Woliweb/Wage Indicator Newsletter 5, December 2004
Table of content:
1. WAGE INDICATORS ALIVE & KICKING IN 8 EU COUNTRIES
2. WAGE INDICATORS AND THE PRESS
3. WAGE INDICATORS IN THE NEW YEAR IN USA, INDIA, BRAZIL, SOUTH KOREA AND SOUTH AFRICA
4. NACE AND ISCO – HOW WE MAKE THEM USER FRIENDLY IN ALL COUNTRIES
5. TIME CHECK, NEW TOOL/TOY ONLINE IN THE NETHERLANDS
6. WORKSHOP WAGE MEASUREMENT
1.WAGE INDICATORS ALIVE & KICKING IN 8 COUNTRIES
Questionnairesand lively websites are online in 8 EU countries now. Spain, Belgium, Poland, Germany, UK, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands. Salary checks
are online in Belgium, the Netherlands, UK, Spain, Denmark and Poland. Germany and Finland want to collect first data and then start a salary check. UK and Denmark built a salary check with data of their national bureau of statistics, Poland uses the data of Gazeta.pl. Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands use the salary check of the Netherlands. Italy starts in the new year!
2.WAGE INDICATORS AND THE PRESS
Wage Indicator has been in the press in Germany, Spain, UK, Denmark and of course in the Netherlands. Germany is even in the process of signing a contract with Süddeutsche Zeitung. Similar to the contract the Netherlands signed with Telegraaf. As Poland, Twojezarobki, did with Gazeta Wyborscza. The UK, Paywizard is talking to the Financial Times. There is not yet a contract though.
Next to press clippings, you can find press releases, banners and flyers on the In the press page of Wage Indicator.
3.WAGE INDICATORS SOON IN THE USA, INDIA, BRAZIL, SOUTH KOREA AND SOUTH AFRICA
In the US the Wage Indicator Foundation will work together with Richard Freeman, Harvard Law School. Start: first week of January. Freeman will add some questions to the questionnaire related to labour rights.
In India, Brazil, South Africa and South Korea the questionnaire will be a bit more related to multinational research. Those 4 countries will start from February 2005, thanks to a grant from FNV, the Dutch trade union confederation and FNV Bondgenoten, the largest of the federations.
Like in Europe the trade unions in these 4 new countries will play a key role in the national wage indicator-teams. And again renowned research institutes, specializing in labour relations, will be their partners. Like f.e. in India the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.
More about how and what? See the project plan
.
4.NACE AND ISCO – HOW WE MAKE THEM USER FRIENDLY IN ALL QUESTIONNAIRES
The Wage Indicator questionnaire uses the international NACE and ISCO classifications to identify the respondents’ industry, respectively occupation. To do so, we have developed ‘choosers’. A chooser enables a web-visitor to choose easily from a long list of items. For NACE this is almost 250 items, for our extended ISCO classification even up to 2500 occupations!
A chooser is a two- or three-step ticking list from an aggregated level in the first step to a detailed level in the second or third step. A chooser is the only workable solution for gathering detailed information without being condemned to a huge recoding effort or restricted to a limited list of items.
A chooser must meet contradictory demands.
1. To begin with, user-friendliness requires a minimum of words: the less words in the response categories of the question, the more likely the respondent will give a reliable answer.
2. Next, visitors must be able to identify their specific industry and they may not be able to identify broader concepts covering their particular enterprise. F.e. is a hairdresser shop retail? This requires detailed lists of items.
3. The 1- and 2-digit levels in the NACE and ISCO classifications are not adequate, as they do not allow visitors an easy choice of their industry or occupations. This we found out over the past 6 months.
4. A chooser must be limited to 3 steps, no more.
5. Yet, for reasons of data-analysis the most detailed codes are preferred.
Taking these partly contradictory considerations into account, we have developed last months new choosers to measure occupation and industry. In the long run, we can use the occupation chooser also in the salary check.
The fact that we changed (improved!) the industry- and occupations list last months explains the fact that we not yet gone full out promoting the wage indicator questionnaires in all EU countries.
The newly developed choosers will be used for Brazil, India, South Africa, South Korea and the US as well.
More? Check our research lab
. We will explain there in more detail how we work.
5.TIME CHECK, NEW TOOL/TOY ONLINE IN THE NETHERLANDS
Dutchmen work hard. This is what the time check tells us. On a normal working day, they don’t have time for God and little quality time with their partner. The time check has been recently developed on the basis of 19,000 diaries, filled in by visitors of the Dutch wage indicator websites during 2004.
The new time check is unique in the world of research – where a database of 1500 diaries is already considered huge, up till now, that is. The time check offers a detailed insight in what kind of activities workers in 140 occupations spend their time on during a normal working day, broken down for gender and age.
Next to the time check simultaneous research was done on time bottlenecks working people experience. 29,000 respondents participated. They allowed to piece together a top-10 list of collective agreements, or sectors of industry, in terms of such bottlenecks. These insights will be brought to the negotiating table in the next round to try and eradicate (some of) them in a structural way, in 2005.
The time check was developed by the Dutch wage indicator team thanks to a grant of EFS. The model is available for other national wage indicator teams and can be seen in action on www.tijdwijzer.nl
. Then go to: tijd check in the menu.
6. WORKSHOP WAGE MEASUREMENT
On January 26 and 27, 2005, the University of Amsterdam/AIAS will organise a workshop Wage Measurement to discuss how hourly wages can be calculated using the worldwide wage indicator dataset. Experts from Eurostat and ILO will participate, as will our Woliweb/Wageindicator researchers and researchers from some other countries.