Rethinking the Future of Work — Direction and Visions – By Colin C. Williams
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2008.00712_10.x |
| Published date | 01 March 2009 |
| Date | 01 March 2009 |
| Author | Paul Ransome |
BOOK REVIEWS
Labour and the Ambiguities of the ‘European Social Model’
Unwrapping the European Social Model edited by Maria Jepsen and Amparo Serrano
Pascual. Policy Press, Bristol, 2006, 260 pp., ISBN 10 1 86134 798 7, £65.00.
Struggling for a Social Europe: Neoliberal Globalization and the Birth of a European
Social Movement by Andy Mathers. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007, 215 pp., ISBN
978 0 7546 4580 1, £50.00.
Trade Union Revitalisation: Trends and Prospects in 34 Countries edited by Craig
Phelan. Peter Lang, Bern, 2007, 582 pp., ISBN 978 3 03911 009 4, £59.90.
The concept of ‘social Europe’ is part reality, part aspiration and part public relations.
The reality is that in broader comparative perspective, most countries of continental
western Europe have high levels of statutory employment protection, multi-employer
collective bargaining and an institutionalized public status for trade unions and
employers’ organizations (also known as the ‘social partners’). The aspiration, shared
by most unions and parties of the left, is for an upwards harmonization of the
‘European social model’ and its extension, in particular, to the new EU member-states
to the east. The public relations dimension dates back over two decades in the
discourse of a ‘social dimension’ to European integration, propagated by Jacques
Delors when president of the European Commission as an accompaniment to the
single market project. It has been reiterated by all his successors, even as they pursue
efforts to ‘modernize’ social protections, which might more honestly be regarded as a
demolition exercise.
How, then, do we make sense of this multifaceted and often contradictory idea of
social Europe? How far is its core of reality threatened by the intensification of a
market logic, at EU and at more general international level? What is the role in this
process of trade unions, as the main institutionalized stakeholders in social regulation
of employment? Do they have the will and capacity to resist the erosion of the models
of social protection, which until recently were taken-for-granted features of the indus-
trial relations landscape? These questions are at least part of the focus of all three
works under review.
Jepsen and Serrano Pascual, in introducing their volume, note that the concept of
a ‘European social model’ (ESM) is ‘highly ambiguous’ (p. 1), and often derives
meaning only through an explicit or implicit contrast with the United States. This
imprecision and ambiguity render the notion a ‘politically constructed project’ (p. 37)
deployed by European policy makers to legitimize an individualization of social
protections and a subordination of employee rights to the dictates of competitiveness.
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2008.00712.x
47:1 March 2009 0007–1080 pp. 180–202
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
The body of the book — co-ordinated by the European Trade Union Institute
(ETUI), the research arm of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) —
consists of a set of thematic contributions, for the most part by academic experts.
Goetschy, writing on the ‘community social model’, initially takes a less sceptical
view than the editors, regarding the concept as ‘a valuable analytical tool’ (p. 47).
Her main focus, though, is on the evolution of social policy at EU level, seen as ‘a
deliberate trade-off for progress in economic integration’ (p. 53). She notes the frag-
mentation of EU social policy interventions, adding that the Commission approach
is inherently elitist, with a dominant effort to reduce political issues to purely tech-
nical choices. She also emphasizes that social policy measures are subordinated to
economic policies, which are increasingly deflationary and deregulatory in charac-
ter. In some ways complementary is the chapter by Keune on the ESM and eastern
enlargement. He stresses that there was an elaborate ‘state socialist welfare state’,
which to some extent cushioned the disruptive impact of economic restructuring in
the 1990s. But he adds that diversity among the new member-states in terms of
patterns of welfare provision, relative poverty levels and income inequality was as
great as in the West — though welfare expenditure in all cases ‘as a percentage
of GDP remains very low and far below the average for the EU15’ (p. 184). Given
the lack of a homogeneous ESM in the West, and the priority of economic
over social objectives in the enlargement process, it is not surprising that there
has been little upwards convergence. A different aspect of enlargement is considered
by Lafoucriere and Green, the role of social dialogue. They discuss the efforts to
construct tripartite institutions in the new member-states, but emphasize the
obstacles — notably, the lack of representative employers’ organizations — and
conclude sombrely that a failure to fill the gap may ‘discredit the rather fragile
ESM’ (p. 251).
Salverda addresses the common argument that the ESM, by creating rigidities in
the labour market, results in lower employment rates and higher unemployment than
in the USA. He notes that (un)employment rates vary substantially within both the
EU and the USA. Much of the aggregate gap reflects the more rapid increase in
manufacturing productivity in the EU up to the mid-1990s, and the lower ‘compen-
sating’ growth in low-wage service employment. Paradoxically, greater institutional-
ized wage moderation in Europe’s ‘co-ordinated market economies’ may also have
depressed aggregate demand, with negative employment effects.
Many of the subsequent chapters consider aspects of the European Employment
Strategy (EES) explicitly designed to redress the presumed gap between Europe and
the USA. Mósesdóttir focuses on the link between the EES, the ESM and gender
equality, identifying a dual policy shift. First, the emphasis has changed from anti-
discrimination to the reconciliation of work and family life; second, hard law has
increasingly given way to ‘soft’ processes of target setting, benchmarking and peer
review (the ‘open method of co-ordination’). She concludes (p. 161) that ‘the EU’s
regulatory paradigm as it relates to gender equality is patchy and involves contradic-
tory objectives’. Salais examines more generally the ‘politics of indicators’ within the
EES, and argues that there is inbuilt bias in the measurement of employment perfor-
mance. For example, employment ratios are calculated on the basis of any position
regarded as a job ‘regardless of length, number of hours worked per week, status, or any
other aspect’ (p. 191). If the raw data were corrected for hours worked, the ‘superior’
performance of the UK compared with France would disappear. A quality vocational
education system, provided outside the firm, paradoxically deflates the employment
ratio for young people. Such biases matter, Salais argues, because governments are
Book Reviews 181
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2009.
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