Search

The author revisits the role of trade unionism and its functions (economic, political, ethical, business or regulatory, welfare and representative). He highlights historical facts, theoretical foundations and contemporary phenomena that contribute to configuring trade unions. In this mission, he considered the influence of the constant change in social and economic structures that affected the configuration of professional relations, namely the union of countries into blocs, the globalization of companies, the relocation of production and the advent of new technologies. As a consequence, the author records the decrease in unionization and the devaluation of unions. For government relations, the model practised in the European Union shows that the State can efficiently fulfil its role by relying on the collaboration of effectively free and integrated trade unions, through social dialog policies. Besides, a healthy trade union organisation is essential to help the government (without burdening the public budget) in monitoring the productive space. Through collective private autonomy, it suggests specific solutions in negotiating international, national and local labour rules.The reconstruction of the Brazilian union structure is a challenge to be overcome to take advantage of the great democratic potential of the unions. From this legislative perspective, sustainable socioeconomic development can be considered as resulting from companies' success, fair remuneration, and peaceful coexistence with employees, whoserepresentation cannot be merely formal and voiceless. The investigation finds international standards, including those of the Portuguese and Brazilian legal systems. The author opted for the academic technique of "ad hoc" review of prestigious European, Brazilian and Uruguayan literature.

Based on both the "stakeholder" and "cognitive" theories, this study shed light on the optimistic side of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it also brings the concepts of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability back into the light, which helps in solving the labor environmental issues. Our research aims to profoundly investigate the correlation between CSR and labor environmental issues based on the International Organization for Standardization's standard 26,000 (ISO 26000) during COVID-19 and to also examine how CSR practices help solve labor environmental issues in the Egyptian small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was adopted, for data analysis and hypotheses testing, on a sample of 307 manager-level employees in the Egyptian SMEs. Results indicate that CSR positively impacts labor practices dimensions (employment relationships, human development and training, social dialog, and health and safety at work). However, CSR has an insignificant effect on social protection and work conditions. This study is scientifically valuable since it helps better understand the pandemic's effects on environmental labor issues in the Egyptian SMEs and shows how CSR helps solve those issues. Also, it discussed the theoretical contributions and practical implications and showed the limitations and future research for this study area [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social robots such as learning companions, therapeutic assistants, and tour guides are dependent on the challenging task of establishing a rapport with their users. People rarely communicate with just words alone; facial expressions, gaze, gesture, and prosodic cues like tone of voice and speaking rate combine to help individuals express their words and convey emotion. One way that individuals communicate a sense of connection with one another is entrainment, where interaction partners adapt their way of speaking, facial expressions, or gestures to each other; entrainment has been linked to trust, liking, and task success and is thought to be a vital phenomenon in how people build rapport. In this work, we introduce a social robot that combines multiple channels of rapport-building behavior, including forms of social dialog and prosodic entrainment. We explore how social dialog and entrainment contribute to both self-reported and behavioral rapport responses. We find prosodic adaptation enhances perceptions of social dialog, and that social dialog and entrainment combined build rapport. Individual differences indicated by gender mediate these social responses; an individual's underlying rapport state, as indicated by their verbal rapport behavior, is exhibited and triggered differently depending on gender. These results have important repercussions for assessing and modeling a user's social responses and designing adaptive social agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the case of the recent Belgian law on the "sharing economy," this chapter develops a critique of the dominant discourse of platform-mediated work as fostering the inclusion of individuals belonging to historically underrepresented groups (e.g., women with caring roles, people living in remote areas, individuals with disabilities, etc.) into the labor market. Exempting platform-mediated employment from social contributions and substantially lowering taxation, the law facilitates platform-based crowdsourcing firms' predatory business model of capital valorization. The author argues that this business model rests precisely on the externalization of the costs of the social reproduction of this "diverse" labor through its precarization. These costs are not only externalized to individual workers, as often held. They are also externalized to the Belgian welfare state, and thus ultimately both to taxpayers and firms operating through classical business models, which fund the welfare state through taxation and social security contributions. For this reason, the debate surrounding platform-based employment might paradoxically provide a historical opportunity for recovering the Belgian tradition of social dialog between employers' associations and trade unions. The author concludes by identifying key foci for action to ensure a better protection of workers of crowdsourcing firms including classifying them as employees, revising the conditions of access to social security protection, inclusive union strategies, the leveraging of technology to enforce firm compliance, and fostering counter-narratives of firms' accountability toward society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of analysis of the state of social-labour relations in Ukraine and, in particular, in the Kirovohrad area, contradiction in their development and dominant of social tension were determined, necessity of activation of social dialog for interests of upgrading labour-resource providing of region and economy growing was grounded.На основе анализа состояния социально-трудовых отношений в Украине и, в частности, в Кировоградской области, определены противоречия в их развитии, доминанты социальной напряженности,, обоснована необходимость активизации социального диалога в интересах повышения качества трудоресурсного обеспечения региона и его экономического роста.

The paper on European welfare regimes and policies presents common and shared features of the social development of the post-communist countries that are members of the EU today. This will provide a basis for an attempt to assess if there is a single regime for those countries that distinguishes them from the three classical (and later four) regimes of the Esping-Anderson classification, or if there is an affinity to one of those models en bloc, or if there is similarity to one of the regimes, but in a different way for each of the new EU members. This attempt will be made primarily on the example of Poland, but with salient references to other countries in the group. The basis of the thoughts presented here is that of a project on Diversity and Commonality in European Social Policies: The Forging of a European Social Model (Golinowska, Hengstenberg, żukowski 2009). Considerations and analysis done in the paper lead into conclusions that social policy development in the new member states is characterized by a one social model distinguishing them differently than according to the Esping-Andersen classification, in spite of a some differences in the outcome of the social policy being pursued. Similarities are mainly of an institutional character, resulting from both the similar past and the similar challenges connected with the systemic transformation towards the democratic system and market economy. In the future this specificity may fade and integration within the EU will cause a Europeanization of social policy of member states, but now this process is not sufficiently advanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]