Employmentweb_low

EMploYMEnt, work, And hEAlth inEquAlitiEs - a global perspective
technologies have resulted in declining demand for low-skilled
labour, thus forcing further structural adjustment (Howell, 2002).
Low-skilled workers are now a highly vulnerable group whose
wages are more likely to fall to the floor set by minimum wage
regulations. Unfortunately, regulations to guarantee higher
earnings increase the cost of labour, constricting the demand for
labour and increasing the rate of unemployment, especially among
the low-skilled (Nickell, 1997).
The labour market in industrialised countries began to move away
from an overlapping interest between labour representatives and
employers in the 1970s, pitting them against each other in the struggle
to balance workers' rights with the need to increase profitability. This
ended the trend of steady economic growth and abundant, stable
employment, ushering in the period of structural adjustment that
frames employment conditions in wealthy countries today.
immigrant workers assembling electrical
towers in vallès oriental, Barcelona
(spain).
source: antonio rosa (2007)
5.2. MIDDLE AND LOW INCOME COUNTRIES
While most Western economies achieved high living standards and
continued growth, the rest of the world, trying to catch up in terms of
economic development, was confronted with two rather antagonistic
development paradigms: modernisation and dependency. In
evolutionist theory, which heavily influenced modernisation principles,
economic development is a process involving several successive
stages. Industrialisation is the driving force of modernisation and, by
extension, the root cause of development, whereas the welfare state is
the logical corollary of this process of industrialisation and increasing
economic growth. Since developed economies represented a more
advanced phase of this development, those economies in the earlier
stages tried to emulate the socio-economic order of the Western world
(Rostow, 1960). Yet in the context of already developed countries, these
efforts often led to low value exports, a preponderance of unskilled and
informal labour, and a trend of poor employment relations and
hazardous working conditions.
Yet, other authors saw that affluence in advanced economies came
at the cost of poverty in the rest of the world. The periphery of this world
system (Wallerstein, 1979) is thus exploited and kept in a state of
backwardness by a core of dominant countries that profit from poor
countries' lack of sufficient skilled labour and industries to process raw
materials locally. Peripheries are obliged to rely heavily on exporting a
single cheap commodity to accumulate foreign currency, frequently in
the hands of Western multinational corporations. In this world economic
system, poor countries are producers of raw materials and cheap labour
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