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Poverty and Insecurity is the first book to examine the relationship between social exclusion, poverty, and the labor market. It challenges long-standing and dominant myths about the unemployed and the poor by exploring their lived realities. Work may be the best route out of poverty, but for many people employment does not solve recurrent poverty, with many individuals trapped in a low-pay, no-pay cycle between lowwage jobs and unemployment. Based on unique qualitative and longitudinal research, the book shows how poverty and insecurity have now become the defining features of working life for many.
Globalization, the economic crisis and related policies of austerity have led to a growth in extreme exploitation at work, with migrants particularly vulnerable. This book explores the lives of the growing numbers of severely exploited labourers in the world today, questioning how we can respond to such globalized patterns of extreme inequality.
The purpose of this volume is to describe the impact of the increased demand for flexibility on employees and its impact on their individual work life trajectories and health. The volume offers concrete examples of interventions aimed to find innovative ways of sustainable work careers for today's workers. We focus on the school to work transition, job insecurity, job loss and re-employment and retirement. The interventions described offer strategies for implementing support in employment contracts, increasing preparedness of individual employees with public education programs or developing work arrangements and support systems in work organizations.
This open access volume identifies the common and specific aspects of social mechanisms that generate inequalities, through comparative analyses of different dimensions in which inequalities are expressed. It includes studies on social inequalities in 5 European and 5 Latin American countries, along 11 thematic axes: inequalities in the labour market and labour trajectories; asymmetries in the relationship between training and employment; inequalities in work and family life; educational inequalities; geographical and social inequalities: ethnicity and language; social inequalities, migration and space; uncertainty, strategies, resources and capabilities; inequality of opportunity: intergene...
This book provides the first foundation of knowledge about the intellectual traditions, contemporary scope and future prospects for the interdisciplinary field of rural gerontology. With a focus on rural regions, small towns and villages, which have the highest rates of population ageing worldwide, Rural Gerontology is aimed at understanding what it means for rural people, communities and institutions to be at the forefront of twenty-first-century demographic change. The book offers important insights from rural ageing studies into today’s most pressing gerontological problems. With chapters from more than 65 established and emerging rural ageing researchers, it is the first synthesis of k...
The assumption that Member States of the European Union enjoyed exclusive competence over social provision has been shaken by the realisation that they are now “semi-sovereign welfare states” whose policy choices are subject to increasing scrutiny under Community law. This book seeks to take stock of how Community membership is reshaping the legal environment of welfare provision across Europe. Topics covered include: the evolving economic and governance debates about Community intervention in social rights; the relationship between public services and Community competition and state aids law; the crucial developments which have taken place in the sphere of health care; and recent judgments on free movement and equal treatment for Union citizens as regards national education and social assistance policies. Social Welfare and EU Law provides a valuable collection of essays overall exploring the emergence of new models of social solidarity within the European Union.
This book explores a variety of social risks and possible policy options that could be put in place to either prevent, or lessen the negative consequences of their materialisation. Pieters groups these policy issues into four major social risks -- income replacement in case of old age and survivorship; unemployment; incapacity for work; and social health care protection – all of which are crucial to the development of a social security system. Navigating Social Security Options draws on extensive knowledge of various national social security systems to compare their costs and benefits, taking into account both their structural elements (conditions of work, education and living), and cultural elements (influence of political parties, trade unions, employers’ organisations, traditions). As a concise comparative point of reference, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of social policy and law, as well as policy makers.
On 1 December 2009 the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force. Although often described as primarily technical, it significantly amended the Treaty on the European Union (TEU) and the old EC Treaty (now the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, TFEU). The authors' aim in this book is to explore what the Treaty means for social law and social policy at the European level. The first part of the book on the general framework looks - at a time of financial crisis - for new foundations for Europe's Social market economy, questions the balance between fundamental social rights and economic freedoms, analyses the role of the now binding Charter of Fundamental Rights, maps the potential impa...
This elaboration is a political analysis within sociological theory. The study has as subject the main propositions of a theoretical framework on the current structure of employment and on the question of the abolition of (the dependent and therefore) wage labour. I note that the latter does not have, as a precondition, the overcoming of capitalism. The analysis, in the form of an intellectual test, examines the methods and the thoroughness of enforcing the new situation of a single work status within the economic activity. This type of labour has morphological similarities to self-employment or otherwise to the own account workers. The basic starting point of the study is the finding that m...
'Global Europe, Social Europe' makes an essential contribution to the debate now opening up over the future of Europe in the wake of the demise of the Constitution.