Trade unions have experienced considerable global decline since the late 1970s. Although union influence remains significant in most nations, many unions have witnessed a fall in membership, on which this influence ultimately depends. Past attempts at turning the fortunes of unions around in the face of 'globalisation' and national predicaments have been the concern of union leaderships. In the case of Nigeria, such events are economic circumstances, the use of legal instrumentality such as decrees and edicts, and lack of democratic environment due to constant military intervention in Nigeria's political system.In light of the current global developments, especially in relation to density decline of trade union membership and the role trade unions are expected to play in industrial relations, The Impact of Political Action on Labour Movement Strength explores the consequences of government action and the economic and political policies on union membership and clout. This book investigates the forms of political action undertaken by trade unions and reviews the conditions under which these actions succeed or fail, whilst exploring how trade unions balance this function in relation to their main aim of collective bargaining.

Kirsten Sehnbruch uses the case study of Chile to show the failures and inner-working of neo-liberal labour policy. She shows in detail what the real policy issue should be, namely the creation of proper institutions and of a corps of competent professionals with relevant skills and powers to operate them. This is extremely timely work, in that institutions are a matter of enormous concern in the international development community of policy-makers, who are desperate to make current orthodoxy work in terms of sustainability, the quality of life, human development and other dimensions beyond GDP growth.

This volume examines the source of ideas in active labor market policies in the US, France, Denmark, UK and at European Union level. What are the most likely trajectories of active labour market policies in different national settings? Will welfare reform become more punitive towards welfare recipients, thus implying that the EU will just pay lip service to the commitment to social justice that is at the core of the European social model?

This book deals with the role host countries' institutional characteristics play in the labour market integration of immigrants in the European Union. Drawing on existing research it develops a comprehensive conceptual framework of factors (and underlying mechanisms) affecting immigrant structural integration in the European Union-15. It maps the European countries with respect to three institutional aspects central to immigrant integration, immigration policies, labour market structure and welfare regimes. Further, it presents a descriptive picture of the labour market situation of the immigrant population in the European Union and seeks to explain the variation in labour market outcomes, namely unemployment risk and occupational status, with reference to differences in the characteristics of the immigrant populations on the one hand, and by differences in labour market structure, immigration policies and welfare regimes in European Union countries, on the other.

Empirical and mathematically rigorous, this book provides a study of the economics of prostitution rather than focusing on the sociological and cultural themes. Using economic tools of analysis, internationally based editors have put together a theoretically informed volume that explores the supply and demand of prostitution.

Prostitution is a globalized industry involving millions of workers and it is characterized by a high degree of inequality in working conditions (ranging from slavery to self-managed and legalized unionized employment), by different sub-markets and fully integrated in the productive system.

Taking a provocative approach to prostitution, this book is a must read for students and researchers in the area of gender and economics.

Labour markets are differentiated by occupation and types of training, and these submarkets are seldom in equilibrium. This disequilibrium -- shortages and surpluses in labour markets -- is often attributed to a lack of flexibility in wage structures, the limited possibility for substitution between submarkets, and the high adjustment costs. In addition, market changes are difficult to foresee, thus making it equally difficult to respond appropriately. This book contains the results of research from three major European institutes -- the Research Centre for Education and the Labor Market (ROA) at the University of Limburg in the Netherlands, the Institute for Employment Research (IER) at the University of Warwick in the U.K., and Institut fA1/4r Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB) at the Bundesanstalt fA1/4r Arbeit in Germany -- looking at how each institute conducts labour market forecasts by education and type of training. The common element of these institutes is their use of the manpower requirements method. The book is grouped into three parts -- Models and Methods, Forecasts, and Reflections -- with each institute presenting its results in each section.

The rapid growth of offshore outsourcing in manufacturing and IT-based services is unleashing dramatic changes around the world. This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners to analyze the implications of this huge transformation. For some observers, offshore outsourcing promises more rapid economic growth for both developed and developing countries. For others, it unravels the social contract in today's rich countries, as labor and governments lose bargaining power vis-a-vis globally mobile capital. For yet others, it offers some developing countries the opportunity to leapfrog, while pushing others even further to the sidelines. This book provides a uniquely comprehensive, yet diverse account of the winners and losers from offshore outsourcing and of how policy might be used to spread its benefits more widely and equally.

Assessing the effectiveness of the North American Agreement on Labour Cooperation (NAALC), this book examines the operation of the core institutions (the Secretariat and National Administrative Offices) over the past seven years. It discusses the main functions of these institutions in hearing public submissions on violations of labour laws and in conducting research and cooperative activities. Based on interview research, the analysis reviews the strengths and weaknesses of the accord to assess its contribution to a common labour relations regime in North America and its impact in creating new transnational communities of actors in government and civil society in the three countries. The NAALC is also compared with the social dimension of the European Union system, and a final assessment is made as to whether the NAALC institutions live up to the promises of their founders and whether these can be a model for labour relations in any future Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement.

Creative Labour Regulation is an interdisciplinary response to the central contemporary challenges to effective labour regulation. Drawing on contributions by leading experts from the Regulating for Decent Work Network, it offers new ideas for research and policy.The book identifies three central challenges to contemporary labour regulation: intensifying labour market fragmentation; complex interactions between labour market institutions; and obstacles to effective enforcement. International in scope, the volume includes chapters on both advanced economies (Europe and the United States) and the developing world (Argentina, Cambodia, South Africa and Viet Nam).Topics addressed include the regulation of precarious and informal work, the role of minimum wage regulation in industrialized and low-income countries, the promise and limitations of 'hybrid' public-private enforcement mechanisms - including in the International Labour Organization/International Finance Corporation's Better Work programme - and the involvement of labour inspectorates and civil society organizations in implementing labour standards.Creative Labour Regulation acknowledges the complexity of ensuring labour protection in contemporary economies. It concludes, however, that innovation in devising more effective legal regulation is possible, in both the advanced industrialized world and in low-income countries.

Does flexible working really provide a better work-life balance? Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, flexible working has become the norm for many workers. This volume offers an original examination of flexible working using data from 30 European countries and drawing on studies conducted in Australia, the US and India. Rather than providing a better work-life balance, the book reveals how flexible working can lead to exploitation, which manifests differently for women and men, such as more care responsibilities or increased working hours. Taking a critical stance, this book investigates the potential risks and benefits of flexible working and provides crucial policy recommendations for overcoming the negative consequences.

This significant book explains how work-life balance is being destroyed because individuals fail to link their work effort with its adverse environmental effects and the personal costs they impose. The burgeoning literature dealing with work-life balance suggests that the developed world is more interested in this issue today than at any other time in the recent past. Provocative and insightful, Work, Leisure and the Environment presents a rigorous explanation based on economic theory as to why contemporary societies suffer from over-work and work-life imbalance, asserting that they are both the cause and effect of environmental degradation. The author focuses upon a fundamental flaw in contemporary market economies that causes individuals to unknowingly reduce their well-being by working and consuming excessively, while enjoying inadequate leisure time. It is argued that this inability to correctly assess the benefits derived from their work effort causes individuals to place unreasonable and unsustainable demands on the environment. By ignoring the environmental destruction that accompanies work effort, its benefits are overestimated and, as a consequence, individuals voluntarily choose to work longer hours than they should. This engaging volume will have widespread appeal amongst researchers and policymakers interested in the environment, consumerism and labour markets and will also be an invaluable reference tool for studies into leisure and work-life balance.

This book, adopting a multidisciplinary approach, investigates the definition of autonomous work and the kind of protection it receives and should receive in a global perspective. The book advocates for the existence of genuine autonomous work to be distinguished from employment and false self-employment. It deserves specific attention from legislators in the view of removing any obstacles to the exercise of freedom of association and collective action at large. The book is divided into two parts. The first focuses on the evolving notion of autonomy and its consequences on social protection, offering a theoretical frame from an organizational, political and legal point of view. The second aims at discovering new regulatory and protective horizons for autonomous work, in the light of blockchain, platform work, EU Competition Law, social security and liberal professions. Finally, the authors offer insights and recommendations on how to protect work beyond categories.

This authoritative book, bringing together the reports of the Competitiveness Advisory Group, identifies actions to improve European competitiveness politically, economically and socially. The objective is to raise living standards and maintain social cohesion. The Competitiveness Advisory Group has the mission of advising the European Commission and the Heads of State and Government of the European Union. The members of this independent group, which includes leading industrialists, trade unionists, politicians and academics, have adopted a 'bottom-up' approach, seeking to draw lessons from the experience of countries, industries and firms: they rely on 'benchmarking' in order to identify best practice. In the context of increasing interdependence of world trade and consequent globalization of the international economy new policy prescriptions are required for growth and employment, greater efficiency and higher standards of living. In relation to this, the Group discusses the need to close the worldwide technology gap, for Europe to develop deeper relations with the fast growing Asia Pacific region and argues for greater European solidarity in international trade negotiations. Within the European Union itself, it emphasizes the need to achieve the internal market for the free flow of goods, services and people. In addition, it stresses that Europe needs to catch-up, construct and eventually lead the development of the information society in which workers are recognized as a major asset to be invested in. The Group concludes that, although unemployment remains high, European competitiveness now has a brighter future with the movement towards economic and monetary union, and the enlargement of the European Union eastwards. This book will be essential reading for policymakers, government advisers, industrialists and academics concerned with the future of European economies and societies.

The vision of a 'new' international division of labour, involving relocation of 'traditional' industrial activities to the Third World and specialisation in 'high-technology' industries by developed countries is an attractive one. But critics respond that this vision conceals the reality of heightened exploitation in the former and industrial and geographic decline in the latter. However, critical approaches are sometimes vitiated by economistic, functionalist and determinist arguments. Because of the potential they offer to overcome these conceptual dilemmas, French regulation theories have attracted attention among scholars from diverse disciplines. This book assesses the implications of French regulation theories for our understanding of the concept of the international division of labour. It distinguishes the Parisian approach, represented by Michel Aglietta and Alain Lipietz, from the Grenoble school. It is based on a thorough study of the French literature and on interviews with the major theorists. For English-language readers, the book offers an excellent introduction to Francophone debates in international political economy.

This book presents over twenty authors' reflections on 'curating care' - and presents a call to give curatorial attention to the primacy of care for all life, and for more 'caring curating' that responds to the social, ecological and political analysis of curatorial caregiving. Social and ecological struggles for a different planetary culture based on care and respect for the dignity of life is reflected in contemporary curatorial practices that explore human and nonhuman interdependence. The prevalence of themes of care in curating is a response to a dual crisis: the crisis of social and ecological care that characterizes global politics, and the professional crisis of curating under the pressures of the increasingly commercialized cultural landscape. Foregrounding that all beings depend on each other for life and survival, this book collects theoretical essays, methodological challenges and case studies from curators working in different global geographies to explore the range of ways in which curatorial labour is rendered as care. Practicing curators, activists and theorists situate curatorial labour in the context of today's general care crisis. This volume answers to the call to more fully understand how their transformative work allows for imagining the future of bodily, social, and environmental care and the ethics of interdependency differently.

This book is concerned with the ways in which the problem of security is thought about and promoted by a range of actors and agencies in the public, private and nongovernmental sectors. The authors are concerned not simply with the influence of risk-based thinking in the area of security, but seek rather to map the mentalities and practices of security found in a variety of sectors, and to understand the ways in which thinking from these sectors influence one another. Their particular concern is to understand the drivers of innovation in the governance of security, the conditions that make innovation possible and the ways in which innovation is imagined and realised by actors from a wide range of sectors. The book has two key themes: first, governance is now no longer simply shaped by thinking within the state sphere, for thinking originating within the business and community spheres now also shapes governance, and influence one another. Secondly, these developments have implications for the future of democratic values as assumptions about the traditional role of government are increasingly challenged. The first five chapters of the book explore what has happened to the governance of security, through an analysis of the drivers, conditions and processes of innovation in the context of particular empirical developments. Particular reference is made here to 'waves of change' in security within the Ontario Provincial Police in Canada. In the final chapter the authors examine the implications of 'nodal governance' for democratic values, and then suggest normative directions for deepening democracy in these new circumstances.

High unemployment rates in the period of an internationalization of economies and an intensified technological competition are the main problems that exist in most EU countries. Taking stock of unemployment patterns, technological trends and employment opportunities in the EU and the US is crucial for the reform debate in Europe. In continental Europe, major problems are an insufficient creation of new firms in innovative technology fields, inadequate labor market developments and inconsistent R&D policies. Founded on new data evaluations, the book presents an innovative analysis of these topics and shows opportunities for reforms.

In economics, the voluntary sector is surprisingly understudied. In order to fully understand economics, unpaid and voluntary work needs to be taken into account and afforded the same status as paid activities. This book constitutes a rigorous economic analysis with special emphasis on gender issues and covers every conceivable angle of unpaid work and all its ramifications for the modern economy. The unified vision offered by this group of leading contributors ensures this book is a work of excellent quality. There is every chance it will become a seminal study on unpaid work and as such will provide a useful reference for students and academics involved in gender studies, econometrics, and consumption studies.

Search Theory and Unemployment contains nine chapters that survey and extend the theory of job search and its application to the problem of unemployment. The volume ranges from surveys of job search theory that take microeconomic and macroeconomic perspectives to original theoretical contributions which focus on the externalities arising from non-sequential search and search under imperfect information. It includes a clear and authoritative survey of econometric methods that have been developed to estimate models of job search, as well as two lucid contributions to the empirical search literature. Finally, it includes a study that reviews and extends the literature on optimal unemployment insurance and concludes with an appraisal of the influence of search theory on the thinking of macroeconomic policymakers.

This volume is a collection of selected papers using the framework of inframarginal analysis of the division of labour held at Monash University on 6-7 July 2001. This framework, pioneered mainly by Professor Xiaokai Yang, (with joint researches involving all the three editors and many of the authors), has been recommended by Professor James Buchanan (Nobel Laureate in Economics) as the most important analysis in economics in the world today.

This book explores the extent to which a transformation of public employment regimes has taken place in four Western countries, and the factors influencing the pathways of reform. It demonstrates how public employment regimes have unravelled in different domains of public service, contesting the idea that the state remains a 'model' employer.

This essential student resource is the first of its kind to study this period. Working chronologically from the early 1840s up to the end of the twentieth century, it examines over 150 years of women's employment history and the struggles they have faced.
With suggestions for research topics, an annotated bibliography to aid further research and a chronology of important events which places the subject in a broader historical context, Gerry Holloway considers how factors such as class, age, marital status, race and locality, along with wider economic and political issues, have affected women's job opportunities and status.
Key themes and issues that run through the book include:
* continuity and change
* the sexual division of labor
* women as a cheap labor force
* women's perceived primary role of motherhood
* women and trade unions
* equality and difference
* education and training.
Students of women's studies, gender studies and history will find this a fascinating and invaluable addition to their reading material.