This article investigates the practices of precarious playbour on Kuaishou, a short-video platform embracing the idea of ‘recording the lives of ordinary people’ and attracting massive numbers of migrant youth to produce creative content as free labour. It examines how young migrants from rural areas in China engage in Kuaishou as a means of realising upwards socio-economic mobility by producing a tuwei (earthiness) culture which has a large fan base. It also examines the way in which they collaborate to cope with precarious conditions lacking guaranteed working time and income, and labour protection. The article attempts to build a conversation with existing scholarship that addresses the ‘exploitation vs. empowerment’ dialectic of labour production. Instead, we address the complexity of digital labour production characterised by a collaborative and symbiotic relationship between social media platforms and users. Through ‘play’ with their followers that generates profit for the digital platform, migrant youth voluntarily accept the uncertain, unpredictable, and risky conditions of digital labour production. They are, however, not passively subjected to platform exploitation but can instead reclaim agency by actively seeking to collaborate with other users to cope with increasing precariousness.

We show consumer expectations indices from the Conference Board and the University of Michigan predict unemployment upticks in the USA up to 18 months in advance, both at national and at state level. These data predict six of the last six recessions called by the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee 6–18 months before the date of recession. The consumer expectations data for 2021 and 2022 are consistent with recession.

We examine labour market performance in the US and the UK prior to the onset of the Covid-19 crash. We then track the changes that have occurred in the months and days from the beginning of March 2020 using what we call the Economics of Walking About (EWA) that shows a collapse twenty times faster and much deeper than the Great Recession. We examine unemployment insurance claims by state by day in the US as well as weekly national data. We track the distributional impact of the shock and show that already it is hitting the most vulnerable groups who are least able to work from home the hardest – the young, the least educated and minorities. We have no official labour market data for the UK past January but see evidence that job placements have fallen sharply. We report findings from an online poll fielded from 11–16 April 2020 showing that a third of workers in Canada and the US report that they have lost at least half of their income due to the Covid-19 crisis, compared with a quarter in the UK and 45 per cent in China. We estimate that the unemployment rate in the US is around 20 per cent in April. It is hard to know what it is in the UK given the paucity of data, but it has gone up a lot.

As Britain prepares to leave the EU immigration policy has come to the top of the policy agenda. The Brexit vote was seen as a vote against free movement and new policies are aimed at introducing more restrictive controls. The report by the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) in September 2018 recommended little new provision for low-skilled migration post-Brexit (MAC, 2018). This was then adopted by the Home Office in its Immigration White Paper, published in November 2018 (Home Affairs Committee, 2018). The White Paper explicitly references public concerns that migrant labour reduces opportunities for British workers and undermines their pay and conditions. Yet employers have argued that they need to be able to continue to recruit lower, as well as highly skilled labour because the supply of British workers is insufficient. The paper explores the likely impact of proposed restrictions on immigration post-Brexit, using data from NIESR studies of employers and of the general public. It combines an assessment of what is needed to meet the needs of employers, the economy and to address public concerns, finding that there is more consensus than there is often considered to be.

Cet article s'intéresse aux effets liés à l'introduction d'un système de modulation des cotisations patronales à l'assurance chômage (ou experience rating) sur le niveau et la structure du chômage par qualification. Nous construisons pour cela un modèle d'appariement dans lequel l'évolution de la demande de travail, les décisions de création et destruction d'emplois, ainsi que l'évolution des taxes destinées à financer l'assurance chômage sont endogènes. Dans ce cadre, la protection de l'emploi a des effets qui peuvent être différenciés selon le niveau de qualification considéré. L'introduction d'un système de modulation des cotisations employeur à l'assurance chômage pourrait améliorer le fonctionnement du marché du travail; l'importance des éventuels effets indésirables liés à ce système dépend de la capacité à substituer la taxe d'expérience rating aux dispositifs de protection de l'emploi déjà en place. La hausse des incitations à se qualifier réduit en partie l'importance de ce problème.

Dans la plupart des pays européens, la redéfinition du contrat de travail et de ses modalités de rupture est au cœur des débats contemporains de politique économique du marché du travail. Ces débats s'appuient sur l'impo-sante littérature consacrée aux liens entre protection de l'emploi et performance du marché du travail développée au cours des dix dernières années. Toutefois, une source de divergence importante entre les marchés du travail européens, le degré de centralisation des négociations salariales, a été curieusement éludée dans la plupart de ces études. L'objet de cet article est précisément d'envisager d'un point de vue théorique la nature des interactions entre politiques du marché du travail et niveaux de négociation. Dans cette perspective, nous développons un modèle dynamique du marché du travail dans la lignée des travaux de Pissarides (2000) intégrant différentes branches d'activité. Notre analyse montre que dans ce cadre de référence, les négociations de branche conduisent systématiquement à une allocation inefficace des ressources. Il existe alors une justification explicite à l'introduction des politiques de l'emploi. Nous montrons alors qu'un ensemble de politiques, notamment fiscales et de protection de l'emploi, est susceptible d'assurer l'équivalence entre équilibre de branches et optimum.

Under the heading of flexicurity, Danish labour market activation policies are receiving international attention because of their perceived ability both to curb unemployment and to boost employment. Indeed, the objectives, target groups and design of activation policy have undergone a remarkable transformation over the past fifteen years. From the initial curbing of unemployment among the insured unemployed through standard activation offers, the aim today is also to increase labour supply among non-economic active groups using individually tailored programmes. Danish activation policies thus embrace not only active labour market policies but also social and integration policies. Despite widespread popularity and belief in the positive effects of activation, little is actually known about its overall impact on the Danish economy.

L’article s’interroge sur les relations entre l’intégration monétaire européenne et la persistance de spécificités et d’un certain degré d’autonomie des marchés nationaux du travail, actuellement hétérogènes dans leurs structures institutionnelles, leur fonctionnement et leurs résultats. L’inspiration théorique trouve son origine dans la remarque de John Hicks selon laquelle les économies seraient passées, après 1932, de l’équivalent d’un «gold» standard, à un «labour» standard. L’intégration européenne désigne un changement de régime économique d’ampleur équivalente mais de sens opposé. Le fait que l’intégration monétaire précède très largement la charte sociale pose donc la question de la viabilité de relations professionnelles et des mécanismes nationaux de formation des revenus. En effet, il est peu de variables macroéconomiques nationales susceptibles de garantir le parallélisme des évolutions de prix et l’identité des taux d’intérêt, si ce n’est à relation salariale inchangée, des mouvements divergents du taux de chômage. Il faudrait donc réformer les relations professionnelles mais les partenaires sociaux ne seront pas nécessairement conduits à négocier des contrats salariaux compatibles avec les objectifs macroéconomiques associés à l’intégration européenne.

As has been found in previous studies, the labor market performance of individuals is often affected by demographic determinants like cohort size, age, marriage status and family size. While most of this analysis was studied for earnings, the paper investigates the issue for labor mobility. Mobility is measured here by the number of new employers and the frequency of unemployment of an individual in a particular period. Given the discrete nature of the data, the ordinal probit model and the censored Poisson as the censored negative binomial model was estimated. Since the choice of the statistical model is not clear a priori, various model comparisons are carried out and some new pseudo-R2 measures are proposed and used in the analysis. Results indicate that demographic determinants matter for labor mobility.