Hit Hard but Recover Slowly: The Asymmetric Effects of Social Distancing Policies on the US Labor Market

This study employs a difference-in-differences approach to examine the US labor market response to two widely used social distancing policies, stay-at-home (SAH) order and non-essential business closure, with special attention paid to the asymmetric effect of the policies’ imposition and lifting. Exploiting the variation across states and time, we find that state employment rates declined by 4.3% and 1.9% for the two policies respectively, within one month of the enaction of social distancing policies, but the recovery was slower after the policies were removed. We also highlight that the low-income group suffered the highest employment rate drop from the SAH enaction while presenting the mildest rebound. Self-employed workers were more affected by the policy impositions but recovered slightly faster than wage earners. Our results suggest persistent efforts must be made after the pandemic, especially for more vulnerable groups in the labor market.

Telework and perceived workload: Learnings prior to the COVID-19 upheaval

During COVID-19, telework has become a new form of work for broader groups of workers who were not teleworking prior to the pandemic. In this study, we ask what we will be returning to after COVID-19, if teleworking will become a new norm or if most workplaces will merely return to the old forms of work. The main research question of this study was to estimate the role of telework in perception of workload. More specifically, to gain an understanding of the stakes involved when reorganizing work after the pandemic, we analysed the relationship between perceived workload and opportunities to telework. Multilevel analysis utilized representative national data of wage earners in Finland (N = 4091). The findings showed that the opportunity to telework is associated with lower perceived workload in the capital area but not in the rural areas. More specifically, increasing telework opportunities among different-level workers, particularly in educational and social work in the capital area, would be beneficial in terms of increasing well-being at work. There could be good reasons for organizations to reject returning to the status quo ex ante after COVID-19 and to consider the new norm, where opportunities to telework are offered to wider worker groups.

Taxpayer Bunching Evidence: Responsiveness at Kink Points of the Honduran Personal Income Tax

This paper studies the response of taxpayers to changes in the marginal tax rate or kinks, estimated through compensated elasticities by applying the bunching methodology to Honduran administrative data on Personal Income Tax (PIT) from the period 2011 – 2018. Due to missing data issues at the first kink, estimates are only generated for the other two kinks. The results show a low response, reflected by a compensated elasticity around 0.09. Higher response on wage earners was found at the second kink. Further analysis is done by type of taxpayer, income source, third-party reporting, gender, and age.

Wage Earners in India 1500–1900:Regional Approaches in an International Context

The study of wage levels and the purchasing power of wages is often viewed as a specialized academic topic of little concern to the wider public. This is far from being the case, as this book demonstrates. The study of wages opens up vistas of the daily life of the working people, of their standards of living and, therefore, addresses questions of larger economic developments and unequal power relationships in a region. Wage Earners in India 1500–1900: Regional Approaches in an International Context brings together several scholars—young and veteran—to study new data and reinterpret older data from a fresh methodological perspective to locate India within global economic systems more effectively. This book • identifies previously unused and unpublished material for the study of wages • underlines the importance of wages as a source of income for Indians from early times • demonstrates the trends in wages over the period under review • stresses the need to take women into account for the reconstruction of household income

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.

"The Living Death": The Repatriation Experience of New Zealand's Disabled Great War Servicemen

<p>The New Zealand government committed over 100,000 men to active service during the Great War of which around 40,000 returned injured. Due to the severity of their disabilities many wounded servicemen required ongoing medical care and were unable to return to their former employment. New Zealand introduced a variety of repatriation initiatives during the 1920s and 1930s to aid the Great War’s struggling wounded soldiers and restore them to their traditional masculine role as independent wage-earners and useful citizens. ‘The Living Death’ uses a variety of qualitative sources including state-based documents, newspapers, journals and oral history as well as a quantitative sample from military personnel files. Using these sources this thesis explores the medical treatment, pensioning and employment assistance offered by state and society to disabled soldiers in order to elucidate how New Zealand’s wounded ex-servicemen experienced and negotiated the cultural issues of disability, masculinity and citizenship in the post-war period. I argue that these men were identified as a class apart from other disabled persons in the immediate aftermath of the war, but that this identity began to fade once the economic conditions worsened, war memory faded and as some wounded ex-servicemen failed to complete a successful transition into civilian life.</p>

"The Living Death": The Repatriation Experience of New Zealand's Disabled Great War Servicemen

<p>The New Zealand government committed over 100,000 men to active service during the Great War of which around 40,000 returned injured. Due to the severity of their disabilities many wounded servicemen required ongoing medical care and were unable to return to their former employment. New Zealand introduced a variety of repatriation initiatives during the 1920s and 1930s to aid the Great War’s struggling wounded soldiers and restore them to their traditional masculine role as independent wage-earners and useful citizens. ‘The Living Death’ uses a variety of qualitative sources including state-based documents, newspapers, journals and oral history as well as a quantitative sample from military personnel files. Using these sources this thesis explores the medical treatment, pensioning and employment assistance offered by state and society to disabled soldiers in order to elucidate how New Zealand’s wounded ex-servicemen experienced and negotiated the cultural issues of disability, masculinity and citizenship in the post-war period. I argue that these men were identified as a class apart from other disabled persons in the immediate aftermath of the war, but that this identity began to fade once the economic conditions worsened, war memory faded and as some wounded ex-servicemen failed to complete a successful transition into civilian life.</p>

Enslaved and Free Workers and the Growth of the Working Class in Brazil

Since the early successful colonial enterprises in Brazil’s territory, men and women forcibly transferred from Africa were used as enslaved workers not only on plantations and other agricultural settings, but also in protoindustrial contexts, such as in the sugar mills and the mining trade and metallurgy. Enslaved people were also a fundamental part of the labor force in the urban artisanry, manufacturing, and the early industrial ventures in the 18th century and after Independence in 1822. In the second half of the 19th century, the first drive of industrialization, in places like Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and São Paulo, was driven by British investments led by slave-owning entrepreneurs and powered by the intensive use of enslaved labor. Foreign workers brought to the country, Brazilian free manual laborers and other poor immigrants, freed, and enslaved people often worked side by side in shipyards, gunpowder factories, mining endeavors, railways constructions, and many other activities. In Brazil, especially in urban contexts, many enslaved men and women would rent themselves out, or they would be leased out by their masters, to perform a variety of urban activities, including working in the country’s many artisan shops and industries. In doing so, not only were they able to get financial compensation for their work by becoming ganhadores (enslaved wage earners), but, in that capacity, they also experienced situations usually associated with “free” laborers, such as wage negotiation, bargaining, and even strikes. Some of the enslaved ganhadores were able to buy their own freedom and carried their experiences into their lives as free workers. Therefore, both free and unfree laborers of African descent were present in a variety of trades and enterprises, and the multiplicity of their experiences shaped the dynamics of labor relations, identity building, political and labor cultures, and individual and collective action and organization in the long history of the making of Brazilian working classes. The heterogeneity that defined the Brazilian laboring classes, composed of people of African descent as well as poor White Portuguese settlers and other immigrants, united and divided by race, gender, nationality, legal status, histories, and cultural backgrounds cannot be stressed enough. It is crucial to understand how the institution of slavery impacted the social and economic relations of all workers, free and unfree, in Brazil even after slavery was abolished in 1888: its legacy of oppression, but also diversity, is expressed in the conflicts and collaborations that marked workers’ collective experience and impacted the transformations that the working classes underwent in post-emancipation Brazil.

Does Entrepreneurship Make You Happier? A Comparative Analysis Between Entrepreneurs and Wage Earners.

Currently, age is characterized, on the one hand, by the existence of governance systems that are gradually eroding the Welfare State and, on the other hand, by the implementation of business management models based on precarious work and a massive reduction in jobs. This work aims to analyze the degree of happiness perceived in the group of Spanish entrepreneurs (either with or without employees), compared to that perceived by employees (whether permanent or temporary); and if that happiness is associated with certain socio-demographic variables gender, level of studies and income level).For this reason, there is a need to consider these working hypotheses proposed. Starting with the general null variable (H0), its opposite is established: H1. There is a relationship between the type of professional situation (employee, businessperson, self-employed, cooperative, etc.) and happiness; that is, there is an association between the different employment categories (represented by the variable professional situation) and the value given to the variable that measures the degree of perceived happiness. The averages of the distributions for each category are not similar. Keywords: Happiness, Entrepreneur, Wage Earners, Well-being, Professional Situation.

Association between Self-Perceived Social Support in the Workplace and the Presence of Depressive/Anxiety Symptoms

This study aimed to investigate the association of support from colleagues and supervisors at the workplace on depressive and anxiety symptoms in wage earners from Korea. The data used in this study were from the fifth Korean Working Conditions Survey (KWCS) conducted in 2017 and analyzed using a multivariate logistic regression model. Furthermore, we measured the odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of depressive and anxiety symptoms by stratifying covariates. The ORs of depressive and anxiety symptoms for the “non-support” group were higher than for the “support group” in terms of support from both colleagues and supervisors. The results of the stratified analysis of covariates, male, young, highly-educated, full-time, and white-collar groups were associated with the lack of support. Support from colleagues and supervisors was significantly associated with the Korean wage worker’s mental health—depressive and anxiety symptoms, respectively. Further longitudinal and clinical studies on the relationship between mental health and support at the workplace are required.