Marge Unt

Tallinn University | TLU · Department of Social Stratification

The proliferation of ride-hailing platforms in the last decade has been challenged by workers’ mobilization around the world. In order to complement the existing research on successful organizing, in this article the authors investigate the lack of collective resistance in two cases. By comparing the ride-hailing industry in Berlin (Germany) and Ta...

The global proliferation of neoliberalism, prioritising market primacy, privatisation, and deregulation, has impelled employers to pursue enhanced labour flexibility.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought about a number of partly improvised, partly only temporary, but in every respect diverse and often unprecedented social policy measures in Europe. The edited volume provides an encompassing and longer-term analysis of social policy responses during the COVID-19 crisis in order to ask in which direction the Europ...

Despite having a significant impact on how we perceive ageing, cultural representations of old age, particularly depictions of old men, have received little attention. This is especially true regarding the cinemas of small nations and Eastern European film. Some authors claim that this gap in knowledge unintentionally repeats a widespread cultural...

This chapter scrutinizes the gender wage gap by sector across the wage distribution in Estonia, a country with a very high labor market participation by women. A unique dataset comprising the Structure of Earnings Survey linked to the registries is used, which enables accounting for human capital, including previous employment history, job position...

The aim of the current paper was to investigate the moderating role of both objective and subjective country-level social (income) inequality on the relationship between employment status and well-being. The focus was on young Europeans (aged 16–29) and a multilevel perspective with individuals nested within 28 countries was adopted. Based on conse...

On average, individuals who have experienced unemployment are disadvantaged in terms of later lifetime earnings. Those who graduated from school during the Great Recession are especially prone to have experienced bouts of unemployment, but we know little about how much they suffer in later career earnings. Estonia was heavily hit by the economic cr...

Labor market insecurities have been growing in Europe and previous research has illustrated that unemployment and insecure jobs negatively affect individuals’ well-being and health. Although empirical evidence suggests that these effects vary substantially across different welfare states, we still know little about the moderating role of specific l...

The latest issue of EXCEPT projects working paper series brings together the empirical results of the project in the six work packages carried out. After a short introduction to the main aims of the project, a short overview of the main results of each work-package is given as bullet-point list. This is followed by more in-depth synthesis of result...

The latest issue of EXCEPT projects working paper series brings together the empirical results of the project in the six work packages carried out. After a short introduction to the main aims of the project, a short overview of the main results of each work-package is given as bullet-point list. This is followed by more in-depth synthesis of result...

The aim of this working paper is to highlight unsolved issues and empirical data problems that were identified by the EXCEPT research consortium. Against this background new ideas for future research (including new data collections and ideas for policy evaluation) are presented that have been developed by the EXCEPT consortium.

This report focuses on the socio-economic consequences of unemployment as well as atypical employment (such as fixed-term employment, mini-/mid- or zero hour jobs or even informal “grey” employment) for the economic situation of youth in Europe in the long-term, i.e. when leaving the labour market and transitioning into retirement. In do-ing so, th...

Youth first footsteps at the labour market (LM) affect the further career and also relate to other life domains. The trajectories depend not only on the personal characteristic of the young person but also on the institutional settings, especially on educational system, labour market regulations, employment policies and overall economic climate. Th...

This report focuses on the socio-economic consequences of unemployment as well as atypical employment (such as fixed-term employment, mini-/mid- or zero hour jobs or even informal “grey” employment) for the economic situation of youth in Europe in the long-term, i.e. when leaving the labour market and transitioning into retirement. In do-ing so, th...

The starting point of this study is the seemingly striking similarity in the number of youth-oriented labour market policies adopted by the Nordic and the Baltic EU member states in 2013–14 despite markedly different welfare regimes. The similarities remain when concentrating on active labour market policies (ALMPs) and extending the observation pe...

Estonia is an extremely fascinating case study for investigating the determinants of retirement. It has been shown to be one of the EU countries where the structure and size of the working age population are likely to be most problematic. Nevertheless, it is already now a forerunner in the employment rate among the elderly in Europe. The aim of thi...

In light of recent policies aiming to promote the prolongation of working life, one of the key questions is how people have adjusted their retirement expectations (i.e., realistic plans) and preferences (i.e., wishes and desires). We explore which social groups plan to continue working after the statutory retirement age, and whether they wish to do...

After a long period of promoting early retirement, European societies have recently started to implement various reforms aimed at fostering a longer working life. Yet cross-national variations in older workers' employment remain, as institutional path dependency, socio-economic climate and persistent retirement culture have not allowed all countrie...

Since the 1980s, growing globalisation and economic restructuring coupled with expansion of tertiary education contributed to tremendous change in the labour market entry process in Europe. Most previous studies have been quantitative, concentrated on the supply aspect and analysed the role of education as the explanatory variable of youth labour m...

The aim of this study is to examine the labour market returns to field of study for tertiary graduates in two countries with post-socialist heritage: Poland and Estonia. So far, research focusing on the employment chances of graduates in Western countries has emphasized the benefits of engineering. We would like to revisit this conclusion and find...

L'articolo fornisce un quadro relativo all'ingresso nel mercato del lavoro da parte dei giovani in Estonia.: transizione scuola-lavoro, prima parte della carriera, formazione di una famiglia. Lo scritto compara le coorti di coloro che sono diventati adulti durante il periodo di stabilitŕ sovietico (anni '80), il turbolento periodo di transizione (a...

This chapter explores the impact of education on school-to-work transitions and on the early periods of careers in Estonia since 1980. It provides a temporal comparison between the Soviet and post-Soviet systems. Based on the data from the Estonian Social Survey (ESS) (2004, 2005), the analysis begins with a brief description of Estonian institutio...

After the breakdown of socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, the role of education systems in preparing students for the “real world” changed. Though young people were freed from coercive state institutions, the shift to capitalism made the transition from school to work much more precarious and increased inequality in early career outcomes. Thi...

This article examines the interplay between changes on the macro level and the destinies and decisions of individuals who worked in agriculture at the beginning of the economic changes in Estonia in the 1990s. The agricultural sector was hit most radically by economic reforms. Our main conclusion is that individual agency was strongly determined by...

On the one hand, a self-employed worker may be a successful business owner exploiting new opportunities.At the other extreme, self-employed may be refugees from poverty and unemployment with few resources and few opportunities to earn high incomes. In this article, we address the question about importance of the `pull' and `push' factors into self-...

This article compares entry to their first stable employment among young people in Estonia and Slovenia after the fall of Communism, when the two countries opted for two different models with regard to the organization of their educational systems. Results show that in Slovenia with the passage of time after the start of reforms, education—job link...

Theoretically, the central research question of this article pertains to the way in which national institutional arrangements, namely educational systems, and related modes of labour markets and welfare provisions, affect the aggregate effectiveness of youth labour market integration in the new EU member states in comparison to the old EU countries...

This article examines the importance of ‘pull’ and ‘push’ factors in self-employment drawing upon the experience of post-socialist Estonia, where self-employment has risen sharply from a negligible level since 1989. Drawing on quantitative data, and also qualitative data, the article identifies a range of different types of self-employment in Eston...

This paper explores school-to-work transitions in three new EU Member states, Hungary, Slovenia and Estonia, focusing on the effect of the level of education and social background on the timing of the first significant employment and the match between educational qualifications and occupation among school leavers. So-called cohort effects are a foc...