In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid the present reconfiguring of corporate purpose, there is an opportunity to realign actions focused on prolonging working lives. We put forward a transformative agenda concerned with workforce ageing that aligns with contemporary expectations regarding sustainability, inequality, and emerging conceptualisations of management. In this article, the new concept of Common Good human resource management (HRM) is utilised as a potential means of encouraging business responses focused on grand challenges such as population ageing. We suggest how these principles might be applied to the issue of managing age in workplaces, to recast debate about issues of age and work, to be used as an advocacy tool encouraging employer engagement, while providing a framework that might direct organisational leadership.

It is the purpose of this study to examine the effects of the unionisation status of US school districts on teacher job satisfaction. Using an ordered probit analysis and a sample of public school teachers, results of the present study suggest that teachers working in unionised districts are, overall, less satisfied with their jobs than are teachers in non-unionised districts. However, teachers in unionised districts were less likely to leave for better pay and were more enthusiastic about teaching than teachers in non-unionised districts. Hence, even though teachers in unionised districts were generally less satisfied with their jobs, they were more satisfied with regards to certain specific aspects of their positions.

This article examines the impact of the neoliberal restructuring of health services on female nurses in Turkey. It provides a qualitative analysis of work–family conflict, establishing that not only work but also family life has become more precarious. The contours of precariousness of both work and family are analysed through interviews with 50 female nurses working full time in different areas of health service provision. The findings suggest that the neoliberal restructuring of health services has led to staffing deficits along with workload intensification, unpredictable work schedules and poor organisational support. This has increased work–family conflict, defined as a form of precariousness because it heightens the difficulties, risks and insecurities entailed in balancing family-related expectations with increasing work demands for female nurses. This precariousness makes spousal support critical if nurses are to be able to address work–family conflict and leads to nurses’ compliance with unfavourable working conditions as a way to resolve the mutual interference of family and work. The increased subordination of life to work has resulted from the neoliberal managerialisation of health services, creating precarisation in the lives of female nurses.

This article critically challenges the findings and assumptions of mainstream job polarisation literature. Based on the European Working Conditions Survey data and on the Job Demand-Control model, which allows for capturing the organisational dimension of jobs, we examine the patterns and evolution of occupations in 22 European countries from 2005 to 2015. Instead of pervasive job polarisation, we observe a near-pervasive trend of upgrading job quality, suggesting that job polarisation may be caused by the undervaluation/devaluation of jobs low in the occupational hierarchy – not by computerisation-driven changes in work tasks. Indeed, only the former can explain the decrease in the number of low-quality jobs while the number of low-paid jobs increases. After documenting the relevance of firm-level organisational choices, we suggest that counteracting job polarisation requires, beyond meso-level collective bargaining, a public intervention that promotes participatory decision-making in firms.

The Amish collective objection to high school education and refusal to comply with compulsory schooling laws can be interpreted with a religious-club-good framework. According to the religious-club interpretation, the Amish use the restriction on secular education as a religious prohibition and sacrifice to improve the welfare of sect members. I exploit the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Wisconsin vs. Yoder, which exempts Amish children from compulsory high school education, as a policy shock to test several key predictions of the religious-club explanations. The evidence suggests that the successful restriction on high school education helped the Amish sect exclude individuals with low religious participation, lower members' shadow cost of time, and grow the sect through higher fertility.

We forward the hypothesis and empirically establish that variations in the strength of family ties are rooted in culture. In particular, we show that individualism is associated with looser family ties. We exploit the associations between contemporary individualism and historical climatic and disease environments to establish a causal relationship. At both the individual- and country-levels, we find strong support that individualism reduces family ties. The estimated effects are economically large and robust to a wide variety of potentially confounding variables.

A variety of states in the United States have adopted the “homemaking provision” in their divorce laws since the 1980s. The provision requires judges to recognize homemakers’ contribution to their marriages in dividing marital properties at divorce. I model the marital decisions of couples as a sequential game, in which the potential wife’s decision in whether to marry and specialize in home production depends on whether she is legally protected by the homemaking provision, as the law would reinforce her post-divorce property rights and therefore increase her bargaining power within the marriage. I use the variation in the timing of the passage of the homemaking provision to identify its effect on marriage. I find that the provision substantially increases marriages using both state- and individual-level data.

This study examines the expected retirement replacement rates (RRs) of several cohorts of Dutch employees at the time of their planned retirements. It also computes RRs based on the available pension records. We find that the expected replacement rate (E(RR)) is, in general, higher than the ones we compute. Larger discrepancies are found for younger cohorts and for individuals with less education and working experience. We also examine the difference between the expected and computed RRs and find that the mismatch is mostly related to poor institutional knowledge. We also show the role of assumptions about institutions and wage profiles in determining our results.

The recession of 2008–9 inflicted a larger cumulative loss of UK output than any of the other postwar recessions. Nevertheless, employment rates remained higher than might have been expected given the experience of previous recessions. The main reasons for this appear to be a combination of high firm profitability levels going into the recession, supportive monetary and fiscal policies during the recession, reductions in real producer wages and relatively buoyant real consumer wages. Unemployment had reached its lowest levels for 30 years going in to the latest recession and has also remained relatively subdued through the downturn, certainly compared to previous recessions. A combination of lower inflow rates into unemployment, allied with a relatively higher outflow rate into employment underlie this. As government support for the economy is scaled back, it may be however that it will take a long time for employment to return to levels last seen before the recession.

L'objectif de ce texte est de questionner les fondements normatifs des politiques d'activation, dans leur version Making Work Pay, afin de souligner les « préférences révélées » des décideurs politiques. Pour cela, nous montrons comment les théories de la justice de Rawls, Dworkin et de Sen, qui s'articulent autour des notions comme la responsabilité, la solidarité, l'égalité, la liberté, ainsi que la théorie de la reconnaissance de N. Fraser, peuvent être utilisées pour éclairer d'une autre façon l'évaluation des politiques sociales et, en particulier, les politiques d'activation.

The challenge for labour market policy in the new member states and other transition economies of Eastern Europe has been to redress the sharp drops in employment and rises in unemployment in a way that fosters the creation of productive jobs. This paper first documents the magnitude and productivity of job and worker reallocation. It then investigates the effects of privatisation, product and labour market liberalisation, and obstacles to growth in the new private sector on reallocation and its productivity in Hungary, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. We find that market reform has resulted in a large increase in the pace of job reallocation, particularly that occurring between sectors and via firm turnover. Unlike under central planning, the job reallocation during the transition has contributed significantly to aggregate productivity growth. Privatisation has not only stimulated intrasectoral job reallocation, but the reallocation is more productive than that among remaining state firms. The estimated effect of privatisation on firm productivity is usually positive, but it varies considerably across countries. The productivity gains from privatisation have generally not come at the expense of workers, but are associated rather with increased wages and employment.

The aim of this paper is to examine, both at partial and general equilibrium, the consequences of work sharing policies, when the wages, the length of the working time and the participation rates are endogenous, in an economy where workers get utility from leisure. It is shown that the effects of a shorter working time are very different at the firm level and at the aggregate level. At a steady state, a decrease in working-time is likely to increase employment at the firm level, but reduces employment and welfare at the aggregate level.