Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The notion of NEET classifies young people who are not in employment or education. This article discusses a series of research on the subject and explores some points of continuity between its analyzes. This text aims to discuss with empirical evidence the non-critical assumptions of the NEET category to reinsert the problematic in the relation between the young people and the wider crystallization of multidimensional processes of production and reproduction of the inequalities. With this aim the article analyzes the main debates about the measurements and the fundamental interpretative hypotheses based on a series of antecedent research and puts in relation the analysis of NEET with the dynamics of the labor market based on statistical data of Spain, Mexico and Argentina. The text concludes by identifying challenges for intervention policies on the issue.

Occupational segregation persists despite continuous promotion of equal opportunity policies. This article describes various barriers that have stood in the way of women train drivers’ and women motor vehicle mechanics’ entering and remaining in employment. The results are based on case studies of these two occupations in Spain and primarily on the analysis of in-depth interviews of female and male employees in these occupations. The comparison is justified because of the companies’ similarities in terms of underrepresentation and yet their dissimilar organisation in terms of both size and management style. The findings indicate the presence of at least two types of obstacles: 1) explicit barriers related to personnel selection and the material characteristics of workplaces; and 2) implicit barriers associated with attitudes and practices in the relationships between the minority of women workers and the male majority.

The deterioration of working conditions once again intensifies the traditional debate on how to prevent social protection from discouraging return to employment. Labour precariousness is a brake to achieve contributive benefits, and even to overcome situations of poverty. In this scenario, the minimum income benefits, originating from charity, are those that protect many of these situations, due to more flexible access requirements. However, these benefits were neither prepared to deal with this volume of people nor to the complexity of new profiles such as the working poor. That is why these tools are subject to a debate and social attention. How to ensure that their protective vocation does not discourage labour insertion? The text presents some of the main challenges of the system to adapt it to this matter.

The main goal is to investigate whether sociodemographic variables, such as education or household, and the economic context have an effect in the relation between health and exit of the labor market in those over 50 years. Logistic regression is used to estimate the probabilities of being active according to health status, by age and sex, controlling of other sociodemographic variables. Data comes from the microdata of the 2006 (ENSE) and 2014 (EESE) health surveys. The results show an increase in the activity rate for all health states in women by a generational component, and the role of education as a modulating variable for the effect of health on the activity of women in both years, and men in 2014 (OR = 6.17 and OR = 5.40 once controlled by education). The effect of the crisis is more intense on those with worse health.

The article aims to contribute to the debate on irregular employment in Spain, by addressing bogus self-employment and bogus internships forms. Drawing from an institutional approach, it analyses the influence that three fields have on these labour frauds, derived from managerial approaches aiming to obtain competitive advantageous: two state fields associated to the regulation and the enforcement of the regulation, articulated through the Labour and Social Security Inspectorate (ITSS); and the industrial relations field which, in Spain, strongly depends on the state and the legislation. The article confirms the relevance of the three institutional fields studied, the interaction and interrelation of which contributes to understand the existence of both fraudulent practices. At the same time, elements and initiatives are identified that suggest that, within the existing institutional framework, there is room to contribute to reduce its diffusion.

The current public employment services reveal a consolidation of the paradigm of activation in the field of policies to combat unemployment. As a way of intervention, this activation has given rise  to policies, devices and technologies that lead to a series of situations experienced by the unemployed and whose analysis gives manifest to ambivalence, contradictions and traps to which the aforementioned paradigm leads. This paper studies the case of the activation policies implemented in Andalusia through focus groups with participants in public employment programs. The results indicate the predominance of three representations or ways of experiencing the activation policies. Although one can speak of a consistent experience, the positions demonstrated, albeit with ambivalence, cause distancing and dissent of the citizens towards logic and means with those provided by the current public employment services.

Learning and training contracts facilitate the transition to the labour market. But for the majority of young people, the labour trajectories that derive from them are discontinuous and unstructured. Such contracts, as forms of work-based learning, do not positively influence on the trajectories of young people, as theoretically would have to be expected. The discontinuity of trajectories lies in legislation, the structural characteristics of the labour market and in managerial practices.

The text is based on the need to develop internationally binding standards on transnational corporations and human rights in order to bring the impunity they enjoy to an end when, directly or along the different links of their supply chain, they provoke violations of these rights, as well as ensuring the reparation of the victims and possible consequences.There are different initiatives at international level, both within the United Nations (Guiding Principles) and within the scope of the corporations themselves and their relations with trade unions (International Framework Agreements), aimed at encouraging transnational companies to behave respectfully, aligned with the rights mentioned. However, and this is the fundamental thesis of the article, these initiatives continue to be insufficient, either because of their lack of obligation or because of their partial nature, dependent on the voluntariness of these transnational economic actors. In addition, the relationship between both sets of regulations, Guiding Principles and Framework Agreements, presents problems that a future Legally Binding Instrument on Transnational Corporations and Human Rights should solve. The fundamental objective of this article addresses the study of this question.