Maarten van Klaveren

Information and Communication Technology (ICT)

In this chapter we concentrate on services closely related to the information and communication technology (ICT) sector. We have already dealt in Chapter 3 with the manufacturing sub-sectors related to ICT. One has to be aware that the division between ICT services and ICT-related manufacturing remains rather arbitrary, in particular because of the existence of large multinational enterprises (MNEs) that integrate these two activities. We used a ‘50 per cent plus’ rule here,1 which although objective remains arbitrary. Moreover, various publications and statistics, like the OECD Information Technology Outlook, combine reporting about ICT services and manufacturing. According to the latest edition of this Outlook (2010), ICT services and manufacturing sales fell over 6 per cent in 2009 in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, but for 2010 growth was expected to recover to 3-4 per cent. The OECD pointed out that the crisis sharpened the relocation trend for ICT manufacturing that had been under way since 1995 to 2008, resulting in a stagnation of ICT manufacturing growth in the overall OECD area. Where growth in the OECD area did take place, it was concentrated in South Korea and Japan. At the same time, the value added in ICT services in the OECD area as a whole grew by 6 per cent p.a. between 1995 and 2008, which in turn was stronger than that for value added in commercial services as a whole (4.8 per cent). According to the OECD, in 2009–2010 ICT services firms in the OECD area ‘weathered the crisis much better than manufacturing firms’. In particular Internet-related services have recently shown almost constant growth; for instance, even in the crisis year of 2009, sales of the world’s ten largest Internet firms increased by 10 per cent (OECD 2010).

Wage and workforce adjustments in the economic crisis in Germany and the Netherlands

This study uses data from a continuous employee web-survey to investigate the trade-off between wage and workforce adjustments and the role of industrial relations in firm-level responses to the economic crisis in Germany and the Netherlands. Workforce adjustments seemed to be a continuous organizational strategy, but wage adjustments were less often reported. We found no large-scale evidence of wage concessions being traded-off for job protection in the two countries. Collective bargaining ensured that wage-setting was more robust than employment protection: employees covered by collective agreements reported workforce adjustments more often than wage adjustments. Low-educated and low-wage employees reported basic wage reductions more often: the economic crisis increased wage inequality. Labour hoarding was reported predominantly by young, male employees with a permanent, full-time contract.

The Retail Industry

In Europe, the retail trade is the largest of the low-wage industries. People work here on the margins of the labour market and trade union attempts to organize workers frequently meet structural difficulties, not least because workers are largely employed in small establishments spread across wide geographical areas (cf. Dribbusch 2003). In 2010, the retail industry in the EU27 employed slightly less than 19.1 million people, of which about 15.2 million were wage earners. An estimated 3.9 million were self-employed though the numbers here were falling. For the European Union (EU) as a whole, the high point in retail employment occurred in 2008, when the workforce reached a total over 19.5 million (European Foundation 2012). The available statistics are not easy to interpret due to a break in the time series for at least two countries,1 but between 2008 and 2010 in both the 10 and the 13 EU countries under study, it seems likely that joint retail employment fell by about 2 per cent. In 2008, 11.5 million wage earners and self-employed were employed in the retail industry of the ten countries, accounting for 7.7 per cent of their workforces. In that year the share of retail (headcount) in national employment varied from lows of 6.3 per cent (Belgium) and 6.6 per cent (Finland) to 8.8 per cent (Netherlands, Poland) rising to 11.0 per cent in the United Kingdom. It should be noted that their Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) shares were one or two percentage points lower because of the large incidence of part-time workers in the industry (authors’ calculations based on Eurostat Annual enterprise statistics; Trawinska 2012). This particular incidence is one of the main characteristics of current retail employment. In a number of Western European countries (Denmark, Germany, United Kingdom) about half of the retail workforce is made up of part-timers. France with less than 30 per cent and the Netherlands with 70 per cent part-timers (Van Klaveren 2010) were at opposite ends of this particular spectrum.

Union organising in the Netherlands - a combination of organising and servicing strategies

Several authors have recently analysed the Anglo-Saxon post-Thatcherite legal and industrial arena vis-a-vis union organising, sometimes comparing it with organising in continental European industrial relations systems (cf. Gall 2003, 2006b; Frege and Kelly 2003, 2004). In the Anglo-Saxon industrial relations systems, union power and influence seem more directly linked with union density and lay activism than in countries like the Netherlands and Germany. Frege and Kelly (2003: 16, 19) suggested that, while US and British union leaders have long regarded membership loss as an indicator of union decline, notably German union leaders have been less concerned with membership decline because of the institutional union protection, like mandatory extension (ME) of collective agreements. This assessment may also be relevant for the Netherlands, with its industrial relations system resembling that of Germany and an even stronger legal base for ME. In the same vein, Heery (2003) asked why ‘union organising’ the unorganised is central to attempts at union revitalisation in Britain and the US but is less of a priority in continental Europe. These differences in priorities may seem outdated. Actually, arguments for emphasising union organising efforts in countries like Germany and the Netherlands look convincing, especially as institutional union protection seems to be weakening here.

Minimum Wages, Collective Bargaining and Economic Development in Asia and Europe

1. Asia: A Comparative Perspective 2. China 3. Vietnam 4. Korea 5. Japan 6. Pakistan 7. India 8. Indonesia 9. Thailand 10. Europe: A Comparative Perspective 11. France 12. Italy 13. Germany 14. The Netherlands 15. The Nordic Countries 16. Central And Eastern Europe 17. The United Kingdom 18. The Russian Federation Statistical Appendix: Comparative Statistics

Employment of Young Women

MDG3 aims at promoting gender equality and empowerment of women, among other ways by increasing the share of women in non-agricultural paid employment. Paid, non-subsistence employment outside agriculture is essential for young women’s perspectives. This full chapter is dedicated to employment issues touching young women, discussing employment perspectives and women’s labour force participation. The focus then shifts to formal and informal employment, an important distinction in the 14 countries. Why do some countries notice a decrease in informal employment, while others do not? Next to be covered are unemployment and underemployment, the transition from school to work and child labour. Migration, addressed in Chapter 2, comes to the fore again because most migration flows are driven by employment opportunities and wage differentials. A chapter about employment cannot be written without detailing the female employment structure by industries and occupations, discussing the distribution of women workers and the female share in these industries and occupations. The Decisions for Life (DFL) project targeted eight occupations in the services sector that offer young women perspectives on work. The chapter ends with a description of these occupations.

Substitution or Segregation? The Impact of Changes in Employment, Production and Product on Gender Composition in Dutch Manufacturing 1899-1999

This study focuses on the issue of substitution or segregation in the demand for female labour. Based on an extensive overview of detailed studies, the authors examine fluctuations in the gender composition of the workforce in four major sectors of Dutch manufacturing industry over the past century. Womens share in employment has been stable in the clothing industry, fluctuated in textiles, increased in food production and decreased in Philips Electronics. Changes in the proportion of women in these industries are primarily explained by segregation, that is by fluctuations in employment in the male and female domains. Only a few examples of substitution can be traced. These are primarily driven by labour shortages, and the numbers of workers involved are small. Overwhelmingly, employers prefer to act within gender boundaries.This study focuses on the issue of substitution or segregation in the demand for female labour. Based on an extensive overview of detailed studies, the authors examine fluctuations in the gender composition of the workforce in four major sectors of Dutch manufacturing industry over the past century. Womens share in employment has been stable in the clothing industry, fluctuated in textiles, increased in food production and decreased in Philips Electronics. Changes in the proportion of women in these industries are primarily explained by segregation, that is by fluctuations in employment in the male and female domains. Only a few examples of substitution can be traced. These are primarily driven by labour shortages, and the numbers of workers involved are small. Overwhelmingly, employers prefer to act within gender boundaries.

Assessing the scale of women’s informal work: An industry outlook for 14 developing countries

This chapter examines the difficulty of assessing the scale of informal employment from a gender perspective: as we show, the widespread paucity of adequate data of sufficient quality is a major obstacle. This, in turn, has significant implications for effective policy-making for the informal economy generally, and from a gender perspective in particular. We focus on industries where large shares of women workers may be assumed, in particular agriculture; wholesale and retail; and hotels, restaurants and catering. Evidence is presented from 14 countries covered in the 2008‒11 Decisions for Life (DFL) project, a major trade union project aiming at empowering adolescent girls and young women in work in which the authors were involved as researchers. This project covered the large countries Brazil, India and Indonesia, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, and the sub-Saharan African countries Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Currently, the harmonized labour force statistics available at country level deliver only a limited contribution to the understanding of the opportunities and constraints that, in particular, women in agriculture face in their efforts to attain decent work and a decent living. For various reasons, leaving out employment data on agriculture may well diminish the possibilities of assessing these perspectives. First, it hampers the assessment of the specific conditions for the structural transformation of national economies that does justice to the role of employment. The most important processes here are related to the shift of employment from agriculture, with large shares of low-productive, own-account workers and contributing family members, to the manufacturing industry and in particular to the services sector. Our statistical exercise combined with industry information on the commerce sector suggests that in quite some developing countries the perspectives for notably (young) women on decent and sustainable employment linked with the shift away from agriculture may be much less rosy than value-added and productivity calculations may indicate. Better employment data at country and industry levels may clarify prospects and problems of particular Second, the lack of adequate national employment data hampers insight in the constraints of this transformation in terms of the lack of infrastructural provisions and basic services. For example, overviews of the situation of women in agriculture in sub-Saharan countries clarify that the persistent lack of such provisions and services turns out to be a major factor in the continuation of conditions of poverty and food insecurity where majorities of women are locked in; even more so if unbalanced transformation takes off and large-scale commercial agriculture starts to emerge. Time and time again, most of the burden of such developments is on girls and women (cf. Van Klaveren et al., 2009c, 2009e, 2009f, for South Africa, Malawi and Zambia; Van Klaveren and Tijdens, 2012: 117‒19). Socio-economic policies aiming at decent work and decent living inclusive of the interests of girls and women, cannot do without adequate statistics. Such statistics should capture their large contributions to the informal economy, including in terms of time use. Here integration of labour force survey data with data from household survey and time-use surveys may be worthwhile. Our research also suggests that there is merit in the expansion of surveying employment status, wherever possible connected with surveying coverage of social security and infrastructural provisions. Such surveys may generate more shaded pictures of formality/informality, for example by using an informality index.

Transport and Telecom

In this chapter, we examine internationalization, wages, working conditions, and industrial relations in transport and telecommunications, or, to put it more precisely, transport and storage (NACE H, codes49–53) as well as telecommunications (NACE 61). Of these two, transport and storage is by far the largest sector. In the EU27 it employed about 10.3 million people in 2010, or slightly over 5 per cent of total employment. In the 13 countries under scrutiny, 8.9 million were employed (86 per cent of the European Union (EU) total) and 6,270,000 (61 per cent) in the ten countries for which we have Wageindicator data. The telecommunications sector was much smaller, and employed slightly over 1.1 million people in 2010 in the EU27. In the 13 countries we studied 923,000 were employed in telecommunications (83 per cent of the EU total) and in the ten countries 636,000 (57 per cent). Between 1995 and 2006, employment in the EU transport sector grew annually by 2.0 per cent but in 2007–2008 growth slowed down.1 Such a slowdown had already occurred some years earlier in the telecommunications industry. In the 1990s, turnover and employment in telecom both grew strongly but, after the turn of the century, employment growth between 2000 and 2006 declined to an annual average of only 0.3 per cent (TNO 2009b, 2009c). Thereafter, from 2008 to 2010, employment (headcount) in both industries fell substantially in the EU27: in transport by approximately 4 per cent and in telecom by nearly 6 per cent. For the ten countries with Wageindicator data, the decrease in transport was somewhat lower but for telecom it was even more severe.2

The AIAS MNE Database and the WageIndicator Survey

In this chapter we present an overview of the AIAS multinational enterprises (MNE) database as well as some preliminary analyses of data derived from it. As we will show, the central variables in this database are the locations of companies, subsidiaries, and establishments, and their mutual ownership relations. The inclusion of such data allowed us to trace patterns of internationalization of MNEs, such as their degrees of internationalization (their spread over countries) and diversification (their range of activities). We mainly focused on these patterns in the five industries scrutinized, namely, metal and electronics manufacturing, retail, finance and call centres, information and communication technology (ICT), and transport and telecom. All of these industries are the subjects of detailed analyses in Chapters 3 to 7. Additionally, in this chapter and in Chapter 8 we also report at a more general level, highlighting the five industries jointly and/or the private sector in general in the countries studied. For purposes of more detailed reporting we selected companies using two criteria: their degree of internationalization (having substantial interests in at least 3 of 13 countries) and their sales ranking in the industry in question. In addition, we also used company annual reports for building the MNE database and sales data were taken from the yearly Forbes and Fortune rankings.