the original volume, What Do Unions Do?), this book offers an overview of a subject that is of huge importance to scholars of labor economics, industrial and employee relations, and human resource management, as well as those with an interest in meta-analysis.

The purpose of this book is to formulate economic models of the advantages and costs of transparency in various areas of public sector activity and to assess what level of obfuscation in politics is rational. The chapters are arranged in four parts. Part 1 is concerned with the manifestations of transparency and obfuscation in domestic democratic settings whilst Part 2 deals with the same realities but in an international context. Part 3 looks at corruption and Part 4 considers some of the implications of transparency and obfuscation for the working of governments and the formulation of public policies.

This book examines the critical themes of employment, growth and development to focus on challenges and opportunities, both old and new, in the contemporary world economy. The essential theme that runs through the book is that there is a strong relationship not only between employment and growth, but also between employment and development, where the causation runs in both directions. The author shows how employment transforms economic growth into meaningful development by providing livelihoods and incomes to people. While the book is primarily concerned with developing countries, it considers industrialized countries as points of reference or comparison, since the latter are a large part of an interdependent world, in which problems faced by the two sets of countries are frequently connected and sometimes common. The ten essays in this volume also provide a macroeconomic analysis of development problems situated in the wider context of a changing world economy, exploring possible solutions, to understand the implications for countries and for people. A timely collection by an eminent economist, this book will be useful to teachers, students and researchers in economics, especially those interested in macroeconomics, political economy and development studies.

Children in poor countries are subjected to exploitation characterized by low wages and long hours of work, as well as by unclean, unhygienic and unsafe working and living conditions, and, more importantly, by deprivation from education, all of which hampers their physical and mental development. Child labour is a complex issue, and clearly it has no simple solution. This book sheds some understanding of its root causes. The book attempts to delve into many of the important theoretical aspects of child labour and suggests policies that could indeed be useful in dealing with the problem under diverse situations using alternative multisector general equilibrium models.

This book provides a comparative analysis of the social, economic, industrial and migration dynamics that structure women's paid work and unpaid care work experience in the Asia-Pacific region. Each country-focused chapter examines the formal and informal ways in which work and care are managed, the changing institutional landscape, gender relations and fertility concerns, employer and trade union responses and the challenges policy makers face and the consequences of their decisions for working women. By covering the entire region, including Australia and New Zealand, the book highlights the way different national work and care regimes are linked through migration, with wealthier countries looking to their poorer neighbours for alternative sources of labour. In addition, the book contributes to debates about the barriers to women's participation in the workforce, the valuation of unpaid care, the gender wage gap, social protection and labour regulation for migrant workers and gender relations in developing Asia.

This title was first published in 2002: Advancing the understanding of a transition society, this book presents an in-depth analysis of social structures in modern Russia. Using unique survey data spanning nearly a decade, it describes and analyzes Russia's social development and class formation during the 1990s. Featuring a fascinating critical examination of such areas as social mobility, the structure and nature of labour markets, economic well-being and societal atmosphere, a team of leading international contributors cast a critical eye over the standard ways of understanding post-communist Russia. The result is an impressive and influential work which will make stimulating reading for researchers, academics and practitioners in the fields of Sociology, Politics and Economics as well as Russian specialists.

In today's global knowledge economy, competition for the best and brightest workers has intensified. Highly skilled workers are an asset to companies, knowledge institutions, cities, and regions as they contribute to knowledge creation, innovation, and economic growth and development. Skilled migrants cross, and many times straddle, international borders to pursue professional opportunities. These spatial relocations provide opportunities and challenges for migrants and the cities and regions they inhabit. How have international skilled migratory flows been formed, sustained, and transformed over multiple spaces and scales? How have these processes affected cities and regions? And how have multiple stakeholders responded to these processes? The contributors to this book bring together perspectives from economic, social, urban, and population geography in order to address these questions from a myriad of angles. Empirical case studies from different regions illuminate the multiscaled processes of international skilled migration. In particular, the contributions rethink skilled migration theories and provide insights into: the experiences of highly skilled labor migrants and international students; issues related to transnational activities and return migration; and policy implications for both immigrant source and destination countries. It also charts a future research agenda for international skilled migration research. Rethinking International Skilled Migration provides a comparative perspective on the experiences of skilled migrants across the local, regional, national, and/or global scale, paying particular attention to spatial and place-based dimensions of international skilled migration. It will be of interest to scholars and professionals in international migration, regional and national development policymakers, international businesses, and NGOs.

Women's careers have been a topic of research and discussion in many disciplines including sociology, business, industrial, organisational and vocational psychology, and career guidance. Despite the introduction of equal employment legislation in many countries, women's patterns of career development continue to reflect structural labour market disadvantage. This unique book brings together expert contributions from academic researchers, as well as representing the voices of older women who participated in an international research investigation. Grounded in multidisciplinary empirical studies, the book provides: * a variety of perspectives on women's careers in the 21st century * an international exploration of the voice of the older woman * an understanding of both the challenges and responses to women as they construct their careers. Offering a comprehensive understanding of women's career development throughout the lifespan, this book will be of key interest to academics and researchers from the fields of education, psychology, management, geography, labour market economics and sociology, as well as career practitioners, managers, trainers, researchers and policy developers.

In the years 1849 and 1850, Henry Mayhew was the metropolitan correspondent of the Morning Chronicle in its national survey of labour and the poor. Only about a third of his Morning Chronicle material was included in his later and better known, publication, London Labour and the London Poor. First published in 1981, this series of six volumes constitutes Henry Mayhew's complete Morning Chronicle survey, in the sequence in which it was originally written in 1849 and 1850. It addresses a wealth of topics from cholera in the Jacob's Island area to the food markets of London. The publication of this complete survey represented the first time in which the whole of Mayhew's pioneering work was available in one place. The set is introduced by Dr Peter Razzell, who was co-editor of the national Morning Chronicle survey. This fifth volume contains letters from June to September 1850. This series will be of interest to those studying the history of social welfare, poverty and urbanisation.