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There is a widespread belief that work is less secure than in the past, that an increasing share of workers are part of the "precariat." It is hard to find much evidence for this in objective measures of job security, but perhaps subjective measures show different trends. This paper shows that in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, workers feel as secure as they ever have in the past 30 years. This is partly because job insecurity is very cyclical and (pre-COVID) unemployment rates very low, but there is also no clear underlying trend towards increased subjective measures of job insecurity. This conclusion seems robust to controlling for the changing mix of the labor force, and it is true for specific subsets of workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statistical data which may be useful to students of economic change are presented in this paper. It interprets long-run statistical series on the growth of educational employment in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, and provides information on the changes in the relative importance of employment in public schools to total governmental employment and to total employment over the long run. Finally, an analysis of the statistical record indicates that some potentially interesting interrelationships exist between the different proportions of school-age population attending public school, teacher-student ratios, and different ratios of school-age populations to total employment in these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically analyzes the labor supply effects of two “making work pay” reforms in Germany. We provide evidence in favor of policies that distinguish between low effort and low productivity by targeting individuals with low wages rather than those with low earnings. We discuss our results more generally and with comparisons to the family-based tax credits in force in the US and the UK. For the evaluation of the policies, we apply a static structural labor supply framework and explicitly account for demand-side constraints by using a double-hurdle model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimal tax rules are used to evaluate the optimality of taxation for lone mothers in Germany and Britain. The theoretical model is combined with elasticities derived from the structural estimation of lone mothers’ labour supply. For both countries we do not find that in-work credits with marginal tax rates are optimal. However we show that when the government has a low taste for redistribution, out-of-work transfers and transfer for the working poor are very similar, implying very low marginal tax rates. Further, the current tax and transfer systems in both countries are shown to be optimal only if governments have a much higher welfare value for income received by the non-workers than the working poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the workforce characteristics of the German and UK operations of McDonald's Corporation. The UK workforce is characterised by predominantly young workers with very limited work experience, the German workforce is much older and mostly foreign workers. The analysis suggests that despite these differences and differences in labour market regulation, there is a key similarity between the workforces. The corporation is able to draw on similarly "weak" and marginalised segments of the labour market and these segments are likely to be particularly acquiescent to managerial prerogative. National institutional arrangements can still constrain the employment relations policies of multinational enterprises (MNEs). However, this analysis supports the notion that there is a growing diversity within national systems increasingly explained by MNE policies and practices. This does not necessarily mean that national systems are becoming redundant, but that there is a dynamic relationship between such systems and the needs of MNEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recruitment and selection policies of firms is a largely neglected, though important, research area which provides insights into the functioning of labour markets and the social reproduction of organizations. This article is based upon comparative research conducted in Britain and German firms situated in different local labour markets. For each firm, data on selection criteria for different groups of workers, on recruitment channels and on recruitment procedures has been collected. A typology of recruitment strategies is developed which shows how environmental conditions and organizational structures influence the recruitment strategy of a firm. Depending on their market power, professional expertise and decision-making structure, firms implement different recruitment strategies which influence the of worker who is recruited. ‘Discrimination’ in the labour market is seen as a rational decision-making process of organizations. It is the specific outcome of a recruitment strategy which the firm has implemented over the years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents updates on studies about international and comparative industrial relations, as of July 1979. Robert Lawrence of the Brookings Institution is working on a study of U.S. exports and imports and the impact of changes in U.S. comparative advantage. A project examining German and British labor organizations in terms of their influence on the use of manpower is being conducted by the International Institute of Management, in cooperation with the Political and Economic Planning of London in England. Koji Taira of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is collaborating with scholars at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan on research on U.S.-Japanese comparisons of poverty characteristics.