Search results

Precarious work, characterized by low wages, unpredictable schedules and hours, physical hazards, and stressful psychosocial conditions, is a significant problem in the twenty-first century US economy. It most harshly affects women, racial/ethnic minorities, and immigrants. Caring labor jobs often involve precarious work and home health aide jobs are among the most precarious of these. With an ageing population creating high demand and a decline in the number of available workers, a societal crisis looms. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a business form that could positively impact the home care work environment.

This paper reviews previous research to call for closer examination of worker cooperatives as a means to reduce precarious work among home health care workers.

Worker cooperatives provide opportunities for economic empowerment for impoverished and marginalized workers. Cooperative Home Care Associates, a worker cooperative in the home care industry, reports better outcomes to workers than similar conventionally governed businesses.

This paper reviews results of a study comparing three organizational forms in the home health industry. Although there are relatively few worker cooperatives in the USA, future research should investigate this structure both where there is a low-wage labor force, and in general.

Better outcomes for employees in the worker cooperative suggest that this is a viable business form for workers in precarious work environments.

The paper highlights the features of an organizational form that could help alleviate social ills caused by precarious work.

This paper considers the structure and function of a business form little studied in the management discipline. Based on their unique features and possibilities, worker cooperatives should be of interest to equality, diversity, and inclusion scholars; and to strategy, organizational behavior, and entrepreneurship scholars.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of timing of first childbirth on the child wage-penalty experienced by working mothers in Japan. There is an increasing age of first childbirth and increasing labor force participation rate of Japanese women: does it indicate that the presence of children causes women to pay a high price for motherhood?

This study estimates regression equations explaining the labor wages of working women, using a longitudinal data set from the Japan Household Panel Survey (the JHPS/KHPS 2004–2015). The fixed-effect method is utilized to control the bias that results from unobserved individual-specific characteristics.

The results indicate that having children negatively affects the wages of Japanese women. However, there is no variation in the child wage-penalty between early child bearers (age 27 years or younger) and late child bearers (older than 27 years). In addition, an additional year of post-birth work experience contributes equally to an additional year of pre-birth work experience on wage gains. These findings remain robust with an alternate cut-off age of 30-years old.

There is no previous study that relates the timing of the first birth to the motherhood wage-penalty in Japan. This study indicates that the timing of childbirth does not seem to be an important factor in the improvement of women’s labor wages. Thus, delaying childbirth may not be an optimal birth timing to maximize the lifetime earnings of Japanese women, especially for those who are career-minded.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

This paper aims to investigate the wage gap between temporary and permanent workers in Pakistan and Cambodia.

Quantile regression estimator is likely to be the most relevant to the sample.

The estimates indicate the presence of a temporary employment wage penalty in Pakistan and contrarily a wage premium in Cambodia. Moreover, quantile regression estimates show that wage differentials could greatly vary across the wage distribution. The wage gap is wider at the bottom of the wage distribution in Pakistan, suggesting a sticky floor effect that the penalty of being in temporary jobs could be more severe for disadvantaged workers. By contrast, a glass ceilings effect is found in Cambodia, indicating that the wage premium is small at the bottom and becomes high at the top of the pay ladder.

Despite the rise of temporary jobs in the past several decades, the empirical evidence on wage differentials between temporary and permanent workers is extremely limited in developing Asian countries. This paper is the first research work that systematically examines the temporary-permanent wage gap in selected Asian countries, based on their National Labor Force Survey data.

The purpose of this paper is to document the wage effects associated with sexual orientation and to examine whether the wage gap has improved following recent institutional changes which favour sexual minorities.

Ordinary least squares and quantile regressions are estimated using Australian data for 2010–2012 and 2015–2017, with the analysis disaggregated by sector of employment. Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions are used to quantify unexplained wage gaps.

Relative to heterosexual men, in 2015–2017 gay men in the public and private sectors had wages which were equivalent to heterosexual men at all points in the wage distribution. In the private sector: highly skilled lesbians experienced a wage penalty of 13 per cent; low-skilled bisexual women faced a penalty of 11 per cent, as did bisexual men at the median (8 per cent penalty). In the public sector low-skilled lesbians and low-skilled bisexual women significant experienced wage premiums. Between 2010–2012 and 2015–2017 the pay position of highly skilled gay men has significantly improved with the convergence driven by favourable wage (rather than composition) effects.

The results provide important benchmarks against which the treatment of sexual minorities may be monitored.

The analysis of the sexual minority wage gaps by sector and position on the wage distribution and insight into the effect of institutions on the wages of sexual minorities.

This paper aims to measure and analyse the wage gap between male part‐ and full‐timers in the private sector of six European countries, i.e. Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and the UK.

Using a unique matched employer‐employee data set providing harmonised information on six European countries (the 1995 European Structure of Earnings Survey), the empirical strategy is based on the estimation of standard Mincer wage equations and the Oaxaca and Ransom wage gap decomposition technique. First, individual gross hourly wages are regressed on a set of human capital variables only and second, a wider range of control variables related to e.g. occupation, sector of activity, firm size, and level of wage bargaining is inserted.

The study finds that the raw gap in hourly gross pay amounts to 16 per cent of a male part‐timer's wage in Spain, to 24 per cent in Belgium, to 28 per cent in Denmark and Italy, to 67 per cent in the UK and to 149 per cent in Ireland. Human capital differences explain between 31 per cent of the observed wage gap in the UK and 71 per cent in Denmark. When the whole set of explanatory variables is included in the wage regressions, a much larger part of the gap is explained by differences in observed characteristics (except in Italy).

Unfortunately, the paper is not able to correct for workers' potential self‐selection into part‐time and full‐time employment. Results suggest that policy initiatives to promote lifelong learning and training are of great importance to help part‐timers catch up with full‐timers in terms of human capital. Moreover, except for Italy, they point to a persisting problem of occupational and sectoral segregation between men working part‐time and full‐time which requires renewed policy attention.

Economic theory advances a number of reasons for the existence of a wage gap between part‐time and full‐time workers. Empirical work has concentrated on the wage effects of part‐time work for women. For men, much less empirical evidence exists, mainly because of lacking data. This paper therefore makes a valuable contribution. The more so given that (to the best of our knowledge) there exists no cross‐national evidence with respect to men's part‐time wage penalty.

The purpose of this integrative literature review was three-fold: to explore the phenomenon of women’s career interruptions as revealed by publications in the past two decades, to propose a new career decision tree model (CDTM) and to outline an agenda for future research.

The authors adopted the integrative literature review approach proposed by Torraco (2005, 2016) and used a mind mapping application called MindMeister to synthesize 64 identified articles.

The proposed CDTM can assist those who are interested in exploring individuals’ career decisions to think systematically about career influencers at different levels.

The CDTM is significantly different from existing career models and theories in that it explains women’s career interruptions in a context-sensitive manner. This model can assist human resource development professionals in analyzing the influencers of women’s career decisions and tackling individual problems level by level.

Only data from developed countries were used to estimate the sexual orientation difference in wages. This paper is the first, which aims to identify the wage discrimination of gay men in Russia – a country where institutional discrimination and ignorance against gay men are known to present.

Gays are identified as men who reported having sex with other men in several waves of the national household survey. A wage equation is used to estimate the gay wage penalty. Extending the wage equation to implement a difference-in-difference design, the paper also evaluates the effect of the gay-propaganda law of 2013 on gay wages.

No wage discrimination is identified. The law also has no adverse effect on gay wages.

Cross-country comparison and theoretical generalizations are premature, and better identification strategies are needed to understand sexual orientation differences.

Policymakers should be aware that in both discriminatory and equitable environments, there may be hidden inequality even if researchers do not detect it.

The findings are implausible and add to existing evidence that gay discrimination measured with wage equation suffers from endogeneity and should be interpreted with caution. Particular caution should be exercised in cross-sectional and time-series comparisons, as a tendency to report the orientation honestly and unobserved confounders vary by location and time.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the implications of the gender wage gap in Australia, before considering policy responses and their effectiveness at both the government and workplace levels.

The method concerns an extensive literature review and an examination of secondary data and reports relating to workplace gender equality and data.

While the gender wage gap in most OECD countries has decreased over time, in Australia the gap has increased, with the largest contributory factor identified as gender discrimination. Consequently it is proposed that current policy responses supporting women in the workplace appear to be ineffective in closing gender wage gaps.

Further research is recommended to identify the impact of gender equality policies on hiring decisions and whether such decisions include an unwillingness to hire or promote women. As findings were based on secondary data, it is recommended that future research include workplace surveys and case studies.

It is suggested that articles such as this one can assist in guiding public policy and workplace decisions on gender wage equality issues, in addition to providing human resource leaders with the information to make better decisions relating to gender equality.

This paper suggests that current policy responses may not only be ineffective in closing the gender wage gap, but may even exacerbate it as employers may avoid hiring women or continue to pay them less than men, due to costs incurred when attempting to meet policy directives.

Knight's Industrial Law Reports goes into a new style and format as Managerial Law This issue of KILR is restyled Managerial Law and it now appears on a continuous updating basis rather than as a monthly routine affair.