Changes In Employment Structure Research Articles

Current problems ‐ emerging issues in occupational and environmental health

Sheds light on emerging problems in occupational and environmental health in the Asia‐Pacific region which include the changing employment structure, including the increased participation of women and ageing workers, hazards from new kinds of carcinogens and organic chemicals, reproductive hazards, AIDS, technology‐related stress at work, and environmental problems resulting from industrial operations.

Changing Employment Structures and their Effects on Industrial Relations in Malaysia

AbstractThis paper describes the various stages of industrialisation through which Malaysia has passed, beginning with import substitution in the 1960s, export-oriented industries of the 1970s to heavy industries in the 1980s. The public sector, which used to employ a substantial percentage of the labour force and a high percentage of ethnic Malays, has been reduced as a result of the government’s decision to corporatise and privatise many of its agencies. However, as more Malays have began working in the industrial sector, a new phenomena of an emerging Malay proletariat alongside the non-Malays has become evident. They now form more than half of the union leadership and are strongly represented among skilled workers. Whether the government will become more liberal with its laws and policies towards unions in the future is uncertain, as the democratic process in Malaysia has yet to gain a firm hold.

International specialization and structural change in the Swedish Manufacturing Industry, 1969–1992

International Specialization and Structural Change in the Swedish Manufacturing Industry, 1969–1992. — The increasing trade orientation of Swedish manufacturing 1969–1992 was mainly caused by increasing intraindustry specialization with most industries. Intraindustry specialization was found to be related positively to the skill intensity of the industry and negatively to average plant size and the incidence of trade barriers. The paper evaluates the links between specialization and inter-as well as intraindustry structure. It was found that changing patterns of relative international competitiveness among industries accounted for more than half of the total interindustry structural change in employment in 1969–1992. The mean plant size tends to increase with intraindustry specialization.

The Changing Employment Structure of the Extended Jakarta Metropolitan Region

This paper examines the changing employment structures in the growing metropolitan region focused on Jakarta It disaggregates the Botabek region surrounding Jakarta into an inner and an outer ring, and finds that the “fringe” growth of Jakarta has come to dominate the pattern of urbanisation in West Java, adding more to the urban population of West Java in the 1980s than did the growth of the West Java capital, Bandung. The increase in employment over the 1980–1990 period differed sharply between Jakarta and the two rings. Employment in DKI Jakarta rose by 52%, in the inner rmg by 425%, and in the outer ring by 36%. Migration patterns indicate that the inner ring was gaining both through city dwellers moving to areas outside the city boundaries and through people moving from elsewhere in Java and further afield. The educational attainment of the workforce in the inner ring rose dramatically, reflecting not only improvements in school facilities within the ring but also in-migration of well educated people.

British Unions in Decline: Determinants of the 1980s Fall in Union Recognition

This examination of establishment-level data from the Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys of 1980, 1984, and 1990 shows that the proportion of British establishments (that is, workplaces in both the private and public sector) that recognized unions for collective bargaining over pay and working conditions fell by almost 20% between 1980 and 1990. Largely accountable for this decline was a much lower rate of union recognition in establishments founded in the 1980s than in previous years, particularly in the private sector. Citing these findings, as well as recent structural changes in employment in the British labor market (such as the shift from manufacturing to services, from manual to non-manual employment, and from full-time to part-time work) and a government that continues to enact anti-union legislation, the authors foresee no reversal of unions' decline in the 1990s.

Trade unions and employment change: An analysis of British establishment data

Few explanations of the changing employment structures of industrialised countries have omitted some reference to the role of trade unions. For some commentators, it is the unions’ ability to raise wages above their ‘natural market level’ that constitutes a brake on employment growth by increasing the employer’s costs and making product prices-uncompetitive. For others, it is the unions’ power to impose uneconomic working practices upon management that leads to decline or lack of growth of the organisation [for a discussion see Freeman and Medoff (1984), Mayhew (1983)]. Empirical testing of these and other lines of explanation has been hampered in Britain by lack of suitable datasets. While employment data are detailed and widely available, systematic and reliable information on the extent of trade union influence has been restricted to reported membership levels for broad industry groups [see, for example, Bain and Price (1983), Pencavel (1974)], the ‘coverage’ of collective bargaining derived from earnings surveys [see, for example, Mulvey (1976), Layard, Metcalf and Nickel1 (1978)] and the extent and frequency of strike action [see, for example, Smith et al. (1978)J. The availability of a new series of nationally representative surveys at the establishment level has enabled us to obtain new insights into the relationship between changes in employment and trade union organisation at the point where such relationships arguably occur the place of work.’ The