Journal Article

Over the last half century, US wage growth stagnated, wage inequality rose, and the labor-force participation rate of prime-age men steadily declined. In this article, we examine these worrying labor market trends, focusing on outcomes for males without a college education. Though wages and participation have fallen in tandem for this population, we argue that the canonical neoclassical framework, which postulates a labor demand curve shifting inward across a stable labor supply curve, does not reasonably explain the data. Alternatives we discuss include adjustment frictions associated with labor demand shocks and effects of the changing marriage market—that is, the fact that fewer less-educated men are forming their own stable families—on male labor supply incentives. In the synthesis that emerges, the phenomenon of declining prime-age male labor-force participation is not coherently explained by a series of causal factors acting separately. A more reasonable interpretation, we argue, involves complex feedbacks between labor demand, family structure, and other factors that have disproportionately affected less-educated men.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the relationship between work and ageing has become increasingly visible as a policy issue. It is both reflected in and influenced by changes in macro-economic policy, life-opportunities and social attitudes associated with growing older, as a combination of falling birth rates and increased longevity and has put pressure on the traditional parameters of the working age. The idea of retiring at a fixed point in the life-course, to enjoy a period of rest or leisure at the end of a working life, emerged in many advanced economies during the 1900s and evolved into policies that encouraged early retirement as the baby-boomers entered the jobs market in the 1960s and 1970s (Phillipson and Smith, 2005). Early retirement, itself a relatively recent development, gave rise to the possibility of a 'third age' of leisure and active ageing (Laslett, 1987), but as demographic and economic changes make themselves felt, it is again becoming an uncertain prospect for many older workers (Biggs and McGann, 2015).

Recent declines in the average length of time that U.S. workers spend with a given employer represent an important change in the nature of the employment relationship, yet it is one whose causes are poorly understood. I explore those causes using Current Population Survey data on the tenure of men aged 30–65, from the years 1979–2008. I argue that long-term employment relationships primarily occur when workers pressure employers to close off employment from market competition, reducing the attractiveness of external mobility relative to internal opportunities and increasing employment security. I then explore how two changes in organizations’ environments—a decline in union strength and increased turbulence from changes in technology and globalization—might have affected workers’ ability to secure such closed employment relationships over the last 30 years. My results support the argument that declines in tenure reflect the reduced power of workers to secure closed employment relationships. Recent declines in tenure have been concentrated in large organizations, and many of those declines are explained by controlling for the changing levels of industry unionization. I find little evidence that foreign competition or technological change affected mobility. The results are robust to measures of changing industry growth rates and within-industry reorganization. Supplementary analyses suggest that layoffs are associated with different industry pressures than tenure and that voluntary mobility may have played an important role in declines in tenure.

Here we propose an overview of the policies implemented throughout the world in favor of the industry of the future. The interest of this overview is not to rank the countries surveyed according to their level of progress in this transition, but to give us to see the diversity of approaches tailored to the economic and political particular contexts. It is interesting to note that despite very different profiles, most of the programs in place are joined around three themes: the development of national technology offers, support for the modernization of the industrial fabric and adaptation of employee skills. This panorama will then allow us to position France in this landscape and draw up an inventory of the "industry of the future" made by the government since 2013. It shows that France has a real part to play, but this assumes that it defines its own priorities and mobilizing its undeniable specific strengths in order to benefit the most of this industrial change. [googletranslate_en]

Universities have discovered that learning need not dwell inside the confines of the four traditional classroom walls. The internet provides a vital link to information like never before. As the number of internet users has increased, universities have begun to rely more heavily on technology in the delivery of course content and instruction. The use of technology has been purported to have the potential to lead the way in developing more competent technology and educational leaders in schools as well as reforming leadership preparation and reaching a more inclusive population of administrator aspirants. Online education seems set on its course to overtake traditional colleges within the next few decades, especially as society becomes ever more dependent on the internet to get work done. This research paper examines areas in which educational programs can meet today's global standards, allow for the greatest flexibility in meeting student needs, and yet continue to increase leadership and educational opportunities for all student groups. The purpose of the study is to outline: whether distance technology is indeed used; what types of distance technology are employed; what goals drive the implementation of distance technology; and what factors inhibit the successful use of distance technology in higher education engagement graduate employability. The paper aims to focus on the issues involve the role of higher education in improving employability in developing the students' potential and flexibility to adapt their knowledge, skills, and attitudes to the labor market. In view of this, distance universities may have an important role in designing and implementing accreditation standards for employability. The attention should be paid to the development of transferable skills such as critical thinking, oral expression and team work to promote employability while raising the quality standards of the Higher Education Degree.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the perception of skills shortages, namely, skills scarcity and skills deficiencies among managers, and its relationship with organizational characteristics. Design/methodology/approach - The study used a quantitative approach and data were collected from 243 managers working in China. Multivariate analysis of variance and box plots were employed for data analysis. Findings - The results revealed that organizational characteristics were found to have a significant positive impact on managers’ skill levels, and hard-to-fill vacancies caused by skills shortages were found in all types of organizations. Existing and deficient skills were also identified as affecting all organizations. Practical implications - The results suggest that organizations would benefit from the adoption of a system supporting internal retention, training and development and external recruitment to close the skills gaps. Originality/value - This is an empirical study that provides an insight into the skills shortages from a multi-organizational context. It highlights the effects of organizational characteristics in relation to skills shortages and provides a foundation to support the skills needed in the context of national and global organizations.

This survey article seeks to contribute to the understanding of the concepts of precarious work and precarization in the history of industrial capitalism by addressing the debate in the social sciences and humanities over the past forty years. Based on a gendered global approach, this article aims to offer a critique of the Global North-centric perspective, which largely conceives precarious work as a new phenomenon lacking a longer historical tradition. The first part discusses the multiple origins, definitions, and conceptualizations of “precarious work” elaborated with regard to industrial as well as post-industrial capitalism, taking into account selected contemporary sources as well as studies conducted by historians and social scientists. In the second part, the influence of different approaches, such as the feminist and post-colonial ones, in globalizing and gendering the precarious work debate is examined in their historical contexts, exploring also the crucial nexus of precarious work and informal work. In the conclusion, the limitations of the available literature are discussed, along with suggestions for further directions in historicizing precarious work from a global perspective.

Policymakers need to know which way technology is headed. If it replaces workers, they will need to cope with ever-growing unemployment and widening economic inequality. But if the primary problem is displacement, they will mainly have to develop a workforce with new specialized skills. The two problems call for very different solutions. Despite fears of widespread technological unemployment, I argue that the data show technology today largely displacing workers to new jobs, not replacing them entirely. Of the major occupational groups, only manufacturing jobs are being eliminated persistently in developed economies—and these losses are offset by growth in other occupations.

Digital was invited to work. The development of the Internet, big data, connected objects, mobile devices and other digital technologies has opened the door to multiple transformations, if they upset the life and consumption, have not spared the job. But how does the work assigned? A burgeoning literature does not fail to emphasize the use of digital technologies has an impact on employment, improving some aspects and by weakening others. It emerges very contrasting evolution scenarios. They oscillate between the announcement of a substitution of man by digital technology often related to the figure of the robot and the announcement of reconstructions under the process of "creative destruction" theorized by Schumpeter, which would lead to the disappearance some jobs and industries in favor of new (Bomsel and Le Blanc, 2000; Bidet-Mayer, 2016). Similarly, the development of digital questioned the effects of the development of new technologies on qualifications or on the interdependence between technology and skills (Bailey et al., 2010). The approaches to "skill biased technological change" tend to emphasize a moving job creation up to the detriment of low and medium-skilled activities, at the risk of appearing a "break numbered America" ​​(Gualtieri, 2015 ). [googletranslate_en]