Hamburg’s Plancraft develops voice-driven tools for small craft businesses to log on-site measurements, prepare estimates, and triage customer calls, signaling a cautious entry of AI into conservative trades amid a skilled-labor squeeze.
Tag: labor
Fifty years on, the mass walkout by 90% of Icelandic women still shapes politics, pay equity, and gender norms, from Vigdís Finnbogadóttir’s presidency to today’s parental leave model.
Despite record employment, millions are opting out of full-time work: it’s a trend that risks undermining growth, pensions, and the country’s future.
From unpaid caregiving and beauty routines to the hidden burden of emotional support, some women are starting to demand compensation for the work they do in relationships — work that often benefits men for a lifetime.
Germans have plenty of names for those who choose not to work: “Drückeberger”, “Bummelantinnen”, “Faulpelze”. But what are the risks of cutting sick pay to reduce absenteeism?
The Macron government says France needs to work more — and it has a point. The French people disagree — and they’re not wrong. Here’s why, and how to bridge the gap.
Women who are garment workers for well-known European labels face frequent gender-based violent harassment, caste-based discrimination, wage theft, forced termination, and other forms of labor and human rights violations. The laws simply don’t help.
Many young Vietnamese pay huge sums to get a training position in Germany. Only very few of them have any idea what they are getting themselves into. It’s a troubling twist to the eternal struggles of the immigrant journey.
Erasing the practice of midwifery through legislation seems impossible, yet fear persists in Mexico, which counts at least 16,000 midwives, trusted by thousands of women every year, especially peasant and indigenous women.
All informal workers face climate change and it impacts their livelihood — reduced income as well as reduced hours of work. Workers talk about fatigue and dehydration, excessive sweating, and general mental stress and anxiety.
In an undercover investigation for Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, journalist Dominika Klimek discovered the brutal reality of Poland’s sweatshops, which produce clothing for some of the biggest brands and best known designers in Europe.
Children left to fend for themselves when their parents seek work abroad often suffer emotional struggles and educational setbacks. Now, psychologists are raising alarms about the quiet but building crisis.
The deaths of migrant worker deaths and Qatar’s poor human rights record will linger over the upcoming World Cup. Foreign powers need to intervene to help the situation of those trapped in slavery-like conditions.
Revelations of slavery-like conditions for migrant workers in Malaysia manufacturing hospital supplies says much about how worker exploitation has extends across the supply chain through the pandemic.
Portugal has become the first place in the world where it is illegal for managers to contact their employees after hours. Will other countries follow suit?
Why are some of society’s most crucial employees still fighting to get paid a fair wage?
Moreno is now reversing course on austerity measures that provoked nearly two weeks of mass protests. But it may be too little too late to salvage his reputation.
Long before Uber’s multi-billion-dollar IPO, the ride-hailing app has been shaking the economic and legal foundations of the dozens of countries around the world where it’s landed. Not only has it disrupted the transportation sector, but the San Francisco-based digital taxi service has introduced a whole new way for companies to deliver their services and […]
Will slow growth rates persist in a global dynamic of ‘secular stagnation?’ Or will the IT revolution set off new bursts of productivity?
Africa must not be industrialized like the Asian dragons. Instead, the continent must invest in a high-quality educational system to adapt to a new global labor market.
Categories
Watch: OneShot — Back From The Gulag
He was born three years before Russia’s October Revolution, and served in the Red Army during World War II. But in 1945, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested for criticizing Stalin, and spent eight years in a labor camp. The experience reshaped his political opinions and inspired his most famous works, including The Gulag Archipelago (1973). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but was hounded by the KGB, stripped of his citizenship, and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He remained in exile for 20 years, before being allowed back in Russia in 1994 — after the fall […]
Lewis Hine was an American sociologist and photographer, best remembered for his images of immigrants arriving in Ellis Island, and for shining a light on the brutal reality of poor children forced to work.
Fair trade doesn’t always mean fair transport, as international shipping leaves a whole category of workers unprotected.
Women have intrinsic qualities that can help them in the fluid, digitalized labor markets of the future. But first they must have equal access to technical education.
Recent UN sanctions are trying to limit the flow of money North Korea generates by sending workers abroad, especially to China.
-Analysis- The honeymoon is definitely over. Just four months after he was elected to lead France, Emmanuel Macron faced his first major nationwide protest Tuesday against major labor reform plans that are seen as the central pillar of his presidency. Tens of thousands of workers have gone on strike for the day, causing some travel […]
‘Flexicurity,’ the Danish labor approach, where it’s easy to be fired but also rehired, has helped unemployment remain among the lowest in the world. But the lack of skilled labor creates new demands.
There are various reasons the wage and wealth gap is growing, but in Europe’s strongest economy it makes no sense to blame the global marketplace.
PARIS — Employees everywhere, here’s one more good reason to grumble: Your boss will probably outlive you. A new study from France’s national statistics bureau (INSEE) quantifies what many might have suspected, also in light of noted correlations between wealth and life expectancy. But the latest French study, which echos similar findings from other countries […]
JAIPUR — Saveera Khan’s three daughters are helping her to make bangles, which requires working in front of a hot furnace that melts the powder used for making natural lac bangles. The children handle many poisonous chemicals such as crystalline silica dust, and inhale noxious fumes of toxic dust. At just 7 years old, Mantasha is the youngest and she goes to school only when there isn’t too much work to be done at home. “Our only brother always goes to school, but mostly we girls in the family work at home,” she says. “The furnace is very very hot […]
President Obama used his State of the Union address to declare his determination to raise the U.S. minimum wage above 10 dollars. Wage policy in the rest of the world may surprise you.
Categories
Tough Labor For Syria’s Refugee Students
GAZIANTEP — Syrian university students unable to complete their degrees due to the country’s ongoing conflict and displaced to Turkey are now jobless, or scraping by as day laborers. Fares, a 29-year-old from Kfar Nabal in the Idlib province, was studying for his final university exams when the security situation in the country made traveling to campus impossible. After years in medical school, he had just completed his training at the Ibn Rashed Hospital in Aleppo. He planned to specialize in the cardiovascular system, but was forced to drop those plans when it became impossible to travel to Aleppo for […]
How many slaves are there around the world? What’s the (government-set) price of marijuana in Uruguay? Can an online video game star be a millionaire? Take a tour of the news by the numbers…
What the death of an overworked young German financial trainee tells us about the drunken carousel of the 21st century economy.
The “dual” vocational training system used to be derided as limiting university degrees. Now it is being lauded in the U.S., and exported to struggling southern European countries.
SWEDEN – Sagas are epic tales full of symbolic details, and the IKEA saga is no exception. The story of the Swedish furniture giant, founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad, who is now 86 years old, definitely qualifies as a saga. It combines successes, setbacks and the carefully maintained mythology around the patriarch, who even […]
URBAN TIMES, XINHUA (China), MING PAO (Hong Kong) Worldcrunch BEIJING – A top Chinese official announced on Monday that China would put an end to its controversial “Reeducation Through Labor” system. According to the Urban Times, addressing a meeting in Beijing, new Political and Legal Affairs Committee head Meng Jianzhu, said: “the use of Reeducation […]
-Editorial- BEIJING – Just like the former extrajudicial “Custody and Repatriation” procedure for moving beggars and homeless people out of Chinese cities, the Re-education Through Labor (RTL) camp system has long been criticized. There is now a general consensus that the unjustified administrative procedures of the labor camp system should be reformed. After years of […]