Employment, Trade Unionism, and Class

The Labour Market in Southern Europe since the Crisis

Gregoris Ioannou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429632129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

The economic crisis has brought about a watershed in institutional, political, and social relations, reshaping the labour market and the class structure in southern Europe. This book provides a critical comparative assessment of the dynamics of change in the employment field, focusing on Spain, Greece, and Cyprus.

The book assesses how the liberalization and deregulation processes and the promotion of market-enhancing reforms progressed in three different national settings, identifying the forces, agents, contexts, and mechanisms shaping the employment and industrial relations systems. The comparative perspective used deciphers the interplay of external and internal dynamics in the restructuring of the labour field in Southern Europe, examining austerity and its contestation in connection with prevailing societal ideologies and class shifts. The first part of the book sets the theoretical and historical context, the second is comprised of three empirical national case studies, and the third discusses comparatively the handling of the crisis, its impact, and its legacy from the standpoint of a decade later. The book presents differences in industrial relations systems, trade union forms, and class composition dynamics, accounting for the development of the crisis and the reshaping of the employment field after one decade of crisis.

It will be of value to researchers, academics, professionals, and students working on issues of employment and industrial relations, labour market and labour law, political economy and class structure, as well as those interested in the contemporary society and economy of southern Europe in general, and Spain, Greece, and Cyprus in particular.

Part I

Southern Europe: The Labour Market and the Crisis

1 The Themes, the Concepts, and the Field

This introductory chapter outlines the theoretical and conceptual framework, articulates the research questions that will be addressed in the following chapters, and provides the necessary background against which historical change has occurred. In doing so it draws insights not only from industrial relations and sociology of work literatures but also from relevant adjacent disciplines and subdisciplines such as political economy and political sociology. It adopts a historical standpoint and provides an overview of the employment field as it has evolved in the last decades of the 20th Century accounting for the institutional setting and the main dynamics in operation. The analytic frame is international and identifies the main themes that are of relevance in this book, such as the institutional context of the labour market and the politics and operation of trade unionism.

The scholarly literature on employment and its regulation and on the role and function of trade unions is reviewed with a view to examining in parallel both the evolution of the world of work and the research about it. The debates on flexibility and precariousness and on worker interests and their representation in the corporatist and post-corporatist neoliberal contexts are briefly presented along with the main features of the Mediterranean industrial relations systems in order to map out the contours of the analysis that will follow. Subsequently the notion of the economic crisis is defined and an overview of its appearance, management, and social and political consequences in Southern Europe is provided.

The chapter ends with a note on the method and the logic of the analytic approach adopted and finally by introducing the content of the remainder of the book in a brief, chapter by chapter summary. It includes a reflection on the process of the writing of this book, the context in which it appears, and an explanation of the choices made in terms of the focus and structure as well as definitional matters and specified analytic aims. This chapter thus accounts for the rationale and the scope of the book and provides the necessary backdrop for the answering of the main question of the book, namely how the crisis in Southern Europe played out in different countries.

Serving as the introduction, this chapter constitutes a general overview of the key notions that structure the book, how they are approached, understood, and operationalised in the analysis of a specified domain and a specified spatio-temporal context. The labour market is conceptualised as a field shaped by dynamics operative in employment relations and determined by a changing correlation of class forces. The institutional order, understood as the result of the constellation of power relations and the framework that bounds interaction and conflict at the workplace and the labour market, is also influenced by economic conditions, social customs, ideological orientations, political expediency. Hence, all these dimensions are brought into the analysis in order to explain the shifts produced by and during the economic crisis in Southern Europe. In addition to the thematic presentation and the theoretical outline, this chapter sketches the basic factual content of the crisis so as to serve as a backdrop for the more detailed empirical accounts that follow in the subsequent chapters.

Employment in Transition: Flexibility and Precariousness

In the last decades of the 20th Century a series of significant changes took place at a global level producing shifts in the economic and political domains. The establishment of the European Economic Community, its consolidation and expansion in the 1970s and its evolution into the European Union, the downturn of the Soviet Union and its implosion and collapse created a new universe based on altered political dynamics in the labour field. On the ideological plane the steady ascendancy of neoliberalism which became a dominant policy framework by the early 1990s exerted further pressures on trade unionism, social partnership politics and the institutional framework of the labour market in general (Hall 2017 [2011]). Decline in trade union density, accelerated deregulation of the labour market, the increasing fragmentation of the labour force, the return of high unemployment and the rise of atypical employment and precariousness were the new contours of the labour field (Streeck 2014). Trade unions found themselves increasingly unable to influence policy at both the national and the EU levels in the last decades of the 20th Century and were weaker than ever before in terms of their basic collective bargaining function (Waddington et al. 2019).

The depth of the transformation of the employment field in Europe under way in the last decades of the 20th Century was fully revealed only in the recent economic crisis (Baccaro and Howell 2017). When it became clear that what had been lost in terms of social and employment rights was irreversible and that the road ahead seemed even bleaker. The end of the Keynesian era brought with it the end of social democracy as a distinct political position and by the 1990s the premises of neoliberalism had become hegemonic even within the centre left, constituting a sort of new ‘common sense’ (Seymour 2014). Flexibility became the new buzz word in the labour market, national competitiveness became the absolute law of survival in the new globalised economy, and privatisations the new political norm. Irregular employment grew at the expense of regular employment, industrial production shrank significantly as manufacturing units moved to low labour cost destinations further east and the service sectors emerged as the dominant ones in the European economies.

At the level of society, social inequalities increased, and the welfare state in all its variants (Esping-Andersen 1990) came under pressure to different extents and in different ways and already by the turn of the Century in several countries. European economies continued to grow but an increasing proportion of their populations was excluded and marginalised. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s all developed countries with the single exception of Greece in different magnitudes and time periods experienced an increase in income inequality (Therborn 2013). Beyond the traditionally vulnerable groups in the labour market, where women, youth, and migrants were over-represented, other social groups were facing increasing difficulties to be included in the world of standard, permanent, well-paid employment. It was not just the industrial workers who were laid off in the de-industrialisation decades – it was more importantly their children who was the first for centuries to find themselves worse off than their parents’ generation.

Beyond the traditional industrial working class, other white collar strata with higher educational attainments and even higher expectations also found themselves in some cases trapped in low paid service jobs with limited prospects and in others led into professional self-employment, working intermittently, most experiencing much more enhanced employment and income insecurity (Burchell 2002). For some flexibility worked out, either because their middle-class backgrounds helped them to avoid being stuck too long in jobs without prospects, or because their networks connected at the right time with the right people or because they possessed or were able to develop some particular skill or attribute valued within specialised niches. But for most workers, the flexibilisation of the labour market meant more time and effort investment, less real income, and more insecurity.

Subcontracting and informal labour emerged as overtly significant dimensions in shaping the work environment and the experience of increasing sections of the working class and thus structuring the dialectic of exploitation and resistance in the new globalised economy (Schierup 2007; Slavnic 2007; Wills 2009). Subcontracting is part of the broader questioning of the ‘normal labour relation’ which promotes the conception of the worker as a business person of her own labour power, assuming part of the risk and part of the cost of production (Paleologos 2006: 201–215). It usually involves piecework, therefore directly linking not just reward to productivity, but remuneration to output. This in conjunction with the neglect or downplay of health and safety measures which are deemed costly and for which responsibility is also passed to workers, exacerbating the intensification of work, a process taken to the extreme in the gig economy.

In the last decades subcontracting or outsourcing has expanded resulting in the increase of the incidence of temporary agency work. Beyond allowing employers to avoid and evade employer responsibility and tax burdens, subcontracting and outsourcing exacerbates the fragmentation of the labour force and workplace divisions between the workers who are directly employed and those who are in-directly employed who typically are in a disadvantaged position (Bertolini 2020). It has also developed in parallel and connected to self-employment which has also risen substantially in recent decades and which includes a large proportion of bogus self-employment. This ‘dependent self-employment’ has become a serious issue of concern and the topic of a small but burgeoning literature (Williams and Lapeyre 2020).

Flexibility is ultimately a very open notion whose theoretical definition, the extent of its empirical identification and most importantly its practical interpretation for the purposes of policies and politics has been long debated and remains still disputed. The boundary between its positive and its normative dimension has always been fluid and shifting while its scope, focus and meaning, let alone purpose and implication, have been matters of some controversy.¹ At a considerable level of generality the concept of flexibility refers to a new organising principle of production (Piore and Sabel 1984) and a new accumulation regime (Harvey 1989) or even a new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) that is seen as a paradigm shift away from Fordist rigidities into post-Fordist fluidities (Vallas 1999; Neilson and Rossiter 2008).

Flexibility has multiple dimensions affecting both the employment relation and the work act (Beck 1992 [1986]) – determining both the numerical composition of the workforce, the total working time, and its distribution, as well as issues of task assignment and remuneration. Its implication is seen as the segmentation of the labour market both externally and internally into a core and a periphery, increasing the distance between skilled and unskilled work, well paid and badly paid jobs, permanent and casual employment (Beck 2000; Vallas and Prener 2012). More importantly flexibility is not only, or not yet a general condition but also and primarily a general tendency (Gallie et al. 1998; Felstead and Jewson 1999; Kalleberg 2011). Therefore, it is more suitable to refer to flexibilisation as a dynamic situation, in the process of which managerial policy and labour organisation is undergoing change (Doellgast et al. 2018).

Flexible work arrangements are generally taken to be both a condition and a choice for women, sometimes originating from employers’ preferences but sometimes also from women employee needs. The over-representation of women in less regulated service sectors, and the relatively higher proportion of women engaged in part-time work were used at the same time as an empirical fact of a connection of labour market flexibility with the employment of women and its normative justificiation. Research focusing on the subjective experience of women, especially immigrants, reveals however that what is at work is a specifically gendered dimension of insecurity in employment and work, compounding precarious work with more general gender inequalities existing in contemporary societies (Purcel 2000; Anthias 2000; Parreñas 2001; Cranford et al. 2003).

By the late 1990s the notion of flexibility had become established and included as part of the general neoliberal consensus with national and EU governments and business circles attempting to realise the strategy of the ‘flexible labour market’ through processes of deregulation (Standing 1999; Kouzis 2001; Barbieri 2009) and re-regulation (Rubery and Grimshaw 2003; Davies and Freedland 2007). However, the fear of the implications of the promotion of flexibility in labour on workers’ security, actual as well as potential, was evident from the beginning. Richard Sennet (1998) argued that the short-termist character of contemporary employment brings illegibility and loss of coherent biographical narrative, superficiality of involvements and erosion of trust, leading to the corrosion of character. Among radical academics and activists, the concept of ‘precarity’ as a life condition or a new norm of work life re-emerged with a double edge – theoretical as well as political – in an attempt to both understand as well as subvert the flexibility discourse (Foti 2004; Frassanito network 2005; Mitropoulos 2006; Tsianos et al. 2008; Foti 2017). The attempt to reclaim flexibility from capital and address workers’ need for security led some scholars and activists to put forward the idea of ‘guaranteed basic income’ (Fumagalli 2005) which subsequently opened up a new thread of debate, significantly boosted by the work of Guy Standing (Standing 2011).²

The idea of using social policy as an instrument with which to address the worse effects of the on-going liberalisation process, control the vicissitudes of flexibility in the labour market and protect the workers was also brewing in establishment quarters who were in search of a means to consolidate the legitimacy of the idea of the flexibility. By 2007 the EU formally endorsed the idea of “flexicurity” a notion deriving from northern countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands (European Commission 2007). The idea of flexicurity was developed along the lines of state intervention to improve the efficiency of labour mobility, adjusting labour force skills to economic needs and facilitating the smooth transition from one occupation to the other (Wilthagen 1998; Wilthagen and Tross 2004). Both Denmark and the Netherlands were hailed as successful examples of balancing flexibility needed for the economy and security needed by society and flexicurity became a buzz word in the debates prevailing on the eve of the economic crisis. The Danish model was commended for combining generous welfare with high labour mobility and replacing job security with employment and income security promoting active labour market policy and life-long learning. The Dutch model was commended for offering employment, welfare, and education and training rights to non-standard workers (Viebrock and Klasen 2009).

The focus on labour flexibility and precarity in the research and politics agendas at the turn of the Century came along with a new interest in gender and its role in the structuring of the work and employment relation. This took many forms such as the focus on the interplay of emotion and sexuality at work (Adkins 1995; Taylor and Tyler 2000), the re-examination of more traditional themes such as male breadwinning ideologies (Charles and James 2003) and the lower cost of female la...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: The Book and its Parts
• Abbreviations
• Part I: Southern Europe: The Labour Market and the Crisis
• Part II: The Changing Context of Employment Relations in Spain, Greece, and Cyprus
• Part III: Beneath and Beyond the Economic Crisis: Development, Contention, and Class Struggle
• References
• Index