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How does one value something one cannot and often does not want to see? How do contemporary digital platforms and their infrastructures of connectivity, evaluation, and surveillance affect this relationship between value and visibility, when it is mediated through the problem of labor as at once a commodity and a lived experience? And how can these infrastructures be mobilized in projects that aim to build different kinds of platforms - the kinds that support the revaluation low-income service work? This essay addresses these questions by examining the gendered, racialized, and classed distribution of opportunities and vulnerabilities associated with digitally mediated service work, or what [the author calls] platform labor.

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This study is a survey of existing research on the utilization and impact of employer based benefits and government subsidized income enhancements on employment related outcomes. The research is persuasive that benefits are an important aspect of income. Government subsidized income enhancements can double the income of a low wage worker. This report also discusses the underutilization of many public benefits and describes a number of best practice efforts underway to address access to income enhancements or, as they are often referred to, 'work supports'.

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This report analyzes labor migration trends and policies in Asia and emphasizes the importance of partnerships to promote effective labor migration management. It addresses temporary migrant worker programs, focusing on the Republic of Korea's Employment Permit System and Malaysia's electrical and electronics industry. It also highlights the key role multilateral and bilateral agreements play in protecting migrant workers' social security entitlements. Key issues covered are how these partnerships can provide safe, orderly, and fair labor migration, and, hence, a fair environment in Asia's labor market.

The four chapters capture the ideas, insights, and discussions from the Eighth Roundtable on Labor Migration in Asia: Building Partnerships for Effectively Managing Labor Migration: Lessons from Asian Countries for the UN Global Compact on Migration, hosted by Human Resource Development Korea in Incheon, Republic of Korea, in January 2018. The event, co-organized by the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the International Labour Organization (ILO), brought together regional experts and policy makers. Two statistical annexes offer detailed coverage of intra-Asia migration flows, as well as cross-regional migration flows. The contents are as follows: Trends in labor migration in Asia / Philippe Herve and Nao Kinoshita; The Republic of Korea's Temporary Foreign Worker Program: innovative policy elements / Jonathan Chaloff; Portability of social security for migrant workers in Asia / Marius Olivier; Migrant workers in Malaysia's electrical and electronics Industry / Pitchaya Sirivunnabood, Erica Paula Sioson, and Nanum Jeon.

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[The authors] analyze the effects of an [active labour market programme] ALMP for disadvantaged workers implemented in a depressed area of Italy. Using propensity-score matching, [the authors] find that: (1) the employment subsidy had a positive effect for participants on both the probability of finding a job and income; (2) the outcome of the policy was more positive for women; and (3) the program was more effective for older and less-educated female workers. Using data on previous contacts between workers and firms and on informal channels for job search activity, [the authors] ultimately explore the role of the program in promoting the transition from informal to salaried employment.

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There are an estimated nine million working aged adults in England (more than a quarter of adults aged 16-65) with low literacy or numeracy skills or both. This reflects England's overall performance in the Survey of Adult Skills - around average for literacy, but well below average for numeracy relative to other OECD countries in the Survey (OECD, 2013). These nine million people struggle with basic quantitative reasoning or have difficulty with simple written information. They might, for example, struggle to estimate how much petrol is left in the petrol tank from a sight of the gauge, or not be able to fully understand instructions on a bottle of aspirin. Here they are referred to as 'low-skilled'. Weak basic skills reduce productivity and employability, damage citizenship, and are therefore profoundly implicated in challenges of equity and social exclusion. This report explores the factors behind these findings, and proposes policy solutions.

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A large part of the Canadian labour force finds it difficult to obtain work that provides a decent income and working conditions that meet societal norms. The Work Network of the Canadian Policy Research Networks (CPRN) has been examining the extent to which labour markets and workplaces are leaving people behind and how the Network can help more people realize their potential. The ‘vulnerable workers’ project, launched two years ago, aimed to: explore the sources of vulnerability; document the circumstances of vulnerable workers; identify policies and practices to improve the inclusion of vulnerable workers in work that provides adequate income and basic employment rights; raise the profile of issues regarding vulnerable workers and help focus the debate on how to respond to these issues; and stimulate change in public policies and in workplace practices. This report provides a synthesis of the key findings of these studies, including some other recent literature on vulnerable workers that emphasise the policy implications of this research. The report examines who the vulnerable workers are in Canada, why they are vulnerable, and what can be done to increase the opportunities available to them to improve their economic security. The report concludes that a combination of measures are required to enable workers to realise their potential, including opportunities for workers to move up by improving their labour market prospects through skills upgrading. The contents are: Executive summary; Introduction; Concepts of vulnerability in the labour market; Forces of change in the labour market; Mapping the dimensions of vulnerability in the labour market; Instruments to assist vulnerable workers; Conclusion: the need for a mix of instruments. Included as an appendix is: Summary of proposed measures. Show less

This study explores factors that initiate and perpetuate low skill labour migration from India to the [European Union] EU, examines the migration processes and evaluates the policy prescriptions available to manage such migration flows. Based on a survey of the available quantitative and qualitative evidence, [the] study points to the existence of a fairly stable and persistent demand for low skilled labour in the EU, at least in the medium term. As this demand cannot be fully met from within the EU, there is and will remain a strong demand for low skilled migrant workers from non-EU countries. This offers immense scope for traditional labour sending countries like India as well as destination countries in the EU to strengthen the migration-development nexus. Unfortunately, on both sides, there seems to be an absence of a coherent and focused policy for governing migration of low skilled workers. Considering that migration of low skilled workers from India is mainly directed to the Persian Gulf, the study also makes a comparison between the existing immigration policies in EU countries and the Persian Gulf in order to draw relevant policy perspectives. Evolving appropriate policy response in relation to low skilled migration to Europe is also necessary given that a significant share of such workers end up as irregular migrants in transit or at the destination.

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This paper is concerned with the implications of structural changes in the economy on the skills development of people on low to middle incomes, particularly moderately qualified, apparently ordinary and unproblematic young people. Many young people with level two and level three qualifications directly enter the labour market. This sizeable group remains overlooked by policymakers as well as researchers. These young people undertake new forms of employment in an increasingly polarized job market, rely on on-the-job training rather than higher education to enhance their human capital and compete more and more with graduates who cannot find jobs to match their own newly acquired high skill levels. The net result is that this middling group ends up becoming trapped, with limited chances of progression, for example in the retail sector where 31 per cent of employees are aged 16 to 24. The paper re-asserts arguments made by those who have analysed the polarised nature of the UK economy, but moves beyond these issues to consider the potential challenges that UK skills policy needs to overcome.

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The objective of this paper is to construct and quantitatively assess an equilibrium search model with on-the-job search and general human capital accumulation. In the model workers enter the labour market with different abilities and firms differ in their productivities. Wages are dispersed because of search frictions and workers' productivity differentials. The model generates a simple (log) wage variance decomposition that is used to measure the importance of firm and worker productivity differentials, frictional wage dispersion and workers' sorting dynamics. I calibrate the model using a sample of young workers for the UK. I show that wage inequality among low skilled workers is mostly due to differences in their productivities. Among medium skilled workers frictional wage dispersion and sorting dynamics are, together, as important as workers' productivity differentials. Differences in firms' productivities are also an important source of wage inequality for both skill groups and account for a large share of frictional wage dispersion. Quantitatively the model is able to reproduce the observed cross-sectional wage distribution, the average wage-experience profile and the amount of frictional wage dispersion observed in the data as measured by the mean-min ratio.

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This report concludes the study of the forgotten half - the approximately 20 million 16-24-year-olds who are unlikely to attend college and so will miss out on the special privileges society accords to the college-educated. Young people in the forgotten half are not a monolithic group, overcome by drugs, crime, teenage pregnancy, and alienated from adults. Rather than a 'generation on the skids', they are a widely diverse group of young men and women, most of whom are high school graduates. With a diploma or without, they aspire to a job, a family, and a place in the community they can be proud of. Those with less education must scramble for good jobs in a sea of part-time, low-paying, limited-future employment opportunities.

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