The Research Handbook of Comparative Employment Relations is an essential resource for those seeking to understand contemporary developments in the world of work, and the way in which employment relations systems are evolving around the world. Special consideration is given to the impact of globalization and the role of multinational corporations, including their consequences for the fate of workers' rights under existing national systems of employment relations (ER) regulation. This Handbook is unique in taking an explicitly comparative approach by discussing ER developments through a series of paired country comparisons. These chapters include a wide selection of countries from all regions, looking beyond those that are frequently discussed. The expert contributors also examine comparative issues from a range of perspectives, including industrial and employment relations, political economy, comparative politics, and cross-cultural studies. These impressive features make this important reference tool the most comprehensive of its kind. Academics and students in final-year undergraduate and postgraduate courses interested in employment relations will find this compendium enriching and insightful. Contributors include: M. Atzeni, L. Baccarro, M. Barry, D. Collings, F.L. Cooke, S. Cooney, T. Dundon, F. Duran, I. Forstenlechner, P. Gahan, P. Gunnigle, T. Jackson, E.H. Jung, B. Kaufman, J. Kelly, J. Lavelle, K. Mellahi, R. Mitchell, P. Pochet, T. Royle, A. Verma, N. Wailes, A. Wilkinson, G. Wood, S. Zalgermeyer

In book two of the series "My Job: Real People at Work Around the World," author Suzanne Skees profiles three professionals from each of the following sectors: health and recovery, education and finance, agribusiness and processing, tourism and culture, and diplomacy and peace. The unique and interesting profiles explore how our experiences, interests, and views help determine the career we pursue and how the career, in turn, continues to shape our identity.

This Research Collection surveys the main contribution to labor supply decisions within the family. It covers both theory, from the initial 'unitary' model that postulates that the family behaves as a single decision maker, to modern "collective" approaches that concentrates on differences in preferences and power relationships and empirical applications. Including an original Introduction by the Editors, a special emphasis is placed on dynamic approaches, in particular issues related to intra-household commitment, and on policy implications.

Trust is an elusive concept, meaning different things to different people, and so needs to be clearly defined. By focusing on relations within and between firms, Bart Nooteboom undertakes to produce a clearer definition of trust and its role in the economy. Trust deals with a range of questions such as: what are the roles of trust? What can we trust in? Can trust serve as an instrument for the governance of relations? Is trust a substitute, a precondition or an outcome of contracts? The author then goes on to analyse what trust is based on, what its limits are, how it grows and how it can also break down. The role of intermediaries is also discussed. Bart Nooteboom argues that trust goes beyond calculative self-interest and that blind, unconditional trust is unwise. He then examines the paradox of how trust can be non-calculative and yet, not blind. The book also reveals ways to measure and model trust, its antecedents and its consequences.

The Aging Workforce examines the changing demographics of the workforce, and their impact on the world of work. The numbers and proportions of older individuals in the U.S. population are increasing. Most organizations are ill-prepared to meet the challenges associated with older workers, and little research has addressed the development and implementation of effective human resource management practices for an aging workforce. The ""graying of America"" requires that we give more attention to both the problems and potential of an older workforce. Consequently, the book focuses on issues related to work life and aging. Topics include: age stereotyping (and employment discrimination); the impact of aging on cognitive performance, job performance, job attitudes, and motivation; the evolving concept of retirement, and what these issues mean for organizational human resource management policies and procedures. Without being particularly academic, the book provides a ""state-of-the-science"" perspective on what we know about issues related to the older worker, thus providing a foundation for confronting the challenges facing the workforce of the future. ""The Aging Workforce"" pulls together research findings relevant to individual older worker performance and motivations, as well as offers discussion related to how best to manage the older worker.

From the national maritime strike of 1890 to the violent dockside clashes of 1998, the waterfront has loomed large as a key battle site in Australian industrial relations. After Robert Menzies was swept to power on a wave of anti-communist sentiment in 1949, it emerged as the nation's own Cold War frontline. By 1950, Australia's wharves were plagued by problems, including inefficient management, backward methods and archaic equipment. As on-going hostility between waterside workers and employers erupted in conflicts over pay and conditions, the government did not hesitate to play on public paranoia. All problems, it claimed, were caused by Kremlin-controlled union leaders intent on crippling the Australian economy. Allegations abounded that wharfies were involved in a communist take-over plot, that their overtime bans were planned in Moscow, that they might plant atomic bombs in Australian ports. But what were the real issues? Tom Sheridan goes beyond the propaganda of the era to reveal for the first time the true causes of waterfront unrest. He depicts the distinctive cultures of shipowners and wharfies and explores the complex role played by government through the relationships between Menzies and his labour ministers, Harold Holt and Billy McMahon. In a compelling story of strikes, lockouts, troop intervention, ASIO surveillance and secret plots and counter-plots, Sheridan vividly captures the drama of the waterfront under Menzies.

Working Mothers in Europe combines comparative perspectives on social policies with analyses of mothers' practices as evidenced in macro data and as explored in country based case studies. Social policy research has emphasised the impact of particular welfare systems and their policies on women's integration into the labour market and the organisation of care and work. However, the authors argue that policies are not the only factor, and, hitherto, we have very little knowledge of the precise interactions between social policies and social practices of individuals and families. In order to accurately grasp the cross-country variation of mothers' work and care arrangements in Europe, this book assembles a comparative approach towards welfare systems and social policies with an analysis of mothers' social practices in several European countries. Exploring the ways in which working mothers manage to combine care responsibilities and paid work on the basis of diverse public and private resources, this book will be invaluable to academics, researchers and students interested in the social sciences. More generally, the book will greatly appeal to those with an interest in women's employment, gender relations and the needs of children as matters that are tackled in the interaction between social policy and individuals.

In this book, Mireya Loza sheds new light on the private lives of migrantmen who participated in the Bracero Program (1942-1964), a binationalagreement between the United States and Mexico that allowed hundredsof thousands of Mexican workers to enter this country on temporary workpermits. While this program and the issue of temporary workers has longbeen politicized on both sides of the border, Loza argues that the prevailingromanticized image of braceros as a family-oriented, productive, legal workforcehas obscured the real, diverse experiences of the workers themselves.Focusing on underexplored aspects of workers' lives-such as their transnationalunion-organizing efforts, the sexual economies of both hetero andqueer workers, and the ethno-racial boundaries among Mexican indigenousbraceros-Loza reveals how these men defied perceived political, sexual, andracial norms. Basing her work on an archive of more than 800 oral histories from theUnited States and Mexico, Loza is the first scholar to carefully differentiatebetween the experiences of mestizo guest workers and the many Mixtec,Zapotec, Purhepecha, and Mayan laborers. In doing so, she captures themyriad ways these defiant workers responded to the intense discriminationand exploitation of an unjust system that still persists today.

This volume presents Richard Blundell's outstanding research on the modern economic analysis of labor markets and public policy reforms. Professor Blundell's hugely influential work has enhanced greatly our understanding of how individuals' behavior on the labor market respond to taxation and social policy influence. Edited by IZA, this volume brings together the author's key papers, some co-authored and some unpublished, with new introductions and an epilogue. It covers some of the main research insights in the study of labor supply. The question of how individuals adapt their behavior in response to policy changes is one of the most investigated topics in empirical labor and public economics. Do people reduce their working hours if governments decide to raise taxes? Might they even withdraw completely from the labor market? Labor supply estimations are extensively used for various policy analyses and economic research. Labor supply elasticities are key information when evaluating tax-benefit policy reforms and their effect on tax revenue, employment, and redistribution. The chapters cover empirical and theoretical developments as well as applications to tax and welfare reform, and each represents a substantive research contribution from Blundell's publications in top research outlets.

Discrimination's dynamic nature means that no single theory, method, data or study should be relied upon to assess its magnitude, causes, or remedies. Despite some gains in our understanding, these remain active areas of debate among researchers, practitioners and policymakers. The specially commissioned papers in this volume, all by distinguished contributors, present the full range of issues related to this complex and challenging problem. Part 1 explores innovations in methods and data collection that help to provide richer descriptions of inequality. Part 2 reviews empirical evidence on discrimination that people with disabilities, older workers and gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals face. Although discrimination among these groups is not new, this Handbook shows that economists are beginning to more fully document their experiences. Part 3 presents a balanced discussion of anti-discrimination policies and the impact of affirmative action. The methods and data chapters are particularly designed to encourage researchers to utilize the new approaches and develop new data sources. Accessible and comprehensive, the Handbook is the seminal reference on the economics of discrimination for academic and professional economists, graduate students, advanced undergraduates, practitioners, policymakers, and funders of social science research.

Despite the fact that immigration policy is today one of the most salient political issues in the OECD countries, we know surprisingly little about the factors behind the very different choices countries have made over the last decades when it comes to immigrant admission. Why has the balance between inclusion and exclusion differed so much between countries - and for different categories of migrants? The answer that this book provides is that this is to an important extent a result of how domestic labour market and welfare state institutions have approached the question of inclusion and exclusion, since immigration policy does not stand independent from these central policy areas. By developing and testing an institutional explanation for immigrant admission, this book offers a theoretically informed, and empirically rich, analysis of variation in immigration policy in the OECD countries from the 1980s to the 2000s.

Organisations and the nature of work have undergone fundamental changes in recent decades. At the same time, the traditional family pattern in Europe is being challenged by the growing number of dual-income families, and by the rise of women's employment. The central aim of this book is to consider to what extent changes in organisations and in the nature of jobs are compatible with the need, increasingly expressed by employees, for greater integration between work and family life. The book questions what sort of dilemmas modern and future employees face, in terms of shaping their careers and organising their lives at home. The authors formulate answers to these problematic questions by shedding light on relevant developments in the European labour markets, the European workplaces, in (flexible) working patterns, changing preferences for working hours and in gender relations at work. With a focus on future developments, this book will be of interest to labour market researchers and social policymakers in Europe, and also students in the social sciences, management (HRM) and social policy.

This book takes a fresh look at professions - their history and sociology, and at the nature both of professional practice and professional competence. Based on research by the authors across 20 varied professions, the book offers an innovative model of professional competence and throws new light on how competence is acquired. It identifies a range of informal learning processes, which seem to be just as important to becoming competent as formal training. As a result, the authors suggest a paradigm of professional development that combines informal and formal learning and also brings together academic and competence-based approaches. Professions, Competence and Informal Learning provides practical advice to professional developers on programme design as well as tips for individual professionals on how to exploit their informal learning opportunities. It draws on the research to forecast the future skills needs of professionals and suggests how professional development programmes may need to change in response. The book should be of value to anyone who is interested in professional competence, whether as a professional educator or developer, or as an individual professional. It is also potentially of use to trainers and educators in non-professional areas, especially those with an interest in informal learning.

Victory at Home is at once an institutional history of the federal War Manpower Commission and a social history of the southern labor force within the commission's province. Charles D. Chamberlain explores how southern working families used America's rapid wartime industrialization and an expanded federal presence to gain unprecedented economic, social, and geographic mobility in the chronically poor region. Chamberlain looks at how war workers, black leaders, white southern elites, liberal New Dealers, nonsouthern industrialists, and others used and shaped the federal war mobilization effort to fill their own needs. He shows, for instance, how African American, Latino, and white laborers worked variously through churches, labor unions, federal agencies, the NAACP, and the Urban League, using a wide variety of strategies from union organizing and direct action protest to job shopping and migration. Throughout, Chamberlain is careful not to portray the southern wartime labor scene in monolithic terms. He discusses, for instance, conflicts between racial groups within labor unions and shortfalls between the War Manpower Commission's national directives and their local implementation. An important new work in southern economic and industrial history, Victory at Home also has implications for the prehistory of both the civil rights revolution and the massive resistance movement of the 1960s. As Chamberlain makes clear, African American workers used the coalition of unions, churches, and civil rights organizations built up during the war to challenge segregation and disenfranchisement in the postwar South.

Labour Supply and Incentives to Work in Europe highlights recent developments in the labour supply in Europe and gives a detailed assessment of their link with economic policies and labour market institutions. Despite major changes in European labour supply during the past few decades, the existing literature still lacks a comprehensive study of the relationship between labour supply and labour market institutions from a macro perspective. The contributors, themselves from a variety of academic disciplines and backgrounds, consider aspects of labour supply such as incentives to work, determinants of labour force participation and new forms of employment relationships. Each original and specially written chapter has its own discussion chapter to follow it. The book ends with a valuable panel discussion on the topic of labour supply in an enlarged Europe. This book will be read with interest by scholars of economics and labour economics in particular, as well as those researching industrial relations.

The position of low skilled workers in the labour market has deteriorated significantly over the past three decades. What has caused this deterioration in low skilled labour demand and what can explain the different labour market responses throughout the OECD? Mark Sanders addresses these questions and evaluates proposed policies to improve upon the present situation and prevent further deterioration in the future. The author develops a theoretical framework that produces two hypotheses to explain the shift in relative demand as well as the different ways in which this shift has manifested itself. The framework is then extended by introducing unemployment, and additional hypotheses are proposed to explain the main EU-US differences. The dynamics thus uncovered yield somewhat unorthodox policy implications on income-, labour market and technology policies in Europe and the US. This comprehensive book will appeal to both scholars and academics, whilst graduate and PhD-students looking for an accessible introduction to modelling the dynamics of technical change and its interactions with the labour market will find it of great interest.

Overeducation is one of the most important mechanisms for labour market adjustment when there is an excess supply of highly skilled workers. However, there is much debate about the consequences of this phenomena and the short- and long-term effects for both the overeducated worker and the economy as a whole. This book contributes to our understanding of recent developments in the research on overeducation by providing a detailed overview of the pertinent theoretical and policy issues. The authors study evidence that a substantial number of workers in Europe are overqualified and challenge the wisdom of greater investments in the education of the workforce. Although it may appear a waste of resources if many workers have a higher level of education than their job requires, others argue that overeducation may actually facilitate the development of a competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in Europe. They move on to look at labour mobility and skill mismatches in the labour market, and examine the impact of overeducation on earnings. They also address the somewhat controversial issue of how to measure employee overqualification, and propose an income ratio based on the difference between actual and potential earnings as an effective approach. Finally, they look at the effect of overeducation on specific groups in society such as licensed professionals, university graduates and ethnic minorities. Economists, social scientists, and academics interested in labour market theory and policy will find this an insightful and original volume which will make an important addition to the literature on overeducation.

Microsimulation Modelling of Taxation and the Labour Market reports new research on behavioural microsimulation modelling of tax and transfer systems. Its aims are twofold. Firstly, the book discusses the rationale for the basic modelling approach adopted and provides information on econometric methods used to estimate behavioural relationships. Secondly, it describes the Melbourne Institute Tax and Transfer Simulator (MITTS) in detail, explaining its main features, installation and use.After providing a broad review of tax modelling, the authors review alternative approaches to the analysis of labour supply behaviour, discuss the main components of behavioural microsimulation models and present econometric results concerning wage functions and preferences. They go on to provide a detailed description of MITTS, which was constructed by the authors in order to examine the implications of tax reforms in Australia. Microsimulation Modelling of Taxation and the Labour Market will appeal to those with a special interest in the analysis of tax and transfer systems and labour supply behaviour.

Nonlinear Models, Labour Markets and Exchange offers a number of broad introductory surveys in the areas of nonlinear modelling, labour economics and the economic analysis of exchange. This collection of articles consists largely of recently published refereed papers. The early chapters provide an introduction to the analysis of 'chaos and strange attractors' and the use of the very flexible generalised exponential family of frequency distributions in analysing both time series and cross-sectional distributions. The volume then provides syntheses of the theories of internal labour markets, trade union bargaining, and population ageing and its implications. It goes on to survey a range of topics in the broad area of the theory of exchange, which is central to the neoclassical economic model. Finally, the book provides some advice for students who are about to start their first piece of research. It ends with a unique survey of the history of economic analysis. Providing introductory material and syntheses of a wide range of topics, Nonlinear Models, Labour Markets and Exchange will be welcomed by economics academics and researchers interested in labour economics and econometrics.

During the last decade, privatization, understood here as the transfer of state-owned enterprises to the private sector, has become a widespread phenomenon among formerly socialist and mixed economies. It has been touted as a quick route to growth and prosperity in countries suffering from bloated, inefficient, and debt ridden public sectors. The contributors to this book, drawn from a number of social science disciplines, explore the various ways in which privatization programs affect workers in the reforming countries. The book includes an examination of how privatization impacts on labor economically, by changing the level and conditions of employment, as well as its influence on wages, benefits, and social services. A second section looks at the political effects of privatization on workers, focusing on the strength and militancy of trade unions and their relationship to political parties. The essays, written by scholars as well as policy practitioners, cover both post-socialist countries, including Russia, China, and Eastern Europe, and the developing regions - the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Scholars and students in economics and political science as well as policymakers will find this collection a welcome addition to the literature on privatization.

The 19th century witnessed an explosion of writing about unproductivity, with the exploits of various idlers, loafers, and "gentlemen of refinement" capturing the imagination o fa country that was deeply ambivalent about its work ethic. Idle Threats documents this American obsession with unproductivity and its potentials, while offering an explanation of the profound significance of idle practices for literary and cultural production. While this fascination with unproductivity memorably defined literary characters from Rip Van Winkle to Bartleby to George Hurstwood, it also reverberated deeply through the entire culture, both as a seductive ideal and as a potentially corrosive threat to upright, industrious American men. Drawing on an impressive array of archival material and multifaceted literary and cultural sources, Idle Threats connects the question of unproductivity to other discourses concerning manhood, the value of art, the allure of the frontier, the usefulness of knowledge, the meaning of individuality, and the experience of time, space, and history. Andrew Lyndon Knighton offers a new way of thinking about the largely unacknowledged "productivity of the unproductive," revealing the incalculable and sometimes surprising ways in which American modernity transformed the relationship between subjects and that which is most intimate to them: their own activity.

Higher education is beginning to play an increasingly important role in the process of globalization, which promotes information technologies, development and diffusion of innovations and the ability of economies to benefit from rapid shifts in the production of goods, services, and ideas. In this volume the editors have brought together some of the most significant previously published academic papers describing how highly skilled graduate labour impacts on the economy. Topics covered include the economic benefits of higher education, student choice of subject and university, the technology of higher education, empirical research on the cost functions faced by universities, the funding and financing of university education, the market for higher education and how universities compete. In their scholarly introduction, the editors provide an overview of the volume and offer suggestions for future research in this field.