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This is an exploratory study on returning migrants as adult learners preparing to return to their home countries. We examined the educational needs and learning experiences of nine Mongolian migrants returning from South Korea who participated in vocational education programs for imminent returnees. Our qualitative analysis found that returning migrants have (a) the need to bring viable skills back to their home countries, (b) the need to learn how to start a business, and (c) the need to prove their experience and skills acquired in South Korea. Participants’ vocational education experiences revealed that current educational practices (a) provide knowledge that is too basic and abstract to meet migrants’ needs, and (b) lack variety to meet individuals’ needs to develop their skills; however, (c) they did enable migrants to share information and ideas about their upcoming return to Mongolia. Based on the findings, we identified key issues that must be considered to support migrants’ sustainable return to their home countries. The study’s limitations and suggestions for future research are provided to support various types of return migrants and their needs.

The author analyzes the effects of further training subsidies for low-skilled employees on individual labor market outcomes in Germany. Using detailed administrative data, the author exploits cross-regional variation in the policy styles of local employment agencies to identify causal effects of program participation. Findings show that training subsidies significantly increase cumulative employment duration and earnings in the short run and middle run for compliers, that is, those workers who additionally participate due to a more generous policy style in their agency. These gains are particularly pronounced for certain subgroups, such as women. A rough cost-benefit analysis, however, suggests that the program overall is not beneficial for the public budget.

This article reports on a study of occupational health and safety (OHS) challenges for temporary foreign workers (TFWs) in low- and high-skilled occupations, based on twenty-two cases drawn from a broader study in three Canadian provinces. Interviewees in construction, meat processing, hospitality, and fast food reported concerns regarding working conditions and OHS issues. They include precarious migration status affecting voice; contrasting access to social support; and mechanisms undermining regulatory effectiveness. Sources of vulnerability include closed work permits (making workers dependent on a single employer for job security and family reunification); ineffective means to ensure contractual compliance; and TFW invisibility attributable to their dispersal throughout the labor market. Violations include increased workload without an increase in pay and non-compliance with OHS and contractual rules without oversight. Positive and negative practices are discussed. Recommendations include improving migration security to preserve worker voice and facilitating communication between immigration and OHS authorities.

Employment concentration among low-skilled immigrants is a well-documented phenomenon in the U.S. labor market though its temporal and spatial patterns are less well examined. With Census microdata, the authors trace detailed occupational niches from 1990 to 2010 for all immigrants, as well as Asian and Latino immigrants separately, to understand how these niches have evolved over the past two decades. Using the Herfindahl−Hirschman Index measure, the authors further capture the geographic variation in relative occupational concentration across metropolitan statistical areas and test what metropolitan-level contexts and policies help explain such differences. The authors find that metropolitan areas with larger total and immigrant populations, greater human capital, higher residential mobility, and more diverse economies have expanded low-skilled immigrants’ occupational choices. Conversely, policies such as higher minimum wages and greater union membership may, in fact, increase occupational concentration, at least for some groups.

Singapore is host to approximately 1.7 million transient migrants who either work or study in the city-state. While there has been extensive research on the conditions of low skilled or unskilled workers, little has been written about the experiences of the educated and middle class transnationally mobile workers and students and how they make a home for themselves in the city-state. Through in-depth interviews with 86 international students and educated transnationally mobile workers on their self-perceived identities, social networks, concepts of home, and media and communication use, this article looks at the strategies used by ‘foreign talent’ migrants to feel at home in Singapore. It is observed that while foreign talent migrants develop a combination of creative strategies in order to make Singapore ‘a home away from home’, being transient negatively affects their relationship with Singaporeans. The study also finds that while transient migrants develop close relationships with co-nationals as a strategy for transience, they also maintain/develop class structures while overseas. In other words, international students and white collar workers do not associate with co-nationals who are in low skilled or unskilled work. Drawing on the concept that transient migrants use their self-perceived identities to negotiate everyday life, this article argues that foreign talent migrants use their self-perceived identities to create emerging social and cultural spaces through their versions of reconstructions of home and by their (non)interactions with co-nationals and Singaporeans. In doing so, this article specifically moves away from the literature on time and temporalities which situates the temporary migrant as facing challenges overseas due to the break in their expected life course and connections to home, highlighting instead that transient migrants see their temporality not as a disruption bur rather part of their evolving life course.

In this article, we document some empirical facts about vocational training in India. First, we show that the education levels and vocational training of the Indian labour force are low and have not changed between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012. Then, we show that in wage employment, regular wage and salary earners and casual labour, the returns to skilling are low while the returns to general education are significant, even within the same occupation and industry category. Using the enterprise surveys from the NSS, we also document that self-employment, which is the outside option for most unskilled, semi-skilled and even skilled people, is very unproductive. We, thus, argue that the Indian labour market is stuck in an equilibrium where both the number of persons getting skilled and the returns to skilling are low. JEL: J240, O150

This paper investigates the impact of minimum wages on low-skilled and female low-skilled employment, and reassesses their effect on youth employment. The sample consists of 19 OECD countries from 1997-2013 for low-skilled, and 1983-2013 for young workers. Several different estimation approaches are applied, such as two-way fixed effects, a data-driven approach (LASSO) to pick relevant covariates, an instrumental variable approach to address the potential endogeneity of the minimum wage variable, dynamic difference and system GMM, and a specification in first differences. I present three versions of these estimates, controlling for up to quadratic country- specific time trends. I further investigate long-run effects, institutional complementarities, and whether effects of minimum wages depend on the phase of the business cycle or the level of minimum wages. The findings consistently suggest that there is little evidence for substantial disemployment effects, neither for low-skilled, female low-skilled, nor young workers. The estimated employment elasticities are mostly small, and always statistically indistinguishable from zero. I finally assess why my results on youth employment differ from those of Neumark and Wascher (2004), and show that they overstate precision and that small changes in their specifications lead to minimum wage effects close to zero. I also confirm the absence of significant disemployment effects for a larger sample of 24 countries from 1970-2013.

Using longitudinal linked employer-employee data, the author investigates the returns to being a native speaker for immigrant men in the low-skilled labor market. She compares the two main recent immigrant groups in Portugal: Brazilians, who are Portuguese native speakers, and Eastern Europeans, who are not. Findings show that both wage level and wage growth of the two groups are similar. To better understand this surprising result, the author studies two mechanisms through which language fluency may lead to higher wages: sorting across occupations and across firms. Brazilians do sort into occupations that require greater language skills; however, this does not translate into a wage premium. Considerable workplace segregation occurs in Portugal, but Brazilians are not less segregated from natives than are Eastern Europeans. Evidence in this article suggests that language skills are not a major driver of economic assimilation in the low-skilled labor market.

This article focuses on the relationship between employment protection legislation (EPL) and skill-specific unemployment risks. As a consequence of skill-biased technological progress, low- and high-skilled workers are expected to be affected differently. Moreover, the level of technological progress should moderate the relation between EPL and skill-specific unemployment risks. The analyses are based on data from the Labour Force Survey from the year 2008 and concentrate on the civilian labour force aged between 25 and 49 years in 20 European countries. The results show that stricter EPL strengthens unemployment risks between skill groups only when the level of technological progress is very advanced. In other countries, stricter EPL is related to less inequality in unemployment risks. However, there are two sides to a coin. While stricter EPL is related to lower unemployment risks for the low skilled in most countries, it leads to higher unemployment rates for the highly skilled at the same time.

Using a 2004 survey done in New York City’s Chinese community, we explore the extent to which legal status affects immigrants’ labor market performance and health status. We focus on five issues related to legal status of immigrants: wages, weekly working hours, employment location, self-rated health, and health care utilization. Our results show that undocumented immigrants are more likely to work for exceptionally long hours and are less likely to see a doctor when they get sick. However, we also find that current legal status does not have a significant effect on current health status. This work contributes to a growing literature on how legal status is linked to labor market and health consequences.

Medium-term employment trends highlight increasing labour market disadvantage for people with no/low qualifications. Consequently, established local populations with no/low qualifications have been reported as being hostile to ‘new arrivals’ filling local jobs, on the basis that they are perceived as taking employment opportunities away from them. Drawing on a local study of migrant and student employment on opportunities for people with no/low formal qualifications in the UK city of Coventry, this paper shows how labour market restructuring in the context of neoliberalism has resulted in an increasingly compartmentalised labour market, in which some types of employment have become undesirable and often not feasible for some local workers, but attractive (or at least acceptable) for other groups, including migrant workers and students. The outcome is reduced labour market opportunities for local people with no/low qualifications, because the more flexible migrant workers and students allow employers to restructure their workforces and develop jobs that fit with the ‘frames of reference’ of these groups but match the requirements of some established local people less well.

Although there have been many studies of low skilled call centre operators, research on professional workers in call centres is less common and cross-national research on such operations even rarer. This article compares the labour process experiences of tele-nurses – registered nurses in call centre settings – across three countries: the UK, Australia and Sweden. Using cross-national, comparative ethnographies, through a system, society and dominance (SSD) approach, the article explores the common problems tele-nurses face as well as distinctive societal differences in the ways in which this branch of e-health care is being established. The outcomes reveal both societal diversity and mounting pressures towards a globalizing conformity between the three countries with regard to the working practices of tele-nursing. The findings have important implications for whether or not a professional project can be developed around tele-health care.

This article examines whether Australia's regulatory settings for temporary migrant labour are working effectively and argues that a backdoor currently exists which permits the entry of low skilled migrant workers on visas which are not for a work purpose, namely the international student visa and the working holiday maker visa. We propose that an explicit visa pathway be created for low and semi-skilled workers so that the working conditions of these visa holders are more appropriately monitored and to enable Australia's temporary labour migration program to better meet skill shortages in the economy.

Australia’s migration landscape has been transformed in the past two decades. Although Australia was initially founded upon a culture of permanent migration, built upon ideas of nation-building and citizenship, temporary labour migration has now become the norm. There are over one million migrants with work rights temporarily residing in Australia. Although Australia has only one primary pathway for temporary migrant workers, namely the subclass 457 visa, a number of other visas provide opportunities for temporary migrants to perform work in the domestic labour market. Both international students and working holiday makers have work rights, and a significant amount of unskilled and low skilled work is done by temporary migrants on these visas.

Economic issues are typically at the heart of migration decisions globally. Disparities in incomes between countries play a major role in motivating people with different levels of skills to migrate from Africa to countries with more developed economies in search of secure livelihoods and improved quality of life. South Africa, an upper middle income country, is the leading migration destination country in sub-Saharan Africa because of its buoyant economy. Research has focused on cross-border migration to South Africa while less attention has been on migration among low-skilled migrants from West Africa. We conducted an ethnographic study of 13 low-skilled Nigerian migrants working as street traders in a flea market in Durban. South Africa. Findings indicate that migrants were motivated to travel to South Africa because of misinformation from migrant returnees as well as friends and family resident in South Africa about their potential for considerable economic success abroad. Some were stuck while planning to use South Africa as a transit country to other countries in Europe and North America. Migrants encountered many challenges that prevented them from achieving their dreams of living a better life overseas and ended up as street traders in the flea market. There they endured a lesser quality of life than in their home country but were ashamed to return home preferring instead to eek out a living, and to request and receive financial support from their families at home. Findings have implications for migration policy highlighting the need for innovative ways of disseminating accurate information to potential migrants and assisting migrants to return home. Further research on migrant integration to host country and reverse remittances will be of great value.

The purpose of this longitudinal study of 255 members of the low-skilled workforce was to enhance insight into the nature of the relations between specific supervisor behavior (social support, positive feedback, task-related communication) and employee well-being. Data were analyzed using latent change models focusing on interindividual change and change–change associations over time. Our results indicated that interindividual differences in the intraindividual change in perceived supervisor behavior were related to changes in indicators of well-being across a 6-month period. These results provide further evidence for longitudinal associations between leader behavior and employee outcomes as well as the necessity of designing specific interventions for low-level managers.

In this study, the authors analyze leadership behaviors as potential health-promoting resources for low-skilled workers in a highly culturally diverse work setting. The authors hypothesize that subordinates' and supervisors' individual power distance orientations will moderate the effect of subordinates' perceptions of leadership behavior and the subsequent effects on their well-being. Multilevel modeling is used to analyze a sample of data from 474 low-skilled employees (50% immigrants) and 35 direct supervisors from three German companies. Supporting the hypotheses, social support, task-related communication, and positive feedback, as expressions of esteem, are found to positively impact subordinates' well-being, but individual consideration shows no significant effects. Furthermore, results confirm that supervisors' power distance orientation moderates employees' perceptions about supervisors' positive feedback and the subsequent well-being effects. The moderating effect fails to hold for employees' power distance orientation. Results indicate that supervisors can most effectively promote the health of low-skilled workers by showing esteem through positive feedback, but if the supervisor has high individual power distance orientation, the effect is attenuated.

This article considers skill requirements in retail work, drawing on the example of high-end fashion retailing. It considers debates about the required ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ elements of skill for such work. Drawing on Cockburn’s typology – skill residing in the worker; in what is required to perform a job; and as a socially constructed political concept – it seeks to offer a more nuanced discussion of the nature of skills in retail work beyond the usual characterization of such work as being inherently low skilled. Data are reported from 37 interviews with managers, supervisors and employees in a range of high-end fashion retailing outlets. The article recognizes how this work was seen as skilled by the interviewees, particularly with regard to the desired product knowledge and selling ability required for such work. Lastly, it seeks to refine Cockburn’s typology in understanding skill requirements in retail work.

The author explores trends of low-skilled migrant labor in Japan before as well as after the global economic crisis, reviews the development of migration policies especially related to low-skilled migrants, and examines new empirical findings and draws some implications for migration policy reform in Japan. In the empirical analysis, the author stresses the effects of production fragmentation on low-skilled labor, the effects of the declining youth population on mismatches in the labor markets, and those of employment strategies by enterprises on the employment of nationals as well as foreigners at the local level. Finally, the author insists on the necessity for Japan to strengthen integration policy at the local level, in addition to immigration control policy at the national level, within the context of developing economic integration in the East Asian region.

The labor market fate of the nation’s male teens and young adults (ages 20—29) has deteriorated along most employment, weekly wages, and annual earnings dimensions in recent decades. The employment rates reached new post—World War II lows in 2009, with the less well educated faring the worst. The deterioration in the labor market well-being of these young men has had a number of adverse consequences on their social behavior. Less-educated young men, especially high school dropouts, are far more likely to be incarcerated than their peers in earlier decades. They are considerably less likely to be married and more likely to be absent fathers, with gaps in marriage rates across educational groups widening substantially since the 1970s. The decline in marriage among less-educated young adults, high assortative mating among younger married couples, and growing gaps in earnings across educational groups have contributed to a substantial widening in income and wealth disparities among the nation’s young families.

This paper analyzes the impact of the 2007 recession on the incarceration of African–Americans. It begins with a brief examination of incarceration, followed by a look at the literature on the relationship between work, crime, and incarceration. Finally, it concludes with the implications of these findings for African-Americans as it relates to the current economic crisis.

The aim of this article is to gain better insight into the care strategies of mothers with varying qualification levels. The analysis is focused on the determinants of work—care decisions in the Belgian region of Flanders. It hypothesizes that schooling level is a crucial factor. Additionally, given the intense debates in the care literature provoked by the work of Catherine Hakim, particular attention is devoted to how personal preferences interact with schooling level. The results reveal a more subtle effect of personal preferences than is suggested by Hakim. Personal preferences impact on the work—care choices of mothers with lower qualifications but not on the choices of high-skilled mothers. Moreover, low-skilled mothers remain constrained in their choices since they cannot afford full-time formal care. The results indicate that personal preferences, rather than being the most crucial factors, impact on the work—care choices of mothers within the boundaries of structural constraints.

This paper presents the results of a survey of a sample of Greek, Yugoslav and Vietnamese born persons who have worked in man ufacturing in Melbourne. Despite individual differences in training and experience before arriving in Australia and differences in their time of arrival, almost all the men and women first obtained jobs here as operators, labourers or drivers. There is evidence about the informal processes that channel migrants into such jobs. But once in these jobs, mobility is very low: about one half of the respondents evidenced no occupational mobility at all while for another one third their only career path was to exit the labour force. Some of the reasons for lack of mobility are examined. Thus, the initial allocation of immigrants into low skilled jobs in manufacturing is of long run significance for their careers rather than being a phenomenon of transition.