Description:
This paper reports some preliminary results of a small pilot survey of University of Ballarat students' knowledge of Youth Allowance rates and eligibility criteria and of their attitudes towards the appropriateness of some of the obligations currently placed on young people in receipt of Youth Allowance. Thus it was asked, do students, who may themselves be experiencing poverty, agree with the current range of government imposed obligations on young job seekers?
Description:
Against a background of population ageing, and with it, concomitant effects on social welfare systems and labour markets, public policy makers in affected nations are seeking ways of pushing out the final age of withdrawal from their labour markets. Central to such efforts is promoting the contribution of older workers to organizations and overcoming labour market age barriers. Within this advocacy approach there has been recent interest in identifying and promulgating examples of employer best practice in order to emphasize new dimensions of the business case for employing older workers. Drawing on literature concerned with advocating an ethical concern in human resource management as it pertains to older workers, this article examines an exemplar set of employer case studies aimed at promulgating best practice. It considers the concept of age management and its manifestations to argue that many standard HRM practices are firmly, although probably unwittingly, grounded in ageist assumptions concerning the capacities, potentiality and contributions of both younger and older workers. This, we argue, is a consequence of an unnecessarily narrow conception of good employment practice based in an economic rationality that is not conducive to the effective management of age in organizations.
Description:
Labour markets respond to supply and demand changes caused by external shocks, including pandemics. In 2020 and 2021, the Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused a sudden reduction in labour demand in certain industries globally. As economies emerge into the post COVID-19 reality, a return of patterns caused by ongoing structural pressures return. In Canterbury, a region centred on Christchurch in New Zealand, these include migration demand pressures. This paper uses data from the Canterbury region, which is no stranger to disasters, as a case study. Two models are developed to estimate the future workforce requirements during the recovery period. A population growth model is utilised to test the regional labour market's limits, while an economic model estimates the required jobs for the regional economy. The paper finds that the lower economic activity resulting from COVID-19 has reduced the near-term employment demand. At the same time, labour force transition coupled with strict border controls reveals the need for labour force participation to adjust during the extended recovery period. Although short-term demand for skilled migration remains lower, those leaving the workforce will require replacing.