WageIndicator
Emigration and Labour Shortages: an Opportunity for Trade Unions in New Member States?
The Decade of Roma Inclusion
One Company, Diverse Workplaces: The Social Construction of Employment Practices in Western and Eastern Europe
CELSI Databank
WUN Leeds Fund For International Research Collaborations
Equalsoc (Economic change, Quality of life & Social cohesion)
GINI (Growing INequalities’ Impacts)

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WageIndicator

MôjPlat.sk and MůjPlat.cz

As a coordinating national research team, CELSI runs the WageIndicator project in Slovakia (MôjPlat.sk) and in the Czech Republic (MůjPlat.cz). The WageIndicator is an international web-based survey on wages and working conditions, operating since 2001. The concept is owned by the WageIndicator Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to labour market transparency by providing accurate wage related information through salary checks and wage data collected through national web surveys. Data collected through web surveys serve the purpose of internationally comparable high-quality analyses of labour markets and working conditions. In 2009, WageIndicator is operated through national research teams in 47 countries in Europe, Americas, Asia and Africa.

Project partners: WageIndicator Foundation, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS), University of Amsterdam

MůjPlat.cz is operated by jobDNES.cz
Media partner for MůjPlat.cz is iDNES.cz

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Emigration and Labour Shortages: an Opportunity for Trade Unions in New Member States?

(with Monika-Ewa Kaminska, University of Amsterdam)

The project explores whether and how unions in the post-socialist EU member states have responded to the opportunity of improving their situation, offered by the increased emigration after the recent EU enlargements. Migration may influence labour force composition and unemployment rates in ways that could facilitate union organizing and bargaining position, and in consequence enhance union legitimacy and bargaining institutions. We adopt an actor-oriented framework to examine union strategies and actions, and we test the above hypotheses in the public healthcare sector largely affected by migration in Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. We argue that variation in union strategies depends mainly on the interplay of union capacities and state strategies. Slovak unions used migration-triggered labour shortages to obtain wage increases and to consolidate existing bargaining channels. In contrast, Polish unions responded to migration through industrial action. Hungarian healthcare unions were the least active in seizing migration-related opportunities to enhance legitimacy or bargaining institutions.

This project is part of the FP6 project EQUALSOC. A journal publication is currently under review in the special issue of the European Journal of Industrial Relations on the Demise of Collective Organization in Europe.

Project partners: Prof. Dr. Jelle Visser and Dr. Monika Ewa Kaminska, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS), University of Amsterdam

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The Decade of Roma Inclusion: A Unifying Framework of Progress Measurement

The objective of this project is to propose a mechanism to allow Decade countries to track and report on the results of Roma inclusion policies using a methodology unified across countries and time. This objective includes a review and evaluation of good practice in monitoring of the integration of ethnic minorities and proposing measures to strengthen outcome monitoring for the Decade of Roma inclusion – either at national level or across the Decade countries. Specifically, this projects develops a unifying integration measurement methodology, identifies the suitable indicators for tracking integration of Roma in the Decade countries for the four focus areas of the Decade – education, employment, health and housing, discusses adequate first and second best mechanisms of collection of data on Roma integration and sets concrete proposals for strengthening the results framework for the Decade, including guidelines for application of the suggested indicators using the available data.

IZA report 21

Project partners: The World Bank, Open Society Institute, and The Decade of Roma Inclusion

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One Company, Diverse Workplaces: The Social Construction of Employment Practices in Western and Eastern Europe

Forthcoming book by Marta Kahancova (publisher: Palgrave Macmillan 2010)

Presenting original empirical evidence gathered in five countries, this book provides an inquiry into the process through which multinational companies (MNCs) establish and reinforce their position across Western European and post socialist Central and Eastern European host countries. It is a direct response to recent literature’s call for systematic comparative analyses of politics inside MNCs and the relationship between management and employees in a cross-national perspective.

 ‘One company, diverse workplaces’ brings a fresh approach, which yields important new insights, to debates on the respective influence of home and host country factors on the employment practices of multinational companies. It does so by examining theoretically and empirically how multinationals become embedded in local environments.’

— Paul Marginson, Industrial Relations Research Unit, University of Warwick, UK

‘Combining sophisticated institutional and sociological theory with in depth research on the ground, Marta Kahancova succeeds in destroying the myth of the MNC as an all-powerful rational actor acting outside social and political constraints. Instead she brings to life the role of corporate values, profit interests, host country institutions, trade union activities, and trust relationships in making employment relations what they are in one of Europe’s largest companies. A must-read for those interested in economic sociology, industrial relations and MNCs.’

— Jelle Visser, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

‘This carefully researched empirical study sheds light on how social interaction anchors economic practices in their social environments, and lays open some of the mechanisms that make for the social “embeddedness” of modern economies.’

— Wolfgang Streeck, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, Germany

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CELSI Databank

As a platform for researchers interested in doing research on labour markets in Central and Eastern European countries, CELSI is developing a databank of available relevant datasets. Our main current initiative is collection, maintenance and analysis of data collected through the WageIndicator project in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The following datasets have been identified by CELSI researchers as most relevant for researchers interested in doing research on labour markets in Central and Eastern European countries:

• Dataset on Institutional Characteristics of Trade Unions, Wage Setting, State Intervention and Social Pacts (ICTWSS)
• Estonian Labour Force Survey
• Eurobarometer
• EU-Survey of Income and Living Conditions
• EU Labour Force Survey
• European Social Survey
• OECD.stat
• Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey
• Transmonee
• Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey
• UNDP Roma and displaced people datasets
• WageIndicator Dataset [coming soon]
• World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study

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WUN Leeds Fund For International Research Collaborations

Restructuring, redundancy and sustainable employment: the challenges of the contemporary economic crisis.

The proposed project will focus on the employment consequences of corporate restructuring, most notably in relation to redundancy. Given current economic conditions, this is of important social significance. Extant research activity has tended to neglect the wider social significance of redundancy or workers’ experiences of job loss. To some extent this has followed key policy concerns which have given more attention to: how companies can anticipate and manage change, in order to ameliorate the consequences of restructuring; and to ‘activate’ the unemployed back into work. The current crisis seriously challenges the ability of companies to anticipate change, with job loss the more immediate response to recent, abrupt downturns in demand. Likewise, it is questionable whether nation states have ready policy and ‘activation tools’ for the increasing roll call of the unemployed.

New policies are urgently needed at supra national (eg EU), national, sectoral, community and workplace level to address the unfolding consequences of corporate restructuring; policies that will need to be enmeshed in new, innovative social pacts to ensure long-term significance. The project will contrast EU developments with the USA, Australia and Canada, and will focus on.

1. Company restructuring and redundancy: What is the map of redundancy in terms of sectors, occupations and various demographic profiles. How can we understand the process by which companies lay off workers, and how this may assist in the process of re-employment? Specific attention will focus on autos, finance and steel.

2. State responses to restructuring and redundancy: How are nation states responding? Which new adjustment policies are being implemented; how effective are they?

3. Worker experiences. How are workers experiencing redundancy and how do they go about regaining employment? What supports do they find most useful?

4. Third-party actors.  How can ‘other actors’ assist redundant workers? Here we will consider the role played by trade unions, as well as many local, regional organisations (eg NGOs) that provide job search advice and training.

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Equalsoc (Economic change, Quality of life & Social cohesion)

EQUALSOC is a Network of Excellence funded by the European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme (duration: 1 September 2005 – 31 August 2010).

EQUALSOC has been created to mobilise and develop research expertise across Europe. Its aim is to stimulate high quality comparative European research on social cohesion and its determinants; encourage the development of additional research centres; provide an infrastructure for training the rising generation of young researchers in the skills of comparative research; and facilitate access to the most recent results of research for the wider research community and for policy makers.

CELSI researchers are involved in the following research clusters within EQUALSOC:

I. SOCCULT: Cultural and Social Differentiation

Research under this theme will focus on social cohesion, on the possible expansion of the social groups less integrated, and on the closures that could develop consequently. The research questions will revolve around the following topics:

• Ethnicity and immigration. Could ethnicity exert a durable influence on social stratification in the European Union?
• Social exclusion and urban inequalities. To what extent do social inequalities vary according to the context in which they are lived?
• Cultural and Life-style differentiation. Are social classes dying and are the highly industrialized modern western societies no more hierarchically structured by socio-economic strata as they used to be?

First, a wide range of activities from monetary consumption, cultural participation and value orientation will be analysed through a variety of national data-sets in order to get a better appreciation of the degree to which the general claim of “destructuration” is valid. Second, analyses of differences in cultural consumption will be carried out on the basis of clear conceptual distinctions between class positions and status order, in the Weberian tradition.

II. TRALEG: Trust, Associations and Legitimacy

Mutual trust, associational life and the legitimacy of the societal and political order all contribute to determining the level and nature of social cohesion. By combining micro and macro perspectives this Reseach Group hopes to shed light on the factors enabling the inducement of increasing social cohesion in Europe, in societies that experience rapid economic change and social reform. We will try to answer the following questions:

• Are knowledge-led economic growth and greater social cohesion, at the local, national or European-level, complementary or are there major structural and cultural tensions between their two key objectives?
• Are there institutional conditions that make it more likely that these objectives will be mutually supportive?
• Which political consequences could we expect if Europe fails to realise its twofold objective?
• How cohesive are European societies and what factors determine the level of cohesion?
• Are there emergent forms of inter-societal trust and cohesion in Europe, within and across Member States?

Within TRALEG, Marta Kahancová begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting from CELSI and Monika-Ewa Kaminska from CELSI’s partner institution AIAS presented their joint work at the 2008 EQUALSOC midterm conference (April 10-12, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, Germany) and at a TRALEG workshop titled The Demise of Collective Organization in Europe:The Decline in Union Membership and its Consequences (July 24-25, AIAS, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands).

Martin Kahanec from CELSI participates within SOCCULT cluster of this research program looking at the employment and unemployment transitions for immigrant groups in Europe. In particular, he contributes to the development of a theoretical framework for country case studies on eEthnic penalties in transition from employment to unemployment and vice versa.

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GINI (Growing INequalities’ Impacts)

The project focus is inequalities in income/wealth and education and their social/political/cultural impacts. It combines an interdisciplinary approach, improved methodologies, wide country coverage, a clear policy dimension and broad dissemination. It exploits differences between and within countries in inequality levels and trends to understand impacts and tease out implications for policy and institutions. It highlights potential effects of individual distributional positions and increasing inequality for a host of ‘bad outcomes’ (societal and individual) and allows feedback from impacts to inequality in a frame of policy-oriented debate and comparison across 25 EU countries, USA, Japan, Canada and Australia. Social impacts include educational access and achievement, individual employment opportunities and labour market behaviour, household joblessness, living standards and deprivation, family and household formation/breakdown, housing and intergenerational social mobility, individual health and life expectancy, and social cohesion versus polarisation. Underlying long-term trends, the economic cycle and the current financial and economic crisis will be incorporated. Politico-cultural impacts investigated are:

• Do increasing income/educational inequalities widen cultural and political ‘distances’, alienating people from politics, globalisation and European integration?
• Do they affect individuals’ participation and general social trust?
• Is acceptance of inequality and policies of redistribution affected by inequality itself? What effects have political systems (coalitions/winner-takes-all)?

Finally, it focuses on costs and benefits of limiting income inequality and its efficiency for mitigating other inequalities (health, housing, education and opportunity).

Martin Kahanec from CELSI contributes to this project in the capacity of a country expert leading the country case studies on Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The main objective is to cover the evolution of inequalities and their impacts on the society and economy, as well as their interaction with national and local policies.