In the context of the diminishing appeal of a career at sea and the continued growth of fleets, promoting employment at sea among young people, especially women, is in the spotlight. Various ...solutions are proposed, including attractive cadet trainee programs, to encourage young people to work at sea and pursue a long-term career. However, the main hopes, incentives, and concerns of the entrants while enrolling at a maritime education and training (MET) institution remain unclear. To investigate this issue, a longitudinal study has been performed on newly enrolled Navigation students of the Gdynia Maritime University by paper-based questionnaires distributed during one of their first courses at the university. The results of this study may prove valuable in determining future seafarers' employment and retention policy-making recommendations aimed at attracting new entrants and retaining them in a number sufficient to sustain the operations of maritime transportation.
In this article, the author engages with the authors of the articles in this Special Issue by clarifying some aspects of the arguments in Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious ...Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s; addressing selected matters of controversy; and highlighting central policy challenges raised by the rise of polarized and precarious employment systems. The author organizes his comments around several key themes raised by these authors: The causes of changes in job quality; the polarization model; cross-national differences in precarious work; and policy recommendations and the politics of job quality.
The current study examined a moderated mediation model of perceived overqualification and job search, with job attitudes as mediators and the competence and growth work value as a moderator. We also ...hypothesized a positive relationship between overqualification and actual voluntary turnover behaviour. College graduates from diverse occupations completed two surveys spaced 6 months apart (n = 368). Results suggested that perceived overqualification at Time 1 led to active job search behaviour at Time 2, both directly and through job satisfaction. The direct link was moderated by work values, such that the overqualification–job search relationship was stronger for employees who highly valued work which offered skill utilization and growth. Perceived overqualification was also predictive of voluntary turnover behaviour; those at the high end of the overqualification scale were over four times more likely to have left their position than those at the low end of the scale. Finally, those who left their original positions reported less overqualification in their new positions. The current findings extend the limited existing literature by establishing relationships between overqualification and withdrawal behaviours 6 months later, and also providing evidence that individual differences may influence reactions to being overqualified.
Practitioner points
The current study found that employees who feel overqualified were more likely to be searching for a new job 6 months later, especially among those who strongly value work that utilizes their skills. Perceived overqualification was also linked to future actual turnover behaviour. Thus, organizations stand to potentially lose talented employees if they feel underutilized and underchallenged in their jobs.
These trends are particularly true of employees who strongly desire work that takes advantage of their talents, suggesting that the most ambitious employees are likely to seek alternate employment if they feel underutilized.
To retain these employees, supervisors first need to identify employees who might be feeling overqualified and underutilized, as these perceptions may or may not line up with ‘objective’ overqualification. The supervisor can then consider ways to empower the employee through increased involvement in decision‐making or offering more advanced job assignments.
ABSTRACTYoung people in the Nordic countries have many options and face obligations to participate in career guidance and counselling (guidance). In Finland, young people are subjected to multiple ...institutionalized guidance practices especially in educational transition phases. Guidance has various objectives as a public policy, thereby setting a framework for guidance professionals too. By using Foucault’s conceptualization on ‘pastoral’ power, we studied how guidance professionals (‘shepherds’) guide young people (‘the flock’) towards ‘wellbeing’. Our aim was to analyse how pastoral power is manifested in guidance practices by asking what governmental discourses the guidance professionals refer to when talking about guidance and how these discourses are practiced in guidance. Our data comprise Finnish guidance professionals’ interviews (n = 15). As a result, dominant governmental discourses of employability, economic efficiency and lifelong learning were identified. Guidance involved pastoral power and demanded employability and educability for the young. Guidance professionals have a crucial role in implementing governmental discourses into guidance practices. These practices create a narrow perspective for young people and guidance professionals, who are simultaneously the mediators and targets of governmental power.
This study explores the roots and details of the Russian population’s demand for broad state interventions in three areas: labour market, social investment, and material support. Demands in labour ...market policy are the most frequent among the Russian population and stem from the need to eliminate inequalities in access to ‘good’ jobs and ensure fair remuneration of skilled labour. In Russia, unlike in Europe, needs in social investment policy do not stem from individualistic interests and the imperative to compensate for market failure. Instead, they result from state failure, leading in particular to growing inequality of life chances in healthcare and worsening health of the broader society. These impacts are perceived as a fundamental adverse effect of unsuccessful social policy changes, and this type of demand for state support is growing alongside household income. At the same time, wealthy Russians also hardly believe in state efficiency in the labour market, show less demand for employment policy interventions, and generally prefer ‘state escapism’. The study argues that an individualistic mindset per se is a cornerstone of the absence of request for state support in any form. These findings support the concept of bottom-up sociocultural modernisation while helping explain state escapism in post-communist welfare regimes. In general, the study provides empirical contributions to the literature on diversity of statist expectations in post-communist welfare regimes.
Good Jobs, Bad Jobs provides an insightful analysis of how and why precarious employment is gaining ground in the labor market and the role these developments have played in the decline of the middle ...class. Kalleberg shows that by the 1970s, government deregulation, global competition, and the rise of the service sector gained traction, while institutional protections for workers—such as unions and minimum-wage legislation—weakened. Together, these forces marked the end of postwar security for American workers. The composition of the labor force also changed significantly; the number of dual-earner families increased, as did the share of the workforce comprised of women, non-white, and immigrant workers. Of these groups, blacks, Latinos, and immigrants remain concentrated in the most precarious and low-quality jobs, with educational attainment being the leading indicator of who will earn the highest wages and experience the most job security and highest levels of autonomy and control over their jobs and schedules. Kalleberg demonstrates, however, that building a better safety net—increasing government responsibility for worker health care and retirement, as well as strengthening unions—can go a long way toward redressing the effects of today’s volatile labor market. There is every reason to expect that the growth of precarious jobs—which already make up a significant share of the American job market—will continue. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs deftly shows that the decline in U.S. job quality is not the result of fluctuations in the business cycle, but rather the result of economic restructuring and the disappearance of institutional protections for workers. Only government, employers and labor working together on long-term strategies—including an expanded safety net, strengthened legal protections, and better training opportunities—can help reverse this trend.
