The authors provide the first systematic evidence on the effectiveness of a contested policy in Germany to help displaced workers. So-called transfer companies employ displaced workers after job loss. Workers are provided with job-search assistance and are paid a wage that is a substantial fraction of their pre-displacement wage. Using administrative data on workers’ earnings and employment before and after displacement, the authors compare outcomes for displaced workers who enter transfer companies against a control group of displaced workers who do not. Using an event study, the authors find that workers who enter a transfer company have worse post-displacement outcomes, but this is the result of negative selection: Workers without outside opportunities are more likely to choose to enter the transfer company. By contrast, ITT and IV estimates indicate that the use of a transfer company has a positive and significant effect on employment rates five years after job loss, but no significant effect on earnings. The positive employment effect arises, however, because treated workers are less likely to leave social security employment rather than less likely to become unemployed.
In the fight for decent work, workers need the support of global union federations (GUFs) to protect and promote their interests. GUF officials are an important resource for the labor movement, and yet we know surprisingly little about these strategic social actors. Drawing from a study of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), the authors identify four distinct but interacting roles—activist, bureaucrat, diplomat, and technocrat—that GUF officials exercise, at different times, in different places, with different interactants. As institutional entrepreneurs, GUF officials must engage in collective action framing and mobilize power resources in strategic action fields to advance the effectiveness of GUFs.
Since 2021, workers across various large, private-sector employers in the United States have unionized. Groups of marginalized workers have led many of these campaigns, reflecting the need for more intersectional analyses of union organizing. This study explores how union activists practice intersectional organizing at work. Drawing on interviews with 53 union activists and representatives from Starbucks Workers United, the author finds that many workers leveraged management’s virtue signaling and progressive brand image, and their lived experiences as marginalized individuals, to advance their organizing campaign at work. These findings emphasize the linkage, rather than distinction or incompatibility, between social identity and economic action. This study contributes to the field of industrial relations by connecting union activists’ social identities, particularly sexual orientation and gender nonconformity, to the emergence of labor activism.
The growing popularity of e-commerce has made warehouses increasingly vital to retailing. The authors test the proposition that competition for online consumers translates into harsher work conditions inside the warehouses that make e-commerce possible. They use data from three surveys, one providing a national sample of US warehouse workers and two targeting those at Walmart and Amazon, the country's largest retailers. In the national sample, job quality and worker well-being are lower in warehouses engaged in ecommerce than in traditional warehouses, but this relationship varies across the two firms. The negative effects are most pronounced at Amazon's e-commerce warehouses, which emphasize speedy delivery. These same effects are less significant at Walmart's facilities, which aim to offer low prices. Future research should explore whether firms vying for e-commerce business are likely to emulate Amazon, converging on a set of labor practices that diminish work conditions in a growing sector.
In response to the pandemic recession, the 2020 CARES Act expanded eligibility and payments for Unemployment Insurance (UI). UI and the CARES Act may be more salient for people with disabilities than for those without disabilities, given their higher rates of job loss, lower personal and family incomes, and greater obstacles in finding jobs. Using March 2009-2023 CPS data, the authors find that relative to people without disabilities: 1) people with disabilities had higher UI receipt and UI values as a percentage of personal and family incomes; 2) the CARES UI supplement had especially favorable effects on incomes and poverty status for workers with disabilities in 2020; and 3) workers with disabilities who received UI were more likely to be employed the following March, an effect that may have been magnified by the CARES UI supplement. The results suggest that UI may play a salutary role in maintaining the health and job readiness of workers with disabilities.
Graduating from college into a recession is associated with earnings losses, but less is known about how these effects vary across colleges. Using restricted-use data from the National Survey of College Graduates, the authors study how the effects of graduating into adverse economic conditions vary over college quality in the context of the Great Recession. They find that earnings losses are concentrated among graduates from relatively high-quality colleges. Key mechanisms include substitution out of the labor force and into graduate school, decreased graduate degree completion, and differences in the economic stability of fields of study between graduates of high- and low-quality colleges.
This article explains how the triadic brokering system in the European Union affects the conditions of work and pay of mobile care workers. Using original survey data gathered from Polish care workers in Germany, the authors found that workers earn less money the more hours they work. Based on qualitative interviews with care workers and representatives of labor market intermediaries, they argue that the brokering relationship is responsible for the misalignment between working hours and pay. Workers negotiate their pay and working hours within two distinct contexts: in the domestic sphere with their German clients (care recipients and their families) and in interactions with care agencies in Poland. The article also identifies the conditions under which workers are able to benefit from, or are disadvantaged by, the brokering relationship. Findings suggest that these consist of a combination of individual (e.g., language proficiency, professional care skills) and structural conditions (e.g., demographic changes, EU mobile rights).
Using detailed information on vacancies and job seekers, the authors study the effect of labor market tightness on labor demand for the near-universe of German firms. To this end, novel Bartik instruments are constructed that combine firms' predetermined employment shares with nationwide shifts at the occupational level. The results show that tightness significantly reduces firms' labor demand, implying that the observed doubling in tightness between 2012 and 2019 reduced employment by 5%. At the aggregate level, the negative tightness effect creates search externalities, which reduce the own-wage elasticity of labor demand from -0.7 to -0.5 through reallocation of workers between firms. To guide the analysis, the authors embed elements of the canonical search-and-matching model into a labor demand equation, while allowing vacancy posting costs to increase in tight markets. Through the lens of this model, the pre-match component of hiring costs amounts to 16-24% of annual wage payments.
Scholars and practitioners agree that organized labor's difficulty recruiting young people constitutes one of the central obstacles to union growth and revitalization. What mechanisms can overcome this impasse? This article tests competing theories of union youth outreach in light of the 2021-2024 labor union uptick in the United States. Through a survey reaching out to every union drive of 2022 and through hundreds of worker interviews, the author demonstrates that young workers have driven the US unionization surge and identifies the labor initiatives that have enabled this exceptional degree of involvement. Many theorized mechanisms for connecting with young workers proved to be either absent or relatively unimportant, such as youth sections, youth marketing, alliances with social movements, coalitions, and social justice demands. By contrast, five mutually reinforcing mechanisms were central: organizing youth-heavy industries; adopting a bottom-up organizing model; forging a "militant minority" of workplace radicals; leaning on digital tools; and spreading contagious worker self-activity.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to streamline hiring procedures, but it raises concerns about transparency and discrimination. The European Union (EU)'s Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) is the first broad attempt to regulate AI, using a tiered approach based on levels of risk. This article asks whether and to what extent such an approach can adequately protect job applicants' fundamental rights. Focusing on the EU as a global reference point, it shows how connecting risk management with rights protection can make regulation more effective. The authors argue that involving affected groups through stakeholder-driven standardization, fundamental rights impact assessments, and co-determination can turn compliance from a box-ticking exercise into meaningful accountability. Placing the AIA within the broader contexts of data protection, equality, and product safety law, the article offers practical lessons for jurisdictions worldwide seeking to align technological innovation with fundamental rights protection.
