Documents Keune, Maarten 119 results

"For many years, in most European countries, the public sector has been under pressure to reduce expenditure and increase efficiency. Long-term pressures on the public sector, and especially the recent austerity drives following from the crisis, have led to reforms and cuts in public budgets with serious negative effects on the European Social Model, on the quality of public services and on social outcomes, including health and inequality.

This book analyses the evolution of employment, job quality and labour relations in the public sector since the 2008 crisis in nine EU Member States: Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, Czech Republic, and the UK. It focuses on three sub-sectors: primary education, health care and municipalities. The authors show that the public sector reforms of the past few decades, as well as the more recent crisis-related austerity policies, have had important consequences for the number and quality of jobs across the nine countries. Public sector workers have frequently had to shoulder the burden of budgetary pressures through declining employment levels and job quality, including stagnating or declining (real) wages and the intensification and ‘extensification' of work. Declines in the number of jobs and job quality have been strongest in the countries where the crisis has been felt the deepest, in particular Italy and Spain. However, in the last few years, there is a moderate recovery in employment and/or job quality, particularly in healthcare and primary education.

The authors have identified several broad trends in public sector labour relations. One is the turn of governments towards greater unilateralism in the initial crisis years. The second is the emergence of new industrial relations actors. Following the dissatisfaction of public sector workers and the limited success of the established trade unions to respond to this dissatisfaction, a variety of new unions, social movements, ad hoc pressure groups and other organisations have emerged. Thirdly, there has been a widespread increase in strikes, protests, campaigns and other forms of industrial action by public sector workers. Finally, the erosion of the quality of public services has become a central issue in the demands of trade unions and new social actors. They now consistently argue that good job quality for public sector employees is essential to guaranteeing and enhancing the quality of public services."

"Dutch public procurement practices have led to problems with high workloads, low wages, low job autonomy and job insecurity. With reference to four sectors – construction, home care, cleaning and regional bus transport – we discuss two main explanatory dimensions: (i) the financial and institutional context; and (ii) the ideas shaping the normative and cognitive frames of actors that influence their policy-making. Procurers (a) prioritise the cheapest procurement contracts; (b) accept no, or only limited, responsibility for workers' job quality; and (c) show limited knowledge of or at best uncertainty about how public procurement rules allow more attention to be paid to job quality and social aspects. Providers focus mainly on cost competitiveness. Finally, even dominant ideas are not shared by all, and there is (still limited) re-politicisation of job quality issues. This sometimes results in experiments that run counter to the dominant cost-efficiency objective and pay attention to job quality."

"Questo articolo si basa su quattro argomentazioni. In primo luogo la contrattazione collettiva è in grado di mitigare gli effetti negativi generati dalla volatilità del mercato e dal processo di adattamento alle sue regole, attraverso la definizione di intese che garantiscono certezza sostanziale e procedurale sia ai lavoratori sia ai datori di lavoro, e una maggiore sicurezza ai lavoratori. In secondo luogo le intese contrattuali multi-employer sono più idonee a svolgere questa funzione rispetto a quelle single-employer. In terzo luogo vi sono differenze istituzionali fra le intese contrattuali multi-employer relative alla governance della contrattazione aziendale che influenzano in misura notevole la loro capacità di promuovere certezza e sicurezza del lavoro. In quarto luogo la pressione dovuta alla crisi sta accelerando l'adattamento al mercato della contrattazione collettiva multi-employer, con effetti potenzialmente dannosi sulla sua capacità di attenuare le spinte negative."

"This paper draws on the research done in the framework of the European Union Framework Programme 7 project The Governance of Uncertainty and Sustainability: Tensions and Opportunities (GUSTO). The New Social Risks (NSR) school of social policy analysis has enabled scholars and policy-makers alike to reshape their approach to take account of the main relevant changes that have affected advanced societies since the major reformulation of welfare state arrangements that took place, in most cases, after World War II. However, the authors of this paper point to certain deficiencies in it, and suggest a new approach which offers an overall framework of analysis for an extended concept of the social policy environment. "

"The liberalisation and privatisation of public sector activities have been the subject of heated debate since the 1970s. The chapters in this volume contribute to this debate by analysing the effects of liberalisation and privatisation on productivity and service provision, employment, wages and working conditions in a number of European countries. The focus is on the service sector, which has been the main source of employment growth in recent years."