Documents Scalise, Gemma 6 results

"The permanent restructuring of the economy, exacerbated by the digital transition and combined with labour market dualization, is progressively increasing semi- and low-skilled workers' risk of marginalization. This article analyses how countries balance employment and equality concerns in core private services sectors and inquires the policy strategy that governments in Germany, France, Italy and Spain have implemented over the last two decades for workers 'at the margins'. The analysis encompasses multiple policy tools – skill upgrading, social benefits, incentives to reduce barriers to employment and wage regulation – and reveals varied trajectories. A common direction is followed by Germany and Spain, which have adopted policies to mitigate long-standing labor market dualism by implementing protective policies that aim at improving job conditions for low-wage and at-risk workers. France is stuck in its protective approach, focusing on job stabilization through subsidies without addressing the need for skill development, which limits long-term labor market mobility. Italy is exacerbating dualism by failing to improve job quality and training opportunities, leading to persistent low productivity and increasing in-work poverty."

"Barely having had the time to digest the economic and social aftershocks of the Great Recession, European welfare states are confronted with the even more disruptive coronavirus pandemic as probably, threatening the life of the more vulnerable, while incurring job losses for many as the consequence of the temporal "freezing of the economy" by lockdown measures. Before the Covid-19 virus struck, the new face of the digital transformation and the rise of the 'platform' economy already raised existential questions for future welfare provision. The Great Lockdown - if anything - is bound to accelerate these trends. Greater automation will reinforce working from home to reduce Covid-19 virus transmission risks. At the same time, the Great Lockdown will reinforce inequality, as the poor find it more difficult to work from home, while low-paid workers in essential service in health care, supermarket retail, postal services, security and waste disposal, continue to face contagion risks. And although popular conjectures of 'jobless growth' and 'routine-biased' job polarization, driven by digitization and artificial intelligence, may still be overblown, intrusive change in the nature of work and employment relations require fundamental rethinking of extant labour market regulation and social protection. Inspired more by adverse family demography than technological change, social investment reform has been the fil rouge of welfare recalibration since the turn of the century. Is social investment reform still valid in the new era of 'disruptive' technological transformation in aftermath of Coronavirus pandemic that is likely to turn into the worst recession since the second world war? Empirically, this chapter explores how Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, in terms of the strengths and vulnerabilities of their labour market to digitization, together with their respective social investment aptitude, are currently preparing their welfare states for the intensification of technological change in the decade ahead."

"Whether and under which conditions immigrants should be admitted and obtain access to employment and social security is an issue of continuously high political salience across the advanced democracies. Unions and employers, as traditionally influential actors in immigration and social policymaking, have important roles to play in this area, but their exact preferences, strategies and behaviour are theoretically difficult to determine and are still only partly understood. This article outlines a series of research problems regarding the roles of social partners in the social and economic integration of immigrants and discusses how the articles contained in this special issue address these problems."

"Migrant inclusion in a society is a process that ultimately succeeds or fails at the local level and cities have increasingly taken a proactive stance in delivering their own policies for integration. The literature on the topic has focused particularly on the cooperation between local political institutions and civil society organizations, underestimating the key role played by social partners. This paper demonstrates the participation of social partners in the local governance of migrant integration in three European cities: Barcelona, Lyon and Gothenburg. Drawing on process tracing analysis and qualitative interviews, the article illustrates the different responses of local unions and employers' organizations to immigration and the variety of approaches to supporting migrant integration into employment and society. The article argues that these approaches, which take place within different institutional and structural contexts, shape different patterns of migrant inclusion and allow us to explain the new and traditional ways in which social partners operate as social and political actors"

"The idea of ‘active inclusion' was embraced by the European Commission in 2008 and supported financially through the European Social Fund, inspiring national and subnational reforms throughout Europe. This article analyses the role played by social partners in its implementation, using three comparative case studies to assess its transposition at the local level in Spain, France and Sweden. Despite convergence in the vocabulary used by actors involved in labour market governance, translation into local measures is different, with significant implications for policy-making. To explain the varieties of active inclusion, I focus on the interplay between structure and the agency of competing local political and social actors who participate in labour market governance."

"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."