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.

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 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.

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.

This book has three purposes. First, to convince professional economists who study the behaviour of the economic system as a whole that they must re-examine some of the assumptions behind the reigning economic theories. Second, to explain to the general public why the currently fashionable economic policies cannot solve the problem of massive long term unemployment. Third, to show that if people's political engagement is revived there is hope for escaping from the economic morass and moral wasteland into which, ever since the 1970s, the fashionable policies have been leading us. To elucidate the theoretical problem the authors pass in review several recent structural developments and consider their effect on the economy. To encourage renewed public political engagement they draw attention to the risks involved in allowing things to drift on in the present direction. The avowed purpose of the book imposes the need to present it in a manner accessible at once to professional macroeconomists and to a wider public ofpeople concerned about today's malaise, politicians, sociologists or philosophers and others. This imposes the need not to encumber readers with the customary glut of academic references in the text, and to refer only to the best known and politically most influential theories and to authors who are also widely known to people who are not professional economists.

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.

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."

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.

Europe 's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2009. Before its birth many observers were concerned about its viability. This volume examines a number of noteworthy concerns that were heard a decade ago and it assesses what has become of them. The contributors to this volume examine various topics. Has EMU been a failure or success? Does EMU require more political integration? What type of deeper integration in the financial market has occurred because of EMU? Does the public like EMU? Does EMU cause a decline of the welfare state, reduce the role of labour unions and are adjustments now made mainly through the labour market? Do countries in EMU become more similar over time? Is EMU sustainable in the long-run? Will EMU survive the global financial crisis? The contributors to this book are leading Political Scientists in the field, and draw on a wealth of research and experience.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

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.

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.

This book presents research findings from across the global South that substantively improves our understanding of time-use, poverty and gender equalities, to shed light on why unpaid work is indispensable to economic analysis and effective policy making.

The results of this extremely data-rich study reveal that women attorneys are victimized by less obvious forms of discrimination than their male counterparts. Based on results of surveys conducted by the ABA in 1984 and 1990, this work challenges the notion that legislation outlawing discrimination actually works. Setting controls for a whole host of individual, firm, and locational characteristics, the study determined that although hourly earnings of female lawyers do not differ appreciably from those of male lawyers, the incidence of promotion from associate to partner is greater for men than for otherwise comparable women. Lentz and Laband also found evidence of sexual harassment and other less-tangible aspects of sex discrimination in the legal workplace. This book is essential reading for members of law firms, labor economists, feminist scholars, and human resource professionals.

A flexible labour market is widely regarded as a key factor in encouraging economic growth and prosperity. In recent years some economies have successfully reformed their labour markets, making part-time and flexible hours easier, limiting the restrictive practices of trade unions, encouraging training and the enhancement of the skills of those in the labour market, coping with the changing age profile of the workforce and in other ways. Other economies have been less successful at labour market reform and continue to struggle with outdated structures and practices. This book discusses the key elements of labour market reform, contrasting a country where reforms have been successfully carried through, Australia, with a country where reforms have been less successful, Japan. At the same time, this book challenges the conventional view that Australia is the lucky country for all its workers ? given the rising hours worked for those in work and the difficulties for young people entering the labour market. Both countries also face issues in terms of an ageing population, and policy challenges in the design of safety nets and pension provision. The book thereby demonstrates to analysts of labour market reform worldwide the key elements of successful labour market reform, and the consequential effects when the reforms are carried through, or not.

"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"--

Sabbaticals for everyone? Not quite, but there's plenty of good reason to extend them beyond academia and into selected sectors of the world outside. Lawyer and teacher Daniel C. Kramer shows from his own meticulous research and others' that sabbatical programs that now exist have produced greater benefits than costs, and that they could be spread to most of the American work force with a simple amendment to the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. They must be conceived and administrated commonsensically, of course, and there will always be places where they won't work. But there's enough evidence that they will work--primarily in organizations of more than 50 people--and in the public and private sectors both. A challenging, thought-provoking book for policy- and executive decision-makers throughout the country, and new fuel for debate within the academic community as well.

Kramer summarizes just about all of the existing research on the topic and finds that the benefits of sabbaticals to those who have taken them far exceed whatever disruptions they may have caused to their organizations. He examines for-profit companies, high tech as well as the more traditional ones, and not-for-profit and governmental organizations too. He looks at elementary and secondary schools, medical settings, and churches and reports on the personal experiences of many who have taken them, summarized from other books and articles as well as from what was disclosed to him personally in the course of his own conversations with more than 100 people in various work settings. Sabbatical grantees travel, spend more time with their children, or just relax--and most of them return to their desks more enthusiastic about their work and better able to do it than before they left. From the organization's viewpoint, Kramer finds that sabbaticals are not as costly as many think, nor do they impede the work flow as some fear--not if they are administrated with ordinary understanding of the basic principles he carefully elucidates. He concludes with a discussion of how such programs could easily be mandated into law, and gives a final, persuasive argument why he thinks they should be.

Advances in technological innovations, automation, and the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have revolutionized the nature of work and created a demand for a new set of skills to navigate the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0). Therefore, it is necessary to equip displaced workers with a new set of skills that are essential for conversion into technical or other functional areas of business. Human Capital Formation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an essential research publication that recognizes the need to revitalize human capital formation for graduate employability in Industry 4.0 and discusses new skills and competencies needed to cope with the challenges present within this industrial revolution. The book seeks to provide a basis for curriculum design in line with the advances in technological innovations, automation, and artificial intelligence to enhance current and future employment. Featuring an array of topics such as curriculum design, emotional intelligence, and healthcare, this book is ideal for human resource managers, development specialists, training officers, teachers, universities, practitioners, academicians, researchers, managers, policymakers, and students.

Economic development has cyclical dynamics and long-term dynamics - the latter are typically related to demographical changes, innovation and long-term insti- tional changes in open economies. Financial markets - that means mainly capital markets - and labor markets are affected in OECD countries both by innovations and institutional reforms. As regards demographics ageing is a typical challenge on both sides of the Atlantic, and pension reforms in industrialized countries have placed greater emphasis on capital markets than in previous decades. Innovation dynamics certainly are also quite important for all high wage OECD countries. The Lisbon Agenda has put particular emphasis on more growth, higher innovation dynamics and better exploitation of the advantages of a digitally networked society. Traditionally, the US has a lead in global innovations, and the US policy certainly has contributed to the American technological leadership. There still is a per capita income gap in favor of the US and the US labor market situation also looks relatively favorable, but in the ?ve years since 2001 employment growth in the euro area was higher than that of the US. The euro area is, however, a rather heterogeneous set of countries which differ in terms of institutions, attitudes and reform progress - and everywhere governments are aware that there have to be reforms, not least in the context of globalization which bring a more complex and dynamic spatial structure of value-added.

In 2001 Germany and Austria became the last EU states to lift transnational controls restricting access to their labour markets for citizens of ex-communist countries. This book challenges anti-immigration discourses to show that given the high percentage of skilled immigrants, it is the sending rather than the receiving countries who lose out.

This study attempts to deal with how China's economic reforms have undermined the "iron rice bowl" system which since the 1950s has provided both "lifetime employment" and "cradle to the grave" welfare for many workers, particularly those in state-owned enterprises. It starts by examining the background of these reforms and how they have changed workplace relations in the Chinese economy; it also looks at key themes relating to the role of trade unions and the management of human resources in both state-owned and joint-venture firms. A number of illustrative case studies involving industrial relations and human resource management are set out.

This chapter has set out in detail the models which are employed below in order to analyse the labour market effects of changes in tax rates and in alterations in the tax structure. The fundamental mechanisms underlying the different approaches have been pointed out. Moreover, vital assumptions have been emphasised. By delineating the models which are used for the subsequent analyses, implicitly statements have also been made about topics or aspects which this study does not cover. For example, all workers and firms are identical ex ante. However, ex-post differences are allowed for, inter alia, if unemploy ment occurs or if some firms have to close down. These restrictions indicate areas of future research insofar as that the findings for homogeneous workers or firms yield an unambiguous proposal for changes in tax rates or the tax structure in order to promote employment. This is because it would be desir able for tax policy to know whether the predicted effects also hold in a world with ex-ante heterogeneity. Furthermore, the product market has not played a role. Therefore, repercussions from labour markets outcomes on product demand - and vice versa - are absent. 55 Moreover, neither the process of capital accumulation, be it physical or human capital, nor substitution pos sibilities between labour and capital in the firms' production function are taken into account. Finally, international competition is not modelled."

This is a long overdue addition to a series of books and edited collections spawned initially from Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System. These 12 `theoretically informed case studies' from a 1987 conference add considerable insight to the heavy emphasis of the World-Systems approaches on macroeconomic determinism with the inclusion of ideological and cultural factors. Most cases address how capital uses social categories to cheapen industrial labor costs in Asia and the US. Two illuminating chapters analyze the `minoritization of immigrants' and variations in masculinity norms as aspects of this labor cheapening process. Choice A collection of papers presented at the Eleventh Annual Political Economy of the World-System Conference, this volume illustrates the degree to which fundamental processes of the world-system entail racist and sexist practices. The contributors have taken as their focus the attempt to both explain--in social, political, or historical terms--the pervasiveness of racism and sexism and trace the relationship between the two and the organization of the contemporary political economy. Taken together, their papers offer a more coherent treatment of the problem than has heretofore been available. By integrating an understanding of racial and sexual oppression with that of other processes that constitute the world-economy they offer new insights into the workings of the world-system and new hope for concerted efforts to eliminate racism and sexism. Many of the essays included here take the form of theoretically informed case studies. Detailed historical works explore such issues as labor force formation in the New York garment industry in the late 19th and early 20th century and competition in the world textile industry in the latter half of the 1880s. A critical analysis of the construction of census categories and an examination of the myths of differential ethnic success provide real-world examples of discrimination and its effects. A number of papers focus on the implications of our understanding of racial and sexual oppression for political struggle, while others assess the impact of women's exclusion from the workforce on power relationships in the home. Two major theoretical pieces address the issues in more general terms, emphasizing the circumstances under which racism and sexism are created and recreated in various contexts. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a necessary and enlightening re-examination of the role of race and gender in the world-economy.

The form and dynamic of wages and salaries are crucial to the shaping of industrial societies. Wage relations are regulated by states both to benefit their economies and to achieve a specific form of freedom, equity and justice. Though there are signs of a common dynamic, wage relations throughout Europe present a bewildering diversity and wage bargaining at European level remains virtually non-existent. Wages were recognised as an issue of concern by the Social Charter but the European Union has shunned direct interference. This book is intended to inform and intensify debate on wage relations in Europe. It focuses on three aspects: the state and the regulation of wages; wage forms, the reproduction of labour and living standards; and competition, the market and changes in work organisation. In papers and discussion by a range of leading experts from eastern and western Europe, rehearsed initially at a symposium supported by the European Commission, entrenched orthodoxies are challenged and new approaches proposed. Should social protection be integrated into the wage system? Are wages best determined according to the quality, quantity or value of the input or the output of labour? How do wage relations reinforce inequalities and social divisions, especially gender divisions, and exclude sections of society? Have flexibility in the labour market and unregulated competition adversely affected firms' productivity and the organization of work and pay? These and many related questions are addressed in this wide-ranging and provocative book - essential reading for all those concerned with wage policies, whether politicians, academics, employers, trade unions or those just interested'.