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As with many other OECD economies, a growing part‐time employment share has been a characteristic of the Australian workforce experience over the past three decades. Examines several distinctive features of Australian part‐time employment, namely: the high proportion of part‐time employees who are employed under casual employment conditions, the growing male part‐time employment share and the growing proportion of involuntary part‐time workers. Outlines several important policy implications, namely: many part‐time employees are entitled to but not receiving permanent employment conditions; many part‐timers are excluded from the many non‐wage entitlements associated with full‐time employment; adjusted hourly wage rates for part‐time workers appear to be falling relative to full‐time workers, the ability of part‐time employees to participate in the newly emerging collective bargaining framework is constrained by their very low trade union density relative to full‐time employees; and there are doubts as to how part‐time workers can effectively participate in and benefit from the emerging programme of employee‐based superannuation entitlements.

Compensation systems serve a critical role in strategic human resources management, and over the past twenty-five years, there have been an increasing number of public sector reform efforts aimed at better aligning compensation practices with institutional workforce needs. While many past reforms have been performance driven, the nationʼs most recent economic downturn has served as potent catalyst for a renewed focus on public sector compensation, particularly reforms to public sector retirement benefits. However, given the traditional importance of public sector retirement benefits within broader bureaucratic structures, these new reforms hold the potential to substantially alter human capital capacity in the public sector. Using wage and retirement benefit data from the U.S. Census Bureauʼs Current Population Survey and National Compensation Survey, this paper finds that state and local governments face significant threats to their long-term human capital capacity in light of potential benefit reforms that place a disproportionate emphasis upon competitive wage rates.

Fringe, or “non‐wage”, benefits typically form an important part of the compensation package provided for employees, having grown considerably during the 20th century. One of the more traditional types of benefit, of interest in this article, is the provision of goods and services to employees at a price below that which they would normally expect to pay. More specifically, we are interested in the sale, at a discount, of a company's own products, rather than the provision of other goods and services, such as meals or private health insurance, at low rates made possible by company subsidy or the exploitation of its buying power or facilities. While a company may sometimes sell discontinued lines or damaged stock to its employees, our focus is on the sale of normal products. Our primary purpose is to show how, with an understanding of cost and revenue relationships, the problem of setting the rate of discount can be approached. The analysis draws on and extends previous work on shareholder concessions.

Asymmetric information between producer and consumer of health care gives rise to a principal‐agent relationship between these two parties. If the consumer of care can credibly assume that producers are motivated by factors other than selfish gain obvious benefits in terms of process utility will accrue and the delivery of care will be facilitated. Examination of earnings equations using a UK data set, where monetary and non‐monetary employer‐provided benefits have been controlled for reveals that in the UK health‐service workers earn less than employees with comparable skills generally. Employee‐generated externalities associated with pursuance of personal goals, it is contended, explain these differences. When such factors are controlled for, returns to health‐service workers are seen to be comparable with those of workers generally. It is concluded that health‐service workers are “different” from workers generally – though not uniquely – in as much as they make reference to arguments in their objective functions to a greater extent than do workers generally. These arguments could, with justification, be termed philanthropic motives. This, we contend, questions the validity of standard neoclassical theory as it relates to this group of workers and demands more thoughtful policy responses in devising incentives in this sector.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the job quality in Benin between 2007 and 2011. To do this, the study constructed a multidimensional measure of job quality and identified the determinants of the quality of the job. The measure adopted by the authors includes four dimensions: wages; extra-wage benefits and regularity of employment; conditions and career opportunities; and, finally, social security. Two methods, including the construction of measure of job quality and the estimation of determinants of the job quality index, were used to test the robustness of the effects. The results show that the quality of job improved slightly between 2007 and 2011 and that factors such as experience, the type of contract, the level of education, the formal character of the company and the work hours explain the job quality of workers in Benin.

The measure adopted by the authors includes four dimensions: wages; extra-wage benefits and regularity of employment; conditions and career opportunities; and, finally, social security. Two methods, including the construction of measure of job quality and the estimation of determinants of the job quality index, were used to test the robustness of the effects.

The results show that the quality of job improved slightly between 2007 and 2011 and that factors such as experience, the type of contract, the level of education, the formal character of the company and the work hours explain the job quality of workers in Benin.

The contribution of this study lies in its analytical approach and in the fact that it reinforces the knowledge that exists on this theme, which is still little studied in African countries.

This paper examines whether and how labour market duality can be alleviated through legislation that prohibits discrimination based on employment type.

In 2007, the Korean government undertook a labour reform banning discriminatory treatment against fixed-term, part-time and dispatched workers. By exploiting a gradual implementation of the anti-discrimination law by firm size targeting a subset of non-regular workers, the paper identifies the treatment effects of the anti-discrimination law, taking a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach.

The results suggest that the anti-discrimination law significantly increases hourly wages and the probabilities of being covered by national pension, health insurance, and employment insurance for targeted non-regular workers in small firms relative to other workers. Anticipatory behaviours of employers and selective transitions of employees in response to the implementation of the anti-discrimination law do not underlie the estimated effects. The presence of labour unions contributes to reducing gaps in labour conditions between regular workers and targeted non-regular workers.

The main contribution of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on causal impacts of equal pay legislation on the gaps in labour conditions between different categories of workers, using a difference-in-difference-in-differences estimation.

This chapter synthesizes two complementary streams in the economic thought of David M. Gordon, and explores their shared relevance to the rise of the “gig” economy in modern economies. Gordon made lasting contributions to the radical political-economic analysis of work and employment. At the microeconomic level of individual workplaces, he and his collaborators originally explained the factors affecting employers’ labor extraction strategies, through which they seek maximum work effort from waged employees while minimizing unit labor costs. At the macroeconomic or structural level, he linked that conflictual process to the broader institutional and structural features of the overall accumulation regime which is essential to any successful incarnation of capitalism. Employment practices and social structures have evolved considerably since Gordon’s passing, but his insights are still useful in understanding the rise of, and limits to, modern work arrangements. In particular, Gordon’s dual portrayal of the parameters of labor extraction, and their positioning within a broader structural and institutional context, provides a convincing explanation of both the recent rise of gig economy practices, and their potential limits.

Higher replacement rates often imply higher levels of absenteeism, yet even in generous welfare economies, employers provide sick pay in addition to the public sick pay. Using comparative population-representative workplace data for Britain and Norway, we show that close to 50% of private sector employers in both countries provide sick pay in excess of statutory sick pay. However, the level of statutory sick pay is also much higher in Norway than in Britain. In both countries, private sick pay as well as other benefits provided by employers are chosen by employers in a way that maximizes profits having accounted for different dimensions of labor costs. Several health-related privately provided benefits are often bundled. In both countries easy-to-train workers, high turnover and risky work are linked to less extensive employer provision of extended sick leave and sick pay in excess of statutory sick pay. In contrast, the presence of a trade union agreement is strongly correlated with both the provision of private sick pay and extended sick leave in Britain but not in Norway. We show that the sickness absence rate is much higher in Norway than in Britain. However, the higher level of absenteeism in Norway compared to Britain relates to the threshold for statutory sick pay in the Norwegian public sick pay legislation. When we take this difference into account, no significant difference remains.

Labour markets across the globe have recently been characterized by rising wage inequality, real wage stagnation or both. Most academic work to date considers each in isolation, but the research in this paper attempts to pull them together, arguing that higher wage inequality takes on an added significance if real wages of the typical worker are not growing, and showing that inequality rises and real wage slowdowns have gone hand-in-hand with one another due to wages decoupling from productivity in the United States and United Kingdom. The lack of growth of real wages at the median in the United States is also shown to be linked to the declining influence of trade unions.