Political discontent and labour in a post-growth region: A view from East Germany

While many economies in the Arab States region continue their post-pandemic recovery, recovery of the labour market lags behind, requiring concerted efforts to intensify diversification and to create jobs in more resilient sectors, the ILO report finds.The region's unemployment rate is expected to remain high at 9.8 per cent in 2024, above pre-pandemic levels, reflecting various factors that affect the region's labour markets such as segmentation, political instability, conflict, economic crises, a weak private sector and demographic pressures.

Evaluation of Germany's Environmental Research. In the course of Germany's re-unification the German Science Council evaluated the research institutions of the former GDR with the aim of restructuring research in East Germany. In environmental sciences special emphasis was given to the creation of regional networks of research units within and outside universities. As a follow-up and expansion of the evaluation in eastem Germany, a similar project was launched in West Germany. In the course of 18 months, a study group of 14 permanent members with about 100 temporary experts is visiting all kinds of institutions engaged in environmental research. The reviews are based on the replies to an extensive questionnaire and on scientific presentations and discussions. Meetings with nation-wide attendance are also held on topics like the socio-economic research related to environmental issues. The primary objective of the study are recommendations to be made on certain structural improvements of German environmental research and its links with neighbouring countries. The study is still going on and its report will not be available before the second half of 1993. Therefore only personal impressions can be reported. They include the need for further flexible, multidisciplinary centers within and outside universities. More coordination is needed and more setting of priorities, although competition between institutes and teams remains indispensable. More emphasis is needed on the psychological, social, economical and legal parts of environmental research.

Human resources is one of the most important factors of competitiveness of enterprises of machine-building industry of Ukraine in terms of innovation and technological development, globalization reforms and market economy. Employment trends at the domestic enterprises of the machine-building industry of Ukraine have been investigated in recent years. Negative trends of reducing the number of the employed population found that primarily due to the poor state of the industry as a whole, the crisis phenomena in the economy, low wages, a lack of interest of companies in raising skill levels, the migration of skilled workers abroad, the lack of systematic planning of human resource development.. As a result, the difficult situation takes place: the state of social and labor relations at the enterprises of the machine-building industry is deteriorating, the level of conflict is increasing, protest activity is manifested, etc. The analysis of employment of workers and the analysis of expenses on compensation on the example of the leading enterprises of machine-building industry of the Zaporozhye region is carried out and testifies to existence of numerous problems for the sphere of personnel management. It is necessary to deal not with the causes of the crisis, but rather with its consequences for the exit of the enterprise from the crisis. Improvements in the machine-building industry are entirely within the competence of industry participants and relevant ministries and departments. The attention is focused on the human factor as one of the determining factors in the crisis, on the need for a systematic approach to personnel management also to achieve the goal of bringing the company out of the crisis. Prospect in further researches is carrying out the statistical analysis of communications for separate factors and indicators of and indicators of economic activities in machine-building production enterprises to use of correlation and regression instrumentes.

The article is devoted to the study of new forms of e-business, as in connection with the increasing influence of Internet Commerce, there is a fundamentally new situation in social and labor relations. In recent years, there has been a steady trend of increasing students' interest in earnings in the Network. Students work on the computer, earning money by performing various tasks and projects, which actually led to the development of new forms of employment. The aim of the study is to analyze the practices of copywriting as a form of earnings in the Internet space. The leading method for the study of this problem is the method of free interview, which allows identifying the pros and cons, as well as the subtleties of students’ work on the Internet. The article analyzes the concept of copywriting. Motives of activity in the field of copywriting are described; skills necessary in this type of work are revealed and the basic principles of the copywriter’s successful work are considered. The advantages and disadvantages of copywriting relative to other forms of earnings in the Internet space are established. The novelty and originality of the study lies in the fact that the main socio-psychological qualities necessary for the work of a copywriter are highlighted: literacy; the ability to express thoughts concisely; attentiveness. The main motives of students to earn money on the Internet are established: self-realization in the profession and improvement of their skills; the desire to independently manage their work and free time; the desire to communicate with interesting people. The advantages of copywriting for students are identified: the ability to work remotely and at home, without visiting the office; flexible schedule and the ability to choose the amount of their load; unlimited opportunities for self-development (books, communication on thematic forums); getting pleasure from their work; regulation of their communication circle; self-realization in the profession; the ability to increase their income and its dependence only on the business activity of the copywriter and his/her responsible attitude to business. Disadvantages of copywriting for students are identified: instability (risk of payment’s non-receipt); abnormal working schedule; the need to spend time on activities unrelated to specialization; lack of experience exchange and lack of communication; low wages, which is determined by high competition; the problem of income legalization, as well as the lack of social guarantees, social package, lack of career growth, promotion. The data obtained in the work can be used in labor psychology, age psychology, social psychology, pedagogy, sociology, as well as for further theoretical development of this issue.

ABSTRACTSIn the past decade a shift in ecological politics has set off a scramble to “protect” and “defend” putatively pristine ecosystems in Africa, Amazonia and Southeast Asia. This aggressive program bespeaks a new sense of manifest ecological destiny among environmental organizations and donors and has given rise to a “politics of stabilization” characterized by new forms of property and labor relationships. This paper traces the impact of ecological policies on commodity production in Gambia where communal market gardens run by women's groups are being converted into privatized orchards managed by male landholders in a state‐directed, donor‐funded initiative designed to meet stabilization goals. The zealous pursuit of commercial objectives has come at the expense of critical food entitlement and livelihood strategies which currently form the basis of the rural Gambian political economy. The paper uses this evidence to urge reconsidering the politics of environmental intervention.

Significance Deteriorating labour market conditions are having negative economic and social effects. The unemployment rate reached 13.6% in the three months ending in April, with 14 million people jobless. The two-year recession and political instability have delayed any sustained recovery in the labour market. Labour relations will also be affected by the controversial labour reform bill, already approved by the Lower House and currently under debate in the Senate. Impacts High unemployment and low prospects of near-term economic improvements will fuel the government’s unpopularity. Labour informality will increase if the domestic market continues showing signs of deceleration. Labour reform may reduce, for better or worse, the reaction time of the labour market to changes in the goods market.

Over the last few years the construct of career maturity has gained more importance for the practice of vocational orientation and the scientific discourse. In the meantime there are a number of further developments and new concepts in the German-speaking area. Otherwise career maturity is considered obsolete, although in many cases existing measuring instruments are still beiing used. For measuring psychological constructs as a part of career maturity (specific attitudes and skills) Likert scales are used almost exclusively. Precise planning and action-related variables are largely ignored, although they can provide a deeper insight into the orientation level of adolescents. The article raises questions about operationalization of the construct which can be processed by closer observation of association structures within an extended field of variables. Using data from a regional panel survey relations between attitude aspects and other career choice variables are shown and systematically studied by log-linear models. Results thus obtained support the construct validation and provide new indications of its scope and relevance for research and practice.

The large number of laborers was a part of the manufacturing factors during the industrial development of South Korea under an authoritarian government in order to control labor as a manufacturing factor and for the stability of the government is significant. Chile is also another country that had success in developing its economy under a militant government. The two countries have labor control policies regulated due to the fact that it involves the economic sector. Moreover, as labor is also a large group that influences the politics, this study tried to search for the similarities and differences of the labor control policies and the reasons for the policies created by the Park Chung-Hee’s government (1961-1979) and Augusto Pinochet’s government (1973-1989). Based on secondary sources, this thesis found that the purpose of controlling the labor of the two countries were for their political and economic stability, for the elimination of rivals and left-wing idealists which infiltrated the labor class to prevent excessive political authority possession, and for economic development which is the most important target of the authoritarian government to create legitimacy of their rule. Labor is another factor affecting the economic system. Therefore, the low wages and negotiation limit should be controlled in order to attract investment and foreign investors. However, the intensive labor control was different. Initially, Chilean labor force was powerful and united, so Pinochet’s labor control has been achieved through violent suppression and then he has stepped down from his position during economic development process. In contrast, South Korean labor force was not powerful and lack of unity comparing to Chile. As a result, the rights and freedom of people were suspended during Park Chung-Hee’s Yushin Constitution period.

This is the first comprehensive account in any language of Israel's central labour organization, the Histradut, and the Israeli Labour Party, which dominated politics for more than four decades. The author develops a political economy approach which draws on contemporary theories of labour movements, labour markets, and state/economy relations. In comparison with the corporatist social democracies of Western Europe, the Israeli case is shown to be in many ways paradoxical. Shalev demonstrates that unravelling these paradoxes provides both challenges and insights for comparative studies of the advanced capitalist democracies. At the same time, he offers students of Israeli society a critical alternative to previous scholarship on labour relations, left-wing politics, and domestic public policy. This volume provides a controversial and theoretically informed assessment of the historical record, complemented by a novel interpretation of the dramatic political and economic instability which surfaced in Israel during the 1970s.

Germany was comparatively successful in weathering the macroeconomic crises of the 1970s and early 1980s, and its industrial sector remained highly competitive throughout. Nevertheless, unemployment has been high and is still rising. The impact of unification is only a part of the explanation. Instead, the very formula for Germany's past success is also the key to its current problems. Cooperative labour relations, on which German international competitiveness depends, were maintained by using the welfare state's generous exit options from the labour market for older and less productive workers. Given the prevailing mode of financing the “Bismarckian” welfare state, however, the resulting rise of social security contributions added to the costs of labour throughout the economy. As the government relied on the same solution in coping with the massive employment losses in East Germany after unification, non‐wage labour costs have risen to a level that can be sustained only by highly productive types of work. This constrains the growth of private services that have compensated industrial job losses in other countries.

Taking Sides in the "Bloodless Croton War":The Coverage of the Croton Aqueduct Strike and Labor's Relationship with the Penny Press Mark Bernhardt In April 1840, Irish laborers working on New York City's Croton Aqueduct went on strike, demanding higher wages and freedom from the requirement they shop at company stores. Initially, these unskilled workers received support from James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, and Moses Yale Beach, publisher of the New York Sun. Both Bennett and Beach blasted the contractors for paying unethically low wages and exploiting their workers by forcing them to buy basic necessities at exorbitant prices. However, as time passed, the two editors became more supportive of the contractors and increasingly critical of the strikers. They published the contractors' rebuttals to the workers' charges and characterized the strikers as violent hooligans preventing others from earning a living. The coverage of the Croton Aqueduct strike in the Herald and Sun reveals the unsteady relationship these papers had with laborers at a volatile time in the city's history in a particularly insightful way because of the strike's complexity, not just pitting employees against employers, but also dividing unskilled workers from skilled, strikebreakers from strikers, and Irish immigrants from the general population. In 1833, Benjamin Day founded the Sun (selling the paper to Beach in 1838). He and several imitators, including Bennett, developed a new business model and style of journalism to take advantage of social and economic changes in the city, exploiting untapped markets and revenue sources. Rather than sell papers that targeted upper-class readers by annual subscription and accept funding from a political party for supporting its platform, they sold papers designed for the city's rapidly expanding working- and middle-class populations for a penny-per-issue on the street and [End Page 9] generated the bulk of their revenue by selling advertising space.1 This approach gave the Penny Press, so named because of how the papers were sold, a more diverse audience and greater political independence compared to other papers. The Penny Press' furnishing of papers for the masses had important ramifications for New York's labor movement. An economic depression crippled the labor press after 1837, which had advocated for the interests and unity of the working class, and a short time later the Penny Press became the primary newspapers supporting labor.2 However, the Penny Press was never fully committed to backing strikes. Their business model required publishers to balance the disparate labor interests of readers, often divided along lines of profession and ethnicity, and the business community, which opposed strikes, to succeed financially. While their independence from political parties and upper-class subscribers gave them the freedom to stand for anyone they chose, in opting to take one side they inevitably risked alienating the other. Seeking a middle ground, Bennett and Beach adopted specific stances on labor issues that offered both employers and workers some support. First, they endorsed the right to organize and strike, although Bennett opposed certain unions he perceived as too radical and both believed the strike should be used as a last resort. Second, they backed the right to work and opposed attempts, especially the use of intimidation or violence, to stop people from crossing picket lines. Third, they sided with property owners and opposed threats to or the destruction of private property as a method of labor activism. Consequently, as the coverage of the Croton Aqueduct strike reveals, the labor press collapse left striking workers, particularly the unskilled, with a less committed ally and no other press support. With more sides involved than in most strikes, the Croton Aqueduct strike coverage provides a detailed view of whose interests Bennett and Beach [End Page 10] favored and the type of support different categories of workers could anticipate from their papers. By supporting both workers and employers to varying degrees at different times they managed not to alienate either, but ultimately favored employers by criticizing the workers with the weakest bargaining position for using their most valuable bargaining chips. The Penny Press and its Audience The Herald's and Sun's wavering commitment to the Croton...

Among the multitude of unionized occupations that have been analysed by labour economists and others, fishing, for some reason or other, has received scant attention. Few articles and no books, as far as the authors are aware, have been written about unionism in the fishing industry of the United States. College text-books and surveys of labour rarely if ever mention the subject. Yet fishermen's unions in that country have been organized and active for more than a half century, and the International Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union today is an important affiliate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Their origins and history remain hidden in obscurity.Much the same situation exists in Canada. Some incidental attention has been paid, in regional surveys like that of the Dawson Commission published in 1944, to trade unions and co-operatives among fishermen in the Maritime Provinces. The far larger, more active, and more important fishermen's unions of British Columbia have been virtually ignored. The 1948 edition of Professor H. A. Logan's Trade Unions in Canada, for instance—by far the most thorough and authoritative survey of the organized labour movement in Canada to date—gives passing reference to the Canadian Fishermen's Union of Nova Scotia, but makes no mention whatever of the Deep Sea Fishermen's Union or of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, both of British Columbia. Yet these two organizations are, or should be, of considerable interest and importance to labour economists and other students of trade unionism. Their history reaches back through more than a half century of diverse organizational growth, numerous and sometimes violent strikes, and generally turbulent labour relations. Both unions are today affiliated with the Canadian Trades and Labor Congress. The U.F.A.W.U. has a membership of some 8,000 fishermen and allied workers and jurisdiction over several thousand more. It negotiates province-wide master agreements with employer associations, governing labour matters in all major branches of one of the most important primary industries in British Columbia. Over one special group of fishermen it shares jurisdiction with the much smaller organization, the D.S.F.U.

The article analyzes the differentiation’s level of household incomes of Ukraine by individual indicators and formulated proposals for smoothing the imbalances of socio-economic development. Existing social distinctness has a destructive influence on the formation of innovation economic, because in such conditions high-tech products can’t be created, because low wages aren’t compatible with complex technological operation. This situation іs negative influence to social-psychical state of society, deform the motivation of economic behavior, is a significant factor that constrains the economic activity of population. There are also political implications of income inequality. They are due to the fact that in a society with high income differentiation is usually a large proportion of dissatisfied and unfair income distribution creates political instability. There, reducing the stratification of the population by income is the most important task of socio-economic policy. The authors were being summarized different approaches to the definition of “income differentiation”. An attempt is made to outline and summarize the main factors contributing to inequalities in the formation and distribution of income. The level of differentiation of household incomes of Ukraine in dynamics is analyzed. In particular, the study of the level of income differentiation was carried out by size and type of settlement (urban and rural households) and by gender (men and women). It was found that the income of the Ukrainian population differs significantly not only in size but also in structure. There has also been a link between income stratification and poverty. The authors compared how Ukrainian families’ perceptions of their own wealth/poverty differ from official statistics. The fact that there have not “middle class” in Ukraine was significant. The main scientific result is to prove the connection between the differentiation of income and disparities in socio-economic development. To smooth out inequalities in income distribution, measures are proposed, grouped by areas: economic growth; active policy in the labor market; small business development; formation of an effective system of social protection of vulnerable segments of the population.

The level of wages of citizens is one of the most important factors in the development of the state, the basis for the formation of society on the principles of social justice. Being under the constant influence of all participants of social and labor relations, the level of wages requires constant analysis and monitoring. In this case, special attention should be paid to the assessment of how wages perform their basic functions and ensure social justice, namely, contributes to the reduction of poverty and improve the overall standard of living of the working population. The article investigates the features of the formation of wages in the Ukrainian economy during 2010-2018. The dynamics of the minimum wage in the context of the impact on the poverty level of the working population of Ukraine is considered. The changes in the level of wages on average in the economy, the indices of nominal and real wages, as well as the differentiation of wages by individual types of economic activity that has developed in Ukraine in recent years are analyzed. The study revealed that the formation of wages in the Ukrainian economy does not correspond to the principle of social justice in society. Raising social standards, namely the statutory minimum wage, is aimed primarily at reducing only extreme forms of poverty. In recent years, Ukraine has seen a slowdown in the growth rate of both minimum and average wages, there is a drop in the overall standard of living of the working population. Traditionally, wages remain low (less than the national average) both in socially important activities (health and education) and in priority ones in terms of sustainable economic development (construction and agriculture). Low wages generally reduce the attractiveness of work, the motivation of workers, contribute to the outflow of labor to other activities (or even abroad), lead to imbalances in the labor market and the emergence of a shortage of qualified personnel. Thus, the issue of ensuring social justice in the formation of wages requires an immediate solution and should be a priority of state policy in the coming years.

This chapter begins with an account of routine police extortion to anchor its broader analysis of coercive policing and its entanglement with migrant precarity in Mae Sot. It considers how police harassment outside the factory gates has shaped not only everyday migrant life but also broader patterns of labor subordination. The chapter details how threats of arrest, detention, and deportation constrain migrants' access to legal protections, public spaces, and collective action. The chapter notes that these external pressures affect migrants' decisions within the workplace, limiting their mobility and leverage. It also recounts how practices of bribery and informal negotiation allow many migrants to remain undocumented, reinforcing employers' power while exposing workers to intensified exploitation. The chapter provides evidence of how the interplay between coercive policing and migrant strategies of evasion sustains low wages and segmented labor structures. It shows how these relations reproduce racialized hierarchies, normalized by prevailing anti-Myanmar sentiment. Finally, the chapter argues that labor relations in Mae Sot are shaped by extralegal enforcement as much as by formal economic policies, and that the entwinement of police and migrant practices constitutes a core feature of border capitalism in the region.