Documents Mori, Anna 6 results

"Through an in-depth analysis of three public procurement protocols developed in Italy, this article discusses the politics of socially responsible public procurement and, in particular, of experimentation with ‘buying decent work'. We analyse the role played by trade unions in experiments aimed at improving working conditions in outsourced public services and the power resources they rely on in different phases of the ‘buying decent work' policy cycle. We show that trade unions are the leading force in the establishment of ‘buying decent work' principles through the mobilisation of their associational, coalitional and ideational power resources. This results in a form of state-backed institutionalisation that equips trade unions with institutional power resources, which are key in the phases of implementation and enforcement of ‘buying decent work'. Associational power resources, however, are also important in ensuring enforcement."

"La crescita delle disuguaglianze nel mercato del lavoro e della segmentazione fra "insider" e "outsider" sono stati un tema molto presente nella discussione accademica e, più recentemente, anche nel dibattito pubblico. Raramente, invece, sono state analizzate le forze trainanti che stanno dietro a questi fenomeni. In particolare, è rimasto ai margini della discussione il ruolo della domanda di lavoro (ossia le pratiche di reclutamento dei datori di lavoro e l'organizzazione dei processi produttivi) nel produrre disuguaglianze e segmentazione. Tuttavia, le scelte di disintegrazione verticale delle organizzazioni, pubbliche e private, sono state fortemente associate alla crescita di cattivi lavori e di fenomeni di segmentazione. Il presente contributo analizza questo tema attraverso l'analisi delle strategie datoriali in due settori economici, i servizi pubblici e la macellazione, evidenziando le motivazioni che stanno alla base di queste scelte e le loro conseguenze in termini di produzione di diseguaglianze e di peggioramento della qualità del lavoro. Attraverso quest'analisi mostreremo come sia necessario riportare le scelte organizzative delle imprese al centro della discussione su diseguaglianze e qualità del lavoro e che le politiche mirate a migliorare la qualità del lavoro dovrebbero concentrarsi non solo sul lato dell'offerta del mercato del lavoro, ma anche su lato della domanda."

"This article examines the impact of outsourcing of public services on employment relations and working conditions in three countries: Italy, the United Kingdom and Denmark. It presents six matched case studies and investigates whether contracting out by public administrations causes a market-driven convergence across national boundaries or whether cross-country differences endure. Although outsourcing blurs the organizational boundaries between public and private sectors everywhere, making terms and conditions of employment fragmented and less protected, distinct structures and legacies of national employment relations institutions result in differences between national trajectories."

"The transition to an on-demand service economy, supported by unprecedented technological developments and the digital revolution, has modified traditional self-employed professions and generated new ones, fostering the growth of a body of highly qualified and hyper-specialised self-employed professionals in the European economies. An analysis of this phenomenon highlights three critical questions, connected to their position in the labour market: 1) the contested definition of their legal status and the (ad hoc) regulation adopted; 2) their position within each national social protection system; 3) the complexity of collective representation in a context of major labour market fragmentation. The article explores these issues from a socio-economic perspective, comparing three European countries − Italy, Germany and the UK − with different welfare state regimes and diverse models for regulating professions. First findings show partly divergent responses to such common challenges, yet display some positive signs of change for self-employed professionals."

"After some promise in the 1990s, European unions have grown increasingly disillusioned with regard to the results of EU social policy and EU social dialogue. The paper analyses the extent and reasons of this disillusion by looking at the impact on social dialogue of the Active Inclusion Recommendation launched by the European Commission at the outset of the economic crisis in 2008. The Recommendation led to a tripartite framework agreement at the EU level in 2010 (the only such agreement in a decade), which was then to be implemented at national and regional levels. With a multilevel governance approach, the paper looks at the extent to which social dialogue on Active Inclusion at the EU level, in six EU countries (France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK) and six regions (Rhône-Alpes, Lombardy, Lower Silesia, Catalonia, West Sweden and Greater Manchester) within those countries was somehow revitalised. The analysis, looking at both top-down and bottom-up processes and based on documentary analysis and interviews, shows that the initiative displays ambiguities similar to those of typical composite EU principles, such as famously the case of ‘flexicurity'. The multilevel governance of the EU, including the interaction between ‘soft' employment policies and evolving ‘hard' Eurogovernance tools, and with poor horizontal and vertical coordination, resulted in multiple distortions of the principle and, over time, to frustration. Unions' engagement varies by level, country and region, reflecting both traditional national approaches and the local perception of ‘active inclusion' as an opportunity. Although trade unions were more welcoming of ‘active inclusion' than they had been for flexicurity, similar related threats and opportunities led to modest achievements and a gradual fading of the idea at the European and national levels, with some more opportunities however at the regional level. The paper concludes that, if trade unions want to engage with the idea of a European Social Model and with Eurogovernance, they could develop stronger networks among regional organisations."