Precarious workers' choices about unemployment insurance membership after the Ghent system reform : The Finnish experience

The literature on the Ghent system has focused on the link between voluntary unemployment insurance and union membership in terms of industrial relations. Less attention has been paid to unemployment benefits and employees' decision-making concerning unemployment insurance, even though the core function of the Ghent system is to provide unemployment insurance. This paper examines both of the options that precarious workers (i.e., part-timers, temporary employees, and low-skilled service employees) choose regarding unemployment insurance membership and the change in union density after the Ghent system reform in Finland. First, the results show that the growth of the independent unemployment insurance fund was the main reason for declining union density in the 2000s and early 2010s. Second, in terms of precarious workers, we find that the emergence of the independent fund has affected their choices about unemployment insurance membership and that their choices depend on the type of precarious employment they have. Moreover, part-timers and temporary employees younger than 35 years of age are much less likely to enroll in unemployment insurance than older employees who have the same types of employment contracts.Peer reviewe

Who gets labour market training? : Access biases of social investment in Finland

Policy access biases worry social policy scholars because they generate Matthew effects that exacerbate socioeconomic divides. Yet, access biases in many social investment policies, like training during unemployment, remain under-researched. Such access biases may be detrimental to a critical objective of social investment: to improve and uplift workers with precarious economic prospects. We focus here on access bias in training provided by public employment services against lower-educated workers. They are vulnerable to unemployment and fractured employment and should thus be targeted for training. While there is burgeoning attention on access biases in training against disadvantaged youths and non-citizens, fewer studies have focused on similar access bias against lower-educated workers. We highlight that access bias against such workers may stem from their lower willingness and demand for training, as well as policy design, informal eligibility criteria and caseworkers' creaming practices. We suggest, however, that greater availability of training opportunities may ease this access bias against lower-educated workers. Using the Finnish Income Distribution survey data (2007-2012), we find evidence of training access bias: primary-educated workers are significantly less likely to participate in training than upper secondary and vocationally educated workers. Concurrently, our results show that availability of training is not significantly associated with the extent of training access bias against primary-educated workers. With a Nordic welfare model that prioritizes training to remedy labour market vulnerability and stresses that access to benefits and services is based on need, Finland represents a least likely case to find such access bias in training. We therefore consider these results worrying: if it is found here, it may be prevalent in countries with other welfare models.Peer reviewe

Insecure workers, union membership and new social policy ideas

This dissertation examines insecure workers’ union memberships and attitudes towards new welfare programmes. To compare union memberships and policy preferences among different types of insecure workers, this research classifies these individuals into four different groups: part-time employees, temporary workers, low-skilled workers in the service sector, and solo self-employed workers. The first sub-study explores the unionisation of insecure workers by European industrial relations regime by estimating multilevel binary logistic models with the data from the European Social Survey Round 5 (2010). The second one investigates insecure workers’ choices regarding unemployment insurance and union membership after the reform of the Finnish Ghent system in 1992 by analysing the pooled Finnish Income Distribution Survey data from 2000 to 2012. On the other hand, the third and fourth sub-studies to examine insecure workers’ preferences for new social policy ideas concentrate on universal basic income and social investment policy for unemployment, respectively. To address these topics, both sub-studies estimate binary logistic regression models with clustered standard errors and country dummies by using the data from the European Social Survey Round 8 (2016) The first sub-study reveals that insecure workers’ inclination to join a union varies according to their form of employment and the industrial relations regime to which they belong. The second sub-study illustrates that in the transformed Finnish Ghent system, both part-time and temporary employees are inclined to have no union membership, whereas low-skilled service workers do not make significantly different choices from other employees. In addition, the third sub-study shows that only temporary employees tend to have more favourable attitudes among different groups of insecure workers. The fourth sub-study demonstrates that in a budgetary trade-off scenario between social protection and social investment, part-time permanent employees are inclined to be more supportive of social investment policy, whereas part-time temporary workers are less likely to support it. On the other hand, full-time temporary employees and solo self-employed workers do not exhibit significantly different preferences from standard employees.Tämä väitöskirja tarkastelee epätyypillisissä työsuhteissa työskentelevien ammatillista järjestäytymistä sekä heidän asennoitumistaan uusiin sosiaaliturvamalleihin. Väitöskirja koostuu neljästä osatutkimuksesta. Ensimmäisessä osatutkimuksessa tarkastellaan edellä kuvattujen työntekijäryhmien ammatillista järjestäytymistä erilaisten eurooppalaisten työmarkkinajärjestelmien näkökulmasta. Analyysi pohjaa European Social Surveyn (2010) viidennen kyselykierroksen aineistoon. Toisessa osatutkimuksessa tutkitaan epätyypillisessä työsuhteessa työtä tekevien valintoja koskien työttömyysturvaa ja ammattiliittojäsenyyttä työttömyyskassauudistuksen jälkeen, joka toteutettiin Suomessa vuonna 1992. Aineistona toimivat vuosien 2000-2012 tulonjakotilastot. Kolmannessa ja neljännessä osatutkimuksessa analysoidaan epätyypillisissä työsuhteissa työskentelevien asennoitumista uusiin sosiaaliturvan malleihin, joilla tässä yhteydessä tarkoitetaan perustulomallia ja työttömyyden sosiaalisen investoinnin mallia. Aineistona käytetään European Social Surveyn (2016) kahdeksannella kyselykierroksella kerättyä dataa. Ensimmäinen osatutkimus paljastaa, että epätyypillisissä työsuhteissa työskentelevien ammatillinen järjestäytyminen vaihtelee heidän työsuhdemuotonsa ja kansallisen työmarkkinajärjestelmän mukaan. Toinen osatutkimus osoittaa, että Suomen nykyisen työttömyyskassajärjestelmän puitteissa sekä osa-aikaisilla että määräaikaisilla työntekijöillä on taipumus olla liittymättä liittoon, kun taas heikosti koulutetut palvelualojen työntekijät eivät tee merkittävästi erilaisia valintoja kuin muut työntekijäryhmät. Kolmannessa osatutkimuksessa todetaan, että perustulomalliin suhtautuvat myönteisemmin vain määräaikaisessa työsuhteessa olevat työntekijät. Sen sijaan osa-aikaiset työntekijät, palvelualojen matalasti koulutetut työntekijät ja itsensätyöllistäjät eivät eroa perinteisistä työntekijäryhmistä. Neljäs osatutkimus havainnollistaa, että skenaariossa, jossa ovat vastakkain sosiaaliturva ja sosiaalinen investointi, osa-aikaiset vakituisessa työsuhteessa työskentelevät ovat taipuvaisempia tukemaan sosiaalisen investoinnin mallia, kun taas osa-aikaiset määräaikaisessa työsuhteessa työskentelevät todennäköisemmin vastustavat sitä

New Social Risk Groups, Industrial Relations Regimes and Union Membership

The literature on new social risk (NSR) groups, such as single parents and temporary workers, has argued that they are less likely to join trade unions than other employees. It has been suggested that this is due to the unions’ incapacity or unwillingness to promote policies that mediate NSRs. We argue that there are differences in unionization between different NSR groups, and that country-level institutional structures, operationalized here as industrial relations (IR) regimes, have effects on how likely NSR groups are to unionize. Our multilevel logistic models using European Social Survey (ESS) data produce three main results: (1) family policy-related NSR groups (single parents, female employees with children and female caregivers) are more – not less – unionized than the average worker; (2) precarious workers (low-skilled service employees, temporary employees and part-timers) are, indeed, less unionized than average but (3) this result concerns mostly the liberal and transitional IR regimes.Peer reviewe

Precarious Work, Unemployment Benefit Generosity and Universal Basic Income Preferences : A Multilevel Study on 21 European Countries

The idea of universal basic income (UBI) has been attracting increasing attention globally over recent years. However, research on the individual and institutional determinants of UBI support is scarce. The present study attempts to fills this gap by analysing workers’ attitudes towards UBI schemes in 21 European welfare states and focusing on the roles of precarious work (i.e. part-time work, temporary employment, low-skilled service employment, and solo self-employment) and unemployment benefit generosity (i.e. net replacement rate, payment duration, and qualifying period). We estimate fixed and random effects logistic models by merging country-level institutional data with the European Social Survey Round 8 data collected in 2016. The findings show that temporary employment is associated with positive attitudes towards UBI schemes, whereas other types of precarious work do not have significant influences. In addition, the results reveal that the more generous a country’s unemployment benefits, the less likely are workers in that country to support UBI schemes.Peer reviewe

Synergistic multi-doping effects on the Li7La3Zr2O12 solid electrolyte for fast lithium ion conduction.

Here, we investigate the doping effects on the lithium ion transport behavior in garnet Li7La3Zr2O12 (LLZO) from the combined experimental and theoretical approach. The concentration of Li ion vacancy generated by the inclusion of aliovalent dopants such as Al(3+) plays a key role in stabilizing the cubic LLZO. However, it is found that the site preference of Al in 24d position hinders the three dimensionally connected Li ion movement when heavily doped according to the structural refinement and the DFT calculations. In this report, we demonstrate that the multi-doping using additional Ta dopants into the Al-doped LLZO shifts the most energetically favorable sites of Al in the crystal structure from 24d to 96 h Li site, thereby providing more open space for Li ion transport. As a result of these synergistic effects, the multi-doped LLZO shows about three times higher ionic conductivity of 6.14 × 10(-4) S cm(-1) than that of the singly-doped LLZO with a much less efforts in stabilizing cubic phases in the synthetic condition

Preventing State-Led Cyberattacks Using the Bright Internet and Internet Peace Principles

The Internet has engendered serious cybersecurity problems due to its anonymity, transnationality, and technical shortcomings. This paper addresses state-led cyberattacks (SLCAs) as a particular source of threats. Recently, the concept of the Bright Internet was proposed as a means of shifting the cybersecurity paradigm from self-defensive protection to the preventive identification of malevolent origins through adopting five cohesive principles. To design a preventive solution against SLCAs, we distinguish the nature of SLCAs from that of private-led cyberattacks (PLCAs). We then analyze what can and cannot be prevented according to the principles of the Bright Internet. For this research, we collected seven typical SLCA cases and selected three illustrative PLCA cases with eleven factors. Our analysis demonstrated that Bright Internet principles alone are insufficient for preventing threats from the cyberterror of noncompliant countries. Thus, we propose a complementary measure referred to here as the Internet Peace Principles, which define that the Internet should be used only for peaceful purposes in accordance with international laws and norms. We derive these principles using an approach that combines the extension of physical conventions to cyberspace, the expansion of international cybersecurity conventions to global member countries, and analogical international norms. Based on this framework, we adopt the Charter of the United Nations, the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, Recommendations by the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts, the Tallinn Manual, and Treaty of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and others as reference norms that we use to derive the consistent international order embodied by the Internet Peace Principles

EFFECTS OF FOOT PLANTING POSITIONS ON KNEE JOINT IN DROP LANDING

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of three different foot placement positions at the moment of foot-ground contact on the knee joint kinematics and kinetics in drop landing in an attempt to estimate the risk of non-contact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. Three foot placement positions were toe-in (TI), neutral (N), and toe-out (TO) positions according to the heading direction of toes relative to femur. Seventeen college students participated in this study and motion capturing system with forceplatforms was used to assess the drop landings. Toe-in (TI) position should be avoided due to the highest combined loading of valgus and internal rotation. The neutral foot landing position is recommended to minimize the risk of non-contact ACL injury