Historically, Canada has adopted immigration policies focused on admitting migrants who were expected to become citizens. A dramatic shift has occurred in recent years as the number of temporary ...labourers admitted to Canada has increased substantially. Legislated Inequality critically evaluates this radical development in Canadian immigration, arguing that it threatens to undermine Canada’s success as an immigrant nation. Assessing each of the four major temporary labour migration programs in Canada, contributors from a range of disciplines - including comparative political science, philosophy, and sociology - show how temporary migrants are posed to occupy a permanent yet marginal status in society and argue that Canada's temporary labour policy must undergo fundamental changes in order to support Canada's long held immigration goals. The difficult working conditions faced by migrant workers, as well as the economic and social dangers of relying on temporary migration to relieve labour shortages, are described in detail. Legislated Inequality provides an essential critical analysis of the failings of temporary labour migration programs in Canada and proposes tangible ways to improve the lives of labourers. Contributors include Abigail B. Bakan (Queen's University), Tom Carter (University of Manitoba), Sarah D'Aoust (University of Ottawa), Christina Gabriel (Carleton University), Jill Hanley (McGill University), Jenna Hennebry (Wilfrid Laurier University), Christine Hughes (Carleton University), Karen D. Hughes (University of Alberta), Jahhon Koo (McGill University), Patti Tamara Lenard (University of Ottawa), Laura Macdonald (Carleton University), Janet McLaughlin (Wilfrid Laurier University), Delphine Nakache (University of Ottawa), Jacqueline Oxman-Martinez (Université de Montréal), Kerry Priebisch (University of Guelph), André Rivard (University of Windsor), Nandita Sharma (University of Hawaii), Eric Shragge (Concordia University), Denise Spitzer (University of Ottawa), Daiva Stasuilus (Carleton University) Christine Straehle (University of Ottawa), Patricia Tomic (University of British Columbia, Okanagan), Sarah Torres (University of Ottawa), and Richard Trumper (University of British Columbia, Okanagan).
This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution, first published in 2010. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and ...nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship and the duration of schooling. The classic era of industrialisation, 1790–1850, apparently saw an upsurge in child labour. While the memoirs implicate mechanisation and the division of labour in this increase, they also show that fatherlessness and large subsets, common in these turbulent, high-mortality and high-fertility times, often cast children as partners and supports for mothers struggling to hold families together. The book offers unprecedented insights into child labour, family life, careers and schooling. Its images of suffering, stoicism and occasional childish pleasures put the humanity back into economic history and the trauma back into the industrial revolution.
"One of the most dramatic economic transformations of the past century has been the entry of women into the labor force. While many theories explain why this change took place, we investigate the ...process of transition itself. We argue that local information transmission generates changes in participation that are geographically heterogeneous, locally correlated, and smooth in the aggregate, just like those observed in our data. In our model, women learn about the effects of maternal employment on children by observing nearby employed women. When few women participate in the labor force, data are scarce and participation rises slowly. As information accumulates in some regions, the effects of maternal employment become less uncertain and more women in that region participate. Learning accelerates, labor force participation rises faster, and regional participation rates diverge. Eventually, information diffuses throughout the economy, beliefs converge to the truth, participation flattens out, and regions become more similar again. To investigate the empirical relevance of our theory, we use a new county-level data set to compare our calibrated model to the time series and geographic patterns of participation." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Längsschnitt; historisch. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1940 bis 2005.
We show that the effects of taxes on labor supply are shaped by interactions between adjustment costs for workers and hours constraints set by firms. We develop a model in which firms post job offers ...characterized by an hours requirement and workers pay search costs to find jobs. We present evidence supporting three predictions of this model by analyzing bunching at kinks using Danish tax records. First, larger kinks generate larger taxable income elasticities. Second, kinks that apply to a larger group of workers generate larger elasticities. Third, the distribution of job offers is tailored to match workers' aggregate tax preferences in equilibrium. Our results suggest that macro elasticities may be substantially larger than the estimates obtained using standard microeconometric methods.
This book, the first in the new series Advances in Labour Studies, is an international and interdisciplinary response to the neoliberal ideologies that have shaped labour market regulation in recent ...decades. International in scope, it includes chapters on both advanced economies (Canada, Europe, United States) and the developing world (Brazil, China, Indonesia, Tanzania). Co-published with Palgrave Macmillan.
The Economics of Labor Coercion Acemoglu, Daron; Wolitzky, Alexander
Econometrica,
March 2011, Letnik:
79, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are "coercive," in the sense that force or the threat ...of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms. We propose a tractable principal-agent model of coercion, based on the idea that coercive activities by employers, or "guns," affect the participation constraint of workers. We show that coercion and effort are complements, so that coercion increases effort, but coercion always reduces utilitarian social welfare. Better outside options for workers reduce coercion because of the complementarity between coercion and effort: workers with a better outside option exert lower effort in equilibrium and thus are coerced less. Greater demand for labor increases coercion because it increases equilibrium effort. We investigate the interaction between outside options, market prices, and other economic variables by embedding the (coercive) principal-agent relationship in a general equilibrium setup, and studying when and how labor scarcity encourages coercion. General (market) equilibrium interactions working through the price of output lead to a positive relationship between labor scarcity and coercion along the lines of ideas suggested by Domar, while interactions those working through the outside option lead to a negative relationship similar to ideas advanced in neo-Malthusian historical analyses of the decline of feudalism. In net, a decline in available labor increases coercion in general equilibrium if and only if its direct (partial equilibrium) effect is to increase the price of output by more than it increases outside options. Our model also suggests that markets in slaves make slaves worse off, conditional on enslavement, and that coercion is more viable in industries that do not require relationship-specific investment by workers.
The increase in female employment and participation rates is one of the most dramatic changes to have taken place in the economy during the last century. However, while the employment rate of married ...women more than doubled during the last 50 years, that of unmarried women remained almost constant. To empirically analyze these trends, we estimate a female dynamic labor supply model using an extended version of Eckstein and Wolpin (1989) to compare the various explanations in the literature for the observed trends. This dynamic model provides a much better fit to the life-cycle employment pattern than a static version of the model and a standard static reduced form model (Heckman (1979)). The main finding using the dynamic model is that the rise in education levels accounts for about 33 percent of the increase in female employment, and the rise in wages and narrowing of the gender wage gap account for another 20 percent, while about 40 percent remains unexplained by observed household characteristics. We show that this unexplained portion can be empirically attributed to cohort-specific changes in preferences or the costs of child-rearing and household maintenance. Finally, the decline in fertility and the increase in divorce rates account for only a small share of the increase in female employment rates.
The new division of labor Levy, Frank; Murnane, Richard J
2004, 2012., 20121126, 2012, 2004-01-01, 20040101
eBook, Book
Die Autoren gehen von der Tatsache aus, dass sich die Situation auf dem Arbeitsmarkt in den letzten Jahren grundlegend verändert hat: Selbst nach einer Rezession werden die durch die Automatisierung ...oder die Verlagerung in Niedriglohnländer verloren gegangenen Arbeitsplätze nicht wieder entstehen. Analysiert werden die Einflüsse der Informationstechnik auf die Arbeitsplatzstruktur, insbesondere die Möglichkeiten der Problemlösung und Kommunikation. Es wird dabei die These abgeleitet, dass komplexe Kommunikation nach wie vor eine Domäne menschlichen Handels sein wird, und Computer auf diesem Gebiet keine Alternative darstellen. Die Gesellschaft muss sich auf diese Veränderungen einzustellen, indem eine Arbeitsteilung zwischen automatisierten Jobs und gut bezahlten und hochqualifizierten Arbeitsplätze akzeptiert und gestaltet wird. Arbeitsplätze, deren Schwerpunkt auf komplexen Problemlösungen sowie auf interpersonaler Kommunikation liegt, werden in großer Zahl entstehen. Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: deskriptive Studie. (IAB).
Using 1980–2000 Census data to study the impact of source country characteristics on married adult immigrants' labor supply assimilation profiles, we find that immigrant women from countries with ...high female labor supply persistently work more than those from low-femalesupply countries. While both groups of women work less than comparable natives on arrival, women from high-female-participation countries eventually close the gap with natives entirely, and women from low-femalelabor supply countries eliminate most of it. Men's labor supply is unaffected by source country female participation, suggesting that the findings on women reflect notions of gender roles.
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