The intention of this booklet is to assist unionists, shop stewards and organisers with preparation for wage negotiations. It raises ideas on how to deal with the common arguments that are used by management. This booklet is not a complete guide to wage negotiations. It concentrates mainly on economic factors which form only one part of wage negotiations. The handbook is divided into two sections. Section One deals with: Information about ownership, control and structure of South African companies; How to read and understand the information in a company’s annual report. Section Two deals with wage-related issues and it includes: Inflation; Subsistence levels and other surveys; Wages and wage policy. The booklet concludes with a checklist of information needed by wage negotiators and ends with a glossary of terms and a reference list.

Over the course of years from 1995 to 2008 was acquired by Average Earnings Information System under the professional gestation of the Czech Republic Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs wage and personal data by individual employees. Thanks to the fact that in this statistical survey are collected wage and personal data by concrete employed persons it is possible to obtain a wage distribution, so it how this wages spread out among individual employees. Values that wages can be assumed in whole wage interval are not deterministical but they result from interactions of many random influences. The wage is necessary due to this randomness considered as random quantity with its probability density function. This spreading of wages in all labor market segments is described a wage distribution. Even though a representation of a high-income employee category is evidently small, one's incomes markedly affect statistically itemized average wage level and particularly the whole wage file variability. So wage employee collections are distinguished by the averaged wage that exceeds wages of a major employee mass and the high variability due to great wage heterogeneity. A general approach to distribution of earning modeling under current heterogeneity conditions don't permit to fit by some chosen distribution function or probably density function. This leads to the idea to apply some quantile approach with statistical modeling, i.e. to model an earning distribution with some appropriate inverse distributional function. The probability modeling by generalized or compound forms of quantile functions enables better to characterize a wage distribution, which distinguishes by high asymmetry and wage heterogeneity. The application of inverse distributional function as a probability model of a wage distribution can be expressed in forms of distributional mixture of partial employee's groups. All of the component distributions of this mixture model correspond to an employee's group with greater homogeneity of earnings. The partial employee's subfiles differ in parameters of their component density and in shares of this density in the total wage distribution of the wage file.

<p>Using mainly quantile regressions, this paper evaluates the gender wage gap throughout the conditional wage distribution in Sweden. The gender wage is found to increase at the upper tail of the wage distribution, indicating an enforcement of the glass ceiling effect recorded in earlier studies.</p><p>The results also indicate that the earlier noted trend of diminishing wage differences at the bottom of the wage distribution now is turning. The increase of overall wage inequalities coincides with a general increase in wage dispersion among high-income and low-income individuals. It is also noted that there are substantial differences in returns to productivity characteristics between the public and the private sectors, and that both the highest and the lowest unexplained gender wage gap is found in the public sector.</p>

Using mainly quantile regressions, this paper evaluates the gender wage gap throughout the conditional wage distribution in Sweden. The gender wage is found to increase at the upper tail of the wage distribution, indicating an enforcement of the glass ceiling effect recorded in earlier studies. The results also indicate that the earlier noted trend of diminishing wage differences at the bottom of the wage distribution now is turning. The increase of overall wage inequalities coincides with a general increase in wage dispersion among high-income and low-income individuals. It is also noted that there are substantial differences in returns to productivity characteristics between the public and the private sectors, and that both the highest and the lowest unexplained gender wage gap is found in the public sector.

I denna undersökning studeras betydelsen av färdigheterna läskunnighet, räknefärdighet och problemlösning på sysselsättning och lönenivå. Undersökningen fokuserar främst på att studera om färdigheterna hos kvinnor och utrikes födda har annorlunda påverkan än för befolkningen i helhet. Studien jämför resultaten mellan Sverige och Tyskland. Metoden som används är linjär multipel regressionsanalys med minsta kvadratmetoden.   Resultaten visar att en individs färdigheter har större betydelse för var i lönefördelningen hen befinner sig än om hen är sysselsatt eller inte. Effekterna på lön är genomgående positiva för båda länderna, men större för Tyskland än för Sverige – vilket indikerar att avkastningen på färdigheter är större i Tyskland. Resultaten visar vidare att kvinnor har lägre löner än män i både Sverige och Tyskland, men skillnaderna är genomgående större i Sverige. Det finns även vissa indikationer på att utrikes födda har det något svårare att komma in på den svenska än den tyska arbetsmarknaden. / This study analyses the importance of the skills literacy, numeracy and problem solving on employment and earnings. The main focus of this study is particularly if the effects of skills within the groups ‘women’ and ‘foreign born’ differ from the population as a whole. The study compares the results between Sweden and Germany. The method used is multiple linear regression analysis using ordinary least squares.   The results show that skills have a greater importance for an individuals placing in the wage distribution than for whether the individual is employed or not. The effects on wages are all through positive for both countries, but greater for Germany than Sweden – indicating that the return to skills is higher in Germany. The results further show that women’s wages are lower than men’s in both Sweden and Germany, but the gaps are larger in Sweden. There is also some evidence that foreign-born individuals have a harder time entering the Swedish labour market than the German.

Les modèles de recherche d'emploi sont aujourd'hui très largement utilisés en économie pour modéliser le marché du travail et évaluer les effets de certaines politiques publiques sur ce marché. Dans cette thèse, nous introduisons l'âge des travailleurs, dans ses deux dimensions, celle de l'expérience et celle de l'horizon social (âge de départ à la retraite), au sein d'un modèle de recherche d'emploi modélisant en même temps la distribution des salaires et les flux sur le marché du travail. Nous montrons que cette hétérogénéité affecte tous les comportements sur le marché du travail : la fixation de salaire, l'intensité de la recherche d'emploi et la productivité des appariements. Un tel modèle nous permet de décomposer la trajectoire salariale des travailleurs au cours de leur cycle de vie, en trois grands canaux : le jeu de salaire, l'accumulation du capital humain, et la présence d'institutions. Ce dernier canal explique notamment, par le biais des allocations chômage indexées sur le dernier salaire, la forte progression salariale associée à un faible taux de mobilité des travailleurs observé en France. Mais l'horizon peut aussi être technologique : la technologie d'une firme devient avec le temps obsolète. Dans ce cadre, nous montrons que la présence d'allocation chômage croissante avec l'ancienneté crée une distorsion croissante qui vient accélérer cette obsolescence. En vue d'atteindre l'optimum social, nous montrons qu'il est alors nécessaire d'introduire une taxe sur les licenciements, elle-même croissante. / In economics, it is today usual to use search models to modelize labor market, and assess public policy on this market. In this thesis, we introduce the age heterogeneity of workers in a search model which takes into account both labor market flows and endogenous wage distribution. We show that this heterogeneity affects greatly agents' economic behaviors in terms of wage setting, search intensity, and matches' productivity, by its two dimensions, the workers' experience and the workers' horizon. This model allows us to decompose the wage trajectory of workers over their life cycle into three main channels : the wage game, the human capital accumulation and the presence of institutions. Besides, we show that this last channel, as composed of unemployment benefits indexed on workers' last wage, accounts for the simultaneous strong wage progression and weak workers' mobility observed in the French data. Yet, the horizon can also be technological : firms' embodied technology becomes obsolete with time. Given this technological horizon, the presence of tenure-growing unemployement benefits yields a distorsion which fastens obsolescence. In this context, only a tenure-growing firing tax allows the economy to reach its social optimum.

Even though the legal minimum wage is not a new thing (it was first set in 1912 in the state of Massachusetts in the USA), we first come across the stipulation of a minimum wage in an amendment to Act No. 65/1965 Coll. of the Labour Code from 1990. The specific level of minimum wage and the conditions for applying it were then set by government resolution in February 1991. Since then the level of minimum wage has been valorised many times (in January 2006 the valorisation of minimum wage was the thirteenth time the minimum wage had been changed). The submitted dissertation deals with selected impacts of the minimum wage on firms, with special consideration to small and medium-sized enterprises (up to 250 employees). Attention is focused both on the demand side of the labour market (acceptance of legal level of minimum wage by firms), as well as on the supply side (effect of the legal level of minimum wage on willingness and motivation of the unemployed to supply their labour on the labour market). The work is focused on the following fundamental areas: detailed mapping of the effect of the minimum wage on firms and employment in economic theory and in contrast to theories for the results of empirical research, identification of the position of minimum wage in wage distribution in the Czech Republic (secondary research), acceptance of minimum wage by small and medium-sized firms in Southern Moravia County (primary research) and willingness of the unemployed to work for the minimum wage (primary research). An integral part of the work is the setting up of aids for the needs of a firm for enrolment and taking on of new employees - decision trees that provide information to the firm on the external labour market.