Diversity in Employment Patterns in North-West Europe : A Regional and Sectoral Approach
The decline in Germany's capacity to provide employment for its population has become one of the most discussed economic questions of the turn of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. It is a change that has occurred despite the economy's continuing strong performance on the most obvious criterion of national competitiveness: capacity to sell goods abroad. Particularly puzzling from some perspectives is that the two parts of Europe that out-perform Germany on employment – the United Kingdom and the Nordic Countries – are often considered in the literature on capitalist diversity to differ from Germany in opposite ways. For example, in the dichotomized world of Hall and Soskice (2001) the UK is a paradigm case of a liberal market economy, while the Nordic countries are, like Germany, coordinated market economies. Other observers claim that the Nordics and the UK both have low levels of labor-market regulation, but this only works if certain forms of government regulation are considered: the Nordic countries have more powerful trade unions and legislation governing the work environment than either Germany or the UK. That in post-industrial economies both so-called 'liberal' and 'social demo-cratic' welfare states might have a superior capacity to generate employment than so-called 'corporatist' ones was anticipated some years ago by Esping-An-dersen (1999). In his scheme the UK, the Nordics, and Germany were clear representatives of these respective types. In free-market economies, he argued, there was a large gap between wealthy and poor populations, enabling the former to employ the latter at low wages and with low or nonexistent non-wage costs in low-productivity service jobs. Also, generous welfare states produced a large number of jobs in public services, many of which also existed at low-skilled levels. These two contrasting kinds of economy both developed a capacity to provide low-productivity jobs in services to replace those that had existed in Fordist manufacturing. Ebbinghaus (2000) reached a similar conclusion about these three country types following an examination of a different policy area: early retirement.
The Same but Different: Regulating Zero Hours Work in Two Liberal Market Economies
Abstract The rise in zero hours contracts in liberal market economies (LMEs) has recently received much attention with calls for regulation to protect workers. LMEs typically adopt flexible labour market policies that are less regulated than coordinated market economies (CMEs) as a competitive advantage. In this paper we examine nuanced differences in the nature and regulation of zero hours work in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland. With an increased diffusion of zero hours work in both countries, we examine the different responses taken by these similar LMEs to this contemporary employment issue. We examine whether, as expected in an LME context, there is weak regulation in both countries and the factors influencing this. We find subtle but important differences between regulations of zero hours contracts. We conclude by discussing the possible implications of the UK’s exit from the European Union (EU) (Brexit) for the regulation of precarious work.
The Paradox of Globalization
What is the impact of globalization on labor in the advanced industrial countries? One body of work holds that globalization pushes all countries toward neoliberalism; another argues that the impact of globalization will vary according to prevailing institutional arrangements and predicts continued divergence between the so-called liberal and coordinated market economies. In an analysis of the German case that combines case-study and formal-modeling methods, we refute the first, neoliberal convergence, theory, showing that globalization in some ways empowers unions by rendering employers extremely vulnerable to industrial unrest. Furthermore, we suggest some revisions to the second, varieties of capitalism, perspective. We show that, in Germany, employers' increased vulnerability to conflict has shored up centralized bargaining arrangements in the short run, but at the same time, has also set in motion feedback effects that are deeply destabilizing to the system in the longer term.