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.

Employment Insecurity and Behavioral Preferences of University Graduates

This paper deals with the employment insecurity in the context of labor market dysfunction and changing institutional structure of the economy. We consider the actorsʼ behavior in the labor market as affected by the institutional factors. Employment insecurity and associated precarity processes are essenstial for young people entering the labor market. Qualitative methodology allowed us to identify the behavioral preferences of the informants through the in-depth interviews. We have conducted and analyzed 17 in-depth interviews with the university graduates. The research findings showed that the graduates are generally aware of the problems associated with unstable employment in the Russian labor market. They are relatively loyal to informal employment during university studies and for the initial few years after graduation. We focus on the graduates’ perception of the precarization processes in the context of the labor marketʼs structural opportunities. The gap between educational and economic policies and the emergence of institutions that create sustainable rules for the professional and personal development of the employees is an important cause of youth unemployment. The behavioral strategies of university graduates are associated with three main groups of factors: the existing institutional constraints on the labor market, adaptation to the demand structure in the region (city) in its competence area, and the level of competence of the graduate and his/her self-assessment of these competencies and their relevance to employersʼ modern requirements. The challenges of precarious employment are addressed by graduates in the context of competition and the need to improve their skills.

Not a Peasant Movement: The Livelihood Struggles of the Taiwanese Labouring Population under the Broken Promise of High-tech Development

In contrast to popular opinion, this paper suggests that recent protests against the Taiwanese government's expropriation of farmland for high-tech development in Taiwan do not constitute a peasant movement. Based on Karl Polanyi's double-movement thesis and Ching Kwan Lee's analysis of workers’ uprisings in the context of market reform, this paper shows that the local cause of such a mobilization is the labouring population's struggle to maintain a livelihood against increasing economic and employment insecurity. Moreover, the intensification of market despotism, economic insecurity and the relocation of firms to China have broken the various promises offered by high-tech development. As a result, local protestors have begun to question the necessity of expropriating farmland to make way for the construction of new science industrial parks.

Despotic Time in the U.S.

This chapter examines the existence of internal labor markets at ConflictCo, looking at flexible scheduling in this workplace regime. While workers at PartnershipCo experienced little employment insecurity, this was not the case at ConflictCo. It was clear that workers at ConflictCo were highly fearful of losing their jobs. This was a consequence of ConflictCo's internal state, which made use of “at-will employment,” meaning that there was no redundancy policy, and managers were free to decide themselves which workers to keep on. Those who lost their jobs received no redundancy pay or notice. There was, therefore, a great deal of employment insecurity among the informants. If flexible discipline is found to be central to the operation of control at ConflictCo, despite the availability of traditional forms of discipline, then it significantly strengthens the case that this is a vital feature of workplace regimes in the twenty-first century.

Strategies of Flexible Accumulation and Perceived Employment Insecurity: Is There a Connection?

Existing research on perceived employment insecurity tends to focus on perceptions of job insecurity (a worker’s perception of how vulnerable their position is with their current employer). This study examines perceived labor market insecurity (a worker’s assessment of their job prospects in the broader labor market) alongside perceived job insecurity. The author uses individual-level General Social Survey and publicly available state-level data from 1977 to 2012 to determine and identify strategies of flexible accumulation (e.g., deindustrialization, deunionization, and financialization) that may be associated with these outcomes. The findings indicate that these strategies are associated with greater levels of perceived job insecurity but are not significant for perceived labor market insecurity, which is only positively associated with unemployment at the state level. The author also finds that individual-level factors such as income and part-time status have differing effects for each outcome. In a time characterized by higher levels of employer-employee detachment, these findings have important implications for the study of employment insecurity.