The recognition that the majority of British children are involved in paid employment at some time before the minimum school leaving age has not been accompanied by comparable analytical advances. Large numbers work in areas beyond those traditionally identified with ‘children's work’ and are to be found in marginal, flexible, service sector jobs, defined by unskilled and low paid manual labour. The efforts of US researchers to link ‘adolescent work’ to child development and socialisation merely pathologises children's involvement in work, while the greater sensitivity of British researchers to the possible connections between work and changes to children's social lives provides only limited insight. It is demonstrated here that children's involvement in work is closely related to employers' increased demand for part-time student labour and that children are making themselves available for work in response to both the changing distribution of family income and the commodification of their leisure time.

This paper investigates the association between opportunities to take part in work-environment dialogue and peripheral labour market position, which was operationalised in terms of short-term employment. A stratified representative sample from Statistics Sweden's Labour Market Survey – with 50 per cent of persons on short-term, and 50 per cent on a long-term contracts – is analysed (n=1,564). More contingent workers than permanent employees report a lack of work environment knowledge. They perceive themselves to be disfavoured with regard to the education/training required to do their job. Further, they regard their form of employment as making it more difficult to raise criticism and to get their viewpoints heard. Women show a greater risk of not being involved in work environment issues. The findings are discussed in relation to legislation and further research.

This paper investigates the relationship between local unemployment rates and individual ill health. It is a case study of Britain in 1984–1991 based on secondary data analysis of the two sweeps of the Health and Lifestyle Survey (1993). High levels of unemployment are distinguished from increasing rates of unemployment and the effects of each on health in different employment statuses are compared, as are the outcomes for contrasting measures of ill health. Increasing rates of unemployment are seen to impact on job stress, but it is high levels of unemployment that influence premature death and self assessed health. Respiratory function is unaffected by unemployment rates. The effects of unemployment rates hold for all employment statuses, regardless of the higher job stress among the full-time employed and their otherwise better life expectancy and self assessed health. The relationships for unemployment rates and employment status are not confounded by sex, age, region or social class.

Official counts of unemployment in the coalfields have not reflected the large-scale losses of thousands of jobs from the mining industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Recent studies have suggested that there are indeed high incidences of unemployment among ex-miners and that much of the unemployment in the coalfields is ‘hidden’, masked by the removal of miners from the official unemployment register through early retirement or being classed permanently sick. This paper examines how miners have been absorbed into the labour market over a ten-year period, between 1981 and 1991. Using data from the ONS Longitudinal Study a sample of miners are identified in 1981 and their labour market position in 1991 examined. The data are used to highlight changes in occupation, employment status and social class. In addition, regional differences in unemployment and joblessness are assessed.

This paper examines whether the supply side characteristics of the low paid are associated with the labour market wage setting institutions of five countries; Britain, Luxembourg, Germany, Spain and the USA, using the harmonised PAnel COmparability (PACO) data based on household panel studies and the Spanish European Household Panel survey. The age, education, marital status, children, lone parent status, household type, employment status of spouse, and housing tenure of the low paid are examined. The links between these characteristics, the low paid and labour market institutions are examined through multivariate analyses. Labour market wage setting institutions clearly influence the characteristics of the low paid and explain the variations in supply side, as well as demand side characteristics across countries.

The Low Pay Commission was established in July 1997, and produced its ‘First Report’ in June 1998. It formed part of a series of initiatives marking a new Labour Government in the UK, which included inter alia the White Paper ‘Fairness at Work’, setting out new state positions on union recognition and wide-ranging changes to the benefits system. This article provides an initial comment on this institution, focusing on context, process, and remit, and on relevance to broader debates on the meaning of ‘fair’ wages and economic ‘efficiency’. The first section explores the political economic context. The second compares and contrasts the Commission's deliberations and recommendations. Finally, an assessment is made of these recommendations and the implications for trade unions.

David Cheal, New Poverty: Families in Postmodern Society, Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1995, £43.95, 209 pp.

David Donnison, Policies for a Just Society, London: Macmillan, 1997, £40, paper £12.50, 218 pp.

Joel Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, We The Poor People: Work, Poverty and Welfare, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997, £25, 281 pp.

Joel Handler, The Poverty of Welfare Reform, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, £16.50, paper £8.50, 177 pp.

Inga Persson and Christina Jonung (eds), Economics of the Family and Family Policies, London: Routledge, 1997, £47.50, 222 pp.

John E. Schwartz, Illusions of Poverty: The American Dream in Question, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1998, £16.95, 237 pp.

Britain's first Labour government for 18 years was elected on a mandate that placed the reform of welfare at the heart of its modernising ambitions (Labour Party 1997; Bennett and Walker 1998). The welfare system, the new government argued, was ‘plainly not working’ (Cm. 1998a). It had not kept pace with profound social and economic changes such as increased divorce and separation, rising numbers of lone parents, less secure employment and a widening pay gap. Moreover, it had actually contributed to growth in workless households, with worklessness going hand in hand with low income and social exclusion.

Lowell Turner, Fighting for Partnership, Labor and Politics in Unified Germany, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998, paper £12.95, x+195 pp.

Lowell Turner (ed.), Negotiating the New Germany. Can Social Partnership Survive?, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997, paper £14.50, xi+271 pp.

A central characteristic of the German industrial relations system until the fall of the Berlin Wall had been its post-war stability and continuity. Indeed it was regarded not only as a significant contributor to Modell Deutschland, meaning the socio-economic and political stability which had marked Germany in the period up to 1990, but also as a model to be imitated and from which other national industrial relations systems might learn. The stability of the German industrial relations system depended on a number of interrelated factors. Firstly, there is a coherent legal framework of labour law giving distinct norms. Legislation defines the parties and outcomes to collective bargaining, the relationship of plant-level industrial negotiations between management and employee representative bodies, such as the works council, and there is an extensive codetermination legislation providing for employee participation. Secondly, employers' associations and trade unions enjoyed over many years a high degree of organisational concentration. The latter are based on the principles of industrial unionism and as these covered extensive industrial sectors the power relationship between trade unions and employers' associations were regulated at sectoral level. Finally, the German system has the distinctive characteristic of a separation of plant-level industrial relations from the sectoral level. The result of these features was to construct a system of industrial relations that demonstrated a high degree of consensus and social partnership, facilitated through mechanisms of consultation and mediation which avoided overt conflict.

Heather Trickey, Karen Kellard, Robert Walker, Karl Ashworth and Alison Smith, Unemployment and Jobseeking: Two Years On, London: HMSO/Department of Social Security Research Report no. 87, 1998, £38.00, viii+203 pp.

Mike Campbell, with Ian Sanderson and Fiona Walton, Local Response to Long-term Unemployment, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation/York Publishing Services, 1998, £12.95 paperback, v+58 pp.

These two reports are both concerned with the unemployed and their futures. One (carried out by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University for the Department of Social Security) tracks the movements of a representative sample of unemployed people and explains ‘success’ in the labour market in terms of a variety of personal characteristics and experiences. The other – commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and written by researchers from the Policy Research Institute at Leeds Metropolitan University – reviews policies to assist the long-term unemployed. In this review the first will be referred to as the DSS study and the second as the JRF report.