Employability is a complex concept that depends on numerous variables and stakeholders. Territorial employability ecosystems are needed to ensure that employability issues are addressed in a personalized and comprehensive manner. In this article, we offer a new perspective on employability and examine what constitutes a territorial employability ecosystem. Using two French case studies, we illustrate how these ecosystems function in practice and emphasize the need for coordination between various levels of public policy to foster collaboration among stakeholders. Our findings highlight the importance of implementing place-based policies to address employability issues more effectively.
While temporary migrants, especially in labour-intensive industries, are expected to contribute to economic growth and the labour market in their host and home countries, the motives for their return to their home countries are ambiguous. In this study, we investigate the effects of occupational credentials, as proof of skills, on migrant behaviour - specifically, whether those held in migrants' home and host countries influence their return aspirations - using primary data on foreign elderly-care workers in Japan. We find that migrant workers who hold occupational credentials in their home countries tend to expect to return to their home countries much sooner than those who do not. Our findings suggest that the occupational credentials issued in each country play a crucial role in migrant workers' return.
This article investigates the relationship between working hours and environmental pressures using panel data from 30 countries-including the European Union countries, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom-over several decades. It examines four indicators: carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, carbon footprint, total ecological footprint and energy use. Building on established theories and introducing several extensions, the article describes the estimated effects of working hours on environmental variables, controlling for key macroeconomic and structural factors. Results show a significant positive association between working hours and environmental pressures (especially CO2 emissions). These findings remain robust across specifications, though effect sizes vary. Further estimations along the distribution of environmental variables reveal stronger associations at the lower and middle ends, particularly for CO2. While not claiming causality, I find a consistent empirical association between working hours and environmental pressures, which could also be evidence of an environmental Kuznets curve.
In this article, we explore how labour organizations use and leverage social media for their agenda-setting in a decentralized labour context (Chile). We combine two studies - a topicmodelling algorithm (BERTopic) analysing the digital activity of five labour confederations on a specific social media platform (N = 14,863 tweets), together with five in-depth interviews with leaders and communication officers from these confederations - to explore how they prioritize messages and frame their content to advance their agendas. We also develop a conceptual model to address the influence of context on the choice of social media content.
Despite extensive research on migrants and the platform economy, few systematic comparisons exist between migrant and non-migrant workers across diverse migrant groups and types of platform work. This article draws on representative survey data from 14 European Union Member States, which show that, on average, migrants are approximately 20 per cent more likely to engage in platform work. However, almost half of this difference is explained by socio-demographic characteristics. Ultimately, migrant workers who are more likely to engage in platform work are those who are more vulnerable based on their group-level characteristics and are at greater risk of being disadvantaged in the traditional labour market.
Our article analyses the quality of green jobs in France, applying a definition of green jobs that has emerged in recent years to the French labour force survey-a large, representative dataset. Using regression and classification techniques, we find that green jobs are associated with lower job quality than non-green jobs, particularly for low-skilled workers, who tend to experience lower wages and reduced socio-economic security. In contrast, high-skilled workers tend to enjoy either better or not significantly different job quality relative to their non-green counterparts. Our analysis also highlights the heterogeneity of green jobs, which can be grouped into four distinct clusters with varying levels of job quality, challenging the narrative of uniformly "good green jobs".
In this article, we examine labour market polarization dynamics in T & uuml;rkiye. First, we use highly refined microdata to classify tasks - mainly abstract, routine and manual - to conduct analysis at the occupation-task level. Second, we find evidence for polarization driven by technological changes (the routinization hypothesis), education and increasing female employment in both low- and high-wage occupations. Lastly, we analyse the tasks performed by workers in their respective occupations and find that the occupational assignment of tasks determines their value, suggesting the existence of a structural task content.
Collective bargaining has a marginal and steadily diminishing role in employment regulation in Hungary. Flaws in the legal framework are certainly among the main reasons behind low and decreasing coverage. In the light of ILO standards and comparative national examples, this article analyses the Hungarian statutory rules on trade union representativeness and outlines potential reform measures to help reverse the downward trend in coverage. Our aim is to present the Hungarian experience on various aspects of trade union representativeness within a European theoretical framework, which may be of particular interest to labour markets with low union density, especially in Eastern Europe.
Germany has historically received a substantial inflow of immigrants from Poland. Polish workers are the second-largest foreign employment group in Germany and contribute substantially to the German economy. In this article, we draw on a large administrative dataset to analyse the wage structure of Polish employees and consider a wide range of factors, including individual and firm characteristics, labour market performance measures and potential network effects. We also account for spatial selectivity, distinguishing between urban, semi-urban and peripheral regions. We conclude that, when compared with Poland, Germany remains attractive to Polish workers-particularly to those who are lower-skilled. Polish employees earn less than their German counterparts, suggesting that wage increases may be a potential means of retaining Polish workers in Germany. Network-related characteristics indicate competition effects among Polish workers.
This article examines labour market transitions towards green employment in Viet Nam and their relationship to social protection. Using a task-based approach and longitudinal labour force survey data, we find that green jobs remain limited, accounting for only 15 per cent of total employment. Transition rates vary significantly by demographic characteristics: younger workers and women face greater difficulties in accessing green employment. Educational attainment is a key determinant, such that individuals with tertiary education are more likely to move into green occupations. Social insurance coverage is positively associated with transitions from brown or neutral jobs to green jobs among those with tertiary education, and negatively linked to the likelihood of moving from green to brown occupations. In contrast, it does not appear to facilitate transitions to green occupations for workers with lower levels of education. These findings highlight the need for integrated policy frameworks that combine social protection and education to promote inclusive green transitions in developing countries.
Recent years have seen an increasing availability and usage of measurements of informal sectors as the basis of scholarship and policy advice on the causes and consequences of informality. This has created an impression of a consensus around a clearly conceptualised and operationalised object of study – that when we talk about the informal sector, we know what we are talking about. This paper argues that this impression is largely a mirage. It suggests that underneath increasingly accepted measurements, and actively masked by them, there remains a fundamental conceptual confusion and continuing diversity in understandings of what the informal sector is. What should be questions of definition have been moved ‘downstream’ into the specifications of statistical models and measurements, resulting in a lack of transparency and the emergence of feedback loops between common conceptions and methodological assumptions. This has led a large part of the current literature on informal sectors to generate potentially misleading insights into substantial development policy discussions around taxation, registration, and social protection. This paper reviews the causes and consequences of these issues and suggests both best practices and revised definitions in order to address them.
