Employment Instability In Western Canada

Author : Xavier St Denis
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (119 download)

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Download or read book Essays on the Rise of Job Instability in Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany written by Xavier St Denis and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The main contribution of this dissertation is measuring and explaining the increase in instability in the career trajectories of Canadian, British and German workers. The motivation behind this project is solving the contradiction between two bodies of literature. On one hand, a large body of scholarship has focused on the shift away from the standard employment relationship and towards precarious work since the 1980s. This literature studies how the adoption of flexible employment practices by employers has led to decreased job and employment security. On the other hand, many empirical studies in OECD countries suggest that jobs have on average remained relatively stable over the past four decades, as measured by the probability of job separation or average job tenure duration. This would seem to contradict the claims made in the precarious work literature.The results presented in the three empirical chapters rely on survey microdata to show important shifts in job stability patterns in Canada, the UK and Germany. These results identify a clear decrease in job stability since the 1980s in Canada (Chapter 2) and in the UK (Chapter 3) for men in the private sector. Like in the US, this decrease is observed in parallel to an increase in job stability among women, generally associated with their greater job attachment especially around childbirth. In Germany, the results presented in Chapter 3 show evidence of a polarization of job instability, consistent with the dualization literature in comparative political economy. This trend is partly driven by differences between core and peripheral sectors of the economy and insider-outsider dynamics underpinned by German industrial relations and skill formation institutions. It is also driven by gendered dynamics that appear to be rooted in German male breadwinner family regime and recent family and labour market policy reforms. This leads to findings of an increase in the share of women with short-term jobs in Germany, in contrast with Canada and the UK. Finally, the fourth chapter of this dissertation develops a new method to obtain reliable estimates of the changing importance of lifetime jobs. Lifetime jobs are generally identified as a central feature of the career model of the postwar labour market. In contrast, flexible employment and unstable jobs predominant in the new economy are often associated with boundaryless careers. In order to provide a more precise empirical evidence of the changing importance of lifetime jobs, a new cohort-based measure using cross-sectional data is developed and evaluated. The results show that lifetime jobs, defined as jobs lasting for the majority of a worker’s active life, were rare even in the postwar economy, in contrast with the descriptions provided by some of the sociological literature. The share of workers who held a lifetime job in the UK appears stable over time, while the share of long-term jobs declined.More generally, this dissertation highlights three important points. First, the use of different measures of job stability should aim to produce complementary rather than competing evidence. Second, several important transformations of the economy and of labour force characteristics have unfolded in parallel to flexibilization and to the increased attachment of women to the labour market. Research on the relationship between employer practices and career trajectories should be designed in a way that allows the removal of the impact of those transformations on the estimates of change over time. Third, relatively different trends in job stability may be observed across countries for reasons associated with institutional arrangements and reform trajectories, highlighting the relevance of adopting a perspective rooted in comparative political economy for the study of job stability"--