Work and Employment
For his specialization we advise you to register in the Major Social Policy for Development (SPD), but other Majors also give access to this specialization.
This specialization focuses on a vital factor in development - labour. It builds a solid academic base from which critical analyses can be developed and up-to-date policy interventions can be designed. It views the scope for productive employment and decent work in the context of social policy. It investigates challenges such as the informalization of work and the more complex guarantee of labour rights in global value chains. The International Labour Organization’s (ILO’s) notion of Decent Work has an important role as conceptual and normative reference point. Adequate social policy responses for the generation of productive employment with decent working conditions, enabled by social dialogue and flanked by the provision of social security are being discussed in the different W&E courses. Throughout the Specialization, attention will be paid to cross-cutting themes, such as gender and income inequality.
Teaching staff:
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Rolph van der Hoeven is Professor of Employment and Development Economics and Member of the Committee on Development Cooperation of the Dutch Government. Earlier he was Director of ILO's Policy Coherence Group, Manager of the Technical Secretariat of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, Chief Economist of UNICEF and policy analyst for the ILO in Ethiopia and Zambia. His work concentrates on issues of employment, inequality and economic reform on which he has widely published.
For more information, see www.iss.nl/vanderhoeven
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Freek Schiphorst is Senior Lecturer in Labour Relations.He was trained as an anthropologist and has a PhD in social sciences from Leiden University. The first fifteen year of his academic career he was involved in research and capacity building in the area of workers’ participation and trade union studies. He was active in Southern Africa, in particular in Zimbabwe where he worked closely with the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. The move form workers’ participation to employee involvement was a small one, so, research interest began to include Human Resource Management (HRM) and responses of (organised) labour to such managerial strategies. Since then his research interest broadened to the informalisation of work and its impact on the conditions of work as well as the insecurities this brought for working poor. The focus is on the (policy) responses from various actors (the state, the corporate world, NGOs, trade unions) but in particular on the variety of organizational forms the informal workers themselves have created to address their situation.
For more information, see: www.iss.nl/schiphorst
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Lee Pegleris Lecturer in Work Organization and Labour Rights. Lee spent his early career working as an economist with the Australian Labour Movement. Recent times have seen him researching labour implications of “new” management strategies of TNCs in Brazil. This interest has expanded to a focus on the implications of value chain insertion on labour, both for formal and informal workers. Trained as an economist and sociologist (PhD - LSE), he currently works as lecturer (Work, Organisation and Labour Rights) at the ISS. Project work includes consultancies on Decent Work in Global Food Chains (ILO) and on cluster / social inclusion promotion in Brazil (World Bank). He also coordinates a project (GOLLS) concerning sustainable value chains - one which links ports and logistics (in the Netherlands) with production and livelihoods in Brazil. This project has significant implications for Government, civil society and companies concerning CSR/sustainability. Such experience has led to Pegler's involvement in exercises to develop responsible chain diagnostics.
For more information, see: www.iss.nl/pegler
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Karin Astrid Siegmann works as a Senior Lecturer in Labour and Gender Economics at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS). She holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics. For the past decade, her research has been concerned with the intersection of global economic processes with local labour markets, stratified by varying degrees of formality of work, gender, as well as other axes of identity. Her work has identified gendered labour dimensions in a number of critical fields such as global production networks, international migration and financial crises. The geographical focus of her work has been South Asia and Pakistan, in particular. Besides, she has a keen interest in methodologies and epistemologies in development research.
For more information, see: www.iss.nl/siegmann
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Irene van Staveren is Dutch and obtained her MA and PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is Professor of Pluralist Development Economics and an interdisciplinary economist. Her teaching and research are in the areas of gender and economics, ethics and economics, social cohesion, and philosophy of economics. Among her professional memberships are Economy Transformers, Sustainable Finance Lab, and the International Association For Feminist Economics. She is the director of the ISS online database Indices of Social Development (www.IndSocDev.org). Part of her current research is on the financial crisis and the instability and inequality that it brings.
For more information see: www.iss.nl/vanstaveren
Work and Employment Courses
Employment Creation and Decent Work
This course provides an introduction to indirect major factors and targeted policies influencing the availability of productive employment under decent working conditions. The course is interdisciplinary with economic and sociological perspectives of labour. The focus of the course is on the national level, but the issues it deals with span both the context of a growing globalization and interlinkages between different markets as well as the role of informal institutions, such as social norms, for productive and decent job opportunities. This focus implies that, after reviewing global economic trends and their implications for the availability of productive employment and decent working conditions in Block 1, the course will look in detail at the flanking role of national policies and labour market institutions (Block 2). Block 3 is devoted to important policies for employment creation and the guarantee of decent working conditions and regulation that provides a social floor to the labour market and while Block 4 takes a detailed look at labour market discrimination faced by a variety of societal groups, such as women, youth and migrants, and how their employment can be enhanced quantitatively and qualitatively. Subsequently, in Block 5, selected country examples will be reviewed with a view of applying the previously imparted knowledge about the indirect and direct impact of different global trends, formal and informal institutions as well as national policies on employment generation and decent work to the labour market analysis of individual case studies.
Precarious Work: Origins, Contours and Responses.
This course will examine how globalization has dramatically transformed the world(s) of work where informality and insecurity seem to have become the norm and flexibility the objective. It will explore the origins of this transformation and how these are being dealt with in the academic debate and the activist world. It highlights the role of geographic dispersion of production of goods and services in global value chains as a crucial determinant of precarious work. The course seeks to familiarize students with the varieties and conditions of work that characterize the contemporary landscape of precarious work and points out their gendered character. More information about this course
