Social Innovation for Work Inclusion – Contributions of Swedish Third Sector Organizations

The innovative contributions of third sector organizations (TSOs) to tackle work-related societal challenges are increasingly acknowledged in policy and research, but rarely in Nordic working life studies. The article helps fill this knowledge gap by an empirical mapping of efforts by Swedish TSOs to promote work inclusion among people considered disadvantaged in the regular labor market, due to age, disabilities, origin, etc. Previous studies of social innovation help distinguish their innovativeness in terms of alternative or complementary ways to perceive and promote work inclusion in regard to Swedish labor market policies. By combining various measures for providing and preparing work opportunities, addressing their participants through individualistic and holistic approaches, and managing work inclusion by varying organization, funding, and alliances, the mapped cases seem to innovatively compensate for government and market failures in the work inclusion domain to some extent, while also being limited by their own voluntary failures.

Greening work: labor market policies for the environment

Jobs are essential for social inclusion, raising taxes, and guaranteeing the financial resilience of (welfare) states. At the same time, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement, and the European Green Deal require the greening of our economies and labor markets. This paper assesses how labor market policies can green employment. The paper analyses the potential effects of eight different policy strategies on four dimensions of the Taxonomy of Sustainable Employment: conversion of plants and businesses, environmental labor law, climate decommodification, socio-ecological job guarantee, vocational guidance and retraining, distribution of employment time, alternative income sources, and equalization of income. All eight strategies have the potential of greening employment but feature different intensities in the four dimensions. In the light of environmental crises, the results suggest widening the toolbox of labor market policies for a green and just transition.

Death by Robots? Automation and Working-Age Mortality in the United States

The decline of manufacturing employment is frequently invoked as a key cause of worsening U.S. population health trends, including rising mortality due to ‘deaths of despair’. Increasing automation—the use of industrial robots to perform tasks previously done by human workers—is one major structural force driving the decline of manufacturing jobs and wages. In this study we examine the impact of automation on age-sex specific mortality. Using exogenous variation in automation to support causal inference, we find that increases in automation over the period 1993–2007 led to substantive increases in all-cause mortality for both men and women aged 45-54. Disaggregating by cause, we find evidence automation is associated with increases in drug overdose deaths, suicide, homicide and cardiovascular mortality although patterns differ across age-sex groups. We go on to examine heterogeneity in effects by safety net program generosity, labor market policies, and the supply of prescription opioids.

EVALUATION OF THE ACTIVE LABOR MARKET POLICIES IN THE REPUBLIC OF SRPSKA

This paper discusses the methods of evaluating active labor market policy. In addition, an important aspect of the analysis, conducted in this paper, concerns the assessment of the relative success of these measures in the case of the Republic of Srpska. The statistical analysis evaluated the success of three chosen projects implemented in the Republic of Srpska. A major problem in evaluating the effectiveness of individual measures is inadequate IT support. The unemployed persons are not monitored for all the characteristics that play a significant role in determining the target groups for particular measures. The measures are primarily intended for young people and categories related to the recent war conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. The relative assessment of the success of individual measures has confirmed that these measures are not greatly influenced by raising general employment, but these programs, at least to some extent, alleviate the problem of unemployment and improve the position of the hard-to-employ categories of the unemployed persons.

Are we all in this together? Alleviating the childcare constraint for women in economic crises

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to advocates the use of gendered economic policies to stimulate a post-COVID-19 recovery. It alerts on the risk of ignoring the female dimension of the current crisis and of resorting again to austerity programs that, like the ones enacted after the 2008 crisis, would hit women and mothers disproportionally harder than other groups.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use data from the British Household Panel Survey on female participation and account for gendered constraints and enablers missed by mainstream economics. Using a sequential empirical approach, the authors simulate various welfare policy scenarios that address factors, such as childcare costs, personal and social nudges, that could help women back into the labor market in the aftermath of a crisis.Findings The authors found that incentive-type interventions, such as subsidies, promote female labor market participation more effectively than punishment-austerity type interventions, such as benefits' cuts. Policies oriented to alleviate childcare constraints can be sustainable and effective in encouraging women back to work. Considering factors wider than the standard economic variables when designing labor market policies may provide fruitful returns.Originality/valueThe sequential methodology enables to estimate current and counterfactual incomes for each female in the sample and to calculate their prospective financial gains and losses in changing their labor market status quo, from not employed into employed or vice-versa. Welfare policies affect these prospective gains and losses and, by interacting with other factors, such as education, number and age of children and social capital, prompt changes in women's labor market choices and decision.