Selected Online Reading on Minimum Wage

As wealth inequality skyrockets and trade union power declines, the living wage movement has become ever more urgent for public policymakers, academics, and - most importantly - those workers whose wages hover close to the breadline. A real living wage in any part of the world is rarely its minimum wage: it is the minimum income needed to cover living costs and participate fully in society. Most governments' minimum wages are still falling short, meaning millions of workers struggle to cover their living costs. This book brings new, vital insights to the conversation from a carefully selected group of contributors at the forefront of this field. By juxtaposing advances across sectors and countries, and encompassing many different approaches and indeed definitions of the living wage, Dobbins and Prowse offer a rich tapestry of approaches that may inform public policy. By including the experiences and voices of those workers earning at, or near, the living wage alongside the opinions of leading experts in this field, this book is a pioneering contribution for public policymakers as well as students and academics of work and employment relations, public policy, organizational studies, social economics, and politics.

The first volume focuses on globalization, international migration, employment, labour agency, technological change, and labour resilience. This book aims to examine how labour institutions, both in developed and developing countries, have responded to the challenges faced over the last 30 years. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in labour economics, political economy, and development economics.

Produced by a team of world-leading economists, this is the benchmark account of recent and historical trends in inequality. World Inequality Report 2022 is the most authoritative and comprehensive account available of global trends in inequality. Researched, compiled, and written by a team of world-leading economists, the report builds on the pioneering edition of 2018 to provide policy makers and scholars everywhere up-to-date information about an ever broader range of countries and about forms of inequality that researchers have previously ignored or found hard to trace. Over the past decade, inequality has taken center stage in public debate as the wealthiest people in most parts of the world have seen their share of the economy soar relative to that of others. The resulting political and social pressures have posed harsh new challenges for governments and created a pressing demand for reliable data. The World Inequality Lab, housed at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, has answered this call by coordinating research into the latest trends in the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth on every continent. This new report not only extends the lab's international reach but provides crucial new information about the history of inequality, gender inequality, environmental inequalities, and trends in international tax reform and redistribution. World Inequality Report 2022 will be a key document for anyone concerned about one of the most imperative and contentious subjects in contemporary politics and economics.

Trade unions in Europe face a range of cross-cutting challenges. This includes the near-universal contraction in union membership; the related decline of traditionally highly unionised blue-collar industries; and the rise of automation, microprocessing, and digitalisation, which can make it cheaper for employers to invest in machines than to pay humans to work. The breakdown of the standard contract of employment and increasing rates of precarious work have further transformed the world of work. Taken together, this makes any collectivist vision of society, and the notion of solidarity upon which trade unionism is built, difficult to sustain. All this raises tough questions for trade unionists, policy-makers, and researchers alike regarding the future of trade unions, the oldest and largest civil society movement in Europe. The contributions in this volume explore the prospects for union revival across a range of cases, including by focusing on the pursuit of legal remedies and on the opportunities associated with the network society to defend the interests of workers. This interdisciplinary volume includes contributions that consider the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the EU level by researchers coming from a range of disciplines and backgrounds. The volume should especially appeal to researchers and practitioners working in the fields of political science, sociology, law, and business studies.

The primary objective of this study was to support the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) by providing an evidence base for their forthcoming Opinion on the European Commission’s initiative on minimum wages. Specifically, the study examined the local and regional dimension of minimum wages, an area only briefly covered in the current literature. The Commission’s initiative includes a proposed Directive which has as its focus the promotion of collective bargaining and the adequacy of statutory minimum wages. The research for the report was undertaken by Metis GmbH, conducted between December 2020 and February 2021 and comprising a literature review, data analysis, stakeholder interviews and case studies.

Le salaire minimum est-il forcément l’ennemi de l’emploi ? La polémique ne faiblit pas, en particulier en France, sur ce seuil légal dont les premières formes ont été introduites il y a plus d’un siècle pour lutter contre les salaires de misère. Ses mécanismes sont pourtant connus depuis longtemps. Les études menées par les économistes dans les nombreux pays qui le pratiquent montrent que son instauration ou sa hausse peuvent, selon les situations, avoir des effets négatifs, nuls ou positifs sur l’emploi. Les résultats empiriques présentés ici permettent de réfléchir au bon usage du salaire minimum dans nos sociétés postindustrielles marquées par une polarisation croissante entre une classe aisée à fort pouvoir d’achat et une armée de travailleurs à bas salaires.

This book examines the role of scientific expertise in minimum wage policy making in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It finds that scientific research is an important part of the public discourse on minimum wages in all three countries. Newspapers frequently cite scholars and research institutions, providing their readers with a good sense of how scientific research evaluates the effects of minimum wages. How often this happens depends on the context. Most importantly, newspapers from the United States cite researchers more frequently than newspapers from the two European countries. The book also shows that scientific research influences the policy preferences of political actors such as trade unions, political parties, and government agencies. The influence is based on policy-oriented learning. It is strong in Germany and the United Kingdom, and weaker in the United States. In both cases, cross-country differences are found to be related to different styles of using scientific expertise in the three countries.

This report on minimum wages in 2020 is part of an annual series. Minimum wage policies and rate changes tend to be met with a high level of interest from all sides in the annual national discussions on this issue. Also the debate on a more coordinated or even common EU level minimum wage policy is not new. Despite this, these discussions were mainly confined to the national level, as wage setting is primarily the competence of Member States and, according to national traditions, the social partners. But the year 2019 saw an increased surge of interest and additional focus of debate at the EU level following then European Commission President-candidate Ursula von der Leyen’s presentation of the political guidelines for the next Commission 2019–2024 to the European Parliament in July, ahead of the vote on her role of president for the European Commission. In these guidelines she proposed an action plan to fully implement the European Pillar of Social Rights, including: As part of this, we will support those in work to earn a decent living, and those out of work as they look to find a job .… Within the first 100 days of my mandate, I will propose a legal instrument to ensure that every worker in our Union has a fair minimum wage. This should allow for a decent living wherever they work. Minimum wages should be set according to national traditions, through collective agreements or legal provisions. I am a firm believer in the value of social dialogue between employers and unions, the people who know their sector and their region the best .… by 2024 every worker should have a fair minimum wage.

Published ten years after the first edition, this new Handbook offers topical, and comprehensive information on the welfare systems of all 28 EU member states and their recent reforms, giving the reader an invaluable introduction and basis for comparative welfare research. Additional chapters provide detailed information on EU social policy, as well as comparative analyses of European welfare systems and their reform pathways. For this second edition, all chapters have been updated and substantially revised, and Croatia additionally included. The second edition of this Handbook is most timely, given the often-fundamental welfare state transformations against the background of the financial and economic crises, transforming social policy ideas, as well as political shifts in a number of European countries. The book sets out to analyse these new developments when it comes to social policy. In the first part, all country chapters provide systematic and comparable information on the foundations of the different national welfare systems and their characteristics. In the second part, using a joint conceptual foundation, they focus on policy changes (especially of the last two decades) in different social policy areas, including old-age, labour market, family, healthcare, and social assistance policies. As the comparative chapters conclude, European welfare system landscapes have been in constant motion in the last two decades. While austerity is not to be seen on the aggregate level, the in-depth country studies show that all policy sectors have been characterised by different reform directions and ideas. The findings not only reveal both change and continuity, but also policy reversal as a distinct type that characterises social policy reform. The book provides a rich resource to the international welfare state research community, and is also useful for social policy teaching.

The main original aim of the European Union was to promote convergence towards higher economic growth and social standards. However, EU countries have sometimes experienced different trajectories, due in part to their different starting points and the fact that their convergence on particular socio-economic indicators has varied. At the same time, little evidence has so far been presented on cross-country convergence within the EU. This book aims to answer a number of important questions. To what extent have European countries converged or diverged with EU-wide economic and social indicators over the past 20 years? What have been the drivers of convergence? Why do some countries lag behind, while others experience continuous upward convergence? Why are these trajectories not always linear? Particular attention is paid to the role of institutions, actors and industrial relations - focusing on the resources and strategies of governments, employers and trade unions - in nudging EU countries onto an upward convergence path.This book provides a unique analysis of socio-economic indicators to identify convergence trends in the EU. It defines a number of clusters that help to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of national socio-economic models and the European Social Model. Cross-country case studies help to identify the possible impact of global movements (migration, foreign investment) and policies (social protection, social dialogue, employment) on cross-country convergence.This book offers a timely assessment of convergence within the EU, identifying its drivers in the world of work and in institutions and industrial relations. It presents examples of where institutions and industrial relations can change convergence outcomes and proposes a range of useful policy options. Scholars and researchers will find it an invaluable reference for studies of European affairs and social policies.

There has been a rapid global expansion of academic and policy attention focusing on in-work poverty, acknowledging that across the world a large number of the poor are 'working poor'. Taking a global and multi-disciplinary perspective, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of current research at the intersection between work and poverty.Authoritative contributions from leading researchers in the field provide comprehensive coverage of conceptual and measurement issues, causal drivers and mechanisms, key empirical findings, policy issues and debates. The Handbook is unique in offering perspectives from a wide range of regions and countries, stretching beyond developed countries. It also does justice to the paradigmatic diversity in approaches to in-work poverty, offering a wealth of variety in disciplinary approaches.Academically rigorous, yet clear and concise, this Handbook will benefit students and scholars of public policy, politics, social policy and development studies. It will also prove accessible for policy analysts and journalists looking to explore the issue from new angles.

This white paper focusses on the policy interventions made to help people manage risk, uncertainty and the losses from events whose impacts are channeled primarily through the labour market. The objectives of the white paper are: to scrutinise the relevance and effects of prevailing risk-sharing policies in low- and middle-income countries; take account of how global drivers of disruption shape and diversify how people work; in light of this diversity, propose alternative risk-sharing policies, or ways to augment and improve current policies to be more relevant and responsive to peoples' needs; and map a reasonable transition path from the current to an alternative policy approach that substantially extends protection to a greater portion of working people and their families. This white paper is a contribution to the broader, global discussion of the changing nature of work and how policy can shape its implications for the wellbeing of people. We use the term risk-sharing policies broadly in reference to the set of institutions, regulations and interventions that societies put in place to help households manage shocks to their livelihoods. These policies include formal rules and structures that regulate market interactions (worker protections and other labour market institutions) that help people pool risks (social assistance and social insurance), to save and insure affordably and effectively (mandatory and incentivised individual savings and other financial instruments) and to recover from losses in the wake of livelihood shocks ("active" re-employment measures). Effective risk-sharing policies are foundational to building equity, resilience and opportunity, the strategic objectives of the World Bank's Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice. Given failures of factor markets and the market for risk in particular the rationale for policy intervention to augment the options that people have to manage shocks to their livelihoods is well-understood and accepted. By helping to prevent vulnerable people from falling into poverty -and people in the poorest households from falling deeper into poverty- effective risk-sharing interventions dramatically reduce poverty. Households and communities with access to effective risk-sharing instruments can better maintain and continue to invest in these vital assets, first and foremost, their human capital, and in doing so can reduce the likelihood that poverty and vulnerability will be transmitted from one generation to the next. Risk-sharing policies foster enterprise and development by ensuring that people can take appropriate risks required to grasp opportunities and secure their stake in a growing economy

This open access book discusses transnational trade union cooperation in Europe - its forms, focuses, conditions, and obstacles. It provides an overview of existing trade union cooperation and includes detailed analyses of two specific questions: the debates on statutory minimum wages and the Posting of Workers Directive. Drawing on empirical research, the authors take a comparative approach, considering national industrial relations regimes as well as individual sectors. With the ongoing processes of integration in Europe, it has become increasingly important for unions to cooperate with regard to employers and EU institutions. The authors illustrate the interconnections between national and European industrial relations, and explore the process of European integration in labour markets. Illustrating the potential for and difficulties involved in deepening trade union cooperation across Europe, this work is a vital read for trade unionists, researchers and students interested in European trade unionism and labour markets.

Through a series of studies, the overarching aim of this book is to investigate if and how the digitalization/digital transformation process causes (or may cause) the autonomy of various labor functions, and its impact in creating (or stymieing) various job opportunities on the labor market. This book also seeks to illuminate what actors/groups are mostly benefited by the digitalization/digital transformation and which actors/groups that are put at risk by it. This book takes its point of departure from a 2016 OECD report that contends that the impact digitalization has on the future of labor is ambiguous as on the one hand it is suggested that technological change is labor-saving, but on the other hand, it is suggested that digital technologies have not created new jobs on a scale that it replaces old jobs. Another 2018 OECD report indicated that digitalization and automation as such does not pose a real risk of destroying any significant number of jobs for the foreseeable future, although tasks would by and large change significantly. This would affects welfare, as most of its revenue stems from taxation, and particularly so from the taxation on labor (directly or indirectly). For this reason, this book will set out to explore how the future technological and societal advancements impact labor conditions. The book seeks to provide an innovative, enriching and controversial take on how various aspects of the labor market can be (and are) affected the ongoing digitalization trend in a way that is not covered by extant literature. As such, this book intends to cater to a wider readership, from a general audience and students, to specialized processionals and academics wanting to gain a deeper understanding of the possible future developments of the labor market in light of an accelerating digitalization/digital transformation of society at large.