Economic Labor Research Articles

FROM LABOUR ECONOMICS TO HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE AND DIRECTIONS OF TRAINING OF SPECIALISTS ON LABOR

ARTICLE RETRACTED The article deals with the stages of becoming and de-velopment the subject ща labor economy, the problem of training in the eld of labor relations associated with the formation of market relations in Russia, and as consequence, the allocation of separate independent direction of learning for higher education personnel management, the demand for it has been steadily in-creasing. The authors proved the inevitability oriented of learning specialists on the micro- and macrolevel and have offer to create new chairs

Houses Divided: The Cultural Economy of Emancipation in the Civil War North

This essay examines late-antebellum portrayals of Irish servant women in popular culture and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s (PAS) wartime correspondence with northern employers eager to obtain access to southern freedpeople. In these sources, white northerners filtered their characterizations of women’s bodies and behaviors through ideologies of gender and race to create submissive and transgressive social types representing ideal and less-than-ideal workers. These declarations about workers, yoked to the northern argument that emancipation was both an act of benevolence and a period of necessary instruction for black southerners in the habits and practices of wage labor, propelled northern benevolent associations, armies, and the state to forge a transportation network that they hoped would ensure the flow of workers northward. This network proved short-lived, ultimately foundering on a lack of funding and employers’ and employees’ mutual disappointment with each other. And yet, because of their wartime cultural work, employers could pivot to a position of even greater strength over white and black workers in the political economy of wage labor.

Economic Development, Women Empowerment and U Shaped Labour Force Function : Time Series Evidence for Bangladesh

This paper supports the validity of nonlinear quadratic U shaped function between female labor force participation rate and Economic Growth for Bangladesh over the period 1991 -2012. The result is robust when growth of per capita energy consumption is considered as a proxy indicator of economic development. In Bangladesh the rising portion of U curve is explained by women’s active participation in manufacturing and service sector. Women are still economically active in the Agricultural sector of the economy. Added worker effect dominates discouraged worker effect. Women join the labor force regardless their marital status. Female labor force participation has positive impact on economic growth.

An American Haunting: Unsettling Witnessing in Transnational Migration, the Ghost Case, and Human Trafficking

This essay examines transnational migration, in particular a popularized case referred to as the “ghost case” or the “blessing scam.” The blessing scam is an internationally known case where Chinese migrants were “swindled” out of their money and jewelry. However, as a normative narrative of criminality circulated in popular media, another story coalesced surrounding a story of vulnerability and victimhood. Through an interdisciplinary and transnational feminist method, the author navigates a wide range of texts from legal documents to news media and Department of Justice archives, to examine how the ghost case was a human trafficking that never was. Through a theory of “unsettled witnessing,” the author moves through the multiple contexts of migration, violence, labor, and informal economy to further unravel the dichotomies that are normalized in human right’s rhetoric and practice: victim/criminal, illegal/legal, and citizen/non-citizen. An unsettled witnessing is a commitment to witnessing without being settled as to what one is seeing. This requires raising questions about the normative aspects of events by examining the politics of representation around victimhood/criminality, citizenship, and legality, as infused with discourses of nationhood, race, gender, and colonial modernities.

Apklausos duomenų analize grįsti šešėlinės darbo rinkos tyrimo rezultai Baltijos šalyse, Lenkijoje, Švedijoje ir Baltarusijoje

The aim of this paper is to present the results of representative population surveys on public perceptions of the shadow economy and actual engagement in shadow economic activities which was conducted in six countries, including Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden in May–June 2015. Major results are that the likelihood of being detected by working in the shadow economy labour market is generally seen as low with the exception of Sweden where the majority of the population tends to see this likelihood as rather high. The majority of the survey respondents in all countries do not justify any kind of shadow economy. Only in the case when they have a legal job contract and a part of the wage is paid as an “envelope wage”, the justification is somewhat higher. Latvia has the highest share of respondents who have friends or relatives working in the shadow labour market (36 %) and Sweden has the lowest proportion of such population (8 %).

W stronę ekonomii politycznej „pracy publiczności” w erze cyfrowej

This article contributes to a political economic theory centred on the concept of “audience labour”. First, the previous use of the concept of audience labour is briefly traced and the process of rethinking the concept as the basis of a political economic theory is begun. Second, a theory of the audience labour process is developed, drawing on previous theories of audience activities of cultural consumption as productive activities of signification and adapting Marx’s theory of the human labour process to the audience labour process. Third, a political economy of audience labour is outlined. As a theory of the basic processes through which communicative capital can control and extract value from audience labour, it describes the exploitation of audience labour and accumulation of communicative capital through distribution relationships of rent and interest. Finally, the continuing centrality of audience labour exploitation in the digital era is discussed.

Introduction

This essay introduces the special section “The Politics of Feminist Politics,” which brings together the work of feminist scholars of the Middle East and South Asia to highlight the silences, exclusions, and occlusions that mark the transregional imaginative geographies of both “feminism” and “Islam.” Together, these essays suggest that careful analysis of the languages of justice, forms of social and political life, and embodied realities that belong to particular places and times can unseat the “common sense” of liberal feminist discourse and trouble its universalist claims. These essays track the everyday languages and institutions of governance, policing, and morality by working carefully through diverse fields, including legal cases and reasoning, histories of education, dynamics of marriage, arts of linguistic transformation, politics of religious argument, legitimations of state power, and political economies of labor and housing. They analyze the circulations of terms and bodies in the public sphere and in public space, drawing attention not only to the social exclusions and selective silencings that often attend feminist projects but also to their points of openness and to possibilities for a more inclusive politics.

Labour Migration and Economic Growth in East and South‐East Asia

AbstractEast and South‐East Asia will face major demographic changes over the next few decades with many countries’ labour forces starting to decline, while others experience higher labour force growth as populations and/or participation rates increase. A well‐managed labour migration strategy presents itself as a mechanism for ameliorating the impending labour shortages in some East Asia–Pacific countries, while providing an opportunity for other countries with excess labour to provide migrant workers who will contribute to the development of the home country through greater remittance flows. This paper examines such migration policy options using a global dynamic economic simulation approach and finds that allowing migrants to respond to the major demographic changes occurring in Asia over the next 50 years would be beneficial to most economies in the region in terms of real incomes and real GDP over the 2007–50 period. Such a policy could deeply affect the net migration position of a country. Countries that were net recipients under current migration policies might become net senders under the more liberal policy regime.

Labor Productivity and Labor Compensation

This work is devoted to a comparative analysis of how the Russian economy's labor productivity and labor compensation change over time. The author discusses the widespread notion that increases in labor costs are outstripping increases in productivity. He shows that this notion has little in common with the realities of the contemporary Russian economy. Furthermore, a stable relationship has not been observed. With respect to labor power, waves of relative price reductions alternate with waves of relative price increases. However, the trend toward reduced unit labor costs is dominant. Calculations show that Russian enterprises had a lower cost of labor power (in relative terms) in 2011–2012 than in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.

The Impact of the Family Policy on the Transformation of Gender Roles in the Professional and Private Spheres on the Example of German Society

This article is an attempt to analyze the impact of different models of the family policy on the distribution of the tasks in paid labour and family economy between men and women. The example of Germany which experienced multiple shifts in its policy direction in the recent decades, provides rich material for cultural and historical comparison. It is argued that modern family policy should be designed as a flexible set of norms that reflect the dynamics of the social changes and recognize the diversity of an individual's configuration of a biographical way, family values and reproductive patterns. In terms of methodology the author proves the fruitfulness of the combination of statistics and biographical methods of sociological research, which focused on the changes of social phenomena and norms. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s1p546

The political economy of development in a globalizing world

The topics in this issue include the political economy of economic reforms, privatization and labor, structural change and growth, democracy and policy volatility, the role of trade intermediaries in the avoidance of export taxes, and the impact of the middle class on democratization and the international propagation of democratic values.

Still Thinking about Olympia's Maid

The black woman in Manet's Olympia (1863) has often been overlooked. So, too, has the model Laure who posed for this painting and others. Manet's painting makes visible France's long reliance on slavery in the Caribbean, but also its Revolutionary redefinition of all blacks as paid workers after the second abolition of slavery in 1848. How does thinking about the entry of blacks, specifically black women, into France's economy of wage labor differently illuminate Manet's painting?

False Economy: Financialization, Crises and Socio-Economic Polarisation

Over the last few decades, a range of profound and widely recognised changes have affected the global economy and global labour markets, driven by a growing imbalance of power between financier dominated capital and labour, a scenario facilitated by the extended availability of labour due to the process of globalisation of itself and, to some degree, by labour supplanting technologies (Standing, 2011, Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2011). However, arguably, what is less clearly understood is that the financial sector's role in this overall process and, indeed, increasing power rests to no small extent on its capacity to ‘conjure’ wealth from credit creation and, often, opaque practices that are highly abstracted and/or only tenuously connected to real economic activity (Korten, 2009). This shift, and the latter in particular, it is argued, in addition to producing a sequence of financial crises culminating (thus far) with the crash and recession of 2007/8, has fundamental implications for the future shape of the global economy, labour markets and, as a consequence, the life chances and opportunities that potentially confront succeeding generations, assuming that trends continue on their present course. This piece considers these issues with particular emphasis on their implications for the UK and its citizens.

Simple is not easy

I review and challenge the views on simplicity and its role in linguistics put forward by Ludlow (The philosophy of generative linguistics, 2011). In particular, I criticize the claim that simplicity—in the sense pertinent to science—is nothing more than ease of use or “user-friendliness”, motivated by economy of (cognitive) labor. I argue that Ludlow’s discussion fails to do justice to the diversity of factors that are relevant to simplicity considerations. This, in turn, leads to the neglect of crucial cases in which the rationale for simplification is unmistakably epistemic, as well as instances where simplicity is part of the content of substantive, empirical hypotheses. I illustrate these points with examples from the history of generative linguistics, such as: (a) the shaping influence exerted by simplicity, via its involvement in the notion of “linguistically significant generalization”, (b) its methodological and substantive contribution to the goal of explanatory adequacy, and (c) its central role in the Minimalist Program’s search “beyond explanatory adequacy”.

Location Clusters, FDI and Local Entrepreneurs: Consistent Public Policy

In order to formulate public policy consistent with attracting foreign investment and fostering regional development, this paper analyzes a model of local entrepreneur’s choices when they are affected by foreign direct investment (FDI) spillovers. FDI is determined by economies of agglomeration, market size, taxes, labor, and location costs. It is shown that location costs of the multinationals (MNE) affect the optimal quantity of MNE capital and regional development, while location costs and preferences of local entrepreneurs affect only their location and consumption. Other determinants of MNE location also impact regional development. The main policies advocated are as follows: provision of logistical infrastructure; creation and/or nurturing of pro-market institutions; non-discretionary policies; reduction of statutory tax rate; incentives to universities and research centers.

‘A Most Complete Whaling Museum’: Profiting from the Past on Nantucket Island

The Nantucket Historical Association found itself by 1930 suddenly transformed from a grass-roots collective to a modern nonprofit organization host to the ambitious new Nantucket Whaling Museum. The change owed largely to president William F. Macy, who promoted the museum as entrée into the nation's rising heritage tourism industry. And yet, by merit of its concern with a seafaring past inextricably bound with maritime labor and global economies, the museum unwittingly complicated the romantic portrayals of ships and their captains favored by local tourism boosters. Its core collection, for instance, a vast assemblage of industrial whaling tools donated by Progressive reformer Edward Sanderson, showcased the hard lives of workaday sailors. This article examines Macy's vision for Nantucket's past and how he sought to ensure that it would remain profitable, history notwithstanding. We discover how moments of institutional change can redistribute historical authority in ways that have considerable long-term impacts on museums and their publics.

Labor Mobility, Structural Change and Economic Growth

This paper develops a two-sector growth model in which the process of structural change in the sectoral composition of employment and GDP is jointly determined by non-homothetic preferences and labor mobility cost. This cost, paid by workers moving to another sector, limits structural change. Our model can explain the following patterns of development of the US economy throughout the period 1880-2000: (i) balanced growth of the aggregate variables in the second half of the last century; (ii) structural change in the sectoral composition of employment between agriculture and non-agriculture sectors; (iii) structural change process in the sectoral composition of GDP between these sectors; and (iv) wage convergence between the two sectors. We outline that the last two patterns can only be explained if labor mobility cost is introduced. Results reveal that mobility cost generates a misallocation of production factors. This implies a loss of GDP which amounts to over 30% of the GDP throughout initial periods according to the calibrated model. During the transition, the loss of GDP decreases and eventually vanishes. Thus, the elimination of the misallocation explains part of the increase in the GDP. Additionally, this study points out that misallocation introduces a mechanism through which cross-country differences in sectoral composition may account for cross-country income differences.

Access to work or liberation from work? Disabled people, autonomy, and post-work politics

Waged work has been a central issue for the Disabled People’s Movement since its inception. For example, the influential analysis of the pioneering Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation in the United Kingdom placed the exclusion of people with impairments from work as the origin of disablement, which is therefore inherent in modern capitalism. Thus it has been traditional in the Disabled People’s Movement in the United Kingdom to regard the removal of barriers to participation in the wage labour economy as a key strategy for overcoming disabled people’s social exclusion and oppression. However, some authors in the Disabled People’s Movement (e.g., Abberley, 1996; 2002; Taylor, 2004; Withers, 2012) have argued that waged work cannot be the route to liberation for all disabled people, pointing out the paradox of disabled people desiring to be included in the same economic system which is responsible for their exclusion in the first place, and whose values fundamentally privilege the ‘more able’. This issue is especially urgent in the present historical moment, when the ‘work ethic’ has been mobilised by neoliberals and neoconservatives in government and the mass media to justify the cutting of vital support systems for disabled people, who are being demonized as ‘workshy’, ‘scroungers’, etc. This paper will examine critiques of work and workerism from anarchist, autonomist, and feminist writers and identify theoretical currents that conceptualize disabled people’s liberation as requiring a much more fundamental rejection of the values of capitalism.

A positive theory of economic growth and the distribution of income

This paper is a positive theory of the distribution of income and the growth rate of the economy. It builds on our earlier work (Meltzer and Richard, 1981) on the size of government. How does the distribution of income change as an economy grows? To answer this question we build a model of a labor economy in which consumers have diverse productivity. The government imposes a linear income tax which funds equal per capita redistribution. The tax rate is set in a sequence of single issue election in which the median productivity individual is decisive. Economic growth is the result of using a learning by doing technology, so higher taxes discourage labor causing the growth rate of the economy to fall. The distribution of productivity can widen due to an exogenous increase in technological specialization. This causes voters to raise the equilibrium tax rate and reduce growth. The distribution of pre-tax income widens. We calibrate the model using data from the U.S., U.K. and France. The results of the calibration show that the model is consistent with the facts about changes in income distribution over time in developed countries.

Labor Rights and Labor Standards in the Global Economy: The Promise and Limits of Private Power: Promoting Labor Standards in a Global Economy and Human Rights and Labor Solidarity: Trade Unions in the Global Economy

Labor Rights and Labor Standards in the Global Economy: <i>The Promise and Limits of Private Power: Promoting Labor Standards in a Global Economy</i> and <i>Human Rights and Labor Solidarity: Trade Unions in the Global Economy</i>