Labour Market Trends Research Articles

Poverty in Retirement: The Long-Term Impact of Rising Economic Inequality

Income inequality is exacerbated by labor market trends that increase the demand for high skill occupations and those in low skill service occupations. This hollowing out of the middle of the income distribution means that an increasing portion of households will be less prepared for retirement as they approach age 65: they will have saved less, have diminished access to define benefit pension plans, and face smaller social security benefits due to lower life-time earnings even if the system is “fixed.” The cultural trend toward later marriage reduces household saving and delays home purchase that results in less house equity. These trends point to increased poverty among future cohorts in the over 65 age group. After social security, pensions, saving and home equity, continuing to work is the only remedy for combatting old age poverty. Labor market opportunities are most vibrant for highly skilled older workers, suggesting that workers with modest skills will face a higher probability of poverty after age 65.

Extreme work hours in Western Europe and North America: diverging trends since the 1970s

AbstractThis article presents a political economy analysis of extreme work hours in 18 advanced Western economies since the 1970s. Empirically, it shows that the culture of long work hours has gained significance not only in the Anglo-Saxon but also in most Continental European welfare states. Theoretically, it provides an institutionalist argument against the neoclassical, or supply-side, point of view on the drivers of long work hours in post-industrial labour markets. It demonstrates that the choice to work long hours is not entirely, or even mainly, left to the preference of the individual. Instead, individual choices are constrained by labour market policies, collective bargaining institutions and new labour market structures, the pattern and trends of which do not necessarily follow the contours of the regime typology. Data on extreme work hours was compiled from the Luxembourg Income Study and the Multinational Time Use Study micro-data collections.

BUREAUCRATISM AS AN INDICATOR OF SYSTEMIC CONTRADICTIONS IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM

Introduction. The problem of a sharp increase in paperwork done by experts of an education system, educators and teachers has been repeatedly brought up by the pedagogical community. The teachers have to draw up endless reports, plans, schedules, references; as a consequence, teachers have less time and energy to perform direct professional duties – training and education of younger generation. Nevertheless, continuous appeals of “masses” and recurrent promises of “heads” to reduce the unreasonable bureaucratic reporting have not led even to the minimum positive changes. The aim of the publication is the identification and discussion of the causes of bureaucratism in education; comparison of the tendencies of development of the world pedagogical system with the processes of development of the Russian system of education. Methodology and methods of research. The methodological framework is based on the holistic approach, the complex systems theory, and the synergetics foundations. The study is made up of the comparative, structural and functional analysis of educational systems with the methods of modeling and forecasting application. Results and scientific novelty. It is proved that bureaucratism has objective nature; it is an indicator of a crisis situation, which in turn, is a consequence of systemic contradictions not only within the framework of the existing education system but also in the whole pedagogical system as an ideal foundation of the education institutions functioning. Having reflected own practice and analysed pedagogical publications, the author has systematized the crises of education according to the singled out levels of the contradictions which differ with degree of “globality”. The groups of contradictions of each of the levels that determine the depth of the crisis are formulated and described: contradictions between the existing global pedagogical system and the social, technical, natural world surrounding it; internal disagreement of elements of the system; particular and local discrepancies which are most often pointed out as the crisis reasons, but actually they are not. The latter involve insufficient financing, lack of teaching hours, low motivation of graduates of pedagogical universities for work within the specialty, etc. The mechanisms, dialectic character of the highlighted contradictions, and reaction of the governing structures to each of them are shown. The advantages and disadvantages of the “liberal” and “statist” approaches to the solution of problems of education are considered. The conclusion is drawn that global social, economic, technological changes and outlined trends in labour market reflect the demand for reorganization of the educational sphere which has less need of an integrated control center. Practical significance. Identification of the facts of the crisis aggravation and accompanying growth of bureaucratism enables to distinguish the strategic discrepancy between the managerial decisions and the existing trends in the educational system and the society as a whole. It is stated that the only proper strategy is the freedom of education, creation of a favourable environment for it instead of imposing of one’s authoritative and grounded decisions.

Part-time practice in healthcare: Impact on operational versus medical performance

We explore how reliance on part-time medical staff affects operational and medical outcome performance in two general surgery departments Whereas prior research has indicated that operational performance is positively associated with medical performance, we find that heavier reliance on part-time practice may deteriorate operational performance but not necessarily medical-outcome performance. For so-called “complex” patients, reliance on part-time practice may even override the effect of patients’ characteristics on medical-outcome performance. This result calls into question common perceptions in behavior marketing literature regarding part-time employees’ working patterns and efficiency, and thereby provides a new perspective regarding current labor-market trends.

Labor Report: State and Regional Analysis for North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota - Q4 2017

This quarterly labor report provides insight into trends in non-farm employment in the Upper Great Plains. It includes state-level data for North Dakota, Minnesota and South Dakota and local-level data for the metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) of Fargo, ND-MN; Bismarck, ND; Grand Forks, ND-MN; Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI; Duluth, MN-WI; Rochester, MN; St. Cloud, MN; Sioux Falls, SD; and Rapid City, SD. In addition to reporting employment and wage figures, this report provides context for labor market and industry trends by conducting regional comparisons and using economic theory to interpret results. By using data to signal the health and functioning of regional labor markets and local economies, this report seeks to offer meaningful analysis for employers, job seekers and policymakers at the state and local levels.

FEATURES, TRENDS AND CHALLENGES OF THE GLOBAL LABOR MARKET

The key trends of the 21st-century labor market include: shifting of demographic patterns, quicker pace of technological changes, further evolution of globalization with its newer implications for the future of work as such. Very soon employees wordlwide will work in more decentralized but at the same time also more specialized firms. Slower labour growth will encourage employers to recruit from social groups with previously relatively low labour participation. Greater emphasis will be placed on staff retraining and lifelong learning. Future productivity growth will support higher wages and may affect wage distribution overall. Considering all of the above, it seems to be vital to understand the issues which organizations/employees are facing today, so that to be aware of the issues the upcoming generations would have to face, to adjust to and be prepare to, considering the growing robustness of the world labour market

Recasting Pensions in Europe: Policy Challenges and Political Strategies to Pass Reforms

Recasting Pensions in Europe: Policy Challenges and Political Strategies to Pass Reforms

Land manager profession on labor market: condition and problems of request and demand

Land manager profession on labor market: condition and problems of request and demand

Shifting perspectives - Planning for the future of the pharmacy profession taking current labor market trends into consideration.

The future of the pharmacy profession and concerns about professional identity have been popular and recurring themes in professional journals and at international pharmacy conferences for more than 30 years. The aim of this paper is to contribute to realistic and viable visions for the future of the pharmacy profession via insights through labor market and work organization theories. These insights provide an understanding of contemporary work patterns and what they mean for the future role of community pharmacists. It appears that an important and influential contemporary trend in work organization today is precarious work, i.e. non-standard employment that promotes and relies on a flexible and fluid work force. Contrary to permanent employment, precarious work is often poorly paid, insecure, unprotected, and in many cases cannot support a household. The growth of precarious work among professionals, including pharmacists has been documented in many countries. In the early 21st century a major concern in the UK was the growth in the number of pharmacists who choose to be self-employed "locums" as opposed to seeking permanent employment. With the spread of precarious work a new, involuntary form of employment appeared a decade later with the spread of "zero-hour contracts" and "exclusivity agreements". Particularly affected by these flexible, precarious work conditions are the highly-educated young health professionals such as pharmacists. The profession needs to be proactive in order to stay abreast of economic/workforce and organizational trends. The way forward is a commitment to a dynamic, knowledge-based vision that includes an ongoing analysis of the outside world. The core role of pharmacists in the future includes: 1. engagement in interprofessional education with other healthcare professionals; 2. an acceptance of the contribution that lay knowledge provides to the understanding of health and medicines, and 3.keeping ajour with new and revolutionary treatments, both pharmaceutical and non-pharmacological.

Against the Grain? Assessing Graduate Labour Market Trends in Germany Through a Task-Based Indicator of Graduate Jobs

Applying work by Green and Henseke (in IZA J Labor Policy 5(1):14, 2016a), this study examines changes in the German graduate labour market in the twenty-first century. To do so, it deploys a new statistically derived indicator of graduate jobs, based on job skill requirements obtained from worker-reported task data in the German Employment Surveys 2006 and 2012. As in previous work, the resulting classifier explains differences in graduate labour market outcomes better than existing methods and can be applied in a range of contexts where intelligence on graduate destinations is desired. It is supplied in the appendix of this study. Despite the expansion of higher educational attainment between 1999 and 2012, my analysis indicates a rising excess demand for graduate labour. Following key findings emerge: Graduate skills are required beyond the narrow range of professions. Work tasks associated with cognitive skills use are key determinants of higher education requirements on the job.The proportion of graduates in the age bracket 25–34 has risen among men from 14.7 to 18.9% and from 13.3 to 22.5% among women between 1999 and 2012. Young women have become the group with greatest level of higher education in the labour market.The growing supply of graduate labour in the age bracket 25–34 was surpassed by the expansion of employment in graduate jobs. The employment share of graduate jobs shifted by 17 percentage points to almost 30% among young women and by 11 percentage points to 28% among young men.Among young female graduates, the incidence of underemployment fell to 22% between 1999 and 2012; roughly comparable to the level among males at the same ages. Prime aged female graduates, however, experience above average rates of underemployment.A sharp rise of the pay premium associated with higher education among men contrasts with stagnating wage differentials among women.The pay penalty associated with underemployment has not changed statistically significantly.

The Labor Market Effects of a Refugee Wave

We apply the synthetic control method to reexamine the labor market effects of the Mariel Boatlift, first studied by David Card (1990). This method improves on previous studies by choosing a control group of cities that best matches Miami's labor market trends pre-Boatlift and providing more reliable inference. Using a sample of non-Cuban high school dropouts we find no significant difference in the wages of workers in Miami relative to its control after 1980. We also show that by focusing on small subsamples and matching the control group on a short pre-1979 series, as done in Borjas (2017), one can find large wage differences between Miami and the control because of large measurement error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labor Report: State and Regional Analysis for North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota - Q3 2017

This quarterly labor report provides insight into trends in non-farm employment in the Upper Great Plains. It includes state-level data for North Dakota, Minnesota and South Dakota and local-level data for the metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) of Fargo, ND-MN; Bismarck, ND; Grand Forks, ND-MN; Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI; Duluth, MN-WI; Rochester, MN; St. Cloud, MN; Sioux Falls, SD; and Rapid City, SD. In addition to reporting employment and wage figures, this report provides context for labor market and industry trends by conducting regional comparisons and using economic theory to interpret results. By using data to signal the health and functioning of regional labor markets and local economies, this report seeks to offer meaningful analysis for employers, job seekers and policymakers at the state and local levels.

The Growing American Health Penalty: International Trends in the Employment of Older Workers with Poor Health

Many countries have reduced the generosity of disability benefits while making them more activating - yet few studies have examined how employment rates have subsequently changed. We present estimates of how the employment rates of older workers with poor health in 13 high-income countries changed between 2004-7 and 2012-15 using HRS/SHARE/ELSA data. We find that those in poor health in the USA have experienced a unique deterioration: they have not only seen a widening gap to the employment rates of those with good health, but their employment rates fell per se. We find only for Sweden (and possibly England) signs that the health employment gap shrank. We then examine possible explanations for the development in the USA: we find no evidence it links to labour market trends, but possible links to the USA's lack of disability benefit reform - which should be considered alongside the wider challenges of our findings for policymakers.

Human Capital on the European Labour Market

Efficient use of human capital and taking care of its quality in the global labour market is becoming a priority. This is primarily due to the need to function in a multicultural environment, growing competition and population aging. This article is an attempt to systematise knowledge about human capital and its use in the labour market. Attention is being drawn to the effective use of capital, including implementation of European strategies, as well as trends and challenges facing key employment issues. In addition, an effort has been made to identify key employee competencies reflecting global labour market trends. The article shows the importance of quality and investment in human resources, which is associated with the use of EU projects and programmes targeted at young people on the labour market.

WoLMIS: a labor market intelligence system for classifying web job vacancies

In the last decades, an increasing number of employers and job seekers have been relying on Web resources to get in touch and to find a job. If appropriately retrieved and analyzed, the huge number of job vacancies available today on on-line job portals can provide detailed and valuable information about the Web Labor Market dynamics and trends. In particular, this information can be useful to all actors, public and private, who play a role in the European Labor Market. This paper presents WoLMIS, a system aimed at collecting and automatically classifying multilingual Web job vacancies with respect to a standard taxonomy of occupations. The proposed system has been developed for the Cedefop European agency, which supports the development of European Vocational Education and Training (VET) policies and contributes to their implementation. In particular, WoLMIS allows analysts and Labor Market specialists to make sense of Labor Market dynamics and trends of several countries in Europe, by overcoming linguistic boundaries across national borders. A detailed experimental evaluation analysis is also provided for a set of about 2 million job vacancies, collected from a set of UK and Irish Web job sites from June to September 2015.

Labor Report: State and Regional Analysis for North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota - Q2 2017

This quarterly labor report provides insight into trends in non-farm employment in the Upper Great Plains. It includes state-level data for North Dakota, Minnesota and South Dakota and local-level data for the metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) of Fargo, ND-MN; Bismarck, ND; Grand Forks, ND-MN; Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI; Duluth, MN-WI; Rochester, MN; St. Cloud, MN; Sioux Falls, SD; and Rapid City, SD. In addition to reporting employment and wage figures, this report provides context for labor market and industry trends by conducting regional comparisons and using economic theory to interpret results. By using data to signal the health and functioning of regional labor markets and local economies, this report seeks to offer meaningful analysis for employers, job seekers and policymakers at the state and local levels.

Labor Market Trends in Greece over the Crisis Period, 2009-2014

In this paper we present key statistics on the labor market of Greece and the Eurozone over the crisis period 2009-2014, with particular emphasis given to youth and longterm unemployment and its consequences. Statistics on the previous occupations of the unemployed, methods used for seeking work and type of employment sought are also presented. Used data reveal that the change of the working-age population in Greece during the crisis follows a U-shape over age with a greater decline occurring in the 25 to 29 years age group as a result of high emigration of the young age group attributable to the decline in economic activity. Greece suffers from unprecedented and socially unacceptable rates of unemployment with the youth and long-term unemployment rates being even more alarming and worrying as they may have such devastating and long-term debilitating effects on young people that have been called ‘scarring effects’. Those scarring effects on young people are interpreted in the literature’ in terms of two factors, the first factor relating to the depreciation of their human capital and readiness to work and the second relating to the so-called ‘unemployment stigma’.

Swedish class voting in decline: Does a new class schema make a difference?

In the light of observations of the decline in class voting, some scholars have suggested that the class variable should be reconstructed in a way that makes post-industrial labor market trends more visible. A leading proponent of this view is Daniel Oesch. In this article we compare the development in class voting according to his class schema compared to a more traditional one, in the Swedish National Election Studies 1968-2014. The results show that the schemas give remarkably similar results, that Oesch’s schema is not markedly better at predicting voting for newer political parties, and that the development in the distribution of positions in the labor market does not make a big difference for the strength of class voting. We discuss the implications of these findings.

Scalable Service for Predictive Learning based on the Professional Social Networking Sites

Professional social networking sites are widely used as a tool for obtaining specific information such as technology trends and professional skills demand. The article is aimed to consider the evolution of services for professional communities through integration of analysis of the patent activity, analysis of the academic research activity and analysis of the labour market trends. Authors have developed the prototype of a predictive learning software service which intended to fill the gap between professional social networking sites and e-learning systems, including massive open online course systems. It includes functionality for monitoring of professional skills demand on the labour market and analysis of patents for each corresponding technology. The software service will help to determine demand for professional skills, to actualise an applicant’s skillset, to organise professional communities and to build individual learning programs for studying of skills and technologies which are predicted to grow in demand on the labour market.

THE CURRENT STATE OF THE LABOR MARKET IN UKRAINE

The article analyzes the current state and development trends of the Ukrainian labor market taking into account important political and economic events. The unemployment rate, dynamics and structure of the Ukrainian population have been researched in the context of economic activity. The dynamics of the main indicators in the labor market has been determined according to the results of the research of the State Statistics Service according to the methodology of the International Labor Organization. The problems and perspectives of the Ukrainian labor market development have been identified and the measures for its reform have been proposed. In the research have been identified features that affected the formation of the labor market, complicated existing problems in the employment field, and gave rise to new ones. Negative trends have been complicated by regional disproportions in the socio-economic situation. The article lighlights the trends of the main demographic indicators of Ukraine that based on the analysis of the data of the state statistics in the context of the demographic situation and registered migration flows. Migration processes have been analyzed in complex. The reasons and consequences of labor migration have been revealed for Ukraine. Problems of law regulation of labor relations with international migrants and prospects of their solution have been outlined. The problems of the formation of the labor market and its regulation are substantiated, the conclusions and recommendations for increasing the productive employment of the population and law regulation of social and labor relations, that regulate the work activity and determine the social policy in Ukraine, have been worked out.