Abstract
The idea of flexicurity has attracted a great deal of attention among labor market reformers looking for a “win-win” way to give employers greater flexibility and still provide protections for workers from the insecurity that usually results from this flexibility. The exemplar of flexicurity is Denmark, which has a long tradition (dating back to 1899) of combining weak employment protection with active labor market policies that help the unemployed to get new jobs.
In this study, Ellen Ebralidze examines the labor market experiences of Danish youth with those of young people in three other labor market systems: liberal regimes such as the United States and United Kingdom which also have weak employment protections but low government spending on active labor market policies; Northern European insider-protection regimes such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden that offer employment protections for insiders (but precarious work for outsiders) along with active labor market policies; and Southern European insider-protection schemes such as Italy and Spain that combine employment protections (for some workers) with low government spending on active labor market policies.
The study highlights the importance of institutional contexts for understanding labor market phenomena. Identifying distinct labor market regimes by cross classifying the degree of employment protections and the extent of active labor market policies provides a useful framework for generating hypotheses about differences in processes of labor market entry. Differences in these institutional contexts also affect the definition of what constitutes a “bad” job: for example, in Denmark it is a low-wage job; in the United States and the United Kingdom, it is low-skilled, low-wage part-time jobs; and in the insider-protection countries it is whether or not a job is fixed term.
The focus on young workers underscores the importance of labor market entry as a key time in a person’s career, since much that happens then affects one’s later career development. The young are also most likely to be the victims of employers’ quests for greater numerical flexibility, as these workers are most vulnerable and likely to be fired when economic conditions warrant.
The study consists of two empirical chapters. The first utilizes a cross-national longitudinal panel design to investigate objective insecurity (i.e., patterns of job quality, job mobility, and unemployment) by following different cohorts from the time they leave the education system until 5 years after they entered their first job. The author examines changes in early labor market careers over the years 1981 to 2003, a time of increasing economic insecurity and uncertainty. She finds that the early career process is not really distinctive in Denmark; precarious work seems to have grown in all countries over this period, at least at labor market entry. In all countries, young workers generally have an increasing risk of getting an initial bad job (except not always in the United States and France); and their bad first jobs tend not to be stepping-stones to better jobs.
The second empirical study uses cross-national data from the 1997 and 2005 waves of the International Social Science Program (ISSP) to examine country differences in four types of perceived insecurity: job, employment, and economic insecurity; and worry about job loss. Danes appear to have low levels of both job and employment insecurity and are not very worried about losing their jobs, especially when compared to workers in Spain and France (whose samples presumably included a large number of fixed-term “outsiders”). Surprisingly, workers in the United States were no less likely than the Danes to perceive that their jobs or employment prospects were insecure, and they were not more worried about losing their jobs. This is an unexpected result in view of the stark differences between Denmark and the United States in their labor market policies and quality of their safety nets. The author interprets this as a “functional equivalence” between the high mobility in flexible U.S. labor markets and Denmark’s active labor market policies, though this explanation needs further study. In particular, it remains to be seen whether this lack of a difference would persist in the high-unemployment periods in the late 2000s.
Taken as a whole, this book—which is based closely on the author’s dissertation—reports an interesting, well-done and useful comparative study. It utilizes solid data from a variety of countries—and sophisticated quantitative analysis—to address some key hypotheses suggested by the notion of flexicurity. As with most dissertations, it appears to be written primarily with an eye toward satisfying the author’s committee rather than for a general audience; hence, the rather academic style, detailed hypotheses derived from reviews of the literature, extensive tables, and speculations about unanticipated results. Nevertheless, this study enhances our knowledge of comparative labor market processes surrounding the early career and illustrates the kinds of cross-national analyses that are needed to refine our theories of institutional variations in labor market processes.