BIAS Word inventory for work and employment diversity, (in)equality and inclusivity (Version 1.0)

The language used in job advertisements contains explicit and implicit cues, which signal employers’ preferences for candidates of certain ascribed characteristics, such as gender and ethnicity/race. To capture such biases in language use, existing word inventories have focused predominantly on gender and are based on general perceptions of the ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ orientations of specific words and socio-psychological understandings of ‘agentic’ and ‘communal’ traits. Nevertheless, these approaches are limited to gender and they do not consider the specific contexts in which the language is used. To address these limitations, we have developed the first comprehensive word inventory for work and employment diversity, (in)equality, and inclusivity that builds on a number of conceptual and methodological innovations. The BIAS Word Inventory was developed as part of our work in an international, interdisciplinary project – BIAS: Responsible AI for Labour Market Equality – in Canada and the United Kingdom (UK). Conceptually, we rely on a sociological approach that is attuned to various documented causes and correlates of inequalities related to gender, sexuality, ethnicity/race, immigration and family statuses in the labour market context. Methodologically, we rely on ‘expert’ coding of actual job advertisements in Canada and the UK, as well as iterative cycles of inter-rater verification. Our inventory is particularly suited for studying labour market inequalities, as it reflects the language used to describe job postings, and the inventory takes account of cues at various dimensions, including explicit and implicit cues associated with gender, ethnicity, citizenship and immigration statuses, role specifications, equality, equity and inclusivity policies and pledges, work-family policies, and workplace context.

Reflection on Social Entrepreneurship in the Penitentiary Environment

Entrepreneurship can be a solution to the dilemma: “Labour is a form of education, a way of ensuring existence, gaining autonomy, a physical and mental training, a way of oppression, a form of occupational therapy, all together or …none of the variants listed?” Depending on the reference field and the perspectives offered by different specializations, work is defined as a physical or intellectual action, which develop material and emotional satisfactions. Especially in closed environments, it is practiced as a form of occupational therapy (ergotherapy), because it ensures a sense of usefulness, helping to maintain somato-psycho-emotional health. The schoolmasters highlight the formative values of work for students: evaluate the native skills and abilities, lead to the discovery of new unknown interests and talents, support the student in his perfection by inoculating the ideas of responsibility, order, discipline, etc. Before 1989, in detention environment labour was mandatory, but now, labour is an optional right. The two perspectives are diametrically opposed, and the issue was addressed only from the perspective of reduced job supply, both during detention and after release. There are few publications with strict reference to this topic. In general, the social reintegration of post-execution prisoners is addressed. At this moment, the main problem highlighted is integration/reintegration on the labour market, as the main facilitating step of maintaining the accumulations during the detention period and a primary factor for avoiding the recurrence. However, those who have served a custodial sentence do not have a "ticket" to the labour market. To be known and solved, the situation should be addressed continuously: prevention before detention, education/re-education/training / retraining during detention and placement on the labor market / retraining immediately after release.

Welfare Sanctions and Deprivation in Germany: Do First Sanctions Lead to Higher Levels of Deprivation Among the Long-Term Unemployed and Recipients of Basic Income Support?

In Germany, as in many other European countries, vast changes in the welfare regime – towards workfare – have taken place. As a central activating element of workfare, sanctions were introduced to take effect by temporarily increasing deprivation through benefit cuts. This paper provides first quantitative insights on the effect of first sanctions on deprivation and contributes to the recent debate on the (un)constitutionality of sanctions, which re-emerged after a verdict of the Federal Constitutional Court, criticizing the lack of knowledge about the effects of sanctions on those affected. We implement a difference-in-differences propensity score matching approach that addresses selection on observables and individual time constant unobserved differences. High data accuracy is ensured by combining the “Panel Labour Market and Social Security” (PASS) with administrative data from the Federal Employment Agency. The results illustrate a slightly higher yet statistically insignificant level of deprivation for first-sanctioned unemployment/basic income recipients compared to non-sanctioned recipients. The results hint in the direction that higher levels of deprivation are not what activates the sanctioned beneficiaries to reintegrate into the labour market. We discuss whether the results imply a significant deviation from the socio-cultural subsistence minimum of sanctioned recipients and a failure of the welfare state.

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.

Revitalising Jiri Technical School in a Dramatically Changed Context: Governance, Management and Employability

This paper examines two assumption: First, whether inadequate practical training, including much shortened apprenticeship training, has negatively affected the employability and incomes of graduates of TVET institutions in Nepal, and the second, whether it is good institutional management and governance that provide the systems for quality training and positive labour market outcomes. Tracer studies and an institutional assessment of Jiri Technical School (JTS) confirm the first assumption. The review of select literature on institution building and the benchmarking of JTS’ operative practices against those of high performing educational institutions (in India) confirm the second assumption. It is argued that poor management and governance of TVET institutions drifts the mission of Technical Schools away from their initial socio-economic mandate: the provision of skilled human resource and access to qualification opportunities to the youth having the aptitudes for such an education. Social rather than labour market demand with corresponding politics is one major force for such deviation. To revitalise the JTS, it is proposed to bank on the federalisation of the TVET governance system to professionalise Board, Management and teachers for enhanced labour market outcomes in closer cooperation between actors from the education and employment systems.

Internal Migration, Living Close to Family, and Individual Labour Market Outcomes in Spain

Migration is often viewed as a way to enhance occupational careers. However, particularly in Mediterranean countries, labour market outcomes may also depend on local family resources. We investigate how men’s and women’s labour market outcomes differ between (1) those who migrated and those who did not; and (2) those who live close to family and those who live farther away. Our main contributions are the investigation of the association between migration and labour market outcomes in a different context than the more commonly studied Northern and Western European countries and the United States, and of the role of living close to family in labour market outcomes. We used a sample of labour market participants from the “Attitudes and Expectations About Mobility” survey, conducted in Spain in 2019. Our results show that the likelihood of being a professional is greater for women who migrated than for those who did not, and that the likelihood of being unemployed or in a temporary job is lower for women who live close to family than for those who do not, but neither association was found for men. The finding for living close to family is in line with the notion that nearby family may protect women in particular from precarious labour market positions. The finding for migration differs from previous findings for Northern and Western Europe and the United States, which indicate that migration is beneficial to men in particular. This difference might be specific to a low-migration context, but data limitations prevent firm conclusions.