Documents Czechia 355 results

"This report identifies and analyses the wage setting practices in Czechia, focusing on four specific sectors – construction, hospitality, urban transport, and waste management. As part of the BARWAGE project 2 this report seeks to understand how exactly wage is setting in these sectors, with a focus on low-wage workers (if relevant) is occurring, which actors are involved, what is the starting point of this process and where does it lead to in terms of institutional stability or change of the wage setting institutions. The findings reveal that sectoral wage setting has historically played a minor role, with only certain wage components, like bonuses and special cases, being adjusted. These adjustments set a base but can be overridden by company collective agreements. Except for the construction sector, sectoral collective bargaining is declining, as seen in urban transport, or is nonexistent, as in waste management. Wage setting is primarily driven by company-level bargaining, with the statutory minimum wage having a limited impact, except in hospitality. Individual bargaining is not significant. In unionised workplaces, wage negotiations are typically conducted by the union, with little individual negotiation."

"This paper aims to verify the relationship between minimum wage growth and the financial indicators of automotive companies. As a hi-tech sector, the automotive industry is usually not expected to be affected by minimum wage policies. The introduction of the minimum wage in Germany and the dynamic development of the minimum wage in Eastern European countries make it possible to assess this relationship. German, Czech, Polish, and Slovak automotive company data was obtained from the Orbis database. Panel regression models were applied to test for dependencies. The paper detects the association between the growth of the minimum wage and the increase in personnel cost, which is next to the associations with several financial indicators at the company level. The identified impact is specific to small and medium-sized companies."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

"We investigate the conditions under which state reformers in postcommunist Europe can implement radical policies aimed at boosting investment now that the fundamental institutions of a market economy are in place. Surprisingly, such reforms are now being pioneered by those countries considered laggards of the first-generation, market-making reforms in the 1990s. Party system institutionalization offers the best explanation for who adopts second-generation reforms, to what degree, and when. Such institutionalization, which enhances vertical accountability between governments and voters, puts state reformers at a disadvantage in enacting second-generation reforms. By making it difficult to create a coherent and credible opposition against reform, underinstitutionalization insulates state reformers from social and political pressures, allowing them to undertake economic policies hard to envision in a more developed democracy. We test this hypothesis by comparing recent reform attempts in Slovakia, Estonia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania."

"Economic transformation after 1989 and the global economic recession that began in 2008 have caused an increase in precarious work in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. As a result of refamilialization, precarious work acquired a specific form for women. We use the Czech Republic as an example in analysing a trend that is obvious throughout the Visegrád countries and apply the capabilities approach to understand the dynamics of precarious work in the lives of women with care responsibilities. Neither the objective characteristics of work nor its subjective assessment alone makes it possible to understand precarious work. The explanation lies in the (temporal) dynamics of the interconnection between the two: insecure jobs accepted by women with care responsibilities as a temporary strategy may turn into a trap excluding them from a stable job."

"Over the past two decades, the income level of the Czech Republic has converged considerably towards the OECD average. However, after the 2008 global crisis, the convergence process stalled. Shortfalls in labour productivity have developed and are mainly structural. Policies are needed to foster domestic sources of productivity growth. Better targeting of government R&D support and more focused innovation policies that would be aided by a streamlining of policy institutions and interventions are necessary. In particular, tailored policies to increase knowledge-based capital (skills, management capacity, collaboration, etc.) are necessary to increase Czech firms' productivity. Also, resource reallocation should be facilitated by reforming framework conditions. In particular, bankruptcy rules, competition and regulation policies, access to finance and SME taxation need to be improved to boost SMEs' growth and productivity."

"This article investigates the role of temporary work agencies (TWAs) at Foxconn's assembly plants in the Czech Republic. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it shows TWAs' comprehensive management of migrant labour: recruitment and selection in the countries of origin; cross-border transportation, work and living arrangements in the country of destination; and return to the countries of origin during periods of low production. The article asks whether the distinctiveness of this specific mode of labour management can be understood adequately within the framework of existing theories on the temporary staffing industry. In approaching the staffing industry through the lens of migration labour analysis, the article reveals two key findings. Firstly, TWAs are creating new labour markets but do so by eroding workers' rights and enabling new modalities of exploitation. Secondly, the diversification of TWAs' roles and operations has transformed TWAs from intermediaries between capital and labour to enterprises in their own right."