Low-quality Employment Research Articles

A Bermuda triangle of policy? ‘Bad jobs’, skills policy and incentives to learn at the bottom end of the labour market

A focus of Government policy has been the need to ensure that those at the lower end of the labour market invest in their human capital through re-engaging with learning, which has been assumed to enable progress into better-paid employment. This article explores the problems created by ‘bad jobs’ and the evidence for the existence of a set of mutually reinforcing factors that reduces the incentives acting on individuals in such work, and in many cases their employers, to participate and invest in education and training. Each of these factors, on their own, would be sufficient to cause problems at the lower end of the labour market. Acting in concert, as a mutually reinforcing matrix, they produce powerful reasons why many individuals perceive that the incentives to engage in work-related learning are weak. More broadly, our argument suggests that the fundamental causes of low pay and low-quality employment have been misdiagnosed and the subsequent public policy solution of up-skilling interventions is relatively ill-fitted to achieving the desired policy goals. Imaginative re-thinking on how policy might help those in low-wage, dead-end jobs is necessary.

Sustainable development: The way for future, where are we?

Sustainable development: The way for future, where are we?

Tackling unemployment in China: state capacity and governance issues

This paper considers China's state capacity and changing governance as revealed through its policies to tackle unemployment. Despite high levels of growth, economic restructuring has resulted in rising unemployment over the last decade. The Chinese state has been able to manage job losses from state enterprises, demonstrating some state capacity in relation to this sector and some persistent command economy governance mechanisms. However both design and implementation of policies to compensate and assist particular groups among the unemployed have been shaped by weak state capacity in several other areas. First, capacity to gather accurate employment data is limited, meaning local and central governments do not have a good understanding of the extent and nature of unemployment. Second, the sustainability of supposedly mandatory unemployment insurance schemes is threatened by poor capacity to enforce participation. Third, poor central state capacity to ensure local governments implement policies effectively leads to poor unemployment insurance fund capacity, resulting in provision for only a narrow segment of the unemployed and low quality employment services. Although the adoption of unemployment insurance (and its extension to employers and employees in the private sector), the introduction of a Labour Contract Law in 2007, and the delivery of employment services by private businesses indicate a shift towards the use of new governance mechanisms based on entitlement, contract and private sector delivery of public-sector goods, that shift is undermined by poor state capacity in relation to some of these new mechanisms.

Low-Quality Employment Concentration and Crime: An Examination of Metropolitan Labor Markets

Over the past two decades, numerous studies have investigated the effects of employment quality on crime. Many of these studies have investigated employment quality with regard to its effect on individual criminality. However, the quality of employment available in a labor market also affects crime at an aggregate level of analysis. Consequently, while the determinants of individual behavior are important, this article seeks to place these behaviors into a larger structural framework. This study contributes to the growing research on the work–crime link by relating differences in the quality of employment, on an aggregate level, to crime rates in metropolitan areas. Metropolitan areas with few quality jobs for less-educated workers have significantly higher rates of both violent and property crime.

Women's roles and health: the mediating effect of perceived control.

Research concerning women's roles and health has revealed inconsistencies regarding the effects of work/family roles on women's health. Recent work in this area suggests that role characteristics or role quality may be more important in determining health than simple role occupancy. In addition, it has been suggested that role factors may affect health by increasing or decreasing one's perceptions of personal control over life. This study uses logistic regression techniques on data from the 1987 General Social Survey to explore the effects of roles and role quality on women's health, as well as the mediating effects of perceived control in the relationship between role factors and health. It is hypothesized that (1) role quality variables are better predictors of health than role occupancy, (2) the effects on health of roles, and role quality, are mediated by perceived control. In the role occupancy model, findings show that employment is the only role associated with health, and perceived control does modify this relationship slightly. Both high and low quality employment roles predict better health, whereas only high quality marital roles predict better health. While perceived control does mediate slightly the effects of job quality on health, the positive effects of marital status on health are suppressed slightly by perceived control.

Poor Personnel Practice In the Hotel and Catering Industry: Does It Matter?

Liz Price, who is a Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management in the School of Hotel and Catering Management at Oxford Brookes University, reviews the evidence suggesting that personnel practice in the commercial sector of the UK hotel and catering industry tends to be poor. In particular, she presents the findings of her own recent surveys which demonstrate that few hospitality employers meet all of the basic requirements set by employment legislation and that managers/proprietors are poorly advised/trained about ‘good practice’. She argues that poor personnel practice is of concern because, ultimately, it threatens UK success in tourism and hospitality markets as well as providing only low quality employment for many people.