How do labor market intermediaries help young Eastern Europeans find work?

2018 ◽  
pp. 443-460
Author(s):  
Renate Ortlieb ◽  
Silvana Weiss

This chapter examines the entry routes of young migrants from Eastern Europe into the Austrian labor market, focusing on the role of labor market intermediaries (LMIs) such as public employment services, online job portals, and temporary work agencies. It takes account of the perspectives of both employers and young migrants. The findings suggest that online job portals are the most prevalent type of LMI. Relatedly, informational services are more relevant than matchmaking and administrative services. The relevance of LMI types and services varies across sectors, indicating that LMIs to varying degrees fulfill specific functions in these sectors, such as reduction of transaction costs, risk management, and network building. The more nuanced understanding of entry routes provided by this chapter will help in the development of theoretical models explaining youth migration and design policy measures aimed at improving the labor market opportunities of young migrants from Eastern Europe.

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeroen Meijerink ◽  
Martijn Arets

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to compare online labor platforms (OLPs) such as Upwork, Fiverr, YoungOnes and Temper with traditional temp agencies. At a first glance, OLPs and temp agencies strongly resemble each other while they aim to meet the need for short-term labor of organizations. The authors ask the question how these labor market intermediaries differ on issues such as information technology usage, ways how labor supply and demand are matched and working conditions (e.g. status, pay and social security of workers). Design/methodology/approach Next to a review of the academic literature, the authors conducted interviews with representatives of six OLPs and temp agencies in the Netherlands as well as a legal specialist in Dutch labor law. Findings The authors found that OLPs and temp agencies differ on several issues. First, although OLPs rely on online marketplaces for matching labor supply and demand, temp agencies generally rely on human matchmakers. Second, although OLPs enable workers and client organizations to initiate transactions themselves, temp agencies employ representatives that do the matching for workers and clients. Third, and as a result, OLPs afford client organizations to almost instantly hire workers on-demand, whereas the flexibility and speed that temp agencies can offer depend on availability and processing capacity of human matchmakers. Originality/value According to the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to compare OLPs and temp agencies and, in doing so, offers academics and practitioners an analytical framework to compare different types of labor market intermediaries.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 566-588
Author(s):  
Jean-François Orianne ◽  
Laura Beuker

By articulating a pragmatic approach of the labor market intermediaries with a systemic approach of the interactions at the State’s counters, the authors study the follow-up and accompaniment procedure of jobseekers in Belgium, within three public employment services. This procedure appears today as the most successful realization of a reform process, within the employment policies, that is still in progress since the middle of the 1990, under the influence of the European institutions (the European employment strategy). The authors analyze the role of the National Employment Office’s facilitators, the agents who are in charge of the jobseekers’ following-up procedure, that is the control of their effort to find a job. They also focus on the role of the employment counselors of two regional public services by showing that the employability – the official target of the activation policies – operate as a way to speak abstractly of employment and unemployment, as a way to sustain and to intensify the communication at the State’s counters. The action of the labor market intermediaries, qualified by the authors as a moral enterprise, can be characterized by its self-referential nature: to socialize the job seekers, to make them sensitive to the norms and standards of employability that are at stake in the three public employment services. According to the authors, the ‘labor market’ acts as a fiction: a simplified reconstruction of the world of work, within the political system, that serve as a readily available reference for the public action of intermediation.


1987 ◽  
Vol 5 (4, Part 2) ◽  
pp. S1-S17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Bull ◽  
Oscar Ornati ◽  
Piero Tedeschi

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