Documents Verd, Joan Miquel 5 results

"The aim of this concluding article is to bring together the ideas and arguments of the articles that make up this issue so as to present some conclusions and recommendations. The article emphasizes important lessons from this special issue, underlining how Europe has lost its way over recent years by imposing the market as the primary mechanism for social and economic organization. It presents some recommendations and priorities for future debates on the employment and social policy agenda. "

"Over the past 20 years, the social protection measures devoted to unemployed people in Europe have become more diverse. In an attempt to complement or curb cash transfers, many countries have put measures, services in kind and activation policies at the centre of social protection against unemployment. This article compares two countries with different policies: Spain, which still has very ‘traditional' unemployment support with little emphasis on activation, and Germany, where there has in recent years been rapid change towards activation measures. The article evaluates these policies and their consequences on the unemployed by means of the capability model, investigating comparatively the effects of institutional intervention on the real set of options available to the unemployed in finding a decent job or pursuing training or other activities. The authors argue that cash transfers can increase capabilities ‘by default', whereas more intervention-oriented public employment services need to give unemployed workers an active part in ‘tailoring' supports to their needs. "

"Since the beginning of the recession period in Europe, unemployment has greatly affected the young adult population. In this context, Spain is regarded as an extreme case, due to its exceptionally high youth unemployment rates. This article seeks to identify the determinants that have led certain groups of Spanish young people to suffer labour market trajectories with higher levels of unemployment and instability during the Great Recession than others. To do this, retrospective data from the 2012 Catalan Youth Survey are used. With these data and using cluster analysis, a typology of labour market trajectories is constructed. Next, multinomial logistic regressions are used to identify what individual socio-demographic characteristics and pre-crisis employment experiences are connected to these different typological career paths. Results show that the highly differentiated career paths are associated with different social profiles and differences in the presence of unemployment. Moreover, interesting differences among the most unstable career paths appear. For the most vulnerable social profiles the employment trajectory prior to the crisis seems to point towards the existence of an entrapment in low-skilled jobs that alternate with situations of unemployment. For those with a slightly better position their employment situation after the initiation of the crisis seems to have been impacted by their brief labour market trajectory before the crisis and their resulting work experience gap."

"Taking as a starting point the relationship between unemployment and the loss of social support put forward by social exclusion theory, this article aims to analyse how long-term unemployment affects young people's support networks for job seeking. To do so, it uses the framework of social network analysis. Based on data produced by a personal network survey of 250 young individuals in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, the results highlight the particularly harmful effect of long-term unemployment on the support network of young individuals with a low family socioeconomic status background. Unemployment reduces the presence of resourceful contacts among these young workers, which is not the case for young people with a higher family socioeconomic status. Moreover, gender and educational level intervene in the relationship between unemployment and loss of social support. These findings refine the social exclusion theory shedding light on how social inequalities crosscut labour market trajectories."