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Flexibility proponents assert that rigid Latin American labour markets impede economic expansion and job growth; they advocate reforming labour codes through increased flexibility. Critics argue that heightened labour flexibility exacerbates inequality without expanding employment. From this perspective, precarious employment and inequality are remedied by strengthening labour’s bargaining power. Chile’s maintenance of flexible labour reforms adopted during the dictatorship make it appropriate for evaluating these competing perspectives. Based on flexibility proponents’ predictions, we should expect increased formal sector employment over time, particularly among the least skilled Chilean workers, as well as reduced wage inequality. Yet, the rate of unemployment among least skilled workers in Chile remains essentially unchanged since the democratic transition as does income inequality. These conditions persist despite a high degree of labour market flexibility. Thus, Chile’s continued adherence to...

This paper presents the public policy on employment boost that must help people looking for a job in order to strengthen individual capacity occupation (by providing outreach programs and personalized career counselling, professional training and fostering individual entrepreneurship initiative) based on a legal framework recast regarding unemployment insurance system and employment promotion. The measures envisaged by the amending Agreement legislation are consistent with the priorities of EU policy on labour market flexibility, reducing youth unemployment and labour market segmentation, facilitating the transition from education system to employment system, and strengthening dialogue with social partners in order to increase employment rate and achieve the target of 70% through the National Reform Program 2015-2017 in the context of the Europe 2020 Strategy. Currently, at European level, in the European Council of March 2015 it was undertaken by 27 EU member states , including Romania , the Euro Plus Pact (EPP ) which is a political commitment aimed at financial strengthening and support of economic competitiveness of the Union. The four pillars of the Euro Plus Pact are : promoting competitiveness, promoting employment , strengthening the sustainability of public finances and reinforcing financial stability . How to cite: Cibotariu, I. S. (2016). Conceptualization of Public Policy on Employment Stimulation in Romania. European Journal of Law and Public Administration, 3(1), 21-27. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18662/eljpa.2016.0301.03

The transformation of the modern world of work towards the information society, knowledge society, have a rapid course. These transformations take on a global character, and the most of their consequences are negative. One of them is to base the employment process on the flexible solutions. Nowadays, neither the high level of education, nor the high competences are not enough to give confidence in finding employment. The contemporary labour market is characterised by unstableness, ‘elusiveness’ and, above all, flexibility. The challenge has become a flexible company, which employs only flexible workers within the framework of flexible forms of employment. Despite its universality, the concept of flexibility still remains inconsistent and vaguely defined.

In this paper the authors present a new, extended approach, involving collaboration strategies between public employment services and private companies, which were under implementation in 2015 in Aarhus (Denmark). The main thesis of the paper is that the cooperation of public labour market institutions with labour demand representaives is crucial in realisation of active labour market policy. The Danish labour market policy is based on the flexicurity model that combines the flexibility of employment assisted by employment security assured by both, developed active labour market programmes and a rationalized system of benefits. The authors also propose some reccommendations for Poland in the area of boosting cooperation between public employment services and business representatives following the Danish example. The research method was the analysis of secondary data, such as literature overview, as well as strategies and reports made on behalf of the Jobcenter Aarhus.

To assess potential public concerns, this paper examines theory and evidence surrounding graduate educational underemployment (overeducation) in this era of mass higher education. Using a new, validated, index of graduate jobs, we find that the prevalence of graduate underemployment across 21 countries is correlated with the aggregate supply–demand imbalance, but not with indicators of labour market flexibility. Underemployment’s association with lower job satisfaction and pay is widespread. Yet in most countries there are external benefits (social trust, volunteering, and political efficacy) associated with higher education, even for those who are underemployed. Taken together with existing studies we find that, in this era of mass higher education participation, under-employment is a useful indicator of the extent of macroeconomic disequilibrium in the graduate labour market. We conclude that governments should monitor graduate underemployment, but that higher education policy should be based on social returns and should recall higher education’s wider purposes.

In this paper, we develop a matching model with both permanent and temporary contracts to address situations in which the quality of a match formed by a worker-firm pair is not observable to both workers and firms. The screening and cost-saving aspects of temporary employment contracts are two primary reasons that firms use them, but screening has received little attention in the study of employment protection. We show that increasing dismissal costs decreases job creation and that higher dismissal costs are likely to reduce the hiring threshold for temporary jobs and raise the threshold for permanent jobs. We also examine how changes in dismissal costs affect the average productivity of permanent jobs and discuss the effectiveness of the policy of increasing labour market flexibility by weakening firing restrictions for permanent employment.

Supply-side economists made numerous pleas for removing labour market rigidities through ‘structural reforms’. From a Schumpeterian viewpoint, however, one can argue that labour market rigidities create useful incentives for innovation. Our estimates on German panel data (2007–2015) support the Schumpeterian view. Using the taxonomy of industries by Peneder (2010) we find that evidence of the Schumpeterian view is particularly strong in R&D intensive manufacturing industries, as well as in service industries with high degrees of cumulativeness of knowledge. Evidence of the Schumpeterian view is weaker in low-technology industries and in start-ups when firms rely more on generally available knowledge rather than on firm-specific and tacit knowledge accumulated in the past.

Migration regimes that prioritise temporary and restricted work status have become increasingly prevalent globally. Temporary migration schemes that prioritise labour market flexibility, skills assessment and a reduced social burden, insert both legal and social stratification into the workplace and community through the restricted rights and future pathways available to migrants. Our contention in this paper is that in addition to their economic rationalities, such stratifications also take shape around governmental and popular articulations of nationalism that support and justify the differential inclusion of migrants as labour. In order to explore this intersection between nationalism and temporary migration management we focus on dairy farming in New Zealand, a key export industry that is often closely tied to national futures and identities, yet has come to rely on the presence of a substantial labour force of work visa holders who have limited rights and only very narrow pathways to longer term residence. We draw on interviews with people holding work visas, employers and intermediaries to draw attention to the way national stereotypes are created, accepted, and used to legitimise workplace inequalities within temporary migration schemes. National stereotyping had significant impacts on workplace hiring queues and segmentation, with key migrants, host communities and immigration practices commonly ignoring or downplaying the significance of the socio-cultural assumptions on which national stereotypes rest. This account demonstrates the need for greater understanding of the socio-cultural basis of ostensibly economically oriented migration regimes, the legitimation of stratification and the role of identity in negotiating temporally constrained labour migration.

The present paper aims to explore whether policies enhancing labour market flexibility result in convergence to world technology frontier, and provide proper incentives to increase investment in human capital. Because of the interdependent relations among labour market flexibility, distance to world technology frontier and human capital investment, the Panel VAR methodology which account co-evolutionary relations in dynamic system is used. The data for 31 developing economies over the period 2000-2015 is used for the purpose of the study. Impulse response analysis shows that distance to frontier increases with labour market flexibility shock, while human capital investment decreases with labour market flexibility shock. Additionally, labour market flexibility decreases with the distance to frontier variable shock and distance to frontier decreases with the human capital investment shock. Results suggest that rigid labour market policies should be put in place first in developing countries to provide right incentives to invest in schooling, training, firm-specific skills and innovation resulting in convergence to the world technology frontier.

Part 1 Freedom from work or freedom through work?: citizen's income as a heretical political discourse - the Danish debate about citizen's income development of work and social (ex)inclusion. Part 2 Perspectives on new forms of differentiation and inclusion: the Portuguese late modernization and the complexities of social inclusion through work regulating the unemployed - from protection to participation atypical employment in the Netherlands non-standard employment, social exclusion, and the household - evidence from Britain employment and social exclusion - the policy context and the policy response in the United Kingdom trends in the Danish social mode of economic regulation labour market flexibility and regulation. Part 3 The European experience: European convergence or national specificities?.

Investigating in education, Hans Heijke and Lex Borghans. Part 1 Prospects: future developments in the job level and domain of high-skilled workers, Andries de Grip, et al the return to education, Jaap de Koning labour market forecasts and choice of education, Dinand Webbink. Part 2 Flexibility: a job to match your education - does it matter?, Joop Hartog and Nicole Jonker flexibility and structure of the Dutch labour market, Lex Borghans and Hans Heijke asymmetric skill substitution, labour market flexibility, and the allocation of qualifications, Adriaan van Zon, et al. Part 3 Curriculum: curriculum characteristics and labour market perspectives, Wim Nijhof does curriculum matter? a theoretical clue to an empirical puzzle, Arie Glebbeek, et al education, skills and wages, Hans Heijke, et al. Appendix: the Dutch education system.

The purpose of this study is to examine how job quality varies across educational level in Portugal. The analysis of job quality by educational level is quite unexplored in the literature, as it focuses mainly on wages. This study contributes to fill this gap and provide a broader analysis on several dimensions of job quality. The empirical analysis draws on 2015 EU-LFS data and an extensive descriptive analysis of job quality variables by level of education, controlling gender and age. Findings suggest that higher educational level originates positive variations on job quality, particularly on working conditions. Female and young employees have lower quality jobs as they are more often in precarious situations, and although it improves for higher educated, the variations caused by educational level is not enough to eliminate these inequalities. Higher educated employees were found to have lower job satisfaction. Overall the investment in higher education has benefits for the worker, particularly in the long term, related to higher experience of employees. Being a descriptive study, it does not allow to correlate variable or conclude regarding cause and effect, being mostly based on assumption which may introduce bias in the interpretation. In a context of labour market flexibility and growing precariousness, education is vital both for the individual and for the society, and therefore this study attempts to raise awareness of its importance and its association to job quality. O objetivo deste estudo é examinar como varia a qualidade do emprego em Portugal consoante o nível educacional. A análise da qualidade do emprego por nível educacional é pouco explorada na literatura, uma vez que se foca principalmente nos salários. Este estudo contribui para preencher essa lacuna e fornecer uma análise mais ampla sobre diversas dimensões da qualidade do emprego. A análise empírica baseia-se nos dados de 2015 do EU-LFS e numa extensa análise descritiva das variáveis da qualidade do emprego, por nível educacional, controlando género e idade. Os resultados sugerem que o nível de educação mais elevado origina variações positivas na qualidade do emprego, particularmente nas condições de trabalho. As mulheres e os trabalhadores mais jovens têm empregos de qualidade inferior, uma vez que apresentam situações mais precárias e, embora melhore quanto maior o nível educacional, as variações causadas pela educação não são suficientes para eliminar essas desigualdades. Verificou-se que os funcionários com maior nível educacional têm menor satisfação no trabalho. No geral, o investimento na educação acarreta benefícios para o trabalhador, especialmente a longo prazo, relacionado com uma maior experiência dos trabalhadores. Sendo um estudo descritivo, não permite correlacionar variáveis ou concluir sobre causa e efeito, sendo principalmente baseado em pressupostos que podem introduzir tendências na interpretação. Num contexto de flexibilidade do mercado de trabalho e crescente precariedade, a educação é vital tanto para o indivíduo quanto para a sociedade e, portanto, este estudo tenta consciencializar sobre sua importância e a sua associação com a qualidade do emprego.

This article examines the relationship between structural reforms commonly referred to as austerity and the growth of precarious labour in Greece. It argues that, in contrast to the proponents of labour market flexibility, the liberalisation of labour markets, employment protection systems, social protection systems and collective bargaining institutions have not increased employment in Greece or minimised the growth of precarious employment. Rather, liberalising structural reforms have resulted in the creation of the very precarity its proponents claim is the product of rigid labour markets, and they have failed to significantly reduce existing levels of unemployment and increasing employment rates.

Chapter objectives This chapter will enable readers to understand the: nature and causes of labour market flexibility in two industries that are high users of precariously employed workers attraction of many employers in retail and hospitality towards a minimalist approach to workplace flexibility, despite policy settings that facilitate employee-oriented flexibility international literature demonstrating that the strategic implementation of flexible working practices can be beneficial to both employers and employees potential for implementing flexible working arrangements in a way that reduces the adverse impacts of events such as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Introduction As illustrated elsewhere in this book (see especially Chapters 2, 10 and 11), there has been a widespread shift in recent decades from full-time, ‘standard’ employment towards part-time, ‘non-standard’ employment, both in Australia and internationally. This trend has brought with it a proliferation of less secure, peripheral labour market participation. Focusing on retail and hospitality, two closely related industries that are characterised by high levels of ‘non-standard’ or precarious employment, this chapter examines how the strategic implementation of flexible working arrangements can enable people to achieve more secure and less peripheral labour market participation. The policy impetus for this discussion is provided primarily by the provisions of the Fair Work Act 2009 in relation to flexible working arrangements, set within the context of Australia’s experience during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The chapter indicates ways in which the use of flexible working arrangements can be implemented to expand equitable labour market participation and to reduce the impact of macro-economic fluctuations.

Economic integration is generally thought to favour convergence in the economic performance of previously separated regions; but this is far from universally true, as the experience of the members of the Eurozone testifies. The paper considers the two sharply contrasting cases of East and West German convergence following reunification and the enduring poverty of the Italian Mezzogiorno since Italian unification a century and a half ago. In both countries, political integration delivers much higher consumption in the lagging relative to the leading region than of per capita GDP. Consumption convergence can be supported by transfers but ‘production’ convergence ultimately requires catch-up in the production of tradeables. The paper demonstrates the radically different performance of the tradeable sector in the two cases, and suggests that this may be the result of differences in labour market flexibility, in investment performance and in the social norms required for the production of complex manufacturing.

Part 1 State, society and employment: flexibility - in search of a new social settlement flexibility and policies in employment - reflections from several European countries the new employment flexibility - the perversion of an ideal part-time employment, the "social movement" and citizenship - work in the arts "modernization" or insecurity - labour market deregulation and state retrenchment - the British case. Part 2 Employment uncertainty and economic security: mobility of manpower in Europe and the transfer of social rights flexible labour markets, citizenship and pension provision - a view from the UK are proposals for pension reform compatible with adaption to employment flexibility? minimum wages, flexibility and social exclusion. Part 3 Citizenship rights, and employment security: labour market flexibility, security and self-respect flexibility, economic security and social rights citizenship and work obligation in Britain and France labour market flexibility in relation to citizenship conclusion.

Over this chapter, we go over the interplay between globalization, labour flexibility and labour standards. We highlight the discourse of flexibility of labour put out by bodies such as the World Bank and contrast it with the labour standards espoused by UN and ILO, particularly in relation to contract labour. It is also noted that international political interactions encourage many international organizations to selectively advocate decent labour standards and state regulations, while on other platforms the same organizations or their counterparts propagate deregulation and labour market flexibility. We conclude by emphasizing that both these—labour flexibility and labour standards—need to be balanced together to govern labour relations.

We estimate a gravity model of the determinants of migration flows using pairwise data from around 160 origin countries to 35 advanced economy destinations over the period 1990–2013. When we interact the various explanatory variables with freedom of movement we find that the elasticities of migration with respect to macroeconomic variables are not constant across country pairs. Under freedom of movement, the response to macroeconomic variables is stronger, and the response to distance and historical migrant stocks is weaker. However, the elasticity with regard to linguistic and historical variables does remain constant. Alongside macro variables commonly used in the literature, we also find a significant role for expected GDP growth. Migration flows are higher to destinations with stronger expected GDP growth, and from origins with weaker expected GDP growth. In addition, greater labour market flexibility in destination countries is associated with higher inward migration.

A common explanation to German economic success for 10 years has been its ability to reform its labour institutions: from 1990, the percentage of firms abiding by the traditional sectoral contracting wage-setting system decreased significantly, allowing new firms to pay lower wages. This increasing heterogeneity of firms would explain, to some extent, the rising wage inequality observed in Germany for 25 years (Dustmann et al. 2009; Card et al. 2013). The Hartz laws (2003–2005) were also supposed to strengthen labour market flexibility by reducing reservation wage and implementing active labour market policy, by creating mini-jobs, etc. (Eichhorst and Marx 2009. The adoption of working time accounts also allowed to adjust employment volume by working hours rather than hiring and firing (Burda and Hunt 2011; Blot et al. 2015). This widespread set of reforms implemented by Germany would explain how Germany managed to cross the subprime crises without lasting fall of employment. This success also contrasts with “sclerotic” French economy, unable, according to many economists, to evolve so as to take globalization constraints into account and to reform its institutions (Hairault 2015) or to promote trust and cooperation (Aghion et al. 2010).

A demand on national economies in the 1970s was that they should begin to increase their labour market flexibility, which came to mean transferring risks and insecurity onto workers. Education was one way to prepare future workers for this new situation. The present article examines this preparation of learning for precarity some 40 years on. It is based on long-term ethnographic research in the Swedish upper-secondary school sector in particular kinds of educational programmes that have been devised and promoted as a means of integrating ‘lost pupils’ into either academic or vocational studies. The findings show this is not what is developing in practice in these programmes.

The French labour market is divided between workers in permanent jobs and those who alternate fixed-term contracts with unemployment spells. Among other public policies aiming at reducing this duality, financial incentives could induce employers to lengthen contract duration or favour permanent contracts. This article develops a matching model fitted to the French labour market characteristics and calibrated on French data. A gradual decrease in unemployment contributions or a firing tax reduces the share of short-term contract in total employment but increases market rigidity and lowers labour productivity. However, decreasing unemployment contributions gradually is less favourable for new entrants than a firing tax and lengthens unemployment spells. An additional contribution levied on short-term contracts to finance a bonus for permanent-contract hirings also decreases labour market duality and increases activity by 0.13% but without negative impacts on labour market flexibility and productivity.

Single, older women in the State of Victoria, Australia, have emerged as a group experiencing housing insecurity and being highly vulnerable to homelessness in their old age. A sizable demographic cohort, it is a group that could overwhelm the existing homelessness service system. One of the most surprising aspects of this trend is their propensity to be tertiary educated. Focus groups revealed ‘critical life events’ as significant, and a shared ‘control belief’ in the value of education. Given that education is a key means by which Australian governments seek to remedy homelessness, the entry of educated women into the homelessness population suggests policy needs to re-examine homelessness causation and explicitly apply a gender-lens.

Many policymakers and economists have argued in favour of greater labour market flexibility as a part of structural adjustment reforms that are expected to improve economic performance. Existing post-Keynesian-Kaleckian (PKK) models are unable to address these issues because they assume away long-term labour by allowing employment to be short term and adjusting freely with output. This paper introduces long-term labour into PKK models. We develop a model that provides alternative ways of modelling labour market flexibility and suggest that when aggregate demand issues are important, an increase in employment flexibility is likely to have adverse growth and distributional impacts.

Following formal economic liberalisation in 1991, business, in particular big business, has gained increasing access to and influence over policy decision-making in India. Industry has been an outspoken critic of national labour laws and has lobbied extensively for greater labour market flexibility. While business has not been successful in influencing “official” labour reform at the national level, it was able to influence labour policy within the National Manufacturing Policy 2011, which curtailed labour protections and implemented “hire and fire” policies. Utilising qualitative data from 40 face-to-face interviews with policy stakeholders in New Delhi, India, this paper aims to explore how business was able to influence labour reform within this policy as well as underscore the wider social welfare implications that may follow. It will be argued that the ability of business to dictate labour reform, while strong, is somewhat variable as competing factors serve to constrain business influence. Furthermore, the extent to which labour laws are hindering manufacturing investment is widely debatable. Nevertheless, curtailment of labour protections, as afforded in this policy, will have a widespread and damaging impact on workers. While the policy promises to empower rural youth, provide gainful employment, and enable growth to become more sustainable and inclusive for its citizens, it is questionable whether these goals can be achieved alongside the curtailment of labour protections.

Many extensions of classical human capital theory regard labour market rigidities as a prerequisite for firms to invest in general training. From this perspective, the German labour market reforms since 2003 should have reduced their willingness to support the apprenticeship training system. This article demonstrates that, on the contrary, German firms did not abandon the training system but instead changed their training strategies after the implementation of the labour market reforms. We analyse the new training strategies that German firms deployed to cope with the increased labour market flexibility engendered by the labour market reforms. Switzerland, where no such reforms occurred, serves as the counterfactual. The results demonstrate that German firms successfully reduced the net costs of training by involving apprentices in more work and reducing non-productive tasks.

Examining the occupational variation within non-standard employment, this book combines case studies and comparative writing to illustrate how and why alternative occupational employment patterns are formed. Through expert contributions, a framework is developed integrating explanations based on labour market regulation, industrial relations and skill supply, filling the gaps in previous scholastic research.

The share of non-standard jobs in total employment has increased in Germany over recent decades. Research tends to attribute this in particular to labour market re-forms and socio-economic change. However, it becomes clear upon closer inspection that macro trends alone cannot provide satisfactory explanations. A striking yet rarely acknowledged aspect of the development in Germany is a large occupational heterogeneity, which is true for both current working conditions and trajectories of change. A process of asymmetric change has been witnessed in recent years, increasing the gap between occupational groups. Given this process, it seems increasingly questionable to aggregate data at the national level. Therefore, this paper analyses the role of different types of non-standard employment across occupations in Germany, explaining variation between occupations with reference to institutional conditions, industrial relations and patterns of labour supply and demand, in particular skill requirements.

According to ‘varieties of capitalism’ (VoC) perspective, coordinated market economies (CMEs) attain comparative advantages by coordinating industrial relations and maintaining regulation to a greater extent than liberal market economies and mixed market economies (MMEs). Yet, Japan, a typical CME in the VoC literature, introduced greater labour market flexibility than Italy, an MME. This article analyses why this is the case and claims that the institutional complementarities that had functioned well previously in Japan have been unraveling since the early 1990s and neoliberal deregulation of the labour market ensued. This comparative study of Japan and Italy shows that economic stagnation and the globalisation of finance and production exerted neoliberal pressures on the state and employers to increase competitiveness by introducing market-oriented policies and business strategies. However, the power resources of labour unions and the partisan composition of the government affected the characteristics of neoliberal changes in labour market policy.

In this article the different phases social cohesion in Spain has passed through from 1980 to 2010, which is analysed using time series based on developments within the work market and the area of social protection. By observing unemployment rates taken from the survey of the working population a clear change of tendency can be noted in the year 1985, when as a result of the first work market reform, temporary employment was introduced, and in the years 1994, 2001 and 2010. The rates of temporary employment demonstrate the plateau produced from 1992 to 2006. As regards the area of social protection, we use the time series SEEPROSS of retirement pensions with the six important work market reforms of 1985, 1990, 1995, 2002, 2007 and 2010. Health with the inflection points at 1984, 1990 and 2003 when the transfers to the autonomous communities are finalized and of benefits for unemployment, family, survivors, social exclusion and housing. In a comparison with neighbouring countries a important distance can be observed as regards developments in the work markets, while the position is more discrete in the area o social market.

This chapter explains why the school-to-work transition is so hard and long in Italy. The country represents a typical example of the South European school-to-work transition regime, where the educational system is typically rigid and sequential, the labour market has been recently made more flexible through two-tier reforms, and the family has an important role to absorb the cost of the passage to adulthood. The main thesis of this chapter is that the disorganization of the educational and training system rather than the supposedly low degree of labour market flexibility explains high (youth) unemployment. The chapter concludes by assessing the potentialities and shortcomings of the European Youth Guarantee as a tool to fight youth unemployment in the country.

This paper looks at the recent past of the benefits system and employment services in the UK and how they have operated through more than five years of austerity. The UK presents an interesting case, as the unemployment rate following the financial crisis has recovered faster than expected. The major reforms of welfare-to-work programmes and cuts to the public sector, together with continued labour market flexibility, have been identified as the source of this triumph. Yet behind this apparent success story is another picture. Many public employment service programmes in the UK were contracted out to private employment agencies following the Coalition Government’s 2011 reforms. A much more restrictive and punitive benefits system and an emphasis on pushing people into work, whatever its quality or stability, has driven the rise of precarious and part-time employment.\ud \ud It is an important time to take stock of the effects of continued austerity and public sector job cuts, as well as the extreme shift to a deterrent model of benefit provision. Using the UK context, we might question what makes for a ‘successful’ story on job creation and what kind of social toll there is to advocating “a job, any job” through the benefits and employment services systems. In particular, I suggest that by paying attention to the experience of those who use the benefits and employment services systems, we might learn about the effects of austerity and welfare reform on public services in a more meaningful way.

Purpose - Examine SMEs' motivations for using flexible work arrangements (FWA). Analyse the incidence of different types of FWA and explore employers’ perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of those arrangements. Methodology - Exploratory study based on semi-structured interviews to SMEs’ managers operating in Portugal. Findings - The evidence suggests that the determined duration contract is the most frequent FWA used by SMEs. The findings indicate that the motivations for the use of FWA can be aggregated in voluntary, pull and push factors. The most mentioned factors were voluntary. Furthermore, the advantage and disadvantage most mentioned were, respectively, cost reduction and the decrease of productivity amongst flexible employees. Objetivo - Examinar as motivações do uso de diferentes contratos flexíveis (CF) nas pequenas e médias empresas (PMEs). Analisar a sua incidência e explorar as perceções dos empregadores sobre as suas vantagens e desvantagens. Metodologia - Estudo exploratório baseado em entrevistas semiestruturadas a gestores de PMEs em Portugal. Resultados - Os contratos a termo certo são os CF mais usados. Existem três tipos de fatores que contribuem para o seu uso: voluntários, de atração, e de pressão, sendo os voluntários os mais mencionados. A vantagem e desvantagem mais mencionadas foram, respetivamente, a redução de custos e a diminuição da produtividade dos trabalhadores.

New Zealand's highly regulated labour market existed in a wider environment of regulation. The government maintained high levels of intervention in areas such as imports and exports, money markets and banking. While the Employment Contracts Act 1991 represented a substantive break with the tradition of industrial relations in New Zealand, it was in keeping with the philosophy that had driven deregulation in other sectors of the economy since 1984. New Zealand has a unique social welfare system which expanded, in stages, during the twentieth century. The system is funded from general taxation rather than from targeted contributions and, in this respect, is unlike the social security systems in most other countries. The National government's labour market and social security changes were clearly designed to enhance labour market flexibility and reduce welfare dependency. A Labour/Alliance coalition government was formed following the elections in November 1999. Once again, industrial relations have been the subject of government attention.

Relocation of production to countries with low labour cost have induced increased labour market flexibility, which has been praised as a silver bullet for economic growth and low unemployment. Within a unionised oligopoly framework, in which a multi-national firm has the option to relocate its production to a foreign country, we analyse the welfare implications of both centralised and flexible wage setting regimes. For very low foreign wages, wage flexibility leads to higher welfare than a rigid centralised regime. In contrast, for 'intermediate' wage levels in the foreign country, an industry-wide uniform wage leads to higher social welfare than flexible wages.

In the realm of managing industrial relations (IR), organizations are handicapped in two ways: the government?s labour regulations and compliance regime, and their own inability to extricate themselves from half-baked theories and poor management practices. Research findings indicate the growth of the informal sector at the expense of the formal sector, but with low productivity, low wages and virtually no job security. And in the formal sector, data indicates rising conflict often laced with brutal violence. While organizations in the formal sector wait for labour reforms towards greater labour market flexibility that would lead to greater labour mobility and higher productivity and employment in the formal manufacturing sector, they could undertake a paradigm shift in their IR strategy. Such a paradigm shift in IR strategy would not just obviate many of the ills besetting the industrial relations scenario, but provide a competitive advantage. Based on a year-long work in a steel tube manufacturing company in western India, this paper distils the architecture of a paradigm shift in IR strategy for organizational turnaround.

This paper makes use of a natural experiment to examine effects of potential capital losses and general attractiveness of pension schemes on employees' propensity to change jobs. On January 1st 2004, the two largest pension funds in the Netherlands, for civil servants and for the health care sector, changed their pension scheme from a final salary to an average salary. This industry-level change excludes the possibility that a negative correlation between having a job with an attractive pension scheme and the number of labour market transitions is driven by self-selection of workers into jobs with an attractive pension arrangement. Using individual data covering the entire Dutch population, we estimate discrete choice models for job-to-job transitions. The results show that the number of job transitions of civil servants significantly increased at the onset of the new pension rules. The changing pension rules affected the propensity to change jobs for individuals working in the health care sector only to a smaller extent.

This paper makes use of a natural experiment to examine effects of potential capital losses and general attractiveness of pension schemes on employees' propensity to change jobs. On January 1st 2004, the two largest pension funds in the Netherlands, for civil servants and for the health care sector, changed their pension scheme from a final salary to an average salary. This industry-leve change excludes the possibility that a negative correlation between having a job with an attractive pension scheme and the number of labour market transitions is driven by self-selection of workers into jobs with an attractive pension arrangement. Using individual data covering the entire Dutch population, we estimate discrete choice models for job-to-job transitions. The results show that the number of job transitions of civil servants significantly increased at the onset of the new pension rules. The changing pension rules affected the propensity to change jobs for individuals working in the health care sector only to a smaller extent.

Since the beginning of the 1990s Australia has experienced a gradual but far-reaching process of labour market deregulation. Labour market deregulation has proceeded primarily through the dismantling of the distinctive system of awards - the main avenue of external, protective regulation in Australia for much of the twentieth century. This paper examines labour market deregulation and its implications for the Australian workforce. It situates the changes in terms of their institutional starting point in the award system and the growing pressures in the 1980s for increased labour market flexibility. It argues that labour market deregulation is amplifying existing trends to growth in precarious employment, wage dispersion and the development of a lowpay sector amongst full-time employees. In addition, it is sponsoring a significant fragmentation of working-time arrangements.

Research on changes to work and employment in the European Union (EU) have highlighted the increase in precarious forms of work (ILO 2012; McKay et al. 2012) especially among migrant workers (Anderson 2010; Potter and Hamilton 2014). However, precariousness has traditionally been conceptualised as affecting migrants in low-skilled, low-status and low-wage jobs (Ahmad 2008; De Lima and Wright 2009) and undocumented migrants (Bloch 2013). This chapter argues that high-skilled migrant workers are increasingly experiencing precariousness resulting from changes to immigration policies in the United Kingdom (UK). The precarisation of high-skilled migrant workers is not merely an issue of changing legislation but occurs within the context of, and is driven by, neoliberal economic transformations. This raises the question: How do high-skilled migrants respond collectively to precariousness? Migrant networks are increasingly recognised as important sites for the collective agency of high-skilled migrants in their attempts to resist precarity; the complex dynamics of migrant collective agency are explored in this chapter as well as the shadow cast by the ‘dark side’ of migrant networks: the social reproduction of the very things migrant networks aim to resist – the control, potential for exploitation and segmentation of high-skilled migrants in work and employment. This chapter is organised into five sections. After this introduction, the next section sets the conceptual grounds for understanding high-skilled migrant workers, migrant networks and precariousness. The third section discusses the research methodology and the research findings are analysed in the fourth section. The final section concludes and identifies directions for future research.