European Jobs Monitor 2014: Drivers of Recent Job Polarisation and Upgrading in Europe

[Excerpt] European labour markets added nearly 30 million new jobs in a golden age of employment creation prior to the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. These labour markets subsequently shed six million jobs, and unemployment peaked at 11% in 2013, its highest rate in well over a decade. This third annual European Jobs Monitor report looks in detail at recent shifts in employment at Member State and European Union level in the two years from the second quarter of 2011 to the second quarter of 2013. It applies a jobs-based approach, which ranks jobs according to wage and then groups them into five categories of equal size (quintiles) ranging from lowest-paid to highest-paid. The net employment change between the starting and concluding periods (in terms of people employed) for each quintile in each country is summed to establish whether there has been net gain or loss. This analytic approach enables employment shifts to be described quantitatively (how many jobs were created or destroyed) and qualitatively (what sectors and occupations were most affected). The report also examines some of the likely drivers of recent shifts in the employment structure: technological advances, as measured by the cognitive and routine task content of jobs; globalisation and trade, measured as the offshorability of tasks or direct international trade; and labour market institutions

A Coordinated EU Minimum Wage Policy?

[Excerpt] Minimum wages exist in all EU member states, even if, as we shall see in this report, they are set up and established in very different ways. Minimum wages, in fact, can be considered as a cornerstone of the “European Social Model”. Yet, the on-going process of European integration has so far had very little to do with them. Wages are explicitly excluded from the competences of European institutions in the existing treaties, contrary to other areas of work and employment such as working time or health and safety. But in the context of increasing European integration, it seems at least plausible that sooner or later there would be some attempt of coordinating this important aspect of social policy across countries. As we will see in this report, the idea has been discussed at the European level several times since the EU was born, and it seems to be gaining momentum the context of the current economic crisis. Of course, the discussion is by no means settled, as many important European and national actors consider that this area should remain within the remit of national governments and according to national traditions and practices. It is certainly possible that wages, and minimum wages, would remain squarely at the level of national competence in the foreseeable future. Still, it seems like a worthwhile exercise (useful to the debate) to explore what kind of implications would be associated with such a coordination of European minimum wage policy. This is what we will try to do in this report. Without taking ourselves a position, we will try to provide arguments and facts that we hope can be useful in this debate. The report is organized in two big sections. In the first one, we will discuss the theoretical and policy considerations around a coordinated EU minimum wage policy. We will review the social sciences literature on the effects of minimum wages, present a broad picture of the current debates around the coordination of EU minimum wage policy and discuss the institutional difficulties that such a coordination would in our view have to face. In other words, that section will try to provide a balanced summary of the theoretical and policy arguments around this debate. The second big section will try to complement the arguments with some facts, by carrying out a “simple accounting exercise” to evaluate how many and what types of workers would be most affected by a hypothetical coordination of minimum wage policy in the different countries, using a baseline scenario of a single national wage floor of 60% of the median national wages and drawing from the two most recent EU-wide data sources on wages and income. Eurofound was established in 1975 with the mandate of contributing with knowledge to the planning and design of better living and working conditions in Europe. We hope that this report can at least contribute to the debate

New Tasks in Old Jobs: Drivers of Change and Implications for Job Quality

This overview report summarises the findings of 20 case studies looking at recent changes in the task content of five manufacturing occupations (car assemblers, meat processing workers, hand-packers, chemical products plant and machine operators and inspection engineers) as a result of factors such as digital transformations, globalisation and offshoring, increasing demand for high quality standards and sustainability. It also discusses some implications in terms of job quality and working life. The study reveals that the importance of physical tasks in manufacturing is generally declining due to automation; that more intensive use of digitally controlled equipment, together with increasing importance of quality standards, involve instead a growing amount of intellectual tasks for manual industrial workers; and that the amount of routine task content is still high in the four manual occupations studied. Overall, the report highlights how qualitative contextual information can complement existing quantitative data, offering a richer understanding of changes in the content and nature of jobs

Lusternik-Schnirelmann category of simplicial complexes and finite spaces

In this paper we establish a natural definition of Lusternik-Schnirelmann category for simplicial complexes via the well known notion of contiguity. This category has the property of being homotopy invariant under strong equivalences, and only depends on the simplicial structure rather than its geometric realization. In a similar way to the classical case, we also develop a notion of geometric category for simplicial complexes. We prove that the maximum value over the homotopy class of a given complex is attained in the core of the complex. Finally, by means of well known relations between simplicial complexes and posets, specific new results for the topological notion of category are obtained in the setting of finite topological spaces.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, this is a new version with some minor changes and a new exampl

Para retomar el programa de investigación marxista de los sujetos colectivos contra-hegemónicos: totalización y territorialización como categorías de traducción

1º Congresso Internacional Epistemologias do Sul: perspectivas críticas - 7 a 9 de novembro de 2016, realizada pela Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana (UNILA).Los autores más influyentes en la Sociología de los Movimientos Sociales (SMS) y del Contentious Politics (MCADAM; TARROW; TILLY, 2001; TARROW; TILLY, 2007) proponen aislar los átomos fundamentales o «mecanismos» presentes en las más variadas experiencias de movilización social para, a partir de ellos, articular combinaciones estables, los «procesos», que expliquen las experiencias más variadas

Tool for fast mismatch analysis of analog circuits

A tool is presented that evaluates statistical deviations in performance characteristics of analog circuits, starting from statistical deviations in the technological parameters of MOS transistors. Performance is demonstrated via the analysis of a Miller OTA in two different configurations and a linearized CMOS transconductor. The CPU time is reduced by a factor of 25 to 90 with respect to conventional Monte Carlo simulation, while maintaining similar accuracy in the computations

Contribución a la caracterización químico-mineralógica de los esquistos del "Complejo de Ordes"

[Resumen] Se presentan los datos qUlmlcos y mineralógicos de 77 muestras de rocas esquistosas de la "Unidad Betanzos-Arzúa", perteneciente al "Complejo de Ordes" , con objeto de analizar la variabilidad existente y discutir las posibilidades de sectorización de los distintos tipos de rocas en función de parámetros de composición.[Abstract] This paper presents the chemical and mineralogical composi tion of 77 samples of schi ts belonging to the "Unit of Betanzos-Arzua" , included in the "Ordenes Complex" . Tqe data were used to make an analysis the variability in the composi tion of the rocks and a subdivision of the " Unidad " based on the rock characteristics was intented

Corrientes sobre el género. Feminismos, educación física y deporte

Los tres grandes movimientos feministas (liberal, radical y socialista) han tenido en la educación uno de sus campos prioritarios, con el doble propósito de ser guías de la comprensión de la desigualdad de Género y como guías para el cambio social. La Educación Física y el deporte, como parte de la educación formal, se ven afectados por estos movimientos feministas; este hecho es muy relevante ya que, tradicionalmente, la Educación Física y el deporte han sido campos en el que se han estimulado, transmitido y defendido valores como la competición o el esfuerzo; que en nuestra sociedad se asocian al género masculino. Sin embargo, los beneficios físicos, psíquicos y sociales de las actividades físicas y deportivas, están fuera de duda para cualquier persona; por tanto se trata de crear un nuevo marco conceptual que huya de los estereotipos masculinos vinculados al campo de las actividades físicas y deportivas, en el que el género femenino esté en igualdad de condiciones