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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the labour market exclusion of the groups in Canada that have been defined as vulnerable in that they were persistently in poverty over a defined period of time. The vulnerable groups were: unattached individuals age 45-64, disabled persons, recent immigrants, lone parents, Aboriginal persons and youth not in school.

Five panels of data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics are used over the period from 1993 to 2010 to compare the vulnerable groups with a benchmark non-vulnerable in various dimensions: a descriptive profile of their labour market exclusion and characteristics; a portrayal of their trends in labour market exclusion; an analysis of the persistence of being excluded from the labour force; and an econometric analysis of the determinants of their probability of transitioning into the labour force and out of the labour force.

The vulnerable groups tend to be disproportionately excluded from the labour force and to be persistently excluded for longer periods of time. They are generally more likely to be female, lower educated, in poorer health and to find their life to be stressful and to have recently experienced a negative life event. Exclusion from the labour market tends to trend downward over time for both the non-vulnerable benchmark group and the various vulnerable groups. There is considerable variability in the patterns across the different groups with respect to transitions into and out of the labour market.

The labour market is a first line of defense against social and economic exclusion. While labour market exclusion is trending downward it remains stubbornly high for the vulnerable groups. Their diversity of experiences suggest a one-size-fits all solution to exclusion is not appropriate for the different vulnerable groups. Different policy initiatives are appropriate and they are discussed for each vulnerable group.

The paper is the first to systematically examine a wide range of dimensions of the labour market exclusion of the vulnerable groups in Canada and to highlight their similarities and differences. It also highlights the various policy initiatives that are appropriate for the different groups.

This paper aims to address the immediate effects of the COVID-19 crisis in the Portuguese tourism and hospitality industry by examining whether some specific characteristics make people more vulnerable or more immune to unemployment.

Using an extensive micro-level data set of personal and job-related attributes containing all unemployed individuals in the Portuguese tourism and hospitality industry, a logit model with 56,142 observations is estimated to assess how each characteristic contributed to the unemployment odds during the COVID-19 crisis (until the end-July 2020), relatively to the pre-COVID period.

The most vulnerable workers to COVID-19 unemployment seem to be older, less educated, less qualified, women and residents in regions with a higher concentration of people and tourism activity. Moreover, the COVID-19 crisis is generating a new type of unemployment by also affecting those who were never unemployed before, with more stable jobs and more motivated at work, while reducing voluntary disruptions.

Public effort should be made not only to increase workforce education but especially to reinforce job-specific skills. The COVID-19 crisis has broken traditional protective measures against unemployment and separated workers from their desired occupations, which justifies new and exceptional job preservation measures. Policy recommendations are given aiming at strengthening worker resilience and industry competitiveness in the most affected sub-sectors and regions.

This study extends the current understanding of worker vulnerability to economic downturns. Herein, this paper used a three-level approach (combining socio-demographic, work-related and regional factors), capturing the immediate effects of the COVID-19 crisis and focussing on the tourism and hospitality industry (the hardest-hit sector worldwide).

This paper evaluates how the first job when individuals entered the labor market affects the probability of youth being currently employed in formal or informal work in Bangladesh.

The analysis is based on data from the ILO School-to-Work Transition Surveys. The authors use a full-information maximum likelihood approach to estimate a two-equation model, which accounts for selection into the labor market when estimating the impact of entry status on current work outcomes. The main equation outcome follows a multinomial distribution thus avoiding a priori assumptions about the level of individual’s utility associated with each work status.

The authors find that entering the labor market in a vulnerable employment position (i.e. contributing family work or self-employment) traps into vulnerable employment and prevents the transition to both informal and, especially, formal paid work. This finding holds when accounting for endogeneity of the entry status and it is valid both in the short and in the long run. Young women are less likely to enter the labor market, and once entered they are less likely to access formal paid wok and more likely to being inactive than young men. Low education anticipates the entry in the labor market, but it is detrimental for future employment prospects.

The findings indicate the presence of labor market segmentation between vulnerable and non-vulnerable employment and suggest the endpoint quality of the school-to-work transition is crucial for later employment prospects of Bangladeshi youth.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused job losses to rise dramatically. Herein, the purpose of the article is to identify which personal and job characteristics make individuals more vulnerable or more resilient to COVID-19 unemployment in Portugal and thus to help policymakers, organizations and individuals themselves, in creating mechanisms to avoid unemployment within this new context.

Using extensive personal and job-related data on the complete population of newly unemployed in Portugal over several months after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, a logit model is estimated to identify the characteristics that make workers more resilient or more vulnerable to COVID-19 unemployment, in comparison with the pre-crisis period.

The COVID-19 crisis is shown to be disruptive by changing the unemployment structure, increasing socioeconomic inequalities and weakening traditional mechanisms of employment protection. Additionally, the authors identify a higher vulnerability of low-skilled individuals and of those in occupations with low working-from-home feasibility and/or from non-essential sectors (particularly tourism).

Policy indications are given aiming to protect the most vulnerable individuals, sectors and regions in Portugal, in this new and unprecedented context.

A seven-month period following the emergence of the pandemic is considered, which allows investigating both the immediate and the medium-term effects of the COVID-19 crisis on job losses. Additionally, by matching data from three different sources, an extensive set of multilevel variables is considered, some of them new in the literature.

In recent years, various groups of workers have become causes célèbres through being identified by both academics and the media as vulnerable in some way or another. The spectre of child labour in family enterprises causing the children involved to miss school or fall asleep over their books, of homeworkers earning a pittance from boring, repetitive work, of major accidents or the onset of diseases at the workplace, as well as job losses on a massive scale, all indicate that the 1980s have brought or confirmed insecurity and other hardships for vast numbers of workers in the UK. For the purposes of this special edition of Employee Relations, vulnerability connotes disadvantage in the labour market more serious than that derived from simply being atypical or marginal.

Following the COVID-19 outbreak, there are concerns whether economies are becoming farther from equality and competency. While this matters to every economy, it is more crucial for developing ones who already suffer from income inequalities and lack of competency. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

This study uses an administrative data from the Iran's Social Security Organization (ISSO) that provides insurance to workers entitled to the Labor Law of Iran. The data contain more than 7,000,000 workers. The authors assess heterogeneous impact of the first wave of the pandemic by firms' size and average payment.

The authors’ estimation results indicate that, following the initiation of the pandemic, the workers whose corresponding firms are smaller, overall, are more prone to the pandemic and are more likely to submit a request for unemployment benefits. However, the relation is neither homogeneous across sectors nor linear among micro-sized firms. Few sectors indicate a positive relationship between size and likelihood of request submission, including cultural activity, shoemaking and clothing sectors. Besides the size, the authors investigate whether pay grades could explain the probability of becoming unemployed after the pandemic. Results show that workers whose corresponding firms pay less are more likely to submit a request. This is robust within different sectors.

The ISSO dataset is not a panel, so the authors cannot employ methods of causal inferences. The authors’ results should be seen as correlation; however, due to exogeneity and sharpness of the pandemic the result infers to some degree of causality. The data does not cover the informal sector, so the estimates are at lower boundary.

Administrative data on unemployment benefits during COVID-19 show that the pandemic interferes with competition by forcing low-paid workers and small firms to exit the market. This is an alarm for the competition in every economy, specially developing ones.

Migrant home care workers constitute a vulnerable group in society, which is often exposed to work-related abuse. The purpose of this paper is to explore which characteristics are linked with their abuse.

Overall, 187 Filipino home care workers who work in Israel were recruited via snowball sampling and filled an anonymous questionnaire regarding work-related abuse incidents and working conditions.

More than half of the participants reported exposure to abuse (e.g. sexual, physical, or emotional) or exploitation (e.g. asking to do more than job requirements). Particularly vulnerable were migrant workers during their first year in the host country and those who were taking care of an older adult with cognitive impairment. Interestingly, men who served as care workers were more susceptible to abuse than women.

The findings point to specific characteristics which make home care workers more susceptible to abuse illustrate the need for a closer supervision on the working conditions of home care workers, especially during the initial period of their work. Training migrant home care workers in the area of dementia care is also important.

Contemporary interest in vulnerable employment groups has focused on women, ethnic minorities and the secondary labour market. Social discrimination, marginal employment and low pay are the badges of vulnerability of these groups. As Section 2 shows, labour law's response to employment vulnerability has been piecemeal and tangential with the result that progress towards the enjoyment of basic employment rights by vulnerable workers has been slow and fortuitous. People with disabilities possess many of the traits of vulnerability shared by other disadvantaged groups but receive only a footnote in the pages of labour law. This article records the developing debate on the employment rights of disabled people and places it in the context of the current analysis of employment vulnerability.

This paper argues that the closures will cause regressive rather than progressive modern slavery shifts as the necessity of survival prevails over addressing modern slavery risks within supply chains.

In the spring of 2020, global clothing retailers were advised or ordered to close physical stores due to lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic and many supply chains temporarily halted production. This paper explains how pre-pandemic modern slavery advancements will be detrimentally affected as a result of societal lockdowns and apparel retail closures around the world.

Two consequences of lockdowns are highlighted, which will have negative implications on modern slavery progress. These are the exploitation of vulnerable people, which includes higher exploitation of those already involved in modern slavery and increased risk of exploitation for those susceptible to being drawn (back) into modern slavery and; the need for repetition of previous work completed by external stakeholders or in some cases, a better alternative.

The pandemic itself causes friction between immediate response solutions and long-term modern slavery goals.

In response to modern slavery drivers, governments may need to fill governance gaps, to control the power of corporations and to reconsider migration regulation.

The COVID-19 lockdowns and subsequent supply chain disruptions were unforeseen. This paper argues that there are significant negative effects on the developments in modern slavery eradication made in the past 10 years. As businesses struggled for basic survival, the apparel manufacturing sector has been detrimentally affected as upstream labourers are now at higher risk from the increased likelihood of modern slavery violations.