Using information about household consumption data from TURKSTAT's Household Surveys for 2007-13 as a sign of religious unorthodoxy, this study explores the effect of religion on women's labor force ...and educational participation in a Muslim-majority country, Turkey. A household is categorized as "unorthodox" if its members report that they consume goods that contradict conservative Sunni practices, such as alcohol. This information is then used in female labor force participation estimations. Results show that living in an unorthodox household has a positive and highly significant effect on the probability of married women's labor market participation. For single women, the estimations provide weaker evidence regarding the positive effect of unorthodoxy on the probability of participation in education and the labor force. The study concludes that protection of the rights to follow unorthodox practices in society may bear positive implications with regard to women's agency.
"We analyse occupational change over the last two decades in Britain, Germany, Spain and Switzerland: which jobs have been expanding - high-paid jobs, low-paid jobs or both? Based on individual-level ...data, four hypotheses are examined: skill-biased technical change, routinization, skill supply evolution and wage-setting institutions. We find massive occupational upgrading which matches educational expansion: employment expanded most at the top of the occupational hierarchy, among managers and professionals. In parallel, intermediary occupations (clerks and production workers) declined relative to those at the bottom (interpersonal service workers). This U-shaped pattern of upgrading is consistent with the routinization hypothesis: technology seems a better substitute for average-paid clerical and manufacturing jobs than for low-end interpersonal service jobs. Yet country differences in low-paid services suggest that wage-setting institutions channel technological change into more or less polarized patterns of upgrading. Moreover, immigration surges in Britain and Spain seem decisive in having provided the low-skilled labour supply necessary to fill low-paid jobs." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Längsschnitt; Querschnitt. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1990 bis 2008.
This study examines the relation between customer abuse and aggression, the gender and sexual expression of workers, and labour control in low-wage services. In-depth interviews with 30 lesbian, gay, ...bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)1 low-wage service sector workers reveal how customer abuse and aggression works in consort with management strategies to reproduce cis- and heteronormativity. Customer abuse and aggression disciplined worker expressions of non-normative gender and sexual identities, leading to concealment and self-policing. Management was complicit in this dynamic, placing profitability and customer satisfaction over the safety of LGBT workers, only intervening in instances of customer abuse and aggression when it had a limited economic impact. It is posited that customer abuse and aggression is not only a response to unmet expectations emanating from the labour process but is also a mechanism of labour control that disciplines worker behaviour and aesthetics, directly and indirectly, by influencing management prerogatives.
Domiciliary carers are paid care workers who travel to the homes of older people to assist with personal routines. Increasingly, over the past 20 years, the delivery of domiciliary care has been ...organised according to market principles and portrayed as the ideal type of formal care; offering cost savings to local authorities and independence for older people. Crucially, the work of the former 'home help' is transformed as domiciliary carers are now subject to the imperative of private, competitive accumulation which necessitates a constant search for increases in labour productivity. Drawing on qualitative data from domiciliary carers, managers and stakeholders, this article highlights the commodification of caring labour and reveals the constraints, contradictions and challenges of paid care work. Labour Process Theory offers a means of understanding the political economy of care work and important distinctions in terms of the formal and informal domiciliary care labour process.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of rural–urban migration on agricultural (labor) productivity in China.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper closely follows the ...framework of Rozelle
et al.
(1999), Taylor
et al.
(2003) and Atamanov and Van den Berg (2012)—new economics of labor migration—to demonstrate the heterogeneous effects of migration on agricultural productivity, using simultaneous equations extended by an interaction term of off-farm income and household wealth.
Findings
The results empirically verify two key theoretical predictions: the loss of labor available for agricultural activities decreases rice yield per worker per day, and the off-farm income that may relax liquidity constraints has a positive offsetting effect, which becomes weaker with increasing household wealth. The final calculation based on these two contradictory influences indicates that the lost-labor effect dominates across all levels of household wealth, resulting in a negative net impact of rural–urban migration on agricultural productivity. The key results are shown to hold for land productivity as well.
Originality/value
To the best of the author’s knowledge, it is the first paper to examine the impacts of rural–urban migration on labor productivity and the heterogeneity across households with different levels of wealth. A major policy issue facing national leaders is whether the massive and ongoing outflow of labor will be a threat to China’s rural development and its food security in the future. This paper provides insightful ideas in a different way.
Types of Temporary Employment Ojala, Satu; Nätti, Jouko; Lipiäinen, Liudmila
Social indicators research,
07/2018, Letnik:
138, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This study aimed to find out how heterogeneous temporary employment is reflected in later labour market attachment. Using data from Finnish Quality of Work Life Surveys in 1990, 1997 and 2003 merged ...with an 8-year register follow-up, we compared permanent workers with three categories of temporary employees: substitutes, common fixed-term (e.g. project workers), and periphery (seasonal, on-call, temporary agency and employment subsidy) workers. First, we applied sequence analysis to identify the main activities at the end of each follow-up year for all employees with permanent and temporary contracts. On this basis, we formed six typical employment sequence clusters. Second, we performed multinomial logistic regression to find out whether there are statistically significant differences between temporary and permanent employees in terms of how they are divided between the sequence clusters. Four in five permanent employees were in stable employment over the following 8 years, compared to only two in five temporary periphery workers. The corresponding proportion for substitute workers was 70% and for common fixed-term workers 64%. Compared to permanent workers, those in common fixed-term or periphery temporary employment were more likely to become unemployed, whereas substitute workers were not. Our major finding is that periphery employment clearly increases the risk of being edged out of the labour market through retirement, especially on disability pension.
This article examines the concept of slave labour through two case studies from Brazil. One involves internal migrant workers and the other cross‐border migrant workers. There have been accusations ...of slave labour in both cases. I argue that slave labour is a multi‐dimensional concept and that cognate notions (eg forced and unfree labour) could also be reconceived as multi‐dimensional. Recent works have proposed that a continuum viewing labour relations as more or less free should replace dichotomies such as free vs unfree. I argue for taking this further to recognise, first, that workers may be more or less free in different ways, and second, that the resulting conditions of employment can be characterised as more or less degrading, also in different ways. This multi‐dimensional approach allows for a better understanding of the heterogeneity of apparently unfree labour relations and for greater recognition of the agency of workers labelled as slaves.
Britain's industrial strategy, preoccupied with labour productivity, projects London as a role model because of a high gross value added (GVA) to employment ratio, an approach since followed in the ...national 'levelling-up' agenda. We demonstrate that this is misplaced: it misses the subtleties of how positive agglomeration effects act and ignores how negative effects can, for distributional reasons, cause real as well as GVA-measured productivity to rise in a misleading way. We consider the implications for both London and infrastructure projects designed to reduce productivity differentials by improving connectivity with other cities, such as the ambitious but flawed High Speed 2 (HS2).
In this article we explore the question of how as sociologists of work we might research those who constitute the substance of our labour process. We approach this question through an examination of ...the new management practices debate, principally in the labour movement where a distinctive and critical view of NMP developed in the late 1980s. Second, we argue that there is a link between this debate and the wider politics of labour process discussion both within and beyond the labour movement which has witnessed a shift away from an earlier engagement with worker interventions. In response we suggest the need to re-evaluate the nature of academic engagement with labour thus reanimating a closer engagement with labour-in-work and collective worker narratives.
Purpose
– Drawing its arguments and conclusion from a ten-year survey on workers’ experiences of labour disputes, along with anticipation of trade union reform, the purpose of this paper is to ...discuss the interaction between labour resistance and its potential for institutional change in the field of labour relations in China.
Design/methodology/approach
– This paper uses a longitudinal cohort study carried out between 2006 and 2015. The survey was conducted every two years, specifically in 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2015, in Guangdong Province, China. Questionnaire and interview methods were used; 2,166 valid sample questionnaires were collected, and 215 interviews were carried out over the research period.
Findings
– An increase in collectivized disputes in China has given rise to an escalation of labour action, characterized by wildcat strikes. Joint action has strengthened the bonds among work colleagues, and it has become more important for workers to pay attention to their rights and interests. In terms of organization, two viewpoints towards union reform were revealed: the pragmatist and the idealist perspectives. Workers with greater experience of resistance were more modest in terms of demands for union reform, while workers with some experience called for their union’s independence from the party-state.
Research limitations/implications
– The data contained industry bias, as too many respondents were from electronics-manufacturing and textile and apparel plants.
Originality/value
– This paper is original, and increases awareness of the development of the labour movement in China.
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