Technological change and employment in Brazil,Colombia and Mexico: Which workers are most affected?

This article adopts a task-based approach to analyse employment patterns in terms of skill distribution and occupations in the urban labour markets of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico during 2002–15. The results suggest that employment fell strongly for some medium-skilled occupations, and increased slightly for both low-skilled and high-skilled occupations. Decomposition results suggest that the decreasing share of employment of secretaries and stenographers is fully explained by changes within industries (routinization hypothesis), whereas the decrease in machinery operation and handicraft jobs is mainly explained by changes between industries. By socio-demographic group, technological changes negatively affected women but benefited younger workers and those with higher educational attainment.     

Gender Segregation,Size of Workplace and the Public Sector

Gender segregation is considered to be a key structuring factor in the labour market, and is central to explanations of phenomena as diverse as the everyday experience of men’s and women’s employment to the underachievement of women and the limited impact of equal pay legislation. Studies of occupational segregation by gender tend to be polarized between qualitative and quantitative extremes. At the quantitative end, a primary focus of research has been to quantify segregation to a single index, permitting simple comparisons between countries and over time. However, detailed case studies of particular occupations have often hinted at ways in which breakdowns in occupational segregation have been replaced by other forms of gender segregation. This paper will present data showing that even within occupational categories there is still significant gender segregation and concentration by public/private sector and by size of workplace. For instance, female pharmacists are very over-represented, and female gardeners very under-represented, in the public sector. And the general tendency for women to work in smaller workplaces is severe for some occupations (e.g. office managers) and reversed in other occupations (e.g. production fitters). These analyses question the usefulness of single indices which take account only of segregation or concentration by occupation and therefore underestimate the gendering of job opportunities even within mixed occupations.     

Planning to work for free: building the graduate employability of planners through unpaid work

In the context of an increasingly precarious and competitive graduate labour market, exposure to pre-graduation professional work experience is becoming an increasingly critical feature of graduate employability. Outside the creative professions the contours of this shift have received comparatively little empirical attention. This study provides evidence of increasing participation in unpaid work beyond the creative industries where it is well established as a common practice. This study examines the complex patterns of opportunities and challenges that are created for and by Australian urban planning students in gaining relevant exposure to professional work, with a particular emphasis on participation in unpaid work experience. Through the lens of employability and the voices of early career professionals, this study explores the complexity of decisions to engage in unpaid work and identifies the potential personal and professional implications of these decisions. Focussing on the ways decisions around unpaid work are shaped by a range of factors including labour market conditions and disciplinary norms the findings yield new knowledge of how unpaid work is practised and shaped as a principal means through which employment-related advantage and enhanced employability in education to employment transitions is sought by participants and the potential implications of this.     

Constructing markets for temporary labour: employment liberalization and the internationalization of the staffing industry

Abstract Temporary staffing has joined the ranks of the globalizing service industries. The largest agencies have now established a presence in more than sixty nations, where they are placing employees in temporary positions across a range of occupations, from clerical, cleaning and light industrial work through to accountancy, law and IT. The opening up of new occupational and geographical markets around the world has been driven by the imperative to sustain growth in sales volumes, in this business of tight margins and fierce competition. The most lucrative of the staffing industry's ‘emerging markets’ are found in the actively deregulating economies of the global North ‐ including Spain, Germany, Italy and Japan. While exploring how the staffing industry has been active in the construction of these markets, we argue that this fast‐growing business has become an important agent of labour market liberalization.     

Palestinian labour mobility

"Following an overview of demographic and migratory trends since the late 1960s, the article examines labour force participation and analyses the distribution of Palestinian workers between the three labour markets in which they participate: the domestic market of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Israeli market and the Arab market, consisting chiefly of Jordan and the oil-rich Arab states. Since 1982 there has been a contraction of employment opportunities for Palestinians in the latter two labour markets. Domestic job creation is one of the main tasks confronting the Palestinian administration to be set up under the 1993 Israel/PLO agreement."     

Occupational licensing and the transition from welfare to work

Occupational licensing laws erect barriers to entry into various labor markets, impeding the upward mobility of welfare recipients seeking to transition into employment. This paper, recognizing that labor market interventions have often been used precisely because of this effect, proceeds to examine various restrictions which directly affect low-skilled workers in the U.S. economy who now have stronger incentives to participate in labor markets in response to recent welfare policy reforms. Three distinct types of labor market restrictions are identified: (1) the licensing of professional, high-skilled occupations tends to crowd workers into lower-skilled occupations, lowering such wages and thus weakening work incentives among the welfare population; (2) quantity license restrictions (permits which set quotas limiting the overall number of suppliers in a market) suppress demand for low-skilled workers, and may substantially reduce work opportunities and, thus, incentives. Taxi license restrictions alone, for instance, may result in several hundreds of thousands of lost employment opportunities throughout the United States; and (3) quality license restrictions, where entrants face higher entry costs (typically through educational requirements above the requirements of the market), may paradoxically provide welfare recipients with enhanced opportunities for employment, particularly when coupled with job-training subsidies typically extended to welfare recipients. This we call a “de facto liberalization” of occupational licensure. While incumbent workers are certain to resist enhanced entry by welfare recipients into licensed occupations, vocational schools should aggressively support such entry, affording a possible realpolitik to the migration path envisioned. More interestingly, once entry has accelerated under de facto liberalization, occupational license rents will predictably decline, thus increasing the likelihood of explicit liberalization, and further opening labor markets to competitive entry.     

Women's Occupational Trends in the Irish Economy: Moving towards High‐skilled Occupations or Evidence of Deskilling?

In recent years the increased participation of women in the Irish labour market and in tertiary education would appear to have placed them in an advantageous position to make use of the expanded opportunities in knowledge‐based occupations. Using occupational data from the 1996 and 2006 census this article examines the experience of women in high‐ and low‐skilled occupations. The data indicate that women are over‐represented in high‐skilled occupations relative to their overall participation rate in the labour force but there is also an increase in the proportion of women in low‐skilled occupations. The employment of women in high‐skilled occupations is substantially weaker in the private sector than the public sector. Public sector employment, we argue, is a crucial factor in the increased participation of women in high‐skilled occupations.     

The Low Status of Female Part‐Time NHS Nurses: A Bed‐Pan Ceiling?

Despite increases in female participation rates into the paid working population of Britain women remain concentrated into particular sectors of the economy. Areas of the labour market where women predominate are also characterized by high levels of part‐time employment. The significance of part‐time work is that it is lower paid and offers fewer employment opportunities for women. This article examines the careers of 643 qualified female NHS nurses. It is found that respondents working part‐time are the least likely to occupy the upper echelons of NHS nursing. Explanations for this centre on the actions and strategies of managers who use negative gender role stereotypes regarding part‐time nurses to inform recruitment and promotion decisions. Managers, however, regard the low status of part‐time nurses as a reflection of their own choice strategies, thus failing to recognize the existence of gender‐based disadvantage. The resultant outcome is one where part‐time nurses are confined to the lowest qualified clinical grades, with little opportunity to progress to the higher grades. Critical labour shortages in nursing, however, may mean that the utilization of part‐timers is re‐examined as NHS management seek to retain more qualified nurses. For such a re‐examination to be successful management attitudes also need to change.     

Declining Numbers of Foreign Students and America's Science and Engineering Enterprise

The enterprise of science and engineering (S&E) is powerfully affected by the role of immigrants in institutions of higher education and in US labour markets (Freeman et al., 2004). Especially since the 1970s and increasingly in the 1990s, educational institutions and labour markets have experienced steady increases of foreign students and workers and have come to expect more of the same. Yet, since 2001 there have been notable downturns in the number of foreign students applying and attending US institutions of higher education.     

Opting Back In: The Influence of Time at Home on Professional Women's Career Redirection after Opting Out

Limited research on professional women's labour force re‐entry after a career break (so‐called ‘opting out’) finds that women redirect away from former careers. Little is known about why this occurs. Our study, based on in‐depth interviews with 54 at‐home mothers, extends prior research to address this question. We find that among women who intended to return to work (who constitute the majority), most planned to pursue alternative careers, typically in traditionally female‐dominated professions or were uncertain about their career direction; few planned to return to their former employers. The reasons for this redirection were women's negative experiences in family inflexible occupations, skill depreciation and perceived age discrimination. Equally or more important, however, was their adaptation to new constraints and opportunities at home (such as increased involvement in mothering and community work), which engendered an aspirational shift towards new, care‐oriented professions that were lower paid and had lower status. We discuss the policy implications of these findings.     

A Stain on the White Uniform — The Discursive Construction of Nurses' Industrial Action in the Media

This article focuses on the discursive construction of the nursing profession in the context of an industrial action. Drawing on studies that claim that the diffusion of new public management reforms restructure healthcare professions and on feminist studies arguing that gender is crucial to understanding the concepts and processes of this restructuring, the article examines a media debate surrounding a recent labour dispute in the Finnish healthcare sector. The analysis illustrates how the nursing profession was discursively constructed through a negotiation of individual and societal rights and responsibilities, and how the debate was framed by competing and contested discourses of professionalization, caring, labour markets and new public management. As a consequence, the debate both sustained and reproduced the traditional gendered meanings related to the nursing profession, as well as provided a context for unsettling, at least for a moment, the normative gender order of Finnish society.     

Older Women in the Workplace and Implications for Retirement:

More women are in the work place than ever before. Job opportunities continue to open up for women, especially in nontradiuonal professions, for example, medicine, law, administration. While these facts seem optimistic, for today and many years to come, an alarmingly vast number of women are living in post-retirement poverty. The poverty is due in part because women of all races remain over-represented in lower paying occupations and industries, a phenomenon which directly affects retirement. Employee assistance programs have a particularly unique opportunity to assist women in helping to eradicate inequities in the marketplace and in averting post-retirement poverty.     

What Happens When There Is Presumptive 50/50 Parenting Time? An Evaluation of Arizona’s New Child Custody Statute

ABSTRACT

The current study presents the findings of an evaluation of Arizona’s 2013 revisions to the child custody statutes that directed courts to “maximize” the child’s parenting time with both parents. A state-wide survey of the four family law professions (i.e., conciliation court staff, judges, mental health providers, and attorneys) assessed their perceptions of the law 4 years after implementation. We averaged the ratings across the four professions to obtain a comprehensive perspective that gave equal weight to each profession. Results revealed that the law functions as a rebuttable presumption of equal parenting time; that it is evaluated positively overall and in terms of children’s best interests; that it is has a neutral impact on legal and interparental conflict; and that it has led to small increases in allegations of domestic violence, child abuse, and substance abuse.     

Reconstructing Popular Childhoods

SUMMARY. For the greater part of the nineteenth century experiences of popular childhoods were rooted in family economies to which children were expected to contribute. Family economies were diverse and family-controlled with children making a range of contributions depending on age and gender within local economies and subcultures. While older children, especially boys, entered paid employment if possible, younger children and girls undertook unpaid domestic tasks. Throughout the century there was a steady decline in opportunities for paid employment among children. Among families where wages and standards of living were rising, childhoods were gradually reconstructed as parents postponed their children's entry to paid employment. The rise in wages was very uneven and there was a growing crisis in the family economies of the poorest families, where children continued to see themselves as contributors despite shrinking child labour markets and the introduction of legislation to control them. Although schooling remained a costly item in domestic budgets, parents who could afford it sent their children to school and a period of often brief and irregular school attendance was a feature of the majority of childhoods by the 1860s. The introduction and enforcement of universal, compulsory school attendance after the Education Act 1870 greatly increased the costs of childhoods, causing a sudden large increment in the dependency of children upon their parents. This marked an acceptance of the legitimacy of intervention by the state in parent child relationships. With a settled period of more or less regular school attendance childhoods became more standardised and visible. Notions of popular childhoods were gradually reconstructed moving away from children as contributors towards children as consumers.     

Skills,control, and the mass professions

Since members of the mass professions are employed mainly by large organisations in the public sector, they are increasingly ‘managed’. What is happening to their skills, their control over their own work, and their professionalism, are matters of concern as revealed by recent disputes. These are precisely questions at the heart of the labour process debate relaunched by Braverman. The insights generated by this stream of writing, already profitably applied beyond blue collar work to clerical occupations may be extended to embrace elements of the service class. There the notion of indetermination goes beyond the notion of discretion. Changes in public ideology have effects analogous to those arising from technological innovation in manufacturing. Yet professionals, whilst attending to technological aspects of their work, typically ignore the wider social issues. In this respect they are vulnerable to deskilling and erosion of control over their work.     

Segregation and Supply: Preferences and Plans among ‘Self-Made’ Women

Recently, Hakim (1991) has argued that women's choices and decisions are a key determinant of labour market behaviour and patterns of gender segregation. Drawing on a case study of women scientists and engineers, this paper examines the extent to which horizontal segregation is the product of preference and planning. The evidence suggests that the women's choices were a significant factor in entering the technical professions. However, from predominantly middle-class families, coming from single-sex schools, the women were able to specialize in technical subjects and to withstand pressure to change their decisions. Their subsequent occupational positions were the product of these educational choices rather than well-formulated career plans. Their involvement in their employers' schools/industry liaison policies highlighted that the majority of young women do not consider professional science and engineering as an appropriate job for them. The findings of the study illustrate that preferences and plans are made in ‘gendered’ social contexts in which women face different opportunities and constraints in exercising their decisions. While the study of women's attitudes and behaviour should not be neglected, sociologists should be wary of voluntaristic accounts of gender segregation which rely on rationalistic notions of labour market behaviour.     

Don’t mention it: Why people don’t share job information,when they do,and why it matters

Network-based job search is especially likely to foster workplace segregation and limit status attainment when information flows through homophilous ties. This paper takes the perspective of information holders and examines how the use of strong versus weak ties – which tend to be homophilous and heterophilous, respectively – differs with characteristics of labour markets in which jobs are located. Using in-depth interviews with entry-level white collar workers I show that information holders with opportunities to mention specific jobs to specific people do so only 27% of the time. Because they hesitate to share information if they are uncertain the information is specifically sought, information flows more commonly to strong ties, whose career goals are more likely to be known. Information is more likely to be shared with weak ties if it concerns occupations for which one may be specifically credentialed, since receiving relevant training serves as signal of interest in such jobs. These finding suggest that the homophily of referrals and their inequality-generating effects may vary across occupations.     

Trends in Socioeconomic Achievement among Immigrant and Native-Born Asian-Americans, 1960–1976*

The first waves of Asian immigration to the United States were halted by exclusionary and racist legislation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the reforms of the 1965 Immigration Act, there has been a resurgence of immigration from Asia. This study analyzes changes in the socioeconomic composition of immigrant and native-born Asian-Americans (Japanese, Chinese, and Filipinos) from 1960 to 1976. The educational levels of all Asian groups, immigrant and native-born, have equaled or exceeded those of whites in recent years. Asians are more likely to be found in professional occupations than are whites, although there is also a concentration of immigrant Chinese and Filipinos in service occupations and the retailtrade sector. Native-born Asian-Americans have reached parity with whites in terms of average earnings, though immigrant Asians remain far behind. The findings are discussed in light of the changing structural conditions and opportunities of Asians in American society.     

Equal Opportunities Policies,Employment and Patriarchy

This paper, based on research in the North of England, seeks to examine the interconnections between equal opportunities policies, women's employment and patriarchy in a local labour market. It is argued that organizations develop a selection of public patriarchal strategies, most notable of which are the denial of inequality and the use of ‘time’ to segregate and disadvantage women within the labour market and labour process. It is masculine culture which has determined the shape and operation of equal opportunities policies where time commitment, individualism and priority to employment are necessary in order to achieve. Equal opportunities policies fail to address not only structural inequalities but also the role that organizations themselves play in maintaining gender segregation. By individualizing women the policies may also undermine women's own employment coping strategies which depend on assistance from other women both inside and outside the employment setting.     

Warrantless Arrest in Domestic Violence

Abstract

Legislators in the United States have responded to domestic violence by passing laws to criminalize domestic violence without empirical support of the effectiveness of this intervention. This research examines policy implementation and domestic violence arrest rates to determine the effectiveness of such legislation in Virginia. The implementation of written domestic violence policies and training for law enforcement officers was expected to increase domestic violence arrest rates. The findings show a positive impact of law enforcement training on felony (repeat offender) domestic violence arrest rates. The findings are relevant for social workers involved in policy and resource allocation for domestic violence interventions.