Contenu du sommaire : Les institutions du travail : quelles réévaluations ?

In the American labour market 20 % to 30 % of workers hold a low wage job (depending on the threshold utilized to define low wages). These jobs are mainly in the service sector, but include a large number of sectors and occupations. Given these magnitudes reducing the size of the low wage sector is an important goal for public policy. These policies include minimum wage and standard setting policies, as well as trade unions. Innovative policies have also been developed at the local level: organizing efforts by community organizations and worker centers, living wage ordinances that set decent wages that apply to local governments or their subcontractors, and linkages between wages and economic development incentives.

This article compares job quality of second generation immigrants in France and in the United States. Using two different labor surveys (Emploi en Continu Survey and Current Population Survey) between 2008 and 2012, I analyze job quality, which relies on three dimensions: compensation, job security and working hours. The first contribution is that I find immigrants' children have jobs of lower quality compared to the natives in both countries other things being equal, with an important heterogeneity across origins in both countries. Second I shed light on more frequent origin-based inequalities in France than in the United States. Overall the results suggest that French institutions might contribute to better job quality than American ones. However they tend on the one hand to foster inequalities between natives and second generation immigrants and on the other hand to make job access more difficult.

This article focuses on the issue of the minimum wage in Turkey. It investigates the impact of the minimum wage on a labour market characterized by very low rates of labour force participation and employment, a high unemployment rate and a significant share of informal employment. It assesses empirically the impact of the minimum wage on employment of non-agricultural salaried workers over the period 1988-2013. More specifically, it distinguishes the effect of the minimum wage on the employment of males and females. It distinguishes also that impact on formal and informal jobs. The results show that the minimum wage negatively affects the whole salaried employment, and male and female salaried employment. These results are consistent with the predictions of the neoclassical theory. The results also indicate that the minimum wage has a positive effect on formal salaried employment and a negative impact on informal salaried employment. Although this result contradicts the predictions of the traditional competitive two-sector model of minimum wage, it is in line with the findings of the empirical literature on developing countries. We explain this result by a labour supply shift from the informal sector to the formal one. We conclude that the minimum wage is an important tool of public policy that Turkey should continue to use.

Labour laws regarding economic redundancies have recently been thoroughly reformed in France as well as in Italy. In both countries, the reforms aim at flexibilizing and securing the terminations of employment contracts ; but their content turns out to be very different. Through two procedural reforms, national laws assign different (if not opposite) roles to judges and to litigations, thus demonstrating that the flexibility and security objective does not have a clear and unambiguous legal meaning.

This article deals with a microeconomic reassessment of how the employment protection legislation is actually used by employers. Focused on the separation rules of open-ended contracts (CDI), the aim of the article is to improve empirical understanding of the use of firings (both for economic reasons – LME – and for personal reasons – LMP), resignations and mutual agreed terminations (RC). First, I show the difficulties and lacks of the current statistical data and next I propose a larger view of the use of CDI terminations in French firms with at least 10 employees. Then, my analysis shows a very weak use of economic firings, which has steadily decreased for almost three decades. Although there is a larger variation in the use of LMP over a long period, it has decreased since 2008 when the RC was introduced. This latter result may suggest eventual substitutions between these two types of terminations. By contrast, I find rather more complementary effects between the different types of CDI terminations.

In this paper, we investigate the microeconomic effects of one major feature of the German Hartz reforms (2003-2005), namely the reduction in compensation duration for older unemployed above 45 years of age. We look at two potential effects of this measure: on job take-up rates, but also on post-unemployment outcomes, through indicators of matching quality (new job stability) and job quality (type of job contract). Applying difference-in-differences estimators, we show that the effects of this specific reform were rather scant. Regarding unemployment duration, only the unemployed within a specific age group (55 to 59 years old) were affected by the reform. Evidence suggests that this is because they previously used unemployment schemes as a bridge to early retirement. In addition, we find some evidence of detrimental effects on job quality.