Overview For some time now, the governments of a few advanced countries,as well as their unions and some parts of the business sector, have been pressing proposals to establish multilateral rules permitting punitive trade measures to be taken against countries deemed to be failing to uphold core...

When this chapter was originally written for the Handbook of Globalisation (Michie, 2003) the burning issue regarding labour standards was the attempt by advanced country governments and unions, particularly the US, to establish multilateral rules in the World Trade Organization (WTO) to enforce...

"By globalization, national economies strengthen their ties towards each other; the same process causes growing interdependence" (Duwendag 2003, p. 119). Internationally agreed standards are regularly called for to guide and direct the process of globalisation. E. g. the German Vice-chancellor...

This paper explores the potential role of adverse working conditions in the determination of workers’ sickness absences. Our data contain detailed information on the prevalence of job disamenities at the workplace from a representative sample of Finnish workers. The results from reduced-form...

The paper examines the results of a job satisfaction survey of employees of the Police Service in Slovenia, whereby the data from surveys conducted in 2002, 2009 and 2012 are compared and analysed. In the framework of the targeted research project entitled ‘The establishment of a system for...

This article presents an analysis of the evolution of job quality from 2000 to 2010 in the European Union 15, using a newly developed composite measure of job quality that is applied to the European Working Conditions Survey. After a careful study of the evolution of job quality across the...

This paper explores the effects of outsourcing on employee well-being through the use of the Finnish linked employer-employee data. The direct negative effect of outsourcing is attributable to greater job destruction and worker outflow. In terms of perceived well-being, the winners in...

Labor union membership is associated with higher levels of life satisfaction in low income countries, but not in high income countries. Evidence suggests that union membership affects life satisfaction in low income countries through better working conditions.

This paper presents the main findings of the author’s study of statistics as well as Eu-ropean surveys on working conditions. Such solutions enabled to compare the data and make the results more reliable. The collected data concerns all Member States of the European Un-ion, where it was...

This study was produced for the “Study of Instruments and Tools to anticipate the effects of industrial change on employment, trades and vocational qualifications” and for DG V (Employment) of the European Commission in the late 1994. It started when the previous Portuguese government was...