Fixed Term And Permanent Employment Contracts

This paper constructs a theory of the coexistence of fixed-term and permanent employment contracts in an environment with ex-ante identical workers and employers. Workers under fixed-term contracts can be dismissed at no cost while permanent employees enjoy labor protection. In a labor market characterized by search and matching frictions, firms find optimal to discriminate by offering some workers a fixed-term contract while offering other workers a permanent contract. Match-specific quality between a worker and a firm determines the type of contract offered. We analytically characterize the firm's hiring and firing rules. Using matched employer-employee data from Canada, we estimate the wage equations from the model. The effects of firing costs on wage inequality vary dramatically depending on whether search externalities are taken or not into account.

In recent decades enterprises worldwide have reaped advantages of hiring employees on a contractual fixed-term basis, thus derogating from their traditional participation in the social protection of workers and insulating themselves from legal liability for unjust dismissal. A broad spectrum of effectiveness has emerged in this development, as different countries have adopted varying measures to regulate the conditions under which fixed- term employment contracts are written, applied, and interpreted. This important book --- which reprints papers submitted to the 10th Comparative Labour Law Seminar of the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training held in Tokyo on 8 and 9 March 2010 - details the regulatory approaches to fixed-term contracts in major industrial jurisdictions in Asia and Europe, providing an opportunity to explore normative directions for labour law and policy in the age of a diversified workforce. Nine Knowledgeable and experienced contributors describe and analyse the legal status of fixed-term employment contracts (including relevant case law) in Australia, Britain, China, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Sweden, and Taiwan. Each author takes into account evaluations from scholars, policymakers, and stakeholders to his or her country's regulatory approach to fixed-term employment contracts, revealing an array of responses ranging from a view that such contracts enhance employment opportunities in society to advocating suppression of their use as inherently abusive and discriminatory. The combined effect of these nine essays is to greatly increase our awareness of the nature of fixed-term employment contracts, from their fundamental value as social policy instruments to their inextricable connection with the law of dismissal. The book sets the stage for deeper and more firmly grounded work that promises to elucidate the underlying pattern of a new employer-employee relationship emerging on a worldwide scale.

Temporary employment contracts are now commonplace in business. However the move towards such employment structures has a significant, and hitherto little understood impact on 'the psychological contract' between employee and organizations. This book is amongst the first to tackle this problem. With detailed research findings from seven countries: Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK and (for a non-European perspective) Israel, it presents an integrated model of the effects of temporary work. The model incorporates key recent trends, including the expansion of non-permanent employment as a persistent form of employment flexibility, the increasing importance of the psychological contract, and the diversity of the European labour market as a result of state legislation. By presenting the results of an overview of the research literature on this contemporary labour market trend this book is of real value to researchers, practitioners and policy makers.

Globalization, Uncertainty and Women's Careers assesses the effects of globalization on the life courses of women in thirteen countries across Europe and America in the second half of the 20th century. The book represents the first-ever longitudinal analysis of micro-level data from these OECD countries focusing exclusively on women's relationship to the labor market in a globalizing world. The contributors thoroughly examine women's employment entries, exits and job mobility and present evidence of women's increased labor market attachment and reduced employment quality in most of the countries studied. They also systematically consider the life course changes influenced by larger transformations in society and, in doing so, explicitly link the phenomena of globalization to individual women's lives in Europe and North America.

This book discusses the need of a legal protection at national and global levels to address the use of temporary employment contracts by employers. Chapter 1 reviews some theories of job security, showing how job security issues should be regulated in labour laws to protect workers and also how temporary contracts affect job security. Chapter 2 examines legal protection of job security in temporary contract in international contexts where it examines the concept and need for job security and job protection especially for temporary contracts based on three United Nations’ instruments, namely, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Chapter 3 studies the ILO standards in relation to job security and temporary contracts as well as those covered by the Philadelphia Declaration and other conventions and recommendations. Chapter 4 discusses Islamic jurisprudence on jobs and job security. The main aims of this chapter is to provide the framework for protecting workers as a means to enhance job security in the world especially in Islam. It discusses Islamic jurisprudence concerning work and job conditions. The Islamic precept is based on the Qur’an and Hadith and these sources are used to explain the concept of jobs in Islam. In addition, this chapter also examines the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI).

Estudio sobre los efectos del mercado de trabajo fijado en términos de la evolución de contratos de empleo en España durante el período de 1987-1995.

This paper analyzes the effects of fixed-term contracts using a version of the Lucas and Prescott island model with undirected search. A fixed-term contract of length J is modeled as a tax on separations of workers with tenure higher than J . While in principle these policies require a very large state space to analyze the firms and households' problems, we show that equilibrium allocations solve a simple dynamic programming problem. Analyzing this problem we show that equilibrium employment dynamics are characterized by two dimensional inaction sets. Finally, to understand the effect of these contracts, we compare them with two extreme cases: for J = 1 the fixed-term contracts are equivalent to the case of firing taxes, and for large J they are equivalent to the laissez-faire case. In a calibrated version of the model, we find that temporary contracts with J equivalent to three years length close about half of the gap between those two extremes.