Low-wage Employment Research Articles

Financial Market Capitalism and Labour in Germany. Merits and Limits of a Sociological Concept

Since the financial crisis at the end of the last decade, Germany is regarded again as a successful coordinated market economy. However, a closer look at labour and working conditions reveals disturbing phenomena like an increase of psychical stress, growing shares of low wage employment or the erosion of collective bargaining or works councils’ coverage. Finance capitalism has become the most popular concept among German sociologists to explain why and how industrial relations and working conditions have been put under pressure in the last one or two decades. But how coherent is the finance capitalism story? This question is tackled in the paper, based on literature review and empirical findings. The paper argues that the concept is overexpanded and that, first, financial market capitalism is refractured by agency and actors on different instituitonal levels and that, second, there are other and independent developments influencing industrial relations like globalisation or the deregulation of labour markets that have to be taken into account.

Industrial Structure and Party Competition in an Age of Hunger Games: Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential Election

The U.S. presidential election of 2016 featured frontal challenges to the political establishments of both parties and perhaps the most shocking election upset in American history. This paper analyzes patterns of industrial structure and party competition in both the major party primaries and the general election. It attempts to identify the genuinely new, historically specific factors that led to the upheavals, especially the steady growth of a “dual economy” that locks more and more Americans out of the middle class and into a life of unsteady, low wage employment and, all too often, steep debts. The paper draws extensively on a newly assembled, more comprehensive database of political contributions to identify the specific political forces that coalesced around each candidate. It considers in detail how different investor blocs related to the Republican Party and the Trump campaign as the campaign progressed and the role small contributors played in the various campaigns, especially that of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. It also critically evaluates claims about the final weeks of the election in the light of important overlooked evidence.

Flessibilità, costo del lavoro e segmentazione dell'occupazione: il caso dei mini job e dei contratti a zero ore

Employment contract types and, more generally, working relationships are one of the privileged objects of the reforms brought forward by the EU Countries between finding new flexicurity balances for all workers and promoting employment at the margins. Zero Hours Contracts and Mini Jobs, two contractual types in the United Kingdom and Germany toolbox are examples of second type. The German device appears more structured, especially after the minimum wage entry into force in 2015. In the Government’s intentions the Mini Jobs had to pursue various goals: create additional low wage employment for marginal workers reducing tax wedge; reduce the undeclared work in families; to allow workers and retirees to supplement their low incomes; promote participation of second earner (mainly women) through tax advantages and reduction of disincentives; give income opportunities to students; promote the reintegration of unemployed. These goals have been pursued effectively even through much of the merit goes to the health of the German production system. The goals of Zero Hours Contract are more limited. According to British tradition, this contract responds to the demand for flexibility of the labour market. UK and Germany chose to rule the segmentation not to eliminate it. The problem for these countries as with other EU countries is how to regulate the working relationships having in mind a minimum level of rights and social protection for all workers (employees, self-employed and new piecework workers) without losing economic dynamism.

Duration of low-wage employment: a study based on a survival model

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate low-wage retention using a survival analysis approach.Design/methodology/approachVariables explaining low-wage retention take into account the characteristics of the employee, such as education, age, tenure with the company, gender and nationality, and the characteristics of the job and the company such as industry affiliation, number of employees, age of the company and location.FindingsFemale workers and workers with low level of education, older ones, those with more seniority in the company and those of Asian origin remain longer in a low-wage situation. Also, workers in smaller and older companies located outside the Lisbon region are more likely to stay in a low-wage situation.Practical implicationsThe policy implications are clear. Education plays a prominent role: the higher the level of education of the individual, the higher the probability of him/her leaving low pay. Training programs may help employees in Portugal to leave the low-wage situation. Furthermore, policies must address the different mobility rates of different nationalities and different activities. Training programs are more urgent for hotels and restaurants and transports and communication. The findings also indicate that those initially working in younger firms and larger firms have a higher probability of leaving the low-wage situation. This is a stimulus for decision makers to stimulate employment in the younger firms or in the larger firms.Originality/valueDespite low-wage retention being a well-known field of research, to our knowledge this is the first research paper using survival analysis to explain the duration of a low-wage situation.

Wage Shocks and the Technological Substitution of Low‐wage Jobs

We extend the task-based empirical framework used in the job polarization literature to analyze the susceptibility of low-wage employment to technological substitution. We nd that increases in the cost of low-wage labor (via minimum wage hikes) lead to relative employment declines at cognitively routine occupations but not manuallyroutine or non-routine low-wage occupations. This suggests that low-wage routine cognitive tasks are susceptible to technological substitution. While the short-run em

Measuring Trends in Urban Inequality and Poverty in the Copperbelt, Zambia

This article is a discussion of how to measure urban inequality using the results of large household samples. It has two aims. The first is to de-mystify the methods of measuring earnings inequality by discussing their logic and their results in plain language that is suitable for a non-specialist audience. The second is to persuade the reader that such surveys can be suitable for measuring income derived from all kinds of livelihood strategies, including informal sector activities. The results show persistently high levels of inequality over time among income earners on the Copperbelt. Disaggregation of the employed workforce by major occupational groups reveals increasingly more elementary and middle-income workers than higher income managers, professionals, and technicians. This pattern differs by gender, however, with only women experiencing a marked increase in low-skill, low-wage employment.

Medicaid Reform, Responsiblization Policies, and the Synergism of Barriers to Low-income Health Seeking

Many recent health reforms in the United States are imbued with neoliberal responsibilization rhetoric, which encourages individual responsibility and reduced dependency on the state. This ideology is evident in waiver-modified Medicaid expansion programs which include personal responsibility requirements such as increased cost sharing and behavioral incentive programs. In this article, we explore the limits of responsibilization rhetoric in the context of the lives of a group of Medicaid-qualified people in Michigan. We consider the health needs and challenges they face, how they view and respond to such notions of responsibility, and their access to healthy behavioral choices such as exercising, eating healthy foods, and seeing a doctor. We found that most already embraced a desire to take responsibility for their health, but due to the synergistic impact of a variety of barriers—notably unreliable and changing health insurance coverage, fluctuating low-wage employment, and limited access to health reso...

Wage Shocks and the Technological Substitution of Low-Wage Jobs

We extend the task-based empirical framework used in the job polarization literature to analyze the susceptibility of low-wage employment to technological substitution. We find that increases in the cost of low-wage labor, via minimum wage hikes, lead to relative employment declines at cognitively routine occupations but not manually-routine or non-routine low-wage occupations. This suggests that low-wage routine cognitive tasks are susceptible to technological substitution. While the short-run employment consequence of this reshuffling on individual workers is economically small, due to concurrent employment growth in other low-wage jobs, workers previously employed in cognitively routine jobs experience relative wage losses.

Egalitarianism Under Pressure: Toward Lower Economic Mobility in the Knowledge Economy?

Based on complete population data, with the exact same definitions of family class background and economic outcomes for a large number of birth cohorts, we examine post-war trends in intergenerational economic mobility in Norway. Despite only mild fluctuations in standard rank-based summary statistics, we show that men and women born into the lowest parts of the parental earnings rank distribution have fallen considerably behind in terms of several quality-of-life outcomes, such as earnings rank, earnings share, employment propensity, educational attainment, and the establishment of a family. In particular, the prime-age employment rates of lower class sons have declined spectacularly, both because their rank outcomes have deteriorated and because the lowest ranks to an increasing extent have become associated with non-employment rather than low-wage employment. We provide suggestive evidence that higher educational requirements in the labor market has increased the importance of parental encouragement and support and thus enlarged the handicap of being born into a less resourceful family. There is no evidence whatsoever of a relative decline in the lower classes' cognitive abilities.

The Rise of Precarious Employment in Germany

Long considered the classic coordinated market economy featuring employment security and relatively little employment precarity, the German labor market has undergone profound changes in recent decades. We assess the evidence for a rise in precarious employment in Germany from 1984 to 2013. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) through the Luxembourg Income Study, we examine low-wage employment, working poverty, and temporary employment. We also analyze changes in the demographics and the education/skill level of the German labor force. Although employment overall has increased, there has been a simultaneous significant increase in earnings and wage inequality. Moreover, there has been a clear increase in all three measures of precarious employment. The analyses reveal that models including a wide variety of independent variables – demographic, education/skill, job/work characteristics, and region – cannot explain the rise of precarious employment. Instead, we propose institutional change is the most plausible explanation. In addition to reunification and major social policy and labor market reforms, we highlight the dramatic decline of unionization among German workers. We conclude that while there are elements of stability to the German coordinated market economy, Germany increasingly exhibits substantial dualization, liberalization, inequality, and precarity.

Le roman de la création: écrire entre mythes et pratiques par Françoise Grauby

aux questions qu’elle nous pose sur l’esthétique plutôt que pour les réponses qu’elle apporte. Christopher Newport University (VA) Michael J. Mulryan Grauby,Françoise.Le roman de la création: écrire entre mythes et pratiques.Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2015. ISBN 978-9-0420-3924-7. Pp. 250. 55 a. Grauby opens her study with the story of Flaubert’s coming to writing: his abandonment of law studies, nervous breakdown, life-threatening illness, and transformative emergence into the private realm of writing. Flaubert’s biography thus mobilizes the myths surrounding the forging of a writer: the tortured path to writing, the long hours of solitude, endless even fruitless hours of work, and unbidden inspiration. Grauby argues that this understanding of the writerly vocation remains more or less intact today. Her book focuses on how myths surrounding literary production and the (exalted) status of the writer nevertheless feed into contemporary practice even in its most professionalized form, the writing workshop. To pursue this inquiry, Grauby relies on a sociology of literature combined with the analysis of specific texts. A first chapter bemoans the lost history of the non-written, something this reader finds less edifying than Grauby’s subsequent history of the notion of a unique author, with origins in the establishment of copyright law. She expands on the tensions between secrecy (writing in private) and revelation (publication) as well as the political and economic forces on the writer. Chapter two explores inspiration, more precisely, that part of artistic creation that seems to come from external or uncontrollable sources. The author begins with concepts of magic or divine intervention, most likely the earliest beliefs about inspiration. She notes the struggle of Enlightenment philosophers to attribute inspiration to human reason followed by the Romantic return to an impulse originating outside of oneself. Finally, beginning in the nineteenth century, the psyche is recognized as inspirational source (melancholy, psychosis, the Id, sublimation, etc.). The chapter ends with a reading of Henry Bauchau’s journal documenting his struggles as writer; Grauby points out several contradictory maneuvers undertaken to be able to write, suggesting the impact of external forces that are then re-worked. The chapter that follows examines various ars poetica spanning several centuries and sharing the premise that writing is based on conscious composition, the result of reason and hard effort. In the same vein, Grauby discusses the increased importance of writing workshops and university programs in writing (even in France) that suggest that writing can be learned, thus democratically opening the sacred vocation to all comers. Her last chapter reviews in detail several French manuals for aspiring writers in order to show that, despite the formulae for producing writing, said manuals still integrate ideas about“inspiration”beyond the writer’s conscious control. Grauby also considers writers’ interviews—another source of information on the craft—to find that their 256 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 257 discussion of“construction”is tempered with references to inspiration and rumination. The author concludes with the hope that writing, however complex as creative practice , will continue on a path to more open,engaging dialogue rather than mystification. A bit uneven in its presentation (e.g., the long analyses of writing manuals) and slightly confusing in its framing (the title seems to suggest an examination of the novel of creation) this study is nevertheless a provocative reflection on writing as occupation. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Grenouillet, Corinne. Usines en textes, écritures au travail: témoigner du travail au tournant du XXIe siècle. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-3185-2. Pp. 261. 26 a. Grenouillet offers a literary analysis of recent writing that relates the experiences of workers in France confronted with the decline of traditional manufacturing, the rise of service industries, and the precariousness of low-wage employment. By listening to the voices of workers expressed in literary form, she seeks to determine the extent to which these texts are literary and the effectiveness of literature as a means of communicating workers’ concerns. Grenouillet connects Henry Poulaille’s idea of proletarian literature in the 1930s to current texts resulting from workshops on creative writing and theater, stenographic recording of oral...

Firm Response to Competitive Shocks: Evidence from China's Minimum Wage Policy

The large regional variation of minimum wage changes in 2002-08 implies that Chinese manufacturing firms experienced competitive shocks as a function of firm location and their low-wage employment share. We find that minimum wage hikes accelerate the input substitution from labor to capital in low-wage firms, reduce employment growth, but also accelerate total factor productivity growth--particularly among the less productive firms under private Chinese or foreign ownership, but not among state-owned enterprises. The heterogeneous firm response to labor cost shocks can be explained by differences in governance or management practice, but is difficult to reconcile with the idea that competitive pressure is a substitute for governance quality.

New insights into informal migrant employment: Hand car washes in a mid-sized English city

This article provides new analytical insight into migrant labour by examining a newly emergent low-margin sector, hand car washes (HCWs). The sector is co-created by pressures from above in the form of economic restructuring and from below by employers and migrants who diffuse fluid and flexible low-wage employment. The diffusion of HCWs demonstrates how exploitative privatized employment generates autonomous economic growth in the unregulated economy. The formal and informal economies are however interlinked and overlapping within and beyond the labour process. Locally, HCWs have the potential to become the established car wash sector, putting regulated outlets in a state of uncertainty as informalization in employment if not business practice becomes the norm.

Better Must Come: Existing Homelessness in Two Global Cities

How do people leave homelessness in the global cities of Los Angeles and Tokyo? Sociologist Matthew Marr offers a “multi-level contextual theory of exiting homelessness,” eschewing either/or perspectives on the causal primacy of individual, local, or national factors for an integrative explanation of when and how various factors matter. Focusing on transitional housing, or programs that offer housing aid with time limits, it reveals both the striking similarities and differences in how urban marginality is constructed and addressed across contexts. In so doing, Marr reminds homelessness scholars not to take their object for granted, and to recognize the parochial nature of much US-centered research and theorizing. Drawing primarily on in-depth interviews, the book usefully shifts focus from how people become homeless, or acculturated to a “culture” of homelessness, to the less-studied question of how people attempt to exit. Unlike much comparative work that seeks to control for all but one variable across cases, Marr's selection of Los Angeles and Tokyo is fruitful because it brings multiple differences into stark relief. In LA, a high rate of homelessness encompasses a more diverse population, yet people's better access to subsidized housing programs, closer ties to service providers, and better support from familial and friendship networks facilitate survival amid poor access to wage labor and affordable housing. Tokyo has a far lower rate of homelessness, with concentration primarily in middle-aged and older men. Yet, despite better access to low-wage employment and affordable housing, these men encounter harsher cultures of service provision and little in the way of social network support. These contrasting configurations cannot be easily reduced to singular variables or characterizations like “liberal welfare state” versus “hybrid corporatist,” or “individualistic” versus “collectivistic” culture, and this is why Marr's multilevel analysis is crucial.

Firm Response to Competitive Shocks: Evidence from Chinaas Minimum Wage Policy

The large regional variation of minimum wage changes in 2002-08 implies that Chinese manufacturing firms experienced competitive shocks as a function of firm location and their low-wage employment share. We find that minimum wage hikes accelerate the input substitution from labor to capital in low-wage firms, reduce employment growth, but also accelerate total factor productivity growth particularly among the less productive firms under private Chinese or foreign ownership, but not among state-owned enterprises. The heterogeneous firm response to labor cost shocks can be explained by differences in governance or management practice, but is difficult to reconcile with the idea that competitive pressure is a substitute for governance quality.

Black youths, joblessness, and the other side of ‘Black Lives Matter’

ABSTRACTWhen income segregation is coupled with racial segregation, low-income blacks cluster in neighbourhoods that feature disadvantages along several dimensions including joblessness. Residents of these neighbourhoods are often innocent victims of crime, including violent crime, which frequently goes unnoticed or unreported in the media. They represent the other side of ‘Black Lives Matter', which suggests the need for a broader vision that also highlights the plight of innocent victims of violent crimes in the inner city, and that recognizes the close association between such crimes and joblessness. I therefore call for a policy prescription that would enhance the employment prospects of jobless youth, who are disproportionally involved in criminal offenses, especially those stigmatized by prison records. In making the case for this public policy prescription, I challenge Orlando Patterson's assumptions, based largely on the research of Roger Waldinger, that young black males are reluctant to take low-wage employment by highlighting the important research of Stephen Petterson on reservation wages.

How Does Family Policy ‘Work’? Job Context, Flexibility, and Maternity Leave Policy

AbstractUsing evidence from Canada and the United States, I review the literature on workplace flexibility and one‐size‐fits‐all federal maternity leave policy as it relates to maternal job context. The literature suggests that job variation is central to accessing work–family policy due to differences in job characteristics, demands, and overriding workplace norms. As a result, the opportunities for and consequences of flexibility and leave vary significantly between high and low wage employment contexts. Accordingly, the evidence suggests that policy development would benefit from taking job context into account.

Travelling fair: Targeting equitable transit by understanding job location, sectorial concentration, and transit use among low-wage workers

Low-wage workers have a pressing need for adequate and affordable transportation services. However, the growing polycentricity of North American metropolises means transit providers face the difficult task of serving ever more dispersed employment centers. Deciding where limited project resources would provide the most benefit for disadvantaged populations should be a concern for transit planners and elected officials. The purpose of this research is to determine where low-wage employment zones are, where different types of low-wage jobs concentrate, and determine if job type and location have an effect on transit ridership for low-wage workers. We use a previously proposed method to identify low-wage employment zones in the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area, Canada and measure job type concentration using a gravity approach. We then test to see if job type concentration and employment centres relate to ridership, while controlling for other factors that influence mode share. Our results indicate significant differences in transit use for different occupations exist. These results can help guide more transit investment and research by tackling specific occupation's travel needs.

Changing Fortunes During Economic Transition Low-Wage Persistence Before and after German Unification

This paper studies whether the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy offers new perspectives for those who, in economic terms, were relatively deprived under the old regime. Previous empirical research on this question has been limited by the availability of representative longitudinal micro-data that track individuals' labour market careers across different political regimes. Our study seeks to fill this research gap by looking at the transition of Eastern Germany following German Unification. Using a unique large-scale German administrative data set, we measure individuals' relative economic position by exploiting information on whether individuals were in the bottom of the pre-unification wage distribution. We then address the question of how workers' low or high-wage status determines their wage and labour market status within and across different regimes. We document strong evidence of a dynamic selection process into low-wage employment after Uni-fication. Furthermore, consistent with a weak connection between individuals' true productivity and their pre-unification low-wage status, the extent of across regime state dependence is found to be small in magnitude and appears to vanish over time. For males, the small extent of across regime dependence is found to be most pronounced among the medium and high-skilled, suggesting the depreciation of general human capital as a potential explanation.

Posting, subcontracting and low-wage employment in the German meat industry

During the last few decades, the German meat industry has experienced an incomparable economic expansion, becoming one of the largest European producers and exporters in the sector. At the same time, Germany, traditionally characterized as a coordinated market economy with strong social partners and labour market institutions, has been nationally as well as internationally criticized for establishing a system of institutional exploitation of mobile and migrant labour in the industry. The aim of this article is to analyse how it was possible to create and maintain such a system under the eyes of social partners and to identify the defining factors for this development.