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This chapter focuses on Japanese men who are working men, family men, aging men, and complex individual men in twenty-first-century Japan. It examines Japanese employees' life stories as they are interwoven with work, family, and leisure spaces in order to shed light on the complexity of employees' lives and on the shifting meanings of various interconnected contexts that are obscured by the economic logic of twenty-first-century Japan. It also analyses how oppositional ideological systems and different individuals clash, operate, and create new meanings. The chapter reveals the restructuring and resilience that marks the ways Japanese employees wrestle with, navigate through, and manipulate dominant ideologies operating in the local and global economies. It discusses the salarymen's shifting identities since the 1990s and the relationship between gender roles, employment structures, and the neoliberal restructuring of the Japanese economy.

This chapter conducts a detailed analysis of the evolution of the employment situation in Egypt over the period from 1998 to 2012, paying special attention to the impact of the economic crisis accompanying the January 25th 2011 revolution. Trends in job creation, employment status, sector, industry, and occupation are examined. This chapter also investigates job mobility between statuses over time. Additionally, we examine changes in the conditions of work, including characteristics such as stability, formality, hours, and firm size. Employment in the private sector continues to be dominated by small firms and informal work. Irregular wage work—the type of employment that is most closely associated with vulnerability and poverty—has risen substantially as of 2012. Overall, there appears to have been a substantial deterioration in employment conditions in the private sector, but stability, if not improvement, in conditions for those employed in the public sector.

In this chapter, we analyze the structure of employment and job creation in Jordan over the period from 2010 to 2016. This period coincided with a notable downturn in the economy, which substantially reduced the rate of job creation. Nonetheless, Jordan continued to rely on a growing population of migrant workers whose numbers were further boosted by the influx of Syrian refugees, resulting in approximately one out of two new jobs going to a non-Jordanian. For Jordanians, employment rates continued to fall, and employment became more precarious for the poorest, least educated workers, despite an increase in the share of public sector employment. Unskilled Jordanian males shifted out of informal regular wage employment into irregular work as well as non-employment. With regard to labor market dynamics, the share of the public sector in the first-time employment of new entrants had started to increase after an extended decline. The increase has now reversed again, but many recent entrants still managed to obtain public sector jobs five years after entry. The transition from school to work is very protracted, with a large fraction of youth remaining in the not in education, employment or training (NEET) state for an extended period of time.

This chapter examines the dynamics of demographic change in Hansestadt Bremen, Germany from 1815 to 1910. It analyses the impact of urbanisation on demographic characteristics and the interrelationship between the pattern of economic development in Bremen and contemporary trends in mortality, fertility, and in-migration. The analysis suggests that the pattern of in-migration and mortality trends reflects the persistence of pre-industrial employment structures in Bremen.

This chapter describes the transformation of the Chinese employment structure following thirty years of economic reform (1978–2008). Notable among these changes is the dramatic growth in informal employment. Informal here refers to employment that is not stable or secure, lacks a written agreement or contract, and does not provide social insurance or benefits. Within a generation, urban China has shifted from a highly protected “iron rice bowl” system that guaranteed workers permanent employment, cradle-to-grave benefits, and a relatively high degree of equality to a market-driven employment system characterized by variations in wages, welfare provision, labor law enforcement, and job security. This book examines the strategies and responses of the Chinese state, workers, and civil society to this growth in informal employment.

This chapter examines changes in the structure and evolution of employment in Jordan over the past quarter-century. Using the detailed retrospective questions in the JLMPS, this chapter reconstructs the employment trajectories of individuals who have ever been employed. One of the main findings is that formal employment in Jordan is becoming more temporary in nature as employers attempt to achieve greater flexibility by providing definite-duration contracts or no contracts at all, while still providing social insurance coverage. This increasing precariousness of employment in the formal private sector is growing especially rapidly for female workers. Non-wage employment, whether in the form of being an employer, self-employed, or an unpaid family worker, is generally in decline in Jordan, with some limited evidence that individuals move into it after a few years of experience in informal-wage employment.

This chapter examines multiple sources of evidence to quantify and characterize the extent of informal employment in urban China. It then discusses its potential policy implications. The increase in informal or “missing” workers raises two questions: (1) Why are these workers not being reported by their employers? (2) Who are these workers, and what kinds of jobs are they performing? By 2005, 10 percent of urban workers were registered as self-employed and another 36 percent were undocumented—neither reported by employers nor self-registered. Many of these “missing” workers were probably employed in the private and service sectors. Most migrant workers were employed informally, but a large number of urban permanent residents were also employed informally.

This chapter considers the steps that must be taken for workplace flexibility to become a viable part of the American employment structure. Leadership is essential in the world of public policy, such as lawmakers educating the public and promoting incentives for businesses to become more engaged on this subject. The first component of this leadership must come in the form of concrete strategy ideas. The second necessary component is more effective group mobilization to pursue these goals. The chapter identifies the ways in which these groups could become more vested in the workplace flexibility desires of their members. While the different groups have distinct approaches to workplace flexibility and how it can be encouraged among employers, harnessing their collective energy is crucial to the realization of enhanced employment opportunities for mothers everywhere.