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The United States has entered into a tripartite Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico with a planned 1 January 1994 debut. What are the possibilities of a North American Common Market being formed? What are the potential threats that could undermine NAFTA? What are the necessary prerequisites for this to occur? What would it look like? Examines these issues, attempts to provide answers to the questions and provides recommendations for marketers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the variation in migrant labour market regimes and what these reveal about variant patterns of state and extra state regulation in two contemporary political economies.

Research based upon a participatory action research agenda in Mexico and the north of Ireland. Migrant workers and their families where involved in the project and its development. This included participation in the research design, its focus and purpose.

Migrant workers experiences of labour market subordination are part of wider processes of subordination and exclusion involving both the state, but also wider, often meta- and para-state, agents. In different locations, states and contexts, the precarity experienced by migrant workers and their families highlights the porosity of the formal rational legal state and moreover, in the current economic context, the compatibility of illegality and state sponsored neoliberal economic policies.

It is important to extend this study to other geographic and political economy spaces.

The study challenges the limits of state agency suggesting the need for extra state, i.e. civil society, participation to support and defend migrant workers.

Notwithstanding the two very different socio-economic contexts, the paper reveals that the interaction, dependence and restructuring of migrant labour markets can be understood within the context of meta- and para-state activities that link neoliberal employment insecurities. Migrants’ experiences illustrate the extent to which even formal legal employment relations can also be sustained by para- and meta- (illegal and alegal) actions and institutions.

Uses a data set from Guadalajara, Mexico, to investigate the determinants of the wage structure of manual employees in the urban sector of a developing economy. Focuses particular attention on whether there is a significant difference in remuneration between permanent and casual employees after allowing for the different human capital and other characteristics of the two groups. Finds that, once a correction has also been made for selectivity bias, a substantial wage gap in favour of permanent employees exists. Also confirms and estimates wage differentials associated with educational background and union membership. However, finds no support for the idea that a large multinational will pay wages above the expected level for a given type of worker.

The labor market responds in a differentiated manner during recessions and expansions, and it is of vital importance to know the magnitude asymmetries. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effects of the disinflationary monetary policy (2005Q1–2022Q4) through the sacrifice rate measured in terms of unemployment and rate of critical labor conditions (RCLC) with nonlinear auto regressive distributed lag (NLARDL; Shin et al., 2014), which allows to efficiently estimate asymmetric effects in short and long terms in the presence of variables of different integration orders.

The authors estimate an asymmetric accelerationist Phillips curve, augmented with labor precariousness for Mexico (2005Q1–2022Q4) following the NLARDL approach (Shin et al., 2014).

The authors prove that the increase in the unemployment gap has greater disinflationary effects than the RCLC in both the short and the long term; the expansionary phases of the business cycle, which reduce U^Gap, do not have inflationary effects either in the short or in the long run, but improvements in the labor market do, when RCLC is reduced; raising RCLC appears to have been the companies’ main survival strategy since 2015; and these asymmetries can generate a low unemployment trap with high and growing precariousness, with huge dynamic costs for well-being, economic growth, inequality and poverty.

As labor precariousness grows, the implications are several both in the short and long run. In the short run, the most notorious example of the effects on workers has to do with unstable and insecure situations, that disrupt all their life planning options, and health issues. Bohle et al. (2004) found in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries that casual employees had less desirable and predictable working hours, greater work–life conflict and more associated health complaints than people with permanent jobs.

The approach includes the labor precariousness variable, which describes a new phenomenon in the labor market. Nowadays, workers are facing a new threat since firms are employing a new labor cost reduction strategy in which they do not lay off workers but rather paying them less, working them more hours, or reducing benefits. The asymmetries between the effects of precarity and unemployment can generate a poverty trap in the long run. This problem is, once again, of great relevance in the context of global high inflation.

It is all too easy in the hectic world of business to get too involved with the day‐to‐ day managing of processes and events. When this happens it is difficult to see the wood for the trees and the automatic pilot syndrome takes over. This does not suggest that you do not know what you are doing ‐ on the contrary you are probably as switched on to whatever activity you are managing as anyone could be. What you could be missing, however, is the explanation as to why you are doing it. If this sounds familiar to you, what might be needed is a detached period from your work. By this I mean stay on the high ground for a while so you can get an overview of what you are doing and, more importantly, why you are doing it. How many managers, I wonder, get the opportunity to question what they are doing? If you allow yourself to slip into complacency then you and your organization will soon lose competitive advantage.

It is all too easy in the hectic world of business to get too involved with the day‐to‐day managing of processes and events. When this happens it is difficult to see the wood for the trees and the automatic pilot syndrome takes over. This does not suggest that you do not know what you are doing ‐ on the contrary you are probably as switched on to whatever activity you are managing as anyone could be. What you could be missing, however, is the explanation as to why you are doing it. If this sounds familiar to you, what might be needed is a detached period from your work. By this I mean stay on the high ground for a while so you can get an overview of what you are doing and, more importantly, why you are doing it. How many managers, I wonder, get the opportunity to question what they are doing? If you allow yourself to slip into complacency then you and your organization will soon lose competitive advantage.

This research aims to find which components of Decent Work are associated with Subjective Well-Being.

With data from 2021 from the states of Mexico, econometric models are carried out.

It is found that disposable income and satisfaction with leisure time have a significant positive relationship with employees' Subjective Well-Being. Likewise, the rate of critical occupancy conditions and informality rate have a significant negative relationship with Subjective Well-Being. The research suggests that influencing the Decent Work conditions of the population in Mexico could favour their Subjective Well-Being.

Share guidelines that enable employers and governments to establish strategies and policies that promote Decent Work to increase the Subjective Well-being of employees.

This article evaluates different variables that make up the Decent Work construct in their level of influence on Subjective Well-being. These relationships and variables considered have not been identified in previous studies as a whole.

The purpose of this paper is to report results from an exploratory, empirical research study that describes personal values and attitudes toward women, two themes that strongly impact employment relations and a wide variety of management issues.

Well‐established measures for the major themes for this paper were used in constructing a questionnaire. Data collection instruments were vetted for content, translated and back‐translated, and applied by native researchers, who also contributed local expertise to the paper.

Female respondents across all four countries were more egalitarian in their attitudes towards women in the workforce than were men. Additionally, Colombian respondents had more egalitarian attitudes towards women scores, followed by Brazilians and Argentineans; Mexicans exhibited the least egalitarian attitudes toward women.

This is the first empirical study that links two well‐validated constructs (personal values and attitudes toward women) in samples from the largest Latin American countries.

This paper evaluates the short-term impact of childcare centres' closures, due to COVID-19 restrictions, on Brazilian mothers' labour force participation and employment rates.

Formal education is non-mandatory according to Brazilian law until the age of four, allowing the identification of children that attend childcare centres and of those that do not attend. Using data from the Brazilian Household Survey, PNAD Contínua/IBGE, the authors construct a two-period panel with women sampled in the second quarter of 2019 and 2020. The authors apply propensity score matching and differences-in-differences methods to control selection into treatment.

The results show a negative impact in terms of employment for mothers whose children attended a childcare centre before the COVID-19 pandemic. But there was no impact in terms of labour force participation rates. Investigating heterogeneous effects associated with childcare centres' closures, the authors find that women with fewer years of schooling, with children aged two or three years old and located in urban areas, suffered greater penalties in the labour market due to the closure of childcare centres.

Few studies could distinguish the pandemic effects directly associated with childcare centres' closures. The paper is the first to analyse the Brazilian case, undertaking an original approach to handle the problem of selection bias. The results help identify the most vulnerable groups of women in the labour market, shedding light on the importance of childcare centres on women's labour supply and of compensating mechanisms to serve as protection during the crisis.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2022-0748.

As a new research interest, robots have surpassed human performance across several aspects. In this research, the authors wish to investigate whether robot adopters perform better than non-adopters in terms of export behavior, especially when distinguishing between different types of firms.

The authors try a new strategy to identify the extent of robot adoption by import data and compare the export trajectories of robot adopters and non-adopters by employing the propensity score matching-difference in difference (PSM-DID) method.

The authors find that robot adopters are more likely to enter export markets and improve subsequent export performance, as the gains from doing so can spread the reduction in variable production costs to a larger customer base abroad. But this rule does not always seem to work; for large-scale firms, robot adoption makes it easier to win export competition and increase market share, while small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) do not seem to enjoy any benefits from adoption. More importantly, robot adoption also leads to the fiercer market competition when improving the productivity of firms, which will threaten smaller non-adopters.

The findings provide new evidence for the scale bias of robotics and offer new insights into whether exporters or future exporters ought to adopt robots in production.

1. First, distinguishing from existing research, we explain the controversial results of previous work on robotics by providing evidence from export markets and using the concept of size bias, which helps to update the theoretical interpretation of robotics and provides new insights for current and future exporters to evaluate their robot adoption decisions.

2. Second, we extend previous research by further considering the potential robotics threats faced by non-adopters, especially we record that export gains of robot adopters are partially at the expense of smaller non-adopters, which provides new evidence for the rationale of SME protection policies and supplements robotics theory with new knowledge, such as the competitive game of firms related to robot adoption.

3. Third, to our knowledge, prior research tended to examine the economic effects of robotics through industry data provided by the IFR, this may lead to systematic bias due to the inability to distinguish the robot adoption intentions of different firms. In this respect, we try a new strategy through robot import data and further distinguish between robot adopters and non-adopters in the sample, which helps to mitigate the potential bias in the findings and provide a complement to the recently developed literature related to robotics.

4. Finally, as we pointed out earlier, robot adoption could be an interesting research work for the Chinese export market, which helps us to obtain some special findings, such as in assessing whether the benefits of robots are equally appropriate for economies that previously had an advantage in terms of labor.

First, distinguishing from existing research, we explain the controversial results of previous work on robotics by providing evidence from export markets and using the concept of size bias, which helps to update the theoretical interpretation of robotics and provides new insights for current and future exporters to evaluate their robot adoption decisions.

Second, we extend previous research by further considering the potential robotics threats faced by non-adopters, especially we record that export gains of robot adopters are partially at the expense of smaller non-adopters, which provides new evidence for the rationale of SME protection policies and supplements robotics theory with new knowledge, such as the competitive game of firms related to robot adoption.

Third, to our knowledge, prior research tended to examine the economic effects of robotics through industry data provided by the IFR, this may lead to systematic bias due to the inability to distinguish the robot adoption intentions of different firms. In this respect, we try a new strategy through robot import data and further distinguish between robot adopters and non-adopters in the sample, which helps to mitigate the potential bias in the findings and provide a complement to the recently developed literature related to robotics.

Finally, as we pointed out earlier, robot adoption could be an interesting research work for the Chinese export market, which helps us to obtain some special findings, such as in assessing whether the benefits of robots are equally appropriate for economies that previously had an advantage in terms of labor.