Labour market protection across space and time: A revised typology and a taxonomy of countries’ trajectories of change

We measure and interpret the evolution of labour market protection across 21 high-income countries over three decades, employing as conceptual foundations the ‘regime varieties’ and ‘trajectories of change’ developed by Esping-Andersen, Estevez-Abe, Hall and Soskice, and Thelen. We measure labour market protection considering four institutional dimensions – employment protection, unemployment protection, income maintenance and activation – and the evolution of the workforce composition. This measurement accounts for the joint evolution of labour market institutions, their complementarities and their relation to outcomes, and mitigate the unrealistic Average Production Worker assumption. We handle the multi-dimensional nature of labour market protection with Principal Component Analysis and capture the characteristics of countries’ trajectories of change with a composite score. We contribute to the literature in three ways. (1) We portray a revised typology that accounts for processes of change between 1990 and 2015, and that clusters regime varieties on the basis of coordination and solidarity levels, that is, Central/Northern European, Southern European, liberal. (2) We illustrate that, despite a persistent gap, a large majority of Coordinated Market Economies experiencing a decline in the level of labour market protection became more similar to Liberal Market Economies. (3) We develop a fivefold taxonomy of countries’ trajectories of change (liberalization, dualization, flexibility, de-dualization and higher protection), showing that these trajectories are not always path-dependent and consistent with regime varieties previously developed in the literature.

The social partners as actors in new labour law legislation in Sweden

This article focuses on the importance of the social partners in new labour law regulation where there is a weak parliamentary majority. The prevailing view in Sweden is that labour law regulation must be modernised as both companies and employees need improved opportunities in order to be able to adapt to changing conditions in the labour market. A Government inquiry and negotiations between the social partners in the private sector focused on these issues. The social partners reached two agreements: a Principle Agreement, including demands that the state provide new labour law regulation; and a Basic Agreement, which is a collective agreement about security, transition and employment protection. The Swedish Government decided to modernise the Swedish Employment Protection Act (LAS) 1 in line with the social partners’ suggestions. The government proposal covers three important labour law areas: (1) changes to the Swedish Employment Protection Act; (2) new state-financed public support for skills development; and (3) a new public transition organisation to provide basic transition support for employees not covered by a collective agreement. This article shows that the social partners have great power over new legislation and can create stability in labour law regulation in Sweden for the future. The government’s proposal implies that new regulation has moved from the provision of employment protection depending on length of service to better transition conditions for employees, and that the state is to take financial responsibility for the lifelong learning of professionals.

Role of Mother’s Group on Women Empowerment: A Case Study of Godawari Municipality, Lalitpur

Mother’s Group is one of the basic groups for women empowerment. It has been functioning for women’s empowerment and social development. Mothers group has managed many skill development programs, income generating programs, literacy programs etc which helped them to make independent. Mother’s group, self-help groups (SHG) and community-based organizations (CBO) play a vital role towards women empowerment by providing vocational trainings, training for self-employment, protection for women and self-awareness programs. Thus, they are mainly concerned with the upliftment of the women in the society. Empowerment of women has been a topic discussed at length in recent times and many strategies have been implemented to address enhance women’s condition. This paper seeks to explore some measure that should be adopted in order to position rural women as equal players in entrepreneurship and economic development. This paper discusses upon the empowerment of rural women by means of self-help group or mother’s group and the advantages of such groups among the rural women.

THE EMPLOYMENT PROTECTION OF MEMBERS OF THE BOARD OF A WORKPLACE TRADE UNION AND THOSE ABOVE AFTER THE AMENDMENTS

The aim of the contemplation is the issue of trade union activists’ employment protection. Discussing article 32 of the Trade Unions Act, the author focuses on changes introduced in the Act from 5th July 2018. In the article, the author points out the meaning of an employed person, the date by which the trade union must adapt its approach towards matters such as a notice of termination, dissolution of employment or one party changes to provision of employment of trade union’s activists. In the study, the author discusses the legal position of the board members of a trade union at the workplace level an above mentioned in the Act of 2003 about so-called group redundancies. The author indicates the differences between the legal protection of an employed person and a union activist that is employed on other category of employment.

COVID-19 impact on job losses in Portugal: who are the hardest-hit?

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic caused job losses to rise dramatically. Herein, the purpose of the article is to identify which personal and job characteristics make individuals more vulnerable or more resilient to COVID-19 unemployment in Portugal and thus to help policymakers, organizations and individuals themselves, in creating mechanisms to avoid unemployment within this new context.Design/methodology/approach Using extensive personal and job-related data on the complete population of newly unemployed in Portugal over several months after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, a logit model is estimated to identify the characteristics that make workers more resilient or more vulnerable to COVID-19 unemployment, in comparison with the pre-crisis period.Findings The COVID-19 crisis is shown to be disruptive by changing the unemployment structure, increasing socioeconomic inequalities and weakening traditional mechanisms of employment protection. Additionally, the authors identify a higher vulnerability of low-skilled individuals and of those in occupations with low working-from-home feasibility and/or from non-essential sectors (particularly tourism).Practical implications Policy indications are given aiming to protect the most vulnerable individuals, sectors and regions in Portugal, in this new and unprecedented context.Originality/value A seven-month period following the emergence of the pandemic is considered, which allows investigating both the immediate and the medium-term effects of the COVID-19 crisis on job losses. Additionally, by matching data from three different sources, an extensive set of multilevel variables is considered, some of them new in the literature.

Economic Dependence and Parental Protection: A Comparative Analysis of Austrian and Slovenian Labour and Social Security Rights of Economically Dependent Self-Employed Parents

Taking parental protection rights as a clear-cut field of study, this article argues that there are significant protection gaps in the social rights and employment protection of the economically dependent self-employed. Their exclusion from employment protection can be justified as far as the protective purpose is tied to the personal subordination of the employee relationship. However, certain vulnerabilities arise not from personal, but from economic dependency, whereas the changing labour market and the growing area of precarious self-employment must be considered. Comparing the rights of working parents in Slovenia and Austria, we distinguish between employees and economically dependent self-employed persons in this specific area and point to challenges for the wider field of labour and social rights. The purposes of parental protection rights are diverse; they include health protection, guarantee social security and serve equal treatment purposes. Therefore, they represent an ideal field to discuss arguments regarding the inclusion or exclusion of the economically dependent self-employed into different protective frameworks.

Supervision and control over observance of labour legislation by state labour service of Ukraine

The purpose of the article is to investigate the role of state supervision and control over compliance with labour legislation in ensuring decent work. Methodology. The research is based on the analysis and generalization of the available practical, scientific and theoretical material and the formation of relevant conclusions. The following methods of scientific cognition were used in the research: logical-semantic, system-structural, terminological, system-functional, structural-logical, normative-dogmatic, method of generalization. Results. It is established that the effectiveness of supervision and control over compliance with labour legislation is ensured by many factors: regularity, the right choice of goal, the actual elimination of violations, the presence of clear legal regulations for control and supervision. Scientific novelty. It is established that supervision and control over observance of labour legislation is an important and necessary form of protection of labour rights, freedoms and legitimate interests of employees. With the help of this form of protection of labour rights and legitimate interests of employees, the following tasks are solved: ensuring strict implementation of regulations in the field of labour; achieving the quality of implementation of decisions; timely taking measures to eliminate identified violations; identifying positive experiences and putting them into practice. The practical significance lies in the possibility of using materials in law enforcement activities - to improve the practice of applying current legislation in the field of labor rights; educational process - in the teaching of disciplines: "Labour Law of Ukraine", "Employment Protection", "Labour Rights Protection in European Union Countries".

Rationalizing the irrational: Making sense of (in)consistency among union members and non-members

Focusing on 13 OECD countries over 25 years, we examine the factors that explain why a sizable fraction of wage-earners exhibit an inconsistency between their union membership status and their confidence in unions by being either confident non-members or non-confident members. While structural factors associated with joining constraints generate inconsistency in specific labour market categories, wage-earners who have extreme ideological orientations and are highly interested in politics are much less likely to exhibit inconsistency across time and countries. For individuals who have intermediate ideological orientations and are not very interested in politics, differences in terms of non-member and member inconsistency between countries are explainable through contextual variables such as economic conditions, the level of employment protection, and historical legacies. Implications for union membership research and union strategies are discussed.

Employer Responses to Legislation Protecting Non-Regular Workers: Evidence from South Korea

Many countries have taken steps to address employment insecurity by enacting employment protection legislation (EPL) for non-regular workers. Although the aggregate impacts of EPL reforms have been examined in the literature, less attention has been paid to the heterogeneous ways that different types of employers respond to these reforms. In this paper, we seek to shed additional light on the impact of non-regular workforce protections by investigating the response of establishments to legal changes in Korea in 2007. We employ a difference-in-difference framework to explore which establishment characteristics predict that employers will convert non-regular workers to regular status. Results indicate that, in the short term, the Korean labor reforms led to increased conversions of fixed-term workers to permanent status. Establishments that have shifted risk onto workers via the use of performance pay are more likely to extend permanent status to non-regular workers. However, establishments that provide favorable employment conditions were less likely to convert. Unions play a double-edged role. Unions in large establishments with a wide range of occupational categories are associated with relatively greater conversion of outsiders to regular status, while unions in smaller, more resource-constrained establishments with a narrower occupational focus are associated with more exclusionary behavior.