An Ontario (Canada) study used longitudinal data on high school seniors of 1973 to investigate educational and work decisions, looking at such factors as the influence of student characteristics on skill-to-job mismatch, predictors of mismatch for college versus university graduates, and effects of student exposure to alternative education on…

Of the currently unemployed workforce, a portion (100,000 to 2.1 million) can be termed dislocated workers. Even as the economy recovers from the current recession, these involuntarily unemployed workers will face serious problems finding new jobs because of structural changes in the economy. Current unemployment and training programs often do not…

Stagnant or declining wages for less-educated workers make policies to upgrade the job market options for low wage workers an urgent priority. One in three low wage workers lives in a low income family. The link between low basic skills and low wages is strong. No single standard of minimum skill requirements applies to all middle income jobs, and…

Most of the nonmetropolitan poor live in a household with at least one worker. In 1987, 70% of nonmetro poor family heads who were not ill, disabled, or retired worked for at least part of the year, and 24% worked full time, year-round. The employed proportion of the poor was significantly larger in nonmetro than metro areas. Despite a lengthy…

Unemployment compensation in the United States is provided through a federal-state system of unemployment insurance (UI). UI provides temporary partial wage replacement to active job seekers who are involuntarily out of work. For older workers, UI is an important source of income security and a potential influence on work incentives. For example,…

The moral and ethical values enunciated by America's leading religious organizations lay much of the groundwork for its major democratic institutions and establish the benchmarks by which U.S. employment conditions and policies should be measured. The public's perception of the economy's relative well-being is based on oversimplified statistical…

This study was conducted to determine how many workers are in low-wage jobs; their characteristics and changes in their characteristics over time; the characteristics of the low-wage jobs; gender, sex, and racial factors influencing participation in low-wage jobs; and the relationship of low-wage work to family poverty and welfare receipt. The…

This report summarizes the presentations and discussions at a conference on contingent labor sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor. The first two sections are introductory: (1) "Introduction to the Role of Contingent Labor" (Kathleen Christensen, Mary Murphree); and (2) "Between Now and the Year 2000: A Glimpse of the Workplace" (Jill Houghton…

Implications of new government approaches to manpower planning and its relationship to higher education in Ontario are examined. In January 1980 the Council of Ontario Universities released a background paper on the employment of university graduates, which reviewed the current major economic and demographic analyses of youth unemployment, the…

The examination of Irish manpower policy is largely devoted to a consideration of the strategy for economic development and permanent job creation--as well as to a study of various aspects of the procedures and administrative arrangements adopted to attain these objectives. Attention is drawn to the fundamental imbalances in the Irish…

This document examines the causes and consequences of Black male joblessness. First, key insights and recommendations of a 1993 policy roundtable on labor force participation and family formation are summarized. Discussed next are the following issues related to the economic and social alienation of Black men: joblessness and absence from the…

This policy statement focuses on ways of overcoming unemployment and underemployment for groups (young, old, disadvantaged) that typically experience high or prolonged joblessness, and on increasing incentives for productive work. Recommendations resulting from the CED study focus on these areas: new and expanded use on a nationwide basis of…

Work in the lives of most Third World nation women is not a matter of equity and/or self-actualization. Rather, the changing economic roles and responsibilities of women make working a matter of economic survival. Despite the limitations of existing definitional and measurement problems related to data collection, regional data do exist which…

Canadians' employment and working patterns were examined by analyzing the 1998 survey called New Approaches to Lifelong Learning and other recent surveys by Statistics Canada. "Work" was defined as comprising household labor, community volunteer activities, and paid employment, and "learning" was defined as comprising informal…

Research synthesized from three studies of the Finnish labor market indicates that a rapidly changing working life in Finland (and the rest of Europe) sets many different challenges for the workforce. In Finland, the population is even more aged than in the other European Union (EU) member states, and the transition of older workers to retirement…