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Laziness or liberation? Labor market policies and workers' attitudes toward employment flexibility
Author(s) -
Hipp Lena,
Anderson Christopher J.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
international journal of social welfare
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.664
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1468-2397
pISSN - 1369-6866
DOI - 10.1111/ijsw.12155
Subject(s) - dismissal , flexibility (engineering) , unemployment , laziness , labour economics , order (exchange) , economics , multilevel model , work (physics) , political science , economic growth , mechanical engineering , management , engineering , finance , machine learning , computer science , law
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 I nternational S ocial S urvey P rogram ( ISSP ) with country‐level information from the O rganization for C ooperation and E conomic D evelopment. 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.