浅析女大学生就业难

就业是民生之本,现阶段总体就业形势严峻。随着高校的大规模扩招,毕业生总体供大于求。大学生就业难仅仅是一般劳动就业问题,女大学生就业难除了劳动就业问题以外,还附带有劳动力市场上的性别歧视问题。本文首先对女大学生的现状进行分析,然后对女大学生就业难提出具体有针对性的对策,以便消除女大学生就业中的"性别歧视",实现男女大学生的平等就业,充分发挥女性人力资源的重要作用。     

The Italian Case: From Employment Regulation to Welfare Reforms?

This article on the Italian case is based on recent trends in labour market reform. We critically review the reform approach adopted in recent years, mainly centred on marginal legislative reforms in employment contracts. The diffusion of flexible labour contracts, especially among the younger generations and women, together with a welfare system still based on employment seniority and job characteristics, have reinforced the segmentation of the Italian labour market and social inequalities. The absence of a negotiating strategy in introducing reforms has also increased social conflict. These trends ask for a comprehensive reform of the welfare system and for active policies to support labour market transitions, a reform which is increasingly considered in the current political debate.     

社会性别意识下的农村流动妇女就业排斥研究

本文主要从社会性别意识的角度,结合目前农村女性外来务工者所受到的就业排斥现象,呈现对农村妇女就业进行排斥的主流性别意识,以及它如何使农村妇女对其进行内化而形成了自身的性别意识。重新审视现有的就业制度与主流性别意识之间的关系,关注农村流动妇女自身性别意识,有利于减轻并进一步消除农村流动妇女受到的就业排斥。     

Indications of Social Policy Convergence in Europe

This paper explores the extent to which, and the ways in which, it might be justified in talking of a movement towards convergence of social policy within Europe. It reviews definitions and typologies of the welfare state as a prelude to discussion of the different theoretical types and possibilities of social policy integration, which itself leads into consideration of supranational EU developments. The empirical data presented in respect of “social protection” expenditures (and taxation regimes) in general and of “active” and “passive” labour market expenditures in particular, lend support to the notion not merely that the welfare state is not yet over in Europe, but that forms of social policy convergence are in evidence already.     

Labour Market Policy in the United States, Canada and Sweden: Addressing the Issue of Convergence

'Convergence theorists' suggest that domestic and/or global challenges and pressures are rendering welfare states broadly similar across national boundaries. 'Resilience theorists', in contrast, argue that a range of socio-political factors have allowed states to respond differentially to these pressures and maintain their distinct national social policy approaches. However, both research streams have addressed the 'welfare state' writ large in a multitude of nations and typically relied upon narrow, quantitative budgetary indicators. This study examines qualitative changes to key income security and social service programmes in one central social policy domain – labour market policy – in three nations, the United States, Canada and Sweden. It suggests that there is evidence of some degree of 'convergence' in the broadest sense of the term across these three nations. However, while both the USA and Canada have readily embraced genuinely neo-liberal restructuring, and become increasingly similar over the past two decades in this policy area, Sweden has managed to retain its distinctive social policy approach so far, despite notable changes, developments and trends. It also suggests that the character and direction of change may vary across and within policy domains in a single nation. The conclusion provides a discussion of universality, equality and solidarity, concepts that are commonly employed in accounts of welfare state change.     

Employment discrimination in upscale restaurants: Evidence from matched pair testing

White and racial minorities with equal qualifications applied simultaneously for 43 waiter/waitress jobs in New York City fine dining restaurants. Applicants of all demographic backgrounds were treated with equal courtesy, but minorities were only 54% as likely as whites to receive a job offer. This discrimination, either conscious or unconscious, was documented in 31% of restaurants tested. Post-hiring differences appear even more widespread, with front of the house minority restaurant servers averaging 12% lower earnings than their equally qualified white peers. Ensuring equal treatment in hiring would expand minority access to good jobs in Manhattan fine dining by 3500 positions but not make it universal.     

Reforming the European Common Agricultural Policy: From price & income support to risk management

Over the last 30 years, the European Union has significantly reformed its Common Agricultural Policy by introducing direct payments to farmers and reducing price support levels. While the European agricultural prices become more volatile, all economic models assessing these reforms remain static and ignore the risk dimensions. This paper develops an original stochastic computable general equilibrium model capturing the different sources of risk, farmers’ risk attitude and risk contingent markets. We find that the reduction of price support levels has modest market impacts but negative global welfare effects by exposing risk-averse European farmers to the world price volatility. This issue is not solved by the direct payments, which have negligible market and global welfare impacts through their wealth effects. On the other hand, we find that unbiased futures markets can solve this global welfare issue by allowing European farmers to transfer their price risks. Therefore, European policymakers should ensure well-functioning risk contingent markets rather than maintaining rigid intervention price levels.     

Keeping Australia's Older Workers in the Labour Force. A Policy Perspective

As in other western industrialised countries the structural ageing of the Australian population has significant labour market implications. Government has responded with a range of policies to persuade older workers to abandon early retirement and/or remain in the workforce past traditional retirement ages. But whether this generation of workers will be prepared to change their retirement plans in response to policy encouragement, and whether current policy measures will translate into significant numbers of older workers extending their labour force participation is uncertain. Using the Australian Survey of Retirement Attitudes and Motivations (ASRAM) a recently completed, nationally representative survey of Australian workers aged 40 – 59 years we find that while the Government message about working longer is getting through, older workers are relatively unresponsive to current policy measures. Other policies, especially policies outside the financial realm, are needed to maximise the number of older Australians in the labour force.     

Social Policy for Poor Rural People in Colombia: Reinforcing Traditional Gender Roles and Identities?

This article provides a 'situated' gender analysis of the Colombian conditional cash transfer programme, Familias en Acción, offering empirical evidence from a specific rural setting. This 'located' approach shows that generalizations about gender implications of conditional cash transfer programmes in Latin America do not always fit neatly with realities. The article shows how the implementation of these programmes in a specific rural context, the municipality of Paipa, reflects a reinforcement of traditional gender allocations and responsibilities. At the same time, the local authorities, official workers and the mothers adapt the social programmes to recent gender trends. For example, men may carry out some domestic activities single-handedly, take care of children without their wives, women may leave men, and women and men may work together in off-farm activities, with husbands and wives taking joint decisions about domestic issues. In other words, the gender effects of the Familias en Acción programme in rural settings currently move between old gender customs and practices and changeable gender conditions. In Latin-American terms, it is possible to say that these conditions range between 'machismo' and 'feminist liberalization'.     

The Dutch and Danish Miracles Revisited: A Critical Discussion of Activation Policies in Two Small Welfare States

Denmark and the Netherlands are usually considered to belong to two different families of welfare states: the Scandinavian and the Continental model respectively. Yet, in both states active labour market policies, or activation, have increased during the 1990s and are currently prominent. Both in Denmark and in the Netherlands activation has been viewed as an important reason for the low unemployment rates which both states have experienced since the early to mid‐1990s, hence explaining the so‐called Dutch and Danish jobs miracles. The paper examines critically the activation measures taken in both countries and their alleged positive effect upon (un)employment. It further examines their effect on rights and obligations from a citizenship perspective. The paper concludes that in both cases the positive development of labour market performance cannot primarily be attributed to activation measures. Furthermore, activation has reduced the entitlements and increased the obligations affiliated with social citizenship.     

The demand for advice at the European Union level: policy advice politicization in the European Commission

ABSTRACT

The study focuses on the role of policy advice brokers – political advisors – pertaining to the issue of politicization in the European Commission (EC). The study conceptualizes politicization as increased use of political advisors – known as “cabinets” in the EC context – by the Commissioners to ensure political direction over the work of the civil service. Commissioners’ private cabinets fulfil several functions, one of which is political steering of the policy work in the departments. The study argues that as a result of the NPM-style reform and strengthening of the civil service accountability to the political level, the political steering function of the cabinet advisors grew in importance. To examine whether the political steering function of cabinets became more important after the reform, the study analyzed the lists of cabinets’ responsibilities available online from the Prodi to the Junker Commissions. The content of the lists of responsibilities was first coded and then statistically analyzed testing for the effect of the reform on the structure of cabinets’ responsibilities.     

The gender gap and torture: Opposition to torture among men and women in the USA

The study of women in politics includes the analysis of both elite women and the masses in regard to their voting, political activity, and attitudes. Research shows that women hold different political attitudes. This gender gap is explained in relation to a number of attitudes, but few studies analyze whether the gender gap is still evident in an issue area that women might be torn in two hypothesized directions. The purpose of this study is to conduct an analysis of the gender gap in individual's attitudes toward the appropriateness of torture to prevent future terrorist attacks.     

Gender Down Under: Welfare State Restructuring in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand

Beginning in the mid-1980s, the governments of both Australia and New Zealand embarked upon programmes of economic reform. In the same period, they have also undertaken extensive, if incremental, restructuring of their social policy gender models, away from the male breadwinner family form and towards dual-earner partnerships based on individualized entitlement. This paper examines and compares this restructuring. It aims to identify those respects in which similarities and differences in this restructuring express enduring cross-national differences in social policy, and in what respects simply reflect differences in the timing of otherwise similar developments.     

Dutch Women are Liberated, Migrant Women are a Problem: The Evolution of Policy Frames on Gender and Migration in the Netherlands, 1995–2005

Over the past decade, there has been a major shift in Dutch gender equality policy to an almost exclusive focus on migrant women. Simultaneously, the focus of ‘minority policies’ has shifted more and more towards gender relations. The appearance of migrant women at the top of the political agenda is remarkable. In this article we examine how this construction of migrant women as a political problem has come about, and consider its implications. As we argue, the dominant policy frames of emancipation and individual responsibility are reinforcing a dichotomy between the autochthonous ‘us’ and the allochthonous ‘them’. As the problem is increasingly defined as a cultural one, it is implicitly stated that there is no problem with the dominant culture and society. Barriers for participation are exclusively located in the migrant (Muslim) culture. In this view, Muslim migrants should first change their culture before they can fully integrate in Dutch society.     

European Union Policy on Asylum and Immigration. Addressing the Root Causes of Forced Migration: A Justice and Home Affairs Policy of Freedom,Security and Justice?

This paper contributes to the debate on the development of the future common European Union Policy on Asylum and Immigration. It seeks to explain the rationale behind the evolution of the Union's policy outlook on asylum and immigration. It then analyses the most recent Union‐wide policy tools available to address asylum and migration issues, arguing that common European asylum policies thus far have focused on containment of migration flows seen as a threat to the European internal security regime and in response to perceived populist pressures. The return and readmission clauses now being implemented, in agreements with countries outside of the Union, serve to illustrate this point, as does the political willingness to extra‐territorialize asylum processing. However, the focus on eliminating the root causes of migration flows is a relatively new paradigm, developed since the 1999 Tampere European Council. Although off to a slow start, the European Union Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument may become an institutional outlet to create a more normative framework for asylum and migration. The success of such a framework is contingent upon breaking with earlier conceptualizations of “asylum” as a security threat. Implicit in such a framework is the need to retain a clear distinction between asylum‐ and labour‐related migration. Partnerships must also be granted a budget sufficient for their establishment in real terms with countries of origin and transit. Lastly, there must be changes in modes of governance, as well as institutional reform, if efforts to elaborate a strategy on asylum and migration are to be executed successfully. Curiously, while the proposed Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe sought to abolish the pillar structure put in place by the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, it would have retained the institutional inhibitions imposed by long‐existing tensions between national and community administrations and the “inter‐pillar” battles between the foreign policy, humanitarian and development dimensions of the EU apparatus. The current political debate about moving Europe “closer to its people”, following the rejection of the proposed Constitution at national referenda in France and the Netherlands, appears unlikely to solve any of these tensions.     

Poverty, Social Exclusion and Social Policy in the Czech Republic

This article analyses the pattern of poverty and social exclusion in the Czech Republic and the impact of social policy on this pattern. The analysis is mostly based on data from the Czech Survey on Social Conditions of Households (2001; 27,000 respondents); Eurostat data provide a benchmark for making international comparisons. The poverty rate in the Czech Republic is among the lowest in Europe. On the other hand, material deprivation, as well as concentration of poverty within specific population groups, is high, with the unemployed facing the highest risk of poverty. Social policy measures in effect reinforce this pattern: while the benefit system is highly redistributive and effectively eliminates income poverty among households of employed persons and among pensioners, incomes of persons outside paid employment are protected less effectively. Labour market policy measures are insufficient in scope and inadequate in targeting groups which are facing the highest risk of labour market exclusion and poverty. We argue that although this practice is effective at present, it is not sustainable in the long term.     

Differences in Well‐being among People with Disabilities in Paid Employment: Level of Restriction,Gender and Labour Market Context

This study investigates the variability in well‐being of people with disabilities in paid employment in two different labour market contexts: the beginning (1998) and end (2009) of a period of growth in non‐standard hours and work intensification. It focuses on the well‐being constraints that arise from three influences: a person's disability, a person's gender, and the labour market context. Hypotheses are developed using the social model of disability and social identity theory. Hierarchical moderator regression is employed to examine two national samples of nearly 4,000 people with disabilities in paid employment. Individuals who are most limited by their disabilities, particularly women, reported lower well‐being in 2009 than in 1998. Welfare‐to‐work policies affecting these disadvantaged groups are discussed in relation to the labour market and national regulatory environments.     

Adjustment costs in labour markets and the distributional effects of trade liberalization: Analytics and calculations for Vietnam

This paper explores the implications of different labour market adjustment formulations for the analysis of trade liberalization across different sectors and households in the Vietnamese economy using computable general equilibrium (CGE) models. The model is calibrated to a model admissible Vietnamese data set for 1997.We use five different adjustment cost treatments in analyzing the effects of trade liberalization in Vietnam. We compare simulation results from each and show how different treatments can significantly affect the distributional impacts of policy reforms, such as the trade liberalization. First, labour is treated as fully mobile across all sectors in the economy. Second, the sectors of economy are broken down into the two blocks of agricultural and industrial-service sectors and labour markets are treated as segmented by sector block. No mobility of labour between blocks is allowed while labour within each sector block remains fully mobile. The third is the same as the second, but movement within each agricultural and industrial-service sector block involves transactions costs. In the fourth, mobility of workers from the agricultural to industrial-service sectors and vice versa is possible with transactions costs. Finally, we calibrate the model with unemployment but no adjustment costs for labour reallocation to explore how model results differ in terms of adjustments in the labour market and welfare effects.Our results indicate significant differences in the impacts from trade liberalization across these cases. The redistributional impact of trade liberalization is sharper against poor rural households with segmented labour markets and with transactions costs, while aggregate efficiency gains are similar to no adjustment cost analyses. The conclusion is the choice of model structure for labour markets is crucially important for the perceived distributional impacts of trade liberalization.     

Financial Incentives and Job‐search Training: Methods to Increase Labour Market Integration in Contemporary Welfare States?

In their efforts to increase labour market integration, contemporary welfare states emphasize the importance of financial incentives, active job‐searching and participation in labour market programmes. However, the effects of these policies have been minor and in some cases even inconsistent. The aim of this study was to examine whether and how financial incentives and job‐search training programmes increase re‐employment and the quality of re‐employment. A total of 1,015 unemployed persons participated in a Finnish follow‐up study with a randomized experimental design. Although no overall impact of job‐search training on re‐employment emerged, a positive effect was found for those groups of the unemployed who had a financial incentive to participate in the programme. Nevertheless, among unemployed workers with benefits at a minimum level there were no positive effects on the quality of re‐employment, and the impact decreased when unemployment was prolonged. Financial incentives and job‐search training appear to increase re‐employment among those of the unemployed who generally have better chances on the labour market, whereas these measures are not sufficient for the more disadvantaged groups of the unemployed.     

Disabling Ideas – Disabling Policies: The Case of Disability Employment Policy in the Newly Established Israeli State

By integrating a social perspective of disability with an ideational approach to social policy, the present study seeks to illuminate the central role of ideas in shaping disability policy. Using employment policy towards civilian disabled people in the newly established Israeli State (1948–65) as a case study, this examination highlights the key role played by the Israeli welfare system in excluding disabled people and structuring the disability category. This case illustrates how the paradigmatic perception of disability, loaded with patronizing attitudes towards the new Mizrachi immigrants, operated both as ‘cognitive locks’ and as a means for gradual yet transformative change. It is argued that this kind of ideational change is best identified and interpreted by assuming that paradigms are relational in nature.