Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth
Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth - Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2015
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Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth - Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2015
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The importance of changing the Croatian Labour Law became general opinion in the analysis of Croatian economy and proposals for improvement. That is almost self-implying. Thus, in various mass media there have been opinions by different journalists, experts, employers and politicians that changes in the Labour Law are one of the crucial factors and precondition for the exit from the economic crisis and recovery. There are conflicting opinions of social partners: while employers are striving and promoting flexible approaches, trade unions are looking for rigid and fixed mechanism and inclusion of automatism into wage setting. There is also difference between trade unions in civil/public and private sector — while the first tend to be rigid, the latter are forced by economic outlooks to look for flexible solutions with employers. In this article the author tried to give short retrospective of negotiation — government position, social partner’s position and in the end author’s position, as a lawyer. The Labour Law as all other forms of regulation should be thoughtful, simple, clear and stable. Frequent changes are the detriment to full and successful implementation, they damage legal certainty and enable a harmonization of court practice because all attention and human capacities are constantly oriented towards new regulation and not to its implementation. This is time — and energy — consuming and not cost-effective.
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Labour status of state and local functionaries in Croatia is regulated in a fragmented way, in a number of laws that are not harmonized. Such a normative situation does not contribute to the transparency of the public sector. The author proposes several measures to improve the regulation of labour status of functionaries, as well as to determine the criteria which provisions of gerenal labour law are appropriate for functionaries.
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The paper focuses on the problem of extending professional activity in the context of the present and future demographic situation. The analysis identifies the demographic conditions for extending professional activity. To do so the author presents a critical analysis of the literature and an analysis of statistical data from GUS and Eurostat, the main statistical offices of Poland and the European Union, respectively. The extension of professional activity is conditioned by the following demographic factors: a low birth rate and natural increase rate, population decrease, longer life expectancy, population ageing and population by age group changing. Present and future changes of these demographic factors are shown based on statistical data. The last part of the paper presents a comparative analysis of the statutory retirement ages, effective retirement ages, duration of retirement and duration of working life.
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The justice is a perceptual concept, and therefore it has been interpreted in various ways either in social or in work environments. This study aims to identify the employees’ perceptions of justice and its relation to their propensity to leave. The scope of the study includes the employees of four and five star hotels (all departments) located in the province of Antalya. A quantitative survey method has been used during the research; the questions and statements had been prepared in a manner that they will not lead the interviewed towards a certain answer in anyway. The data were collected through face to face interviews, online survey portal and email communications. Research findings suggest that, the propensity to leave effects interactional justice, although on a low-scale. It can be said that employees with a tendency to leave develop a higher perception of interactional justice. However, propensity to leave does not have an effect on procedural or distributive justice.
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In the age of raising global migration flows and increased mobility of the labour force in the world, there is a need to understand the main determinants of this phenomenon and to direct the focus of migration research to the various challenges it brings. This is a very important theme, especially in Europe, because 2014 and 2015 were the years of the highest number of immigrants, since WWII. Migrants are economic migrants and refugees, but in unique term they are asylum seekers as they want to stay, live and work in EU countries. Their population structure is quite different from that of EU population: they are young and in optimum reproductive and working age. Is that going to change not only quantitative, but also qualitative characteristics of population living in EU countries which are facing population decline or stagnation, low fertility rate, ageing and lack of labor force? Can we expect the redistribution of EU population due to intensive migration flows in certain countries, or a change in religious structure of the continent? Those are the questions of great importance because the migration flows today are shaping the future of EU population.
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In recent decades, employment decreased while unemployment rose in most world economies. In the same period there was an increase in wages received by workers for their labor. The present paper work examines the influences of wages evolution on employment and unemployment. Based on the data from European Union I studied and the other types of correlations that can be established between variables which characterize HR compensation policy, employment, unemployment and economic growth. The results showed that there is not a significant correlation between the evolution of wages and evolution of employment and unemployment rates.
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We study the effect of corporate taxation on unemployment utilizing a dynamic panel covering 41 countries over 11 years. The purpose of this article is to investigate how changes in the corporate income tax affect unemployment. We employ system general method of moments (GMM) due to peculiarities of the data set and the endogeneity issues present in the research problem. We find that a rise in the effective average corporate tax rate significantly increases unemployment levels, which directly contradicts past findings of some seminal authors. In addition, the present research supports findings of past studies on capital tax elasticity that obtained similar insights using differing methodologies. This research lays the groundwork for future studies, which may take the same methodology and apply it to even larger international panels. This research implies that international tax competition is affecting unemployment, presumably through its effects on international capital investment. These results provide support for policy makers who may be wary of raising corporate tax rates in countries where capital is especially mobile because of the negative effects which may accumulate to the voting public in the form of unemployment.
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The great decoupling is real. Productivity and employment/wages link changed after 1980 in many countries, not just the U.S. This study investigates the productivity and employment/wages link (1950–2014) looking for empirical proof of the “great decoupling” put forward by Brynjolfsson and Mcafee (2013). The results should stimulate policymakers to openly question why real wages and productivity don’t line up with the theory. We use the Hodrick and Prescott (1997) filter to isolate trends in real wages, labor share in GDP, and labor productivity and rolling correlation to explore if the great decoupling is real. We have found that the great decoupling i.e. the divergence between real wages/employment and productivity is present in all countries (10 in the sample). The dynamics of the great decoupling are however different between the countries although year 1980 seems to be a dominant breaking point for the start of the phenomena. This paper provides multicounty empirical proof of the presence of the great decoupling phenomena and explores its dynamics over 1950–2014. Policy makers as well as firms and unions should take the existence of this phenomena seriously since it can have significant consequences on economic growth and labor markets’ functioning.
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In this paper, the authors attempt to observe the problem of the application and functioning of social rights in the conditions of globalization and stiff international competition. In the first section of the paper, the influence of globalization on the concept of the social state is analyzed, and it is pointed out that it is necessary to reform the social state by making it capable to give answer to new challenges, especially the ones which came about due to changes in the global context and the structure of society. In the second section of the paper, the object of research is the enforcement of social rights in the conditions of globalization and the increasing flexibilization and deregulation of labour law. Specifically, the question asked is how can labour law and society in general efficiently respond to the ubiquitous trend of decreasing the level of social security? This attack on social rights and the inclination to turn labour relations back to free, market- regulated relations is an attack on the distinctness and independence of labour relations in general. Also, in this section of the paper the authors will also shortly analyze the current situation regarding the enforcement and protection of social rights in the Republic of Serbia.
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This paper examines the role of preferences and technological differences between two countries in determining dynamics of global wealth and pattern of trade in a reformed H-O model of international trade. The paper builds a trade model with endogenous wealth accumulation and labor and capital distribution between sectors and between countries under perfectly competitive markets and free trade. The model is based the H-O model, the Solow-Uzawa neoclassical growth model and the Oniki-Uzawa trade model. Each country has three sectors, producing one globally homogenous tradable capital good, specifying in producing one-tradable commodity, and supplying non-tradable goods and services. The study simulates the model for the economy to demonstrate existence of equilibrium points and motion of the dynamic system. It examines effects of changes in output elasticity of an industrial sector, population expansion, and propensities to consume the domestic commodity, to consume the other country’s commodity, to consume services, and to hold wealth.
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This paper seeks to explain the relationship between a firm’s profitability and firm size, leverage ratio and labour costs – using a sample of 782 Slovenian fast-growing firms from the years 2008 and 2009. We determined that profitability is negatively related to the firm size and leverage ratio, but positively to the labour costs. These results illustrate that, with increasing firm size, a fast-growing firm becomes less profitable. The negative coefficient for the leverage ratio indicates that the higher the extent to which debts were used as the source of financing, the lower the profits. One explanation for this is that profitable, fast-growing firms rely on their equity capital. Alternatively, higher-leveraged firms bear greater risks of bankruptcy; consequently, creditors are reluctant to approve credit for such clients. The positive association between labour costs and profitability implies that the higher the labour cost, the higher the profitability of fast-growing firms.
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In Serbia, at the moment, there are simply no forms of workers' shareholding or participation of workers in the consultation and decision-making in commercial enterprises. On the other hand, the process of democratization of working relations caught, first of all, the European space, and then the other parts of the world. Set with clear economic and social content, without ideological burden, workers' shareholding and participation conditions have to expand, strengthen and become one of the important factors in the structure of modern society. The process of transformation of social ownership, in our area, began with the workers' shareholding. Workers employed in the company, were given the right to buy internal shares under privileged conditions. That was the main form of transformation. The starting point was the confidence in the company to initiate, organize and manage the process of transformation in their own interest. The funds obtained through the issuance of shares by selling a part of the company or the whole companies, according to the express provisions of the law, belong to the company or its complex form. Later, already in 90s, workers' shareholding and participation unjustifiably attributed to ideological properties, which led to their complete exclusion from economic and legal system. By subsequent regulations, privatization was almost exclusively reduced to the sale, leaving and excluding all other possible different forms of privatization. This approach lost the sight of the basic economic objectives of privatization: there has been no acquiring of new capital or new investment cycle; there was no rise to new business entities able to receive and fertilize the capital, nor has the privatization been the impetus for the dynamic development of the economy and employment. Economic enterprises were extinguished, and unemployment increased. And now, in a much less favorable economic and social climate, it is reasonable to raise the issue of whether there is still a requirement by the introduction of the workers' shareholding and participation for activation of the inner forces of taking upon themselves the responsibility for the crisis. The previous condition for this is certainly the creation of a legal framework for the establishment and development of the workers' shareholding and participation. This would at the same time bring us closer to the legal system of the European Union and its member states, in which the workers' shareholding and participation are wide set and regulated institutes by the law.
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Elections of the most attractive employer take place both in Lithuania and worldwide. Instruments used to measure organizational attractiveness in these elections are focused on a priori features of a universal “employer of choice” and therefore neglecting a fact that people may have different perceptions and preferences. Addressing this limitation the article presents the results of an empirical study of employer attractiveness in Lithuanian business sector. Based on the responses (N = 1020) to an open-ended question, the study allowed to identify the most important features of an attractive employer, namely: attractive salary, good working atmosphere, flexibility and freedom at work, timely payment of wages.
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This paper proposes an empirical analysis of the effects of unemployment benefit on unemployment in Romania. First, the existence of a long-run equilibrium relation between the two variables was checked using single-equation cointegration tests. The results showed that such a relation does not exist. Next, in order to evaluate the short-term effects of unemployment benefit on unemployment level, a VAR analysis was employed. Impulse response functions analysis showed that the number of persons registered as unemployed is expecting to rise as the value of monthly unemployment benefit is increasing. However, the variance decomposition analysis pointed out that only a small part (under 5%) of unemployment short-term dynamics could be explained by potential shocks in the unemployment benefit level.
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This paper proposes a dynamic economic model with wealth accumulation and human capital accumulation with elastic labor supply. The economic system consists of one production sector and one education sector. Our model is a synthesis of three main models in economic theory: Solow’s onesector neoclassical growth mode, the Uzawa-Lucas two sector model, and Arrow’s learning by doing model. The model also includes Zhang’s idea about creative leisure or learning by consuming. Demand and supply of education in our model are determined by market mechanism. The model describes dynamic interdependence among wealth accumulation, human capital accumulation, division of labor, and time distribution among leisure, education and work under perfect competition. We simulate the model and examine effects of changes in the total productivity of the education sector, the total productivity of the production sector, the propensity to obtain education, and learning efficiency in school.
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Maritime Labor Convention of 2006 fulfills the assumptions of the recommendation of 1920 concerning the adoption of a binding “International maritime labor code” in the form of the “Bill of Rights for Seafarers”. The uniqueness of this convention is perceived inits unanimous adoption at the maritime session in 2006, which confirms the status of the Maritime Labor Convention as an act providing widely accepted standard for the minimum protection of seafarers. What is more, the Convention has been incorporated into the audit system used by the International Maritime Organization which is indicated by: 1. the element of the certification of sea vessels of the weight more than 500, 2. the coordination of bodies preparing maritime labor certificates (Port State Control – PST) 3. the creation of a common profile of the risk of the flag of a ship for the ports of European Union Member States.
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On 11 May 2012 the Sejm passed law providing the increase and equalization of the retirement age for men and women in Poland. The raise of the retirement age took place on 1 January 2013 and it applied to women born after 1952 and men born after 1947. The process of gradual unification of the retirement age for men and women is supposed to finish in 2040, when every insured person regardless of gender will retire at the age of 67. The doubts have been raised in regard to the compliance of the mechanism used in order to raise and standardize the retirement age for women and men with the constitutional principles of the protection of rights already acquired, the citizens’ trust to the state and its laws, the appropriate legislation, as well as the equality before the law and equality between men and women in matters of social security. It is also said that the above mentioned regulation violates art. 26 p. 2 of the Convention No 102 of the International Labor Organization, which has been ratified by Poland, in regard to minimum standards of social security, which defines the maximum age limit for the retirement at 65 years and allows for older age only if older people in particular country retain the ability to work. These doubts have been resolved by the Constitutional Tribunal in its judgment of 7 May 2014 (K 43/12). The Tribunal stated that the amending of the Act of 11 May 2012 infringed art. 2, art. 32 and art. 33 of the Constitution. The Tribunal pointed out that the acquiring of the right to partial retirement under different conditions provided for women and men was not restricted by a term and therefore it did not harmonize with the alignment of the retirement age for men and women. In other respects, the Tribunal did not see any grounds for declaring the unconstitutionality of the law of 11 May 2012 and its noncompliance with art. 26 p. 2 of Convention No. 102. The Author critically assesses the Tribunal’s point of view on the compatibility of the provisions of the law of 11 May 2012 with art. 26 p. 26 of the Convention No. 102. In his opinion, the Tribunal unreasonably appealed to other circumstances than citizens’ ability to provide work due to a natural phenomenon of aging.
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Author of the article wrote about dr. Zivko Topalovic, a socialist and labor union activist, who marked history of socialism with his political activity in 20th century in Serbia. Dr Zivko Topalovic was born in 1886 in Uzice and graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Belgrade, granted Ph.D. in Law Sciences in Germany and was active in Serbian Social-Democratic Party of Dimitrije Tucovic and in Main Labor Association of Serbia. After 1918, he founded the Socialist Labor Party of Yugoslavia (1921) and became its president. He was engaged in activities of inter-war Labor Union and Labor Movement. During the Second World War, starting from 1943, he jointed the Ravnogorski Movement and in 1944 he went to Italy. While in the exile in France, he founded the Democratic Union of Yugoslavia, as well as the journal Labor Unionist. For many years he lived abroad as an emigrant – “enemy of the nation”, publishing prominent books and other works. He passed away on February 1972 in Vienna, Austria.
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This research develops a theoretical model of sustainable leadership, organizational trust and satisfaction at work in higher education environment in Syria. The model assesses staff perception of outstanding leadership behaviors and examines its relationship with perceived organizational trust in the field of higher education institutions in Syria. This research examines a conceptual framework identifying outstanding leadership styles and behaviors which are associated with sustainable leadership, organisational trust identified by members’ trust in their coworkers, and job satisfaction at an institutional level. The research methodology applied in this research develops a quantitative approach through application of questionnaire survey. To measure the dimensionality of scale factors an exploratory factor analysis is conducted. Reliability analysis is performed, Cronbach alpha test indicates that the research scales are internally consistent. The sample of the study employed a convenience sample from higher education institutions. The managerial implication of the research study recommends application and adoption of sustainable leadership behaviors among functional, mid and senior levels of managers and academics in management positions in higher education institutions. The limitation of research is mainly indicated in the sample size and measurement scales of sustainable leadership, organizational trust and job satisfaction.
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