Title: Labor Market Dualism in the International Context (Winter 2021)
Instructor: Kostiantyn Ovsiannikov
Email: k.ovsiannikov@gmail.com
Office Hours: by appointment
GitHub: ko-suta
The proposed course will concentrate on the labor dualism issue from the comparative perspective. It will focus on the underlying causes as well as the socio-economic consequences of this phenomenon. From an empirical point, it will investigate countries that range from those where low labor turnover costs are combined with representative industrial unions (e.g. Sweden), to those where labor bifurcation is relatively more rigid and centered on inter-corporate rather than industrial coordination (e.g. Japan).
According to the “dual labor market hypothesis” formulated by Doeringer & Piore (1971), employers often benefit from classifying their personnel into “internal” and “external” camps. While the members of the internal labor market enjoy long-term career paths, on-the-job training and accompanying social benefits, external market is mostly composed of non-regular workers who can be fired relatively easy as part of the “optimization efforts” during the economic crises such as the one caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The class will focus on the cutting-edge political and economic issues around the world. It will therefore be of a particular interest to those willing to explore labor-related problems pertaining to different countries and to engage in the comparative analysis. The offered course fits best into the “Thinking and acting economically” cluster of the Transdisciplinary Course Program.
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Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. Source code is available at https://github.com/ko-suta/labor-dualism-tuebingen, unless otherwise noted. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".