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Policymakers throughout Europe are enacting policies to support youth labour market integration. However, many young people continue to ...face unemployment, job insecurity, and the subsequent consequences.
Adopting a mixed-method and multilevel perspective, this book provides a comprehensive investigation into the multifaceted consequences of social exclusion. Drawing on rich pan-European comparative and quantitative data, and interviews with young people from across Europe, this text gives a platform to the unheard voices of young people.
Contributors derive crucial new policy recommendations and offer fresh insights into areas including youth well-being, health, poverty, leaving the parental home, and qualifying for social security.
This article evaluates a national project for the integration of long‐term unemployed and disadvantaged groups of jobseekers implemented in the Czech Republic since 2019. It discusses how individual ...work and active labour market policy measures for these groups have changed, and what the outcomes were. We combined a quantitative evaluation of the targeting and outcomes of the measures with a qualitative evaluation of changes in the project implementation through semi‐structured interviews and focus group discussions conducted at the Labour Office branches. The findings show the need to broaden the availability of hard measures such as private‐sector placement subsidies for the most disadvantaged jobseekers, and to improve soft measures (counselling and training), especially if front‐line workers do not have sufficient competences for individual work. We are cautious about generalising the findings, as the pandemic complicated the implementation of soft measures.
Objective
To understand how heterosexual US married parents interpret and respond to a spouse's unemployment and subsequent job‐searching.
Background
The pervasiveness of employment uncertainty, and ...unemployment, may propel families to embrace gender egalitarian norms. Quantitative research finds that this possibility is not borne out. Qualitative research has sought to illuminate mechanisms as to how gender norms persist even during a time that is optimal for dismantling them, but these mechanisms remain unclear.
Method
Seventy‐two in‐depth interviews were conducted with a nonrandom sample of heterosexual, professional, dual‐earner, married, unemployed women, men, and their spouses in the United States. Follow‐up interviews were conducted with 35 participants. Intensive family observations were conducted with four families, two of unemployed men, and two of unemployed women.
Results
Unemployed women, men, and spouses acknowledge that a set of time‐intensive activities are key for reemployment (the ideal job‐seeker norm). Couples with unemployed men direct resources such as time, space, and even money to facilitate unemployed men's compliance with the ideal job‐seeker norm. Couples downplay the importance of women's reemployment and do not direct similar resources to help unemployed women job‐search.
Conclusion
Couples preserve a traditional gender status quo, often in defiance of material realities, by actively maintaining men's position at the helm of paid work and women's at unpaid work.
Implications
Linking unemployment and job‐seeking with the institution of heterosexual marriage reveals novel insights into social and marital processes shaping job‐seeking.
Unemployment, especially in insecure times, has devastating effects on families, but it is not clear what happens to domestic work. On the one hand, unemployment frees up time for more housework by ...both men and women. On the other hand, once unemployed, women may take on more additional housework than men do, either because they capitalize on their time to act out traditional gender roles or because unemployment compounds women’s general disadvantage in household bargaining. Multi-level analyses based on the European Social Survey show that both men and women perform more housework when unemployed. However, the extra domestic work for unemployed women is greater than for unemployed men. They also spend more time on housework when their husband is unemployed. Compared to their employed counterparts, unemployed women, but not men, perform even more housework in a country where the unemployment rate is higher.
In the 1990s, the Chinese government launched an unprecedented reform of state enterprises, putting tens of millions of people out of work. This empirically rich study calls on comprehensive surveys ...and interviews, combining quantitative data with qualitative in its examination of the variation in workers' collective action. Cai investigates the difference in interests of and options available to workers that reduce their solidarity, as well as the obstacles that prevent their coordination. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, this book explores the Chinese Government's policies and how their feedback shaped workers' incentives and capacity of action.
This study investigates whether minimum wage increases impact worker health in the United States. We consider self‐reported measures of general, mental, and physical health. We use data on ...lesser‐skilled workers from the 1993 to 2014 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey. Among men, we find no evidence that minimum wage increases improve health; instead, we find that such increases lead to worse health outcomes, particularly among unemployed men. We find both worsening general health and improved mental health following minimum wage increases among women. These findings broaden our understanding of the full impacts of minimum wage increases on lesser‐skill workers. (JEL I1, I11, I18)
This paper revisits the histories of Unemployed Workers’ Centres to consider the politicisation of unemployment in the UK. Drawing upon archive material and over 50 oral histories, it considers the ...emergence of centres as a response to a crisis of increasing unemployment and retrenchment of the welfare state. The paper indicates how Asef Bayat’s concept of “non‐movement” proves useful for capturing a wider sphere of labour organising, moving beyond more conventional spaces and actions. This approach critically revisits the role of centres in conversation with emerging work in labour geography and social movements studies around the fostering of solidarities. It reveals tensions around their making, whilst also stressing the potential of seemingly small acts when held alongside campaigns. Revisiting this repertoire of activity reveals the persistence of trade union engagements with communities beyond the workplace, as well as a critical insight into the politics of space in forging such alternatives.
Labour law and social policy have long provided an arena within which key debates over the depth and pace of European integration have taken place. Increasingly, as the European Union's employment ...policy has matured, employment and economic policy discourses have come to displace discourses around social policy and social law, a displacement which has occurred in tandem with a shift from legislative harmonisation to the use of 'soft law' and governance by means of guidelines. This book charts the evolution of the European Employment Strategy and the new forms of governance to which it has given rise, in particular the 'open method of coordination'. It offers an interdisciplinary exploration of European social law and employment policy, scrutinizing the law and economics of labour market regulation in the European context and responding to the economic critique of traditional notions of social protection. Through a detailed examination of the legal and economic underpinnings of the European Employment Strategy, the author outlines the implications of this strategy for labour law, social protection and industrial relations within the EU. Using the open method of coordination in the European Employment Strategy as a case study, the book also provides a timely contribution to the growing literature on 'new governance' in the EU. This innovative form of governance has the potential to forge a middle course through the regulatory choices facing the EU: the choice over the appropriate level of regulation in the EU, whether national or supranational; that over the legitimate role for the state in regulating or deregulating the labour market; and ultimately, the choice between centralised harmonization and regulatory competition. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/law/9780199279647/toc.html
Why did unemployed university graduates form collective associations in some countries in the Middle East and North Africa but not in others? Despite similar levels of grievances around educated ...unemployment, reversals in guaranteed employment schemes, and similarly restrictive conditions
for mobilization, unemployed graduates' associations formed in Morocco and Tunisia but not in Egypt. Conventional explanations - focused on grievances, political opportunities, or pre-existing organizational structures - cannot account for this variation. Instead, I point to the
power of ideologically conducive frames for mobilization around the time that grievances become salient. A strong Leftist oriented tradition of student unionism in Morocco and Tunisia was necessary for the emergence of a rights-based discourse around the "right to work." This was not the case
in Egypt, where Islamists, not Communists, dominated student politics at the time that grievances around educated unemployment became salient. This article offers one of the first comparative studies of the mobilization of the unemployed in a non-Western, non-democratic context.
•The study focused on employment, gender and substance consumption during COVID-19.•Employment is a protective factor regarding substance consumption during COVID-19.•Employment is more critical for ...men’s substance consumption than for women’s.•Continuous pandemic is associated with higher consumption than short-term pandemic.
This study aims to assess the impacts of the continuous pandemic state, gender and employment status on changes in substance use during the COVID-19 outbreak.
A sample of 828 Israelis participated in an online survey and answered questions on demographic characteristics, ranking their substance consumption, and perceived increase in alcohol/drug consumption. The age range was 18–65 (Mean = 30.10, S.D. = 11.99), and the majority (72.9 %) were female. We gathered the data in two waves: 1) during and following the early first lockdown; 2) following the second lockdown.
Men reported higher beer, hard liquor, and illegal drug consumption than women. Continuous COVID-19 was associated with higher consumption of all alcohol, and cannabis, and higher perceived increases in substance consumption than short-term COVID-19. Significant interactions were found between gender and employment regarding all-drug consumption measurements and interactions between gender, employment, and pandemic duration (short/continuous) were found regarding cannabis consumption.
The discussion addresses the results in the context of continuous COVID-19 and traditional gender roles. Policymakers should develop prevention and harm reduction interventions for substance use and abuse, focusing on unemployed men as an at-risk group.
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