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 rests on three thematic pillars: the limits of conventional macroeconomics; the long-run agenda of structural transformation and the development of capabilities. Islam and Kucera highlight the tenuous links of conventional macroeconomics with core development concerns. The chapters of this book enunciate an empirical approach to track the various sources of structural transformation and nurture the thesis that investment in infrastructure leads to the inculcation of capabilities, broadly defined to include knowledge accumulation, dissemination and application. The editors reinterpret social protection from the perspective of inclusive development and structural transformation. The volume examines secular trends in the functional distribution of income and explores their possible macroeconomic consequences by developing a two-country macroeconomic model for open economies. It seeks to establish whether growing inequality in many countries combined with stagnant real incomes is one of the sources of the global and financial crisis of 2007-2009.

This book consists of four parts: I. Labour demand and supply, II. Productivity slowdown and innovative activity, III. Disequilibrium and business cycle analysis, and IV. Time series analysis of output and employment. It presents a fine selection of articles in the growing field ofthe empirical analysis of output and employment fluctuations with applications in a micro-econometric or a time-series framework. The time-series literature recently has emphasized the careful testing for stationarity and nonlinearity in the data, and the importance of cointegration theory. An essential part of the papers make use of parametric and non-parametric methods developed in this literature and mostly connect their results to the hysteresis discussion about the existence of fragile equilibria. A second set of macro approaches use the disequilibrium framework that has found so much interest in Europe in recent years. The other papers use newly developed methods for microdata, especially qualitative data or limited dependent variables to study microeconomic models of behaviour that explain labour market and output decisions.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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."

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 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.

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.

The idea was simple: pack a suitcase, go to another city where you have no connections and try to find a job, anonymously. That was the idea that took Florence Aubenas - one of France's most accomplished undercover journalists - on a journey into the worst recession since the Great Depression. Day after day she searched for work, one unemployed worker among others, with no special skills or qualifications. She immersed herself in the crowd of job seekers, going from one employment office to another, eventually managing to cobble together a few hours working as a night cleaner on a ferry that crossed the English Channel. For many people the global financial crisis seems real enough but remote from their daily lives. They have little sense of what it really means to be unemployed in the midst of a recession. Florence Aubenas was determined to find out. This book is the story of her journey. The Night Cleaner became an instant number one bestseller in France and has subsequently become a bestseller in many countries throughout the world. Better than any academic treatise on the topic, this book shows what recession means today.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This Handbook focuses on the complexity surrounding the interaction between trade, labour mobility and development, taking into consideration social, economic and human rights implications, and identifies mechanisms for lawful movements across borders and their practical implementation.

This book studies the dynamics of monetary and fiscal interactions in the Euro Area. The policy makers are the European Central Bank and national governments. The primary target of the ECB is low inflation. And the primary target of a national government is low unemployment. However, there is a short-run trade-off between low inflation and low unemployment. Here the main focus is on sequential policy decisions. Another focus is on simultaneous and independent policy decisions. And a third focus is on policy cooperation. There are demand shocks, supply shocks, and mixed shocks. There are country-specific shocks and common shocks. The key question is: Given a shock, what are the dynamic characteristics of the resulting process?

This book presents and analyzes how restructuring processes due to technological change are reflected and processed in political and public discourses in the United States in the most recent past. More specifically, this work examines how the themes of automation, digitization, and the platform economy and their impact on the future of work are reflected in public discourse through the analysis of journalistic articles, and political discourse through the analysis of congressional hearings. Public and political discourses, as well as economic narratives, shape our understanding of certain developments such as technological change, our behavior more generally, and societal support of said developments. Therefore, it is vital to investigate and analyze these discourses in order to show how technological change is perceived and evaluated today. This work draws from concepts and methods of several different disciplines, most notably using a combination of corpus-linguistic methods and exemplary textual analysis. This way, this work stands as truly interdisciplinary, with a unique approach to the quantitative and qualitative examination of discourses.

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.