Documents Bonoli, Giuliano 20 results

"In this paper we focus on the impact of welfare institutions on the supply of platform workers. We assume that at the individual level the decision to engage or not in platform work depends on the available alternatives. As a result, we hypothesize that individual decisions can be explained as a consequence of welfare regime performance. In particular, we consider the ability of a welfare regime to: (1) provide effective protection against poverty; (2) to allow parents to reconcile work and family life; and (3) to facilitate a smooth transition from education to employment. Our general hypothesis is that failures in reaching one or more of these policy objectives will make participation in the platform economy more attractive, and hence increase the supply of workers. Empirically, we test our hypotheses both on macro- and micro-level data. We start by testing our macro-level hypotheses on a sample of 21 countries using two datasets on platform work (ETUI IPWS and COLLEEM II). At the micro-level, we use data on Germany and Spain. We find limited evidence in favour of our hypotheses. Higher rates of economic insecurity are associated with a stronger prevalence of platform work. At the macro-level, we also find support for the hypothesis that platform work is a response to the failure of supporting parents in reconciling work and family life. It also appears that online platform work may be an attractive option for tertiary educated people in countries with a strong labour market mismatch (e.g. Spain)."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"It is widely known that informal contacts and networks constitute a major advantage when searching for a job. Unemployed people are likely to benefit from such informal contacts, but building and sustaining a network can be particularly difficult when out of employment. Interventions that allow unemployed people to effectively strengthen their networking capability could as a result be promising. Against this background, this article provides some hints in relation to the direction that such interventions could take. First, on the basis of data collected on a sample of 4,600 newly-unemployed people in the Swiss Canton of Vaud, it looks at the factors that influence jobseekers' decisions to turn to informal contacts for their job search. The article shows that many unemployed people are not making use of their network because they are unaware of the importance of this method. Second, it presents an impact analysis of an innovative intervention designed to raise awareness of the importance of networks which is tested in a randomized controlled trial setting."

"Since the early 1990s, European welfare states have undergone substantial changes, in terms of objectives, areas of intervention, and instruments. Traditional programmes, such as old age pensions have been curtailed throughout the continent, while new functions have been taken up. At present, welfare states are expected to help non-working people back into employment, to complement work income for the working poor, to reconcile work and family life, to promote gender equality, to support child development, and to provide social services for an ageing society. The welfare settlement that is emerging at the beginning of the 21st century is nonetheless very different in terms of functions and instruments from the one inherited from the last century. This book seeks to offer a better understanding of the new welfare settlement, and to analyze the factors that have shaped the recent transformation."

"France, Italy, Germany, Austria and Spain have all gone through several waves of pension reforms both in the 1990s and in the early 2000s. Comparing the politics of these reforms shows some similar trends: reforms were usually postponed until European integration and/or economic recession forced governments to act. Before the first wave of reforms, the main form of ‘action' had been to increase payroll taxes to finance pensions. In the 1990s, reforms were usually negotiated on the basis of a quid pro quo: benefits were intended progressively to decrease in exchange for non-contributory pensions being financed from general tax revenues instead of through the insurance schemes. The second wave of reforms (during the 2000s) seems to have brought more innovation, with new goals such as the development of voluntary private pension funds and the need to increase employment rates among the elderly and to stop early retirement. The article aims, first, to trace the political processes leading to these reforms; second, to reveal the commonalities in these processes between the various cases; and third, to highlight the differences between the first and second waves of pension reform. It will emphasize the role of ‘sequencing' and demonstrate how each pension reform facilitates the adoption of the next one."

"Western welfare states were built during the postwar years, with one key objective: to protect family (male) breadwinners against the consequences of losing their ability to extract an income from the labor market. Structures of social risk, however, have changed dramatically since then, so that current social risks include precarious employment, long-term unemployment, being a working poor, single parenthood, or inability to reconcile work and family life. Changes in structures of social risk have resulted in the adaptation of welfare states only in the Nordic countries but much less in continental and southern Europe. To account for this divergence in social policy trajectories, this article argues that the reorientation of the Nordic welfare state was possible because new social risks emerged before the maturation of the postwar welfare states. The argument is demonstrated through comparative statistical analysis relating the timing of key socioeconomic developments to current levels of spending in relevant policies."

"As a result of recent welfare state transformations, and most notably the reorientation of welfare states towards activation, the internal fragmentation of social security systems has emerged as a key policy problem in many western European countries. The types of response that have been adopted, however, vary substantially across countries, ranging from the encouragement of inter-agency collaboration to the outright merger of agencies. The purpose of this exploratory article is twofold. First, by proposing the concept of coordination initiatives, it tries to develop a better conceptualization of the cross-national diversity in responses to the fragmentation problem. Second, starting from existing theories of welfare state development and policy change, it presents first hypotheses accounting for the variation observed in coordination initiatives."

"The present paper has a twofold objective. First we discuss different possible interpretations of recent current social policy change. Western European welfare states have been characterised by (functional and normative) innovation towards cost-containment, activation, social investment, and the flexicurity model. While the effect of recent waves of reforms is still debated, norms and cognitive elements of welfare policy have clearly changed. Second, on the basis of existing scholarship, we try to develop an explanation of the observed pattern of change with specific reference to the politics of ‘blame avoidance' and ‘credit claiming'. The recent reform process has seen the emergence of a complex set of strategies policymakers have implemented to improve social and political consensus for innovation. The latter has consisted in the transformation of the social and employment policies inherited from the past. Third we shed light on some key aspects of the reforms' output and outcome, with a brief summary of the main issues in need for further research. Reforms have been consistent with the ‘contingent' convergence of national welfare states through a sequence of transformative innovations, with evident distributional effects."

"This paper deals with the recruitment strategies of employers in the low-skilled segment of the labour market. We focus on low-skilled workers because they are overrepresented among jobless people and constitute the bulk of the clientele included in various activation and labour market programmes. A better understanding of the constraints and opportunities of interventions in this labour market segment may help improve their quality and effectiveness. On the basis of qualitative interviews with 41 employers in six European countries, we find that the traditional signals known to be used as statistical discrimination devices (old age, immigrant status and unemployment) play a somewhat reduced role, since these profiles are overrepresented among applicants for low skill positions. On the other hand, we find that other signals, mostly considered to be indicators of motivation, have a bigger impact in the selection process. These tend to concern the channel through which the contact with a prospective candidate is made. Unsolicited applications and recommendations from already employed workersemit a positive signal, whereas the fact of being referred by the public employment office is associated with the likelihood of lower motivation."

"The objective of this paper is to distinguish between different types of working poverty, on the basis of the mechanisms that produce it. Whereas the poverty literature identifies a myriad of risk factors and of categories of disadvantaged workers, we focus on three immediate causes of working poverty, namely low wage rate, weak labour force attachment, and high needs, the latter mainly due to the presence of children (and sometimes to the increase in needs caused by a divorce). These three mechanisms are the channels through which macroeconomic, demographic and policy factors have a direct bearing on working households. The main assumption tested here is that welfare regimes strongly influence the relative weight of these three mechanisms in producing working poverty, and, hence, the composition of the working-poor population. Our figures confirm this hypothesis and show that low-wage employment is a key factor, but, by far, not the only one and that family policies broadly understood play a decisive role, as well as patterns of labour market participation and integration."