Labour Mobility

12 Key excerpts on "Labour Mobility"

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  Internal Migration

  Geographical Perspectives and Processes

  • Darren P. Smith, Nissa Finney, Nigel Walford(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  While most short distance residential moves are prompted by housing market factors, it is important that due consideration is paid also to the economic and labour market drivers of population mobility. As noted by Fielding (2012), economic drivers typically imply migration for the purpose of accessing employment, or for improved terms and conditions in employment. The neo-classical approach to migration (Boyle, et al., 2008) sees migration as an adjustment mechanism to labour market inequalities and employment. Hence, on the basis of this economic logic, it might be expected that the unemployed would be the most residentially mobile of all groups. Evidence partially confirms this, but the reality is more nuanced: the unemployed do tend to be more residentially mobile than the population groups they tend to be drawn from, but these groups (e.g. people in less skilled manual jobs residing in social housing) are, on average, very spatially immobile (Fielding, 2012).

  Therefore it is unsurprising that the academic and policy literature has underlined the significance of Labour Mobility (Gordon, 2003). In popular terms this may be seen in terms of people in high unemployment areas ‘getting on their bikes’ and ‘getting on the bus’ (as Government Ministers Norman Tebbit and Iain Duncan Smith urged the unemployed to do in 1981 and 2010, respectively) to take up jobs elsewhere, so adjusting in the face of economic disparities and overcoming social exclusion. Underlying this perspective is the unspoken assumption that spatial mobility is ‘good’ and that the UK economy and society needs more of it. Whilst true in some circumstances, this assumption requires qualification and critical overview. Long commutes, for instance, can be viewed as conflicting with environmental sustainability whilst high levels of ‘population churn’ in some places might disrupt social ties.

  Labour Mobility has a complex relationship with the economy and wider social dimensions. The economy is subject to short-term business cycle processes, medium-term restructuring processes and long-term ‘deep structural’ changes (Fielding, 2012). These factors influence levels of Labour Mobility on different time scales sometimes in opposing ways. In terms of wider social and demographic dimensions, changes in levels and characteristics of employment by gender – and associated alterations in the shares of two-earner, one-earner and no-earner households – also have implications for Labour Mobility. Likewise developments in transport policy may have significant impacts on employment and there are important interconnections between housing markets and labour markets.

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  Labour Migration

  The Internal Geographical Mobility of Labour in the Developed World

  • James H. Johnson, John Salt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 1

  Labour Migration: The General Context

  James H. Johnson and John Salt

  Movements of population may be classified in many ways, since population migration is a complex phenomenon, with many dimensions and causes. Even if attention is focused on those movements which involve a relatively permanent change of home there are different types of migration involved, depending on the reasons for moving. This book is concerned with one broad type of movement - internal labour migration.

  Population movements which take place within a nation state may be described as ‘internal’. Although in the developed countries of the world it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate internal moves of population from international moves because of the emergence of supra-national economic groupings of states and because of the freer movement of highly specialised workers, it still remains true that the great majority of migrants move within their own countries. In addition, an individual nation continues to provide a distinctive economic and political context for migration.

  Labour migration consists of those moves of population where a change of residence is accompanied by a change of job. It might be assumed that labour migrants could be defined as those movers who are primarily motivated by job considerations and for many this would be certainly true; but other reasons for moving are also influential for those who are changing both home and job. Labour migration brings a change in the social environment of the people involved and in their housing conditions; it also has implications for the social and economic opportunities available to other members of a migrant’s household. These other factors may dominate the decision of some households to migrate (Johnson, Salt and Wood, 1974). Although there is abundant evidence that the further a migrant moves home the more likely it is that a change of job will also take place, it is better not to prejudge the deeper reasons for moving but simply to employ a definition which merely uses the coincidence of a parallel move of job and home as its basis.

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  Development Economics

  Theory, Empirical Research, and Policy Analysis

  • Julie Schaffner(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  workers. To see this, look again at Figure 9.3. The investment that increased Producer 1’s demand for labor raised wages for Producer 2’s low-skill workers, even though Producer 2’s business was shrinking while Producer 1’s was expanding. Because Producer 2’s workers were mobile, Pro- ducer 2 had to raise wages to retain some workers when Producer 1 began offering higher wages. This indicates that: When labor is mobile, labor markets help spread the benefits of sector-specific labor demand growth to workers in other sectors and locations. For example, workers in both agriculture and nonagriculture within rural communities benefit from labor demand increases in either agriculture or nonagriculture, as long as workers are freely mobile between sectors within rural communities. We saw an example of this in the dis- cussion of Green Revolution impacts on wages in Chapter 6. Similarly, if workers were freely mobile between rural and urban areas, low-skill workers in both rural and urban areas would benefit from labor demand increases in rural or urban areas. (We examine reasons why this might not be the case later.) Under the assumptions of the basic model, labor markets in diverse sectors and locations are perfectly integrated, with wages in all low-skill labor markets rising and falling together. Costly mobility Now suppose that workers face a cost of moving from one producer’s sector or location to the other producer’s. We can think of workers as located nearer to one producer than the other at any time. Workers who are nearer to Producer 1 currently supply their labor to Producer 1’s labor market, but they may also choose to incur a mobility cost and export their labor to Producer 2’s market.

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  Migrant Women

  • M. Zulauf(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2 Labour Mobility in the European Union One of the basic principles underlying European integration is the free movement of labour within the EU. Formal restrictions on Labour Mobility have been removed, and the principles that govern the condi- tions for access to employment for EU workers in member states have been gradually developed. Legislation on freedom of movement gives EU workers, with some exceptions, the right to take up employment and receive treatment as if they were nationals of that country. In this chapter I am concerned with the process of intra-EU mobility. The chapter begins by documenting the Union’s legislative and policy framework on freedom of movement since its introduction. It is not the aim to cover all EU efforts in the area, but rather to present an overview of the European Union’s commitment to facilitate mobility. A review of past and current patterns of labour migration between mem- ber states follows to assess the significance of intra-EU labour migra- tion. The final section of the chapter identifies the specific obstacles to skilled Labour Mobility within the EU in the context of mainstream theories about migration behaviour and literature that considers the potential barriers to mobility. The implementation of the principle of freedom of movement The right to move freely within the EU has been a long-term concern of the Union. Free movement of persons in the European Union was established in the Treaty of Rome (1957) and came into force in 1968. The free movement of workers and freedom of establishment were part of the wider project of establishing a barrier-free Europe. The aim was 11 M. Zulauf, Migrant Women Professionals in the European Union © Monika Zulauf 2001 to achieve four freedoms: capital, goods, services and labour (Commission of the European Communities 1977a).

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  A Cultural History of Work in the Age of Enlightenment

  • Anne Montenach, Deborah Simonton, Anne Montenach, Deborah Simonton(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  ancien régime’s economy. What is less well known, however, is how and through what means workers “on the move” could integrate into local labor markets. In the sections “Supra local Connections” and “Places, Houses, Workshops: Mobile Workers and Local Settings,” the chapter explores some of these channels of access: on the one hand, supra local networks, and on the other specific elements of local settings, namely hiring places, forms of cohabitation, and guilds.

  FROM MIGRATION TO MOBILITY

  In this chapter, the notion of mobility is used to define a broad set of situations that have unsettledness as a common feature. The other common feature this chapter focuses on is that they are all workers. While all the sectors of the economy (both rural and urban) are taken into account, this choice excludes people who were constantly “settling in motion,” such as merchants. The reason for this lies in the aim of exploring how people who were not granted fiscal exemptions and who did not have consulates and specific facilities at their disposal (for instance, the entrepôts) were nevertheless able to access local labor markets without settling down. While the bibliography on merchants in the city is extremely rich, few works have explored the way migrant workers of the lower classes accessed local resources other than hospitals and poor shelters.2

  In fact, “foreigners” in early modern societies were not necessarily individuals coming from elsewhere; instead, the term applied primarily to individuals who were unsettled and lacked local ties. For this reason, this chapter uses “mobile workers” to refer not to individuals who came from outside the city and settled inside it but to those who continued being mobile, unsettled individuals such as seasonal and temporary migrants but also laborers and journeymen whose professional (and thus spatial) mobility was deeply entrenched. In doing so, this chapter falls within the framework of recent historiography on migrations in ancien régime societies that has profoundly transformed the notion of “foreigner.” One of the main changes introduced by this body of work has been a shift from the notion of “mobility transition” to that of mobility as a commonplace experience in early modern societies. According to the concept of “mobility transition,” twentieth-century modernization was the key event that produced a sharp increase in individual instances of migration as compared to premodern societies, which were stable and self-sufficient.3 This notion of a stable early modern society in which people moved only when forced to has been called into question by the work of Jan and Leo Lucassen, who argue that high levels of mobility actually date to much earlier than the twentieth century, and that most “basic decisions by human beings—the choice of a profession or a partner—” pushed people to migrate from their places of birth or residence. Regardless of distance, people’s movement often led them to other geographical environments.4 In a recent article, they point out that the increased mobility characterizing the nineteenth century was due more to improvements in transportation than to any so-called “modernization,” and concluded that “it was not the underlying structural causes of migration that changed, but rather its scale.”5

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  The Politics of Migrant Labour

  Exit, Voice, and Social Reproduction

  • Gabriella Alberti, Devi Sacchetto(Authors)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Bristol University Press

    (Publisher)

  Bickerton, 2019 ).

  The neoclassical approach tends to see Labour Mobility as a mere competitive market response to existing mismatches between labour supply and demand. According to this viewpoint, Labour Mobility reflects wage differentials across countries, but contributes to erasing them and producing equalizing effects by naturally following market rules. On the opposite side, the institutionalist turn is represented by scholars studying the interaction between Labour Mobility and national Varieties of Capitalism (VOC) (for example, Wright, 2012 ; Devitt, 2011 ). In broad terms, the VOC perspective (Hall and Soskice, 2001 ) distinguishes different economic models across countries in liberal capitalist economies, primarily liberal and coordinated market economies (LMEs and CMEs). While the former are mostly regulated by market mechanisms, characterized by low wages, flexible labour markets, lower protections, and lack of sector collective bargaining, the latter presents a higher level of coordinated wage bargaining, education skills, and training policies, usually managed by the state providing for the reproduction of the workforce and its skills, and cooperative industrial relations systems. Some labour migration scholars have also used this framework to understand different management systems of Labour Mobility, arguing that: ‘Compared to coordinated market economies with relatively regulated labour markets, liberal market economies with flexible labour markets and relatively large low wage labour markets can be expected to generate greater employers’ demand for migrants, especially but not only for employment in low-waged jobs’ (Ruhs and Palme, 2018

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  Migration And Mobility In Britain Since The Eighteenth Century

  • Colin Pooley, Jean Turnbull(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Analysis presented in this chapter has suggested that the relationship between migration and employment is, at different levels, both straightforward and complex. Whilst much migration was to some degree stimulated by the need or desire to change employment, only a relatively small proportion of such moves were clearly related to the economic and labour market characteristics of particular areas. Whereas London did consistently attract labour migrants over long distances, in most other areas labour migration patterns were remarkably similar over both time and space, though specialized labour markets could attract workers over long distances from other areas with similar economic structures. Thus although work could be an important factor in stimulating migration, for most people that stimulus was as likely to come from individual, family life-course and local circumstances. It is very difficult to sustain a convincing argument about consistent links between migration and the relative economic prosperity of particular regions. Employment was a factor which consistently affected migration, but this influence was exercised in a variety of complex ways.

  For many people the ways in which particular occupations either restricted or provided opportunities for migration were rather more important. Thus in some areas of employment there were strong benefits to be gained from remaining in the same neighbourhood, building up local networks, and exploiting these in the process of career advancement. In other jobs the nature of career progression required mobility and it was necessary to move to a new location to gain relevant experience and career advancement. In this sense the career path that an individual chose also affected their subsequent migration path. Employment could also affect residential decisions in other ways. Opportunities for upward social mobility may have allowed migrants to improve their housing and to move to a better residential area, whilst other jobs required employees to live close to their workplace and thus constrained the journey to work and residential location.

  In most households migration decisions related to employment opportunities were taken to benefit the career of a male household head, or possibly to provide opportunities for male children. Female household members often had to fit their careers around such moves and hence women were much more likely to enter or leave the labour market following migration. However, it is clear from the individual case studies in particular that migration for employment reasons was often closely intertwined with movement stimulated by other factors. Although job-related movement was the single largest category, migration for housing improvement, marriage, family reasons and as a response to crises were all important and may have disproportionately affected women and children. Subsequent chapters will examine the pattern and process of migration for this wider range of reasons in much more detail.

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  Globalisation and Labour Market Adjustment

  • D. Greenaway, R. Upward, P. Wright, D. Greenaway, R. Upward, P. Wright(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  7 Trade Adjustment and Occupational Mobility Richard Upward and Peter Wright 7.1 Introduction It is widely agreed that there has been a dramatic shift in demand away from unskilled towards skilled workers in many OECD countries. 1 This has manifested itself both in deteriorating employment prospects and worsening wage outcomes for low-skilled workers. However, workers are not immutably either low- or high-skilled. One way of modelling this is to consider the decision of workers to invest in human capital, as discussed in Falvey, Greenaway and Silva (Chapter 6) of this volume. In this chapter we take a different approach, and con- sider explicitly the role of firms in the shift towards a more skill-intensive workforce. When firms change their desired skill mix of workers, they can do so either by hiring new workers, or by retraining their existing workforce. Thus, a ‘shock’ which changes the relative demand for skilled and unskilled workers may change the pattern of mobility between occupations. To illustrate the potential importance of firms in the process of skill upgrading, consider Table 7.1. We use a representative panel of workers in the UK from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). 2 The first row shows that 76 per cent of those in private sector employment were working for the same firm in the previous year; the remaining 24 per cent entered from another firm, another sector, or from non-employment. Of those in a private sector firm at time t , 28 per cent exit the firm before t + 1. The second panel shows that, even amongst those who remain with the same employer, there is considerable promotion from non- managerial to managerial or supervisory roles. 3 There is relatively little demotion amongst those who remain with the same employer. Amongst 115

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  Trade Unions and Technological Change

  A Research Report Submitted to the 1966 Congress of Landsorganistionen i Sverige

  • Steven Anderman(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 8

  Labour Mobility

  The advance of technology in post-war Sweden has taken place in a labour market characterized by a manpower scarcity of hitherto unknown severity. The projections of the Long-term Planning Commission for the period 1965–80 indicate that this shortage of labour will continue and probably intensify. Registered unemployment has been exceedingly low, apart from that in several occupations highly susceptible to seasonal fluctuations and in a few isolated regions, though of course when the aggregate figure is broken down by industry and sub-industrial sector, we obtain a more varied picture. The highly diversified economic development, with considerable expansion in some industries and stagnation or contraction in others, reflects the process of dynamic growth working its way throughout the economy.

  It is no more than an assumption, however, that this process will accelerate in the future. Indeed, if we view it in a historical perspective, the acceleration hypothesis is somewhat dubious. The transformation of the rural society and the household production and consumption patterns of the pre-industrial economy into the production apparatus and market economy of an industrialized society was a lengthy process. Its earlier stages were marked by events of greater dramatic impact and repercussions for many more people than technological change has had in recent years. The enormous wave of emigration that swept through Sweden in the latter half of the past century was a symptom of the abject failure of society at that time to master its economic and social problems. The crucial difference between the present situation and conditions seventy-five years ago is that expanding sectors in today’s economy are capable of absorbing manpower at a rate commensurate with the growth in the labour force and redundancies in the contracting sectors. Another important difference is that the personal difficulties for an individual adjusting from a rural to an industrialized job environment are probably greater than the problems involved in the transfer from one industry to another.

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  Migration and Mobility

  The European Context

  • S. Ghatak, A. Sassoon, S. Ghatak, A. Sassoon(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  49 3 The Economic Impact of Labour Mobility in an Enlarged European Union Thomas Krichel and Paul Levine Introduction The possibility of East–West European migration waves within a more liberal immigration regime has received considerable attention from policy makers and concern has been expressed about the economic and political impact. The political dimensions of migration are important, and they are explored in other chapters of this book. This chapter focuses narrowly on the economic issues. From the perspective of an economist, the migration decision based on the maximisation of expected income, the existing wage gap between Western and Eastern European countries, and a probability of employment in the West at least as good as in the East suggests large group of potential migrants. This chapter assesses the short-run and long-run economic impact of a laissez-faire migration between the regions, and assesses who are the winners and losers and the possible need for migration controls. The rest of the chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 examines recent migration trends from Central and Eastern Europe into the Euro- pean Union (EU) (in fact mostly into Germany). Section 3 focuses on the short-run impact of migration from a less developed East into a more developed West. This section draws on Levine (1999) and emphasises the importance of labour market flexibility in the West for realising economic gains from migration. Section 4 is concerned with the long-run and reviews some recent papers that study the effect on both transitional and long-run growth of migration between undeveloped and developed regions. Section 5 concludes the paper. S. Ghatak et al. (eds.), Migration and Mobility © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2001 50 Thomas Krichel and Paul Levine Recent trends in Central and Eastern Europe An important part of migration in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is the repatriation of ethnic minorities.

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  Creating an Internationally Competitive Economy

  • Harry Bloch, P. Kenyon(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  A model of job movement Our approach is to adapt and develop a model of intersectoral movement from Jovanovic and Mof®tt (1990), allowing us to analyse gross as well as 90 Sectoral Mobility in UK and US Labour Markets net labour movements. Assume there are N sectors in the economy, each with a constant number of identical price-taking ®rms, normalized to unity. Each ®rm is assumed to have a production function of the form: y st f s x st ; z st 2 where y st is the output of sector s at time t; f s x st ; z st ) is the production function of sector s at time t, x st is total labour in ef®ciency units; and z st is a sector-speci®c shock. On the demand side, each ®rm is assumed to choose the amount of labour in ef®ciency units which will maximize pro®ts: max p st f s x; z st � w st x : 3 x where p st is the output price in sector s at time t and w st is the price per ef®ciency unit of labour in sector s at time t. Thus employment is chosen so that the marginal revenue product of ef®ciency units equals the wage, which implies a derived demand for labour of the form: 8 9 s > > w st > > x st  : ; z st ; 4 p st s where  is the inverse marginal product function in sector s. The productivity of the ®rm's workforce depends on how well the characteristics of its workers match with those of the ®rm. A worker's productivity is assumed to be randomly drawn from a normal distribution and is speci®c for each worker±®rm match. Workers and ®rms only discover the quality of the match once the appointment has been made: 8 9 > F m  N m;  2 : m � m ;: 5  > Individual workers are paid according to the quality of the match that they achieve with the ®rm. That is, they are paid their own marginal revenue product: w ist m i p st f s 0 x; z st m i w st 6 where w ist is the wage per worker and m i is the worker-speci®c match. This structure is important because it determines the mobility of individuals.

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  Social Mobility in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England

  • A. Miles(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  6 Mechanisms and Meanings of Mobility In this chapter, an attempt is made to pursue further both the assump- tions which underlie a marriage-based study of inter-generational change and the emergence of the bureaucratic career by turning to the processes of work-life mobility: to the structures and dynamics of the individual career. Here, the actors behind the numbers and the tables come to the fore as strategies, motivations and understandings are explored. This perspective is relatively rare in modern survey research, despite the ready availability of evidence via tape recorder and ques- tionnaire. Historical evidence of the mechanics and meanings of mobility is, of course, much harder to come by, but among the limited range of suitable materials available autobiography can provide a particularly rich insight. These issues arc explored here by following writers through the different stages of their careers, and listening to how they rationalised and made sense of their experiences. In the detail of their testimony, there is further evidence to support the impression given by the preceding analysis of career structures that formal, more impersonal and credentially defined structures were gradually challenging the role of direct and informal influences in the negotiation of a working life. It is also clear that the authors conceived of the movements they made in ways which do, by and large, correspond to the major social divisions assumed by the census stratification scheme employed in the rest of this study, that they indexed their achievements in inter- as much as intra-generational terms, and that, whatever its emotional significance, the event of marriage was, more often than not, a crucial watershed in career terms as well. JOINING THE LABOUR MARKET The most impressive feature of the autobiographers' entry into the world of work was the early age at which it occurred.

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