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The COVID-19 pandemic publicly exposed the urgent need for seasonal workers in agriculture. In Germany, an entry ban and entry quotas for seasonal workers at the beginning of the pandemic caused major attention. Taking this moment as magnifying glass, the article asks how the German seasonal labour migration regime is constructed (legally) and legitimated (discursively), and in how far the pandemic has caused shifts within this regime. Based on an analysis of the legal framework and the political discourse around seasonal work from 2018 to 2020 in Germany, the seasonal labour migration regime is characterised as just-in-time migration tailored to the needs of agricultural business, where migrants' work force is not absorbed homogenously by precarious labour sectors, but rather specific groups of migrant workers are integrated differently through mechanisms of differential inclusion. Within this regime, seasonal workers function as outsourced labour, whose reproduction costs remain abroad. On the discursive level, the article shows how seasonal workers are produced as 'wanted migrants' by linking seasonal migration to the interests of the 'homeland'. While the pandemic momentarily caused some shifts on the discoursively level, the article shows that the seasonal labour regime as a whole remains rather stable in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors investigate whether a cut in unemployment benefit payout periods enacted in Germany in 2006 affected older workers' labor market transitions. The authors use rich administrative data and exploit a difference-in-differences approach. During 2004–2007, using monthly observations, they compare a reference group of 40–44 year olds with constant benefit payout periods to older treatment groups with reduced payout durations. Compared to the reference group, those groups with reduced payout periods had lower job exit rates, higher rates of finding a job, higher propensity to remain employed, and lower propensity to remain unemployed. These patterns suggest that the reform may have contributed to the recent rise in old-age employment in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the hiring patterns of start-ups and incumbent firms to analyze whether start-ups offer relatively more job opportunities to disadvantaged workers. Using administrative linked employer–employee data for Germany that provide the complete employment biographies of newly hired workers, the authors show that young firms are more likely than incumbents to hire applicants who are older, foreign, or unemployed, or who have unstable employment histories, arrive from outside the labor force, or were affected by a plant closure. Analysis of entry wages shows that penalties for these disadvantaged workers, however, are higher in start-ups than in incumbent firms. Therefore, even if start-ups provide employment opportunities for certain groups of disadvantaged workers, the quality of these jobs in terms of initial remuneration appears to be low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasts predict a growing shortage of skilled nursing staff in countries worldwide. Nurse migration is already a common strategy used to address nursing workforce needs. Germany, the UK, and Australia are reviewed here as examples of destination countries for nurse migrants. Agreements exist between countries to facilitate nurse migration; however, it is not evident how nurse migrants have contributed to data on which these arrangements are based. We examined existing primary research on nurse migration, including educational needs and initiatives to support policymakers', stakeholders', and health professions educators' decisions on measures for ethical and sustainable nurse migration. We conducted a rapid evidence assessment to review available empirical research data which involved, was developed with, or considered migrant nurses to address the research question: what are the findings of research that directly involves migrant nurses in producing primary research data? A total of 56 papers were included. Four main themes were identified in this research data: Research does not clearly define what is meant by the term migrant nurses; discrimination is often reported by migrant nurses; language and communication competencies are important; and structured integration programs are highly valued by migrant nurses and destination healthcare employers. Migrant nurses continue to experience discrimination and reduced career opportunities and therefore should be included in research about them to better inform policy. Structured integration programs can improve the experience of migrant nurses by providing language support (if necessary), a country-specific bridging program and help with organisational hurdles. Not only researching migrant nurses but making them active partners in research is of great importance for successful, ethical, and sustainable migration policies. A broader evidence base, especially with regard to the views and experiences of migrant nurses and their educational support needs, should be promoted to make future immigration policy more needs-based, sustainable and ethically acceptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors analyze a randomized field experiment in two German labor market agencies that provide public and private provision of intensive job placement services. The findings, based on analysis of administrative agency data over 18 months in 2009–2010, show that assignment to public employment services reduced accumulated days in unemployment by one to two months, compared to an assignment to a private provider. The effects, however, were short-lived. Moreover, two-thirds of the effect is attributable to labor force withdrawals. Finally, several important differences in the modes of service provision are only partially attributable to inherent aspects of in-house production and contracting out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors investigate immigrants’ and natives’ labor supply to the firm within an estimation approach based on a dynamic monopsony framework. Applying duration models that account for unobserved worker heterogeneity to a large administrative employer–employee data set for Germany, they find that immigrants supply labor less elastically to firms than do natives. Under monopsonistic wage setting, the estimated elasticity differential predicts a 7.7 log points wage penalty for immigrants thereby accounting for the entire unexplained native–immigrant wage differential of 5.8 to 8.2 log points. When further distinguishing immigrant groups differing in their time spent in the German labor market, their immigration cohort, and their age at entry, the authors find that the observed unexplained wage differential is larger for those groups that show a larger elasticity differential relative to natives. These findings not only suggest that search frictions are a likely cause of employers’ more pronounced monopsony power over their immigrant workers but also imply that employers profit from discriminating against immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We experimentally investigated three variants of a real-effort game with taxation that differed in the degree of redistribution of tax revenue. Concretely, we compared a Leviathan scenario, where no tax is redistributed, with a situation where tax revenues are used to finance a public good involving neither a direct nor immediate monetary transfer to participants and with a scenario where direct transfer payments are made to each participant. Our results confirm previous findings of a nonlinear decreasing relationship between tax rate and work effort. We found that, for tax rates above 50 percent, the level of effort was highest under direct redistribution, followed by the public-good scenario, and by the Leviathan case. Conducting the experiment in Canada, France, and Germany, we observed average effort (and thus tax revenues) to be higher in France than in Canada and Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that women providing family care tend to decrease paid work. We take the opposite perspective and examine how current and previous family care tasks influence women's likelihood to (re-)enter employment or to increase working hours. Family care is defined as caring for an ill, disabled or frail elderly partner, parent, or other family member. Using German Socio-Economic Panel data, we apply Cox shared frailty regression modeling to analyze transitions (1) into paid work and (2) from part-time to full-time work among women aged 25–59. The results indicate that in the German policy context, part-time working women providing extensive family care have a lower propensity to increase working hours. When family care ends, the likelihood that part-time working women change to full-time does not increase. Homemaking women's likelihood of entering the workforce is not influenced by either current or previous family care tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of labor-related research projects that are still in progress as of January 1987. The projects include Determinants of Good Relations Between Management and Employees, from Georgia State University, Regional Industrial Relations Systems in Britain, from the University of Glasgow, Analysis of the Legal and Arbitral Standards Governing the Rehabilitation of Alcoholics and Drug Abusers in the Federal Sector, from Cornell University, The Earnings and Employment Experience of Displaced Workers in South Carolina, from the University of South Carolina, Local Labor Markets in Germany: An Analysis of Employment and Industrial Characteristics and Governmental Labor Market Characteristics, from the International Institute of Management.

This paper provides evidence on the role of art experts (bohemians) in high-skilled professionals' locational choices in German regions (NUTS 3) over the period 1998–2008. In particular, it examines Richard Florida's thesis, which considers art experts as creative people who attract high-skilled labour force. Our panel data estimation results support the thesis that art experts have positive and significant impact on high-skilled experts and that these individuals flock where art experts are. We also find that regional per capita income and employment have positive and robust effect on the distribution of high-skilled professionals. The positive effects suggest that the distribution of the high-skilled labor force is a reflection of economic and non-economic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how institutional differences matter to the quality of a nation’s jobs; job quality is conceived as a dimension of a national economy’s social performance and thus defined in accordance with civic principles. Focus is on the two archetypical varieties of capitalism, the United States and Germany. Using data from a 2009 telephone survey of U.S. and German workers, we find that the overall attainment of civic principles, as perceived by workers, is no different in Germany than in the United States, even though the German institutional environment should be more conducive to them. This is due to higher worker expectations in Germany and a tendency for employer practices to compensate for the weaker (liberal) institutional environment in the United States. Once these are controlled, German workers report substantially more positive outcomes. We find that institutional differences also matter in how various employer practices are adopted and hence have indirect as well as direct implications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Though information about jobs passed through personal networks has been central to the labor market integration of immigrants in the United States, its role in the economic absorption of immigrants in Germany, where jobs are scarcer and employers more likely to demand formal qualifications, is less clear. Through analysis of German Socio-Economic Panel data, we discovered that nearly half of all immigrant-origin job changers found their positions through networks and that the most vulnerable to unemployment – the young and the less educated – were especially likely to rely on them. Also, jobs found through networks were as likely to lead to improved working conditions as jobs acquired through more formal means. These findings have implications both for debates about assimilation and for social policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the labor market of temporary agencies in Germany. He describes the position of Randstad in the German market. As one of the largest temporary and contract staffing organizations in the world, Randstad delivered creative employment solutions with 312,000 flexworkers in 20 countries in 2006. Further, he also adds the results of some neglected international papers on the effects of temporary agency works and discusses the incentives of temporary agencies for flexworkers' human capital investments.

The "big trade-off," described by Arthur Okun some thirty years ago, is back again: equality or efficiency, or to put it differently, modern highly developed economies and societies have to choose between the Scylla of income inequality and the Charybdis of unemployment. Furthermore, it looks like the continental European economies—foremost Germany and France—sided with more egalitarian ends accepting higher unemployment while the liberal economies such as the United States and the United Kingdom chose higher inequality for lower unemployment. In this paper it is argued that the trade-off is not a supply-side necessity to maintain work effort in a situation of incomplete contracts, but is a politico-economic issue of particular interest groups seeking rents. However, unlike in Mancur Olson's seminal approach, it is not the trade unions that are forming distributional coalitions on the labor market, but rather the meritocracy which is happy to use Keynesian-type demand management to advance their material interests by pursuing a "meritocratically optimal rate of unemployment" (MORU). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human capital represented by corporate employees involved in the information and knowledge economy is becoming an increasingly central value-creating factor in global competition. However, in contrast to other value-creating factors, human capital is more difficult to measure, evaluate and manage. Due to human capital's great importance for economic value creation, a series of studies on human capital evaluation have been published during the last few years. This paper discusses why so many traditional evaluation methods are only partly appropriate for categorizing, analyzing and evaluating human capital's special characteristics. In particular, it is difficult for many traditional approaches to integrate notions of flexibility and options with regard to the human capital of companies. Our result shows that the real options theory provides a theoretical framework for the evaluation of human capital and allows a differentiated analysis that, on a qualitative basis, enables investments in uncertainties that are associated with human capital. This theory thus forms the foundation for the quantification of human capital's inherent opportunities and risks. Consequently, this paper provides approaches for the future evaluation of human capital and a conceptual context for empirical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German discourse on Human Capital Management (HCM) has a long history which resulted in the manifoldness of notions connected with HCM. The exact specification of the meaning of HCM basically depends on the frame of reference used: the frame of the past, of the present or of the future. The present article which concentrates on the German aspects of the HCM debate is aimed at systematizing this discourse by outlining the past and present HCM development in Germany as well as its future perspectives. It will result in a synoptic view, summing up the German state-of-the-art HCM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of heterogeneity across regions, economic policy measures are increasingly targeted at the regional level and, therefore, require regional forecasts. The data available to compute regional forecasts are usually a pseudo panel of a limited number of observations over time and a large number of regions strongly interacting with each other. Traditional time-series techniques applied to distinct time series of regional data are probably a suboptimal forecasting strategy. Although both linear and nonlinear models have been applied and evaluated to forecast socioeconomic variables, spatial interactions among regions are often ignored. This article evaluates the ability of spatial error and spatial lag models to correct for misspecifications due to neglected spatial autocorrelation in the data. The empirical application on short-term forecasts of employment in 326 West German regions shows that the superimposed spatial structure that is required for the estimation of spatial models improves the forecasting performance of nonspatial models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers Germany as a case study in the management of migration through a hierarchical system for the granting of citizenship rights. In May 1999 Germany took a significant step away from its reliance on blood based belonging, revising its nationality law to introduce an element of territory in the designation of citizenship. The article also considers the likely impact of the new law on the legal structures of inclusion and exclusion. It has been argued that alongside the enhanced recognition of the original guestworker population a set of contradictory pressures now dominate the politics of migration--the recognition of human rights, the management of the labor market and the protection of welfare resources. These pressures are mediated by the granting and withholding of rights as part of a system of selection, surveillance, deterrence and control which has broader implications for the present thinking about citizenship. This account of the German system of foreigner rights thus endorses an expanded remit for thinking on citizenship, to take in the full continuum of rights--an approach which may have growing relevance elsewhere.

The article focuses on stratification, which has shifted from a focus on the characteristics of individuals to a focus on the characteristics of larger social structures such as organizations and industries. Structuralist perspectives have developed primarily in isolation from each other. Using new life-history data from the Federal Republic of Germany. Three structuralist perspectives has been drawn to specify more complete models of the mobility process. Specifically, it investigates the effects of organizational size, social class and industrial segmentation on job-shift patterns, using event-history methods. The findings show that recent structuralist perspectives which are commonly thought to be contradictory are in fact complementary. Most empirical research on the dual economy involves the estimation of cross-sectional wage equations or the use of aggregated data to examine global differences in labor force out comes between sectors. Rarely has mobility at the individual level been investigated within this context, especially as a filly dynamic process.

The article reports on the consequences of the military mobilization of the German economy between 1914 and 1916. The author states that German industrialists often clashed with the German War Ministry over issues such as manpower, steel allocations and compensation rates for materials provided to the military. The author notes that German industrialists systematically secured their own profits at the expense of national interests, ultimately crippling the war effort and contributing to Germany's defeat.

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.

The article presents the author's views regarding the Human Capital Management in Germany. Human Capital Management is one of the most controversially discussed topics in Human Resource research and practice. Employees are necessary, at the same time, they are more risky than material stock. The author said that people are the most important asset. All kinds of new organizational solutions were observed to protect oneself against the loss of investments and outsourcing of activities just being one of them.