Suchergebnisse

In this article, I describe the work performed by service providers, defined broadly, and the changes in this work engendered by an increasing reliance on encounters as a form of service delivery. This delivery mechanism facilitates the view of service providers as labor costs to be managed and reduced rather than human resources to be nurtured and developed. The provision of services by encounters may be a prelude both to the substitution of machine providers for humans and to large-scale unemployment.

The gig-economy is a flexible form of labor characterized by project employment on digital platforms. The purpose of the article is to analyze the essence of the gig-economy in order to assess its impact on the work of the older generation. The analytical review was made taking into account the following tasks: 1) analysis of relevant literature, 2) secondary analysis of quantitative, qualitative and statistical data, 3) assessing the impact of the gig-economy on the employment of pensioners in terms of precarization. An analysis of the literature shows that the "flexibilization" of the labor market is described in ambiguous terms: a number of authors describe the positive aspects (no set schedule, growth of individuality, eradication of bureaucratic restrictions), while others focus on the negative consequences (instability of income, lack of social guarantees, overexploitation, etc.). The author highlights a number of negative risks for the elderly gig-employed (forced self-employment, vulnerability to fraud, lack of social guarantees from the employer, etc.), but comes to the conclusion that the gig economy has a fairly positive impact on the employment of the elderly: 1) social security (basic pension income and social state protection), 2) integration into a new labor reality and opportunities to improve well-being, 3) resocialization, etc. A separate advantage of selfemployment is a fiscal innovation that is beneficial for the elderly which allows pensioners to obtain the status of self-employed without sacrificing pension indexation. The scientific novelty of the study lies in analyzing the employment of the older generation through the lens of the gig-economy and precarization.

Regardless of primary population served, human service organizations are likely to come into contact with individuals who have been currently or formerly involved in the sex trade. In the United States, social workers have had a fraught history with this population, either treating them like delinquents or like victims in need of rescue. Sex worker activists in the United States continue to decry the negative treatment provided by individuals in the helping professions, even as harm reduction, the practice of reducing the harm of risky behaviors, has entered the service provision lexicon as an antidote to abstinence-only services. This article uses qualitative interviews with managers of human service organizations in the city of Chicago to determine how they think about their work with sex workers and how they perceive the proposed solutions to "fixing" the sex trade: abolitionism and decriminalization. Findings show that despite the dominant discourse of abolitionism in the United States, most of managers in this project believe full decriminalization of sex work will best assist their sex worker clients. Future research needs to understand how this finding holds in different settings and how this affects current efforts to advocate for decriminalization.

This study examined the relationship between labor market policies and employees' willingness to make concessions in order to avoid unemployment. In contrast to previous work that analyzed the behavior of employers and the unemployed, we examined how labor market policies influence employees' flexibility. Multilevel modeling techniques were applied to a data set that was created by combining individual‐level data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) with country‐level information from the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development. The main findings of our analyses were that dismissal protection and unemployment benefits do make a difference to employees' willingness to make concessions, and that the relationships between the willingness to make concessions and labor market policies are nonlinear. Substantively, these nonlinear relationships suggest that employees' willingness to be flexible is negatively associated with both "too much" and "too little" social protection.