Job quality in European employment policy: one step forward,two steps back?

Abstract

German

French

This article analyses the development and use of the concept ‘job quality’ in European Union (EU) employment policy. Using a set of complementary public policy theories, it examines how both political and conceptual factors contributed to the failure to achieve any significant progress in articulating job quality in the EU’s policy objectives and guidelines. Conceptual clarity in defining what job quality is (and what it is not), from whose perspective it should be considered, and which direction of change indicates improvement, are vital prerequisites for an effective integration of job quality into the EU’s employment strategy and into the elaboration of any successful social indicator. A constant political struggle between different stakeholders at EU level, and a need to reconcile the often-contradictory views of the social partners, has precluded the completion of this first step. Instead, attempts to include job quality into the policy formulation process were made without simultaneously adapting the overall narrative, which continued to give prominence to flexibility and deregulation. The outcome has been a rather cursory and inconsistent effort to implement policies and actions aimed at boosting job quality.

Keywords

Job quality quality of employment European employment policy European Employment Strategy European Semester flexicurity Pillar of Social Rights

Introduction

Ever since the Lisbon Strategy raised the profile of employment policy within the European Union (EU) by explicitly stating that its aim was to sustain ‘economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’ (European Council, 2000), the expression ‘more and better jobs’ has become more of a rhetorical catchphrase of European employment and social policy rather than a policy of substance. In practice, both EU institutions and individual governments have prioritised the quantity of jobs, as measured by the unemployment rate or the labour market participation rate, basically ignoring their quality (Muñoz de Bustillo et al., 2011; Raveaud, 2007). Despite institutional and academic efforts, job quality remains a contested concept, insufficiently penetrating policy-making at EU level.

Studies on this issue mainly focus on the role of ideas and actors in formulating policy (Burchell et al., 2014), as well as on the balance between economic and social goals shaped by institutional and political developments (Souto-Otero, 2017; Streeck, 1995). We seek further to develop knowledge in this area by expanding the existing discussion to include the role and impact of statistical job quality indicators in EU employment policy. In short, we argue that indicators play a key role in formulating and assessing policy problems which tend to be ignored when not measured. Moreover, indicators represent a necessary element of the EU’s governance in the area of employment, relying on goals, benchmarks and targets, none of which can be monitored, evaluated or sanctioned without appropriate indicators. Theoretically, we propose an analytical framework integrating agenda-setting and public policy research (Jones and Baumgartner, 2005; Kingdon, 1995), with an EU-focused analysis of social policy formulation (De la Porte and Pochet, 2012; Streeck, 1995).

The contribution of this article lies in examining reasons for the lack of effective progress observed thus far in developing job quality indicators capable of guiding European social and employment policies. We first review institutional perspectives of job quality in the context of the current policy debate within the EU with the aim of explaining why the issue remains on the political backburner. In this context, we consider how job quality has been framed as a social policy problem in the evolving EU employment strategy, and how its measurement has been defined and redefined. We then address the question to what extent proposed definitions and indicators of job quality have been driving policy-making at EU level. To what extent has job quality been included in EU governance and what impact has it had so far? To this end, we undertake an extensive document analysis of EU publications and policy debates, focusing particularly on the role of the European Commission, a key driver of EU policy in this area. We conclude by identifying the principal political and methodological shortcomings hindering progress on job quality within EU employment policy.

Overall, we show how such a complex concept as job quality has been defined and operationalised in EU policy-making. The policy impact of any job quality indicator depends not only on methodological quality and data availability, but also on the power relations between the actors involved. Job quality remains highly contested and contentious, as it is viewed differently depending on whose perspective it is evaluated from. In particular, we point to constant contradictory pressures from different sides of the social partners’ negotiating table, as well as to the tension between social and economic surveillance within EU institutions. Re-entering EU employment policy, the flexicurity narrative merging seemingly incompatible calls for a better quality of work with labour market deregulation is used to illustrate this point. We conclude by arguing that conceptual clarity and practical operationalisation are vital prerequisites for including job quality in any employment strategy put forward by the EU in the future.

Articulating and measuring job quality in EU employment policy

In this article, we argue that our core question as to why progress towards better jobs in Europe has been so slow and so unpredictable can be at least partially understood through considering theories of public policy-making. Many institutions and actors may have started their involvement in this process with a simple rational-choice approach, believing that the path to better jobs could be achieved by careful measurement and careful conceptual analysis of the roles of the various aspects influencing employment policy – regulation, trade unions, EU institutions, etc. This theory of public policy-making rationalism might have worked with other less political and less divisive policy objectives, but cannot explain the route taken so far in defining job quality, and will probably be an even worse description of the way ahead. We are not advocating replacing this approach with one grand theory, but perhaps several theories can each explain a part of the process.

For instance, another useful public policy theoretical framework posits that many public and social policy-making processes are better described as ‘incrementalism’ processes or ‘punctuated equilibriums’ (Jones and Baumgartner, 2005). The reasons for cycles of change and retrenchment can vary, as some policy priorities suddenly override others. In the case of job quality, for instance, it could be argued that progress is often undermined by socio-economic crises in the EU, such as the credit crunch crisis, the Euro crisis and more recently Brexit – in each case, the urgent trumping the important.

A further useful theoretical contribution in the study of public policy is known as ‘group models’ or ‘subsystems theory’. According to these theories, we should not be looking for simple, unfragmented paths but rather recognise the ability of think tanks, political groupings, pressure groups, researchers and scholars to set agendas and change policy (Heclo, 1977). As the number of actors increases, so too does the complexity of the possibilities for informal and dynamic alliances. Kingdon (1995) goes further, suggesting that, given the number of different ways to define problems and the nature of competition between politicians jockeying for advantage, along with the vagaries of policy-making, the sheer number of possible directions of travel yield a process that can be more accurately described as ‘organised anarchy’ (referred to elsewhere as the ‘garbage can model’) (see also Béland and Petersen, 2017).

In this process of policy development, many aspects interact with one another in complex, non-linear ways. Policy problems are identified by actors and ideas take the form of contested problem definitions. Actors then formulate potential policy alternatives to address these problems, which are not always coherent. Concrete policy decisions are then framed and brokered in a process shaped by the balance of power between actors. This article will illustrate just how well this theory suits the concept of job quality and its ongoing redefinition.

Finally, earlier research on the Open Method of Coordination (De la Porte and Pochet, 2012) and EU social policy (Copeland and Daly, 2018; Streeck, 1995) indicates that the presence of agreed and concise indicators is necessary for raising the profile of social issues and increasing the likelihood of any corrective action, just as in the macroeconomic public policy sphere. Thus, any employment strategy needs to be underpinned by indicators, if rhetoric and discourse are to be turned into action. In this article, we review the extent to which this was the case in the period between the adoption of the Lisbon Strategy and that of the European Pillar of Social Rights, positing that statistical indicators are a powerful aspect of problem definition and monitoring, with a significant impact on policy debates. If indicators, however, are ambiguous, policy responses also end up being framed in an ambiguous way, open to interpretation and discussion by various stakeholders.

As this article argues, the development of job quality indicators and the conceptual articulation of job quality in EU employment policy are thus closely interlinked. Putting job quality high on the policy agenda, the launch of the Lisbon Strategy stimulated efforts to come up with a suitable methodology for its measurement. Progress in this area in turn provided policy-makers with working definitions of job quality, allowing for the formulation of more specific policy recommendations in this area.

Applying these lenses of public policy theory to the EU’s process of attempting to improve job quality provides a good way of understanding what has happened in the past, as well as allowing a more realistic understanding of what to expect in the future. In the following section, we therefore review some of the milestones in the articulation and measurement of job quality in EU employment policy, considering to what extent these processes have been successful and what impediments were encountered.

Post-Lisbon ‘more and better jobs’ agenda

The promotion of good working conditions and provision of social security have long been core elements of the European social model and a basis of democratic welfare states. In fact, implicitly, the quality of jobs has always been an integral part of EU policy. Indeed, the Treaty of Rome, the founding treaty of the European Economic Community (EEC) signed in 1957, specifically stated the goal of improving the living and working conditions of its citizens.

However, employment policy was historically left to individual Member States. It was not until 1997 that the first European Employment Strategy (EES) was launched with the aim of improving labour market outcomes by coordinating employment policy between Member States (see Van Rie and Marx, 2012). Shortly afterwards, the quality of work was institutionalised as one of the EU’s central policy objectives in the Lisbon Treaty of 2000, aimed at achieving ‘sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs’ (European Commission, 2001). Despite the conceptual weakness of the job quality dimension in the Lisbon Strategy, the European Council meeting in Laeken in 2001 agreed on a portfolio of indicators to monitor progress towards the principles of the employment policy agenda set in Lisbon (European Parliament, 2009).

Presented at the time as a political breakthrough (European Commission, 2001), the Laeken indicators certainly helped introduce a multi-dimensional concept of job quality into the EU policy discourse. However, due to multiple and well-documented weaknesses (see e.g. Bothfeld and Leschke, 2012; Davoine et al., 2008; Dieckhoff and Gallie, 2007; Muñoz de Bustillo et al., 2011; Peña-Casas, 2009; Piasna et al., 2017) this impact was limited and shortlived. The Laeken indicators were not suitable for setting goals, benchmarks or targets, nor for assessing the implementation and impact of the policy recommendations in the area of job quality. In short, they were not suitable for the governance mode of EU employment policy and failed to produce an open method of coordination that required appropriate social indicators (De la Porte and Pochet, 2012).

Subsequent initiatives seeking to improve the Laeken proposal (e.g. European Commission, 2008) replicated many of the initial weaknesses, resulting in a disorganised aggregation of variables describing jobs, individual attitudes, policies, participation rates and various forms of distributional inequalities. Furthermore, the question of quality for whom? remained unresolved. Actors involved in the job quality debate within EU employment policy represented divergent views on what constitutes desired aspects of jobs, with wages and non-standard contracts among the most contentious issues.

In parallel to the Laeken indicators, major stakeholders closely linked to the EU, including UNECE, ILO, Eurostat and Eurofound, joined forces to elaborate a broader, multi-dimensional conceptual framework for the comparative measurement of the quality of employment, bringing together elements of the ILO’s decent work and the EU’s quality of work concepts (UNECE/ILO/Eurostat, 2007). The process leading to the publication of a statistical framework for measuring the quality of employment took 15 years (UNECE, 2015), demonstrating the difficulty of finding a compromise between institutional actors and policy agendas. However, this statistical framework represented a complex statistical toolbox, and not a monitoring tool linked to any particular policy. It provided measurements for a very broad range of job, employment and social protection features, without any value judgments about what is considered ‘high quality’ or ‘low quality’ employment. Such a toolbox character precluded any international policy leverage, with countries free to pick and choose items that they found relevant or coinciding with their current national political agendas.

Post-2008 stagnation in articulating job quality at the policy level

This limited progress was then punctuated by the economic downturn of the late-2000s (Jones and Baumgartner, 2005), a period characterised by budgetary austerity and deregulatory reforms. The EU policy focus shifted towards ‘flexicurity’ (European Commission, 2007) and the Europe 2020 strategy adopted in 2010 (the successor of the Lisbon Strategy) assigned only a marginal focus to job quality. ‘Social devaluation’ (Degryse and Pochet, 2018) was taken as the road towards restoring job growth and economic competitiveness in the EU.

The renewed commitment of the European Commission to flexicurity took the form of an encompassing strategy for balancing the expectations of economic growth, full employment and social cohesion. At EU level, flexicurity evolved from an emphasis on skill development and employability as substitutes for job security (European Commission, 2007) to the prominence given to flexibilisation and the deregulation of employment relationships (European Commission, 2010a). Any proposal or recommendation from that period aimed at improving the situation of the EU labour market came with a caveat that it should not in any way limit the flexibility required by employers, nor create barriers for business (European Commission, 2017d).

Through redefining the basic power relations between employers and workers as well as transferring risks and responsibilities from employers to the workforce, such policies created a favourable climate for employer representatives firmly to resist any regulation encroaching on their need for a flexible and highly adaptable workforce, as seen in the Employment Guidelines from that period, discussed below.

After a period of stagnation, a renewed and much-anticipated attempt to produce statistical indicators relevant to the problem definition and monitoring of job quality was made by the EU’s Employment Committee (EMCO), the main advisory body on employment in the European Employment Strategy (EES) framework and responsible for drafting the Employment Guidelines. In 2013, one of its two bodies, the Indicators Group, announced a multi-dimensional and comprehensive framework for measuring job quality in four dimensions, subdivided into 10 further sub-dimensions with 55 indicators (European Commission, 2014). Arguably, EMCO was inspired by independent academic efforts, largely emerging at that time on the basis of the information provided by large-scale surveys, such as the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS), the European Social Survey and the European Labour Force Survey. Prominent examples include the job quality index developed by Green and Mostafa for Eurofound (Green and Mostafa, 2012), the European Job Quality Index developed by ETUI researchers (Leschke et al., 2008; Piasna, 2017), as well as other definitions largely based on EWCS data (e.g. Holman, 2013; Muñoz de Bustillo et al., 2011).

However, the weaknesses of the EMCO proposal were manifest, casting doubts on whether it could have had any discernible policy impact. First, several indicators referred to the population at large (e.g. early leavers from education), people not in employment at all (e.g. inactivity due to family responsibilities) or social services (e.g. child-care coverage). Furthermore, features of jobs (e.g. temporary employment) were confused with labour market dynamics and segmentation (e.g. labour transitions from temporary to permanent employment), as well as with worker characteristics (e.g. educational attainment or computer skills). Finally, the EMCO proposal relied on multiple data sources, many of them with infrequent and non-coinciding data gathering procedures, such as the five-yearly European Working Conditions Survey, or four-yearly Structure of Earnings Survey. This rendered the updating of the index rather problematic and too infrequent to be of any use in the annual cycle of EU economic and social governance.

Overall, EMCO’s proposal shifted from assessing working conditions of a particular job to monitoring labour market flexibility, the quality of labour supply or the social infrastructure enabling workers with caring responsibilities to participate in the labour market. The complexity and confusion precluded the formulation of any clear policy recommendations and impact assessment, because heterogenous levels of analysis require different policy responses. For instance, the inclusion of worker characteristics in the job quality policy framework is likely to produce supply-side focused policies not addressing the demand side of the labour market. When educational attainment or skill levels are included in the job quality framework, the policy responses will include upskilling or lifelong learning. Although the importance of such policies cannot be questioned, they fail to address the lack of good quality jobs.

We find an illustration of the weaknesses created by the complexity of measurement and the lack of clarity about the subject of analysis in the Employment and Social Developments in Europe (ESDE) report (European Commission, 2014). While exploring the development of various job quality indicators along the dimensions proposed by EMCO, its policy conclusions did not follow this analysis. For instance, there was confusion in the ESDE report as to whether increasing work intensity, one of the dimensions of job quality, was to be deplored as negatively impacting workers’ well-being or applauded as a means for increasing productivity (European Commission, 2014: 145–146). In a similar vein, the analysis of job security was carried out predominantly from an employer perspective. While a certain level of job security was expected to have a positive impact on workers’ commitment, too much would risk inducing shirking (European Commission, 2014: 142).

In stark contrast to the elaborate and very complex EMCO indicators, a very simple and brief ‘Scoreboard of key employment and social indicators’ was released by the European Commission around the same time (Andor, 2013). It was composed of three employment indicators (unemployment rate, youth unemployment rate, and NEETs rate) and three social indicators (gross household disposable income, risk of poverty, and income inequality). Certainly contributing to its attractiveness, the very simplicity and brevity of the scoreboard resulted in it being widely used in policy monitoring and assessment at EU level (European Commission, 2015c, 2017c). Moreover, the scoreboard omitted, admittedly together with many key labour market and social indicators, any disputable or contentious items, including any aspect related to job quality. While structural features of the labour market (such as the unemployment rate) are crucial to the environment in which job quality develops, they do not, however, evaluate the quality of job characteristics. In that respect, the scoreboard was certainly a missed opportunity to insert job quality indicators into the cycle of EU policy coordination.

The European Pillar of Social Rights and the art of compromise

With some signs of labour market recovery and the installation of a new European Commission presided over by Jean-Claude Juncker in 2014, social issues regained some ground in the EU policy debate. The turning point in the narrative came with the proclamation of the European Pillar of Social Rights in 2017.

Aimed at promoting convergence between Member States towards fair and good working and living conditions (see e.g. European Commission, 2017b), the Pillar covered three areas of rights: equal opportunities and access to the labour market, fair working conditions, and social protection and inclusion. While not explicitly referring to job or employment quality in any of its 20 principles, the area of fair working conditions overlaps with some aspects of job quality, including employment contract types, wages, social dialogue, work-life balance and health and safety at work (European Commission, 2017f).

The only direct reference to quality working conditions in the Pillar was in the context of promoting innovative forms of work and encouraging entrepreneurship and self-employment. The Pillar very much replicated the commitment to flexibility and even adopted some of the flexicurity language, by making the provision of fair and secure working arrangements conditional on ensuring ‘the necessary flexibility for employers to adapt swiftly to changes in the economic context’ (European Commission, 2017f). According to the Pillar, solely the abuse, not the use, of atypical contracts leading to precarious working conditions was to be prevented. It is very likely that regulations negotiated under such ambiguously formulated policy objectives will not effectively address the issues of job quality, though admittedly the Pillar paves the way for at least some regulation on some extreme features of poor quality employment.

The Pillar was accompanied by a new set of indicators, called the Social Scoreboard (European Commission, 2017a), replacing the 2013 Scoreboard of key employment and social indicators. These new indicators were intended as a key tool for monitoring convergence towards better working and living conditions and for facilitating stronger consideration of employment and societal challenges within the European Semester (European Commission, 2017a). The Social Scoreboard consists of three broad dimensions corresponding to the three main categories of Pillar rights. Interestingly, the second dimension, entitled ‘Fair working conditions’ in the Pillar, was changed in the Scoreboard to ‘Dynamic labour markets and fair working conditions’. The three dimensions are further divided into 12 areas and measured with 42 indicators in total (web version) assessing employment and social trends.

Upon closer examination, many of the indicators in fact overlap with the 2013 scoreboard, replicating the focus on job quantity and structural features of the labour market while failing to include job quality features. Even the dimension ‘Dynamic labour markets and fair working conditions’ makes no attempt to measure the quality of working conditions. On the Commission’s website with the full version of the Scoreboard,¹ this dimension includes labour force structure, with employment, unemployment and activity rates; labour market dynamics, with activation measures, tenure at current job and transitions from temporary to permanent employment; and income, with household income, risk of poverty and compensation of employees per hour worked. Thus, the latter variable – individual income from employment – is the only aspect of job quality included in the Scoreboard.

However, it should be noted that the measurement of income did not feature in the actual policy-making process, as observed in the 2018 Joint Employment Report (European Commission, 2018), the first report to use the Scoreboard in the European Semester. In it, the Social Scoreboard is employed selectively, with the dimension ‘Dynamic labour markets and fair working conditions’ assessed only through the employment and unemployment rates and the gross disposable income of households. In practice, the new Social Scoreboard closely resembles the 2013 scoreboard. From the perspective of measuring job quality, no effective progress can thus be observed.

Translating discourse into actions: job quality indicators in the Employment Guidelines and European Semester

In the previous section we reviewed some of the key policy strategies developed at EU level in the area of work and employment. Such strategies constitute a reference framework for the monitoring and assessment of how Member States perform. In practical terms, they frame the narrative and provide key terms and indicators used in the cycle of EU economic and social governance coordination, currently synchronised within the European Semester, an annual process setting priorities, evaluating performance and outlining recommendations. This is where job quality indicators could potentially play a role. However, as we demonstrate in the following review of the evolution of socio-economic governance in the EU, job quality has barely featured here. We argue that this is largely accounted for by weaknesses in the conceptualisation of job quality (giving no clear indication of the direction for improvement) and the dominant commitment to flexibility in the policy discourse. Overall, the process described below closely resembles Kingdon’s (1995) theory of organised anarchy, with multiple actors attempting to converge in the formulation of the job quality problem.

The ‘more and better jobs’ objective set in Lisbon and reasserted during the subsequent Council meetings in Nice and Stockholm gave job quality a prominent place among priorities for common employment policy. The 2002 Employment Guidelines (European Commission, 2002) reiterated the calls for improving the quality of jobs, employment and work, while also specifying the areas to be addressed in order to achieve improvement in job quality. The list mirrored the Laeken proposal, including all 10 dimensions. This was certainly an important contribution of the Laeken framework, as it provided a working definition of job quality. However, its methodological weaknesses and the lack of agreement on indicators and data sidelined job quality in the formulation of concrete targets. Instead, the emphasis remained on full employment, flexible forms of work and lifelong learning, with the underlying assumption that action in these areas would also bring improvements in job quality.

By the launch of the Europe 2020 strategy in 2010, job quality had lost much of its momentum at EU level. The focus was on restoring employment growth and activating labour markets, with flexicurity principles cited as a necessary set of measures to achieve these goals. This is clearly visible in the 2010 Employment Guidelines (European Commission, 2010b). Guideline 7 was entitled ‘Increasing labour market participation of women and men, reducing structural unemployment and promoting job quality [emphasis added]’. It stated that ‘[t]he quality of jobs and employment conditions should be addressed’, but without giving any details as to how this should be pursued, nor setting any targets or including indicators. The only concrete and measurable target included in the guideline was the employment rate.

Such a way of including job quality in the guidelines greatly reduced its potential impact and failed to overcome the rhetorical level. As a result, job quality was consistently omitted from the annual evaluation of the implementation of the guidelines across EU Member States. A good illustration is found in the Joint Employment Reports (JER), key inputs to EU economic governance which each year examine Member State actions in implementing their employment policy in line with the Employment Guidelines. The sections dedicated to Guideline 7, which includes the promotion of job quality in its title, simply kept erasing that part of the title and accordingly failed to include any issues related to job quality in the evaluation. For instance, in JER 2014 the guideline was reduced to ‘Increasing labour market participation’ (European Commission, 2013: 18), and in JER 2015 to ‘Increasing labour market participation and reducing structural unemployment’ (European Commission, 2015c: 32).

The launch of EMCO’s job quality indicators made its mark on the following revision of the Employment Guidelines in 2015. Its influence resembled the impact of the Laeken proposal on the earlier guidelines. The positive contribution consisted of adding content to the label ‘quality employment’ by providing a list of dimensions that should be addressed by the Member States. Thus, in line with the EMCO proposal, the guidelines recommended that quality employment ‘should be ensured in terms of socio-economic security, education and training opportunities, working conditions (including health and safety) and work-life balance’ (European Commission, 2015b). However, a lack of specific targets or measures to be applied for boosting employment quality meant that the earlier bias towards the quantity of jobs was reproduced. The employer perspective again dominated the formulation of policies based on these Guidelines. In particular, the evaluation of the extent to which countries follow the Guidelines on improving employment quality was limited to a very simplistic assessment of labour market segmentation which included the share of temporary employment and transition rates from temporary to permanent jobs (European Commission, 2016: 52–56). Accordingly, policy responses across Member States that were positively evaluated by the European Commission included the relaxation of employment protection legislation to ease dismissals, which translates into less job security for workers and was found to have an adverse impact on job quality (McGovern et al., 2004; Piasna, 2018; Piasna and Myant, 2017; Rubery et al., 2016). The report’s focus on the quality of working time was similarly limited to policies increasing flexibility to allow for economic adjustments and improved cost-competitiveness (European Commission, 2016: 60–61).

This fits in with yet another important impediment to how job quality impacts EU employment policy. The commitment of EU institutions to improving job quality was in fact rather superficial and inconsistent, often based on inserting the word ‘quality’ before ‘job’, without paying attention to the context and the logical meaning of the message. This is not just a suspicion but can be verified when comparing proposals for the revised guidelines with the final adopted texts. The 2015 Employment Guidelines are a good illustration of this point. Guideline 5 states:

Member States should facilitate the creation of quality jobs , reduce the barriers business faces in hiring people, promote entrepreneurship and, in particular, support the creation and growth of small enterprises. (European Commission, 2015b, emphasis added)

In this case, the word ‘quality’ was not present in the proposal (European Commission, 2015a), and was only added at a later stage, although the rest of the sentence remained essentially the same. Overall, this results in incoherent recommendations for promoting job quality through deregulation, liberalisation and more contractual diversity (European Commission, 2017d), contradicting the vast body of research linking such policies with poor job quality and precariousness (see overview in Rubery and Piasna, 2016).

The launch of the Pillar in 2017 with its objective of achieving fair working conditions raised the profile of the social dimension in the governance structure, assigning the social side a stronger position in a subsequent revision of the Employment Guidelines. The wording of the above-cited guideline was again tweaked by changing ‘promote entrepreneurship’ to ‘fostering responsible entrepreneurship and genuine self-employment’ (Council of the European Union, 2018: 9). While this was an important change insofar as it acknowledged that self-employment is not necessarily a route to good quality employment and may be precarious, the meaning of ‘responsible’ and ‘genuine’ was left open to interpretation, thus risking a further dilution of this guideline in the evaluation process.

Finally, an analysis of employment guidelines illustrates an important source of tension in the debate on job quality within the EU which has significantly hindered its progress: the political struggle between pro-regulation and deregulation coalitions (Mailand and Arnholtz, 2015). Put differently, in terms of political priorities, the concept of job quality has had to fight for attention within the ‘flexicurity’ debate which emerged within the EU during the mid-1990s and had gained a firm foothold within DG Employment by 2008 (for discussion see e.g. Klindt, 2011).

Policy objectives formulated at EU level emphasise the need to ensure flexibility for employers, encourage new forms of work and flexible work arrangements. At most, only ‘extreme flexibility’ (European Commission, 2017e: 116) is undesirable, yet there is no clear delineation of the boundary beyond which the ‘extreme’ form begins. This commitment to flexibility, very much linked to flexicurity policy, distorts the processes of policy evaluation and recommendations in the area of job quality, resulting in very weak and often contradictory guidelines on how to create quality jobs.

Examples of such contradictions can be found in the Country Specific Recommendations (CSRs) issued by the EU institutions to all Member States to assess inter alia the implementation of Employment Guidelines and to put forward proposals for the European Semester. For instance, Lithuania in 2011 was advised to ‘enhance labour market flexibility by amending its labour legislation to make it more flexible and to allow better use of fixed-term contracts’ even though the latter are commonly regarded as indicative of poor job quality (e.g. Green and Mostafa, 2012; Muñoz de Bustillo et al., 2011). Similarly, Poland in 2015 was given the contradictory advice that permanent employment is burdensome, costly and not attractive for employers, but that a high proportion of non-standard and weakly protected contracts may reduce the quality of available employment (European Commission and Council, 2015). We find similar inconsistencies with respect to wages, another important dimension of job quality. The CSRs for Bulgaria in 2015 and Latvia in 2016, for example, recommended wage moderation, as wage increases were considered to be distorting the labour markets and harming competitiveness. At the same time, both countries were warned about high levels of poverty.

Discussion: political and methodological shortcomings

The analysis of the progress made towards articulating job quality in EU employment policy points to several major impediments hampering the development of an EU-level policy-oriented framework for the comparative measurement of job quality.

To begin with, power imbalances between social actors and the role of a dominant narrative have greatly impacted the use of available indicators in policy-making. While EU socio-economic governance assumes the mutual reinforcement and effective balancing of economic, employment and social policy (Council of the European Union, 2006: 23), in practice, this positive interaction has not always worked as intended (Zeitlin, 2007). The influence and organisation of actors in the domains of finance and employment within EU institutions have developed unevenly, resulting in an asymmetry between economic and social issues (Mailand and Arnholtz, 2015; Maricut and Puetter, 2018). The 2008 crisis significantly slowed down the development of social Europe while further accentuating the asymmetry in favour of economic actors, resulting in EU employment policy consisting either of direct calls for more flexibility and less regulatory burdens for employers (e.g. European Commission, 2010a), or making social policy measures conditional on neither imposing any constraints on employers nor obstructing the development of new (in most cases casual) forms of work (e.g. European Commission, 2017d). Even the Social Pillar is built around the vision of balancing rights for workers with flexibility for employers, subjecting the former to the latter.

Furthermore, the articulation of job quality at policy level is undoubtedly hampered by the methodological, conceptual and theoretical confusion about what job quality actually is and from whose perspective it should be considered. Our review of the EU’s institutional initiatives in the area of job quality reveals the absence of a coherent theoretical framework guiding the selection of variables and their meaningful interpretation. The choice of variables tends to be driven by pre-existing policy objectives and data availability rather than by any explicit reference to social or economic theories. Many key dimensions of work quality were thus omitted, for political or practical rather than for conceptual reasons, while too many others were included in a way with little analytical impact (see discussion in Burchell et al., 2014; Sehnbruch et al., 2015). For instance, labour supply characteristics were often mixed up with labour demand indicators, while the distinction between dependent and independent variables became confused. The complexity, overly broad scope and lack of transparency are partly to blame for the limited impact of these initiatives, whether as an advocacy or policy tool (Hoffmann and Dooren, 2017; Ward, 2004). This not only hinders the formulation of concrete policy measures but may even generate conflicting recommendations, as demonstrated by the CSRs discussed above.

Another major impediment stems from the fact that the definition of job quality and the selection of those employment aspects via which to measure it depend on the perspective adopted. A complex and multi-dimensional concept such as job quality can be analysed from many, often rivalling, political or ideological perspectives. The meaning attributed to job quality will be different depending on whether it is viewed from the standpoint of individual workers, families, employers or from a societal perspective. The difficulties faced by the EU institutions in their efforts to conceptualise and measure job quality and build effective policy measures thus stem from tensions between the different perspectives of the social partners: governments, employers and trade unions (Freistein, 2016). Whilst higher wages may be better for workers, employers would argue that they harm their cost competitiveness. Employer-led forms of work flexibility might represent unpredictability and insecurity for workers, and so on. This has led to a plethora of variables being included in job quality definitions to ensure that these different points of view are incorporated. In practice, however, such a broad scope makes these definitions impossible to operationalise.

These complex problems generate a highly problematic vicious circle: to provide appropriate input to political debates, evidence is needed on the respective outcomes of policies promoting job quality. Yet without a precise conceptualisation and definition of what is meant by ‘job quality’, we cannot provide input to this debate. Furthermore, without such a definition, the EU cannot propose specific guidelines for a more integrated employment policy taking job quality into account and according the issue the importance we think it deserves.

Conclusions

This article has analysed the standing of job quality in current EU employment policy, considering to what extent the articulation of job quality in EU employment policy has been successful, not only in terms of overarching principles but also concrete action. The analysis shows that the progress observed thus far in developing job quality indicators at policy level has been hindered by conceptual confusion, the lack of a shared definition and disagreement on how to mould a multitude of work dimensions into a coherent comparative framework of indicators. Moreover, many labour market variables are contentious and their interpretation in terms of job quality depends on the perspective taken. The interests of workers, employers and public policy-makers often clash, as do the interests of individual human beings and free markets. This poses particular difficulties for international bodies, where any progress is based on a compromise between the interests of employers, policy-makers and employees. As a result, no agreement has been reached on statistically relevant indicators able to help define and monitor job quality.

A policy strategy needs to be converted into concrete aims or targets so that non-compliance can be sanctioned: this is the role of indicators. But the combination of punctuated equilibriums (Jones and Baumgartner, 2005) and organised anarchy (Kingdon, 1995) have led to a failure to effectively integrate job quality into EU employment policy-making. As shown in the previous sections, job quality indicators that follow from EU policy strategies appear ambiguous and ambivalent. Therefore, the actions devised on their basis do not add up to any coherent policy capable of effectively addressing issues of poor job quality. Moreover, our analysis has confirmed what previous studies noted: the dominance of economic surveillance, or market-making social policies, using the ambiguity and confusion in job quality indicators to their advantage and subjecting social policy to market efficiency goals. We thus find little ideational impact of job quality indicators in EU employment policy.

The conceptual confusion with vested political interests is real but not insurmountable. We argue that, in order to integrate job quality analysis better into a coherent social policy framework, it is necessary carefully to define and consider what the relevant dimensions of job quality are, on which level the analysis should focus, and from whose perspective. These choices should then be applied consistently in the formulation of Employment Guidelines and their monitoring across countries (see also Piasna et al., 2017). In addition, successful indicators with a significant influence on policy-makers must not be too complex, both in terms of their methodology and the quantity of variables involved (Ward, 2004).

Raising the profile of social issues on the policy agenda and balancing the input from different sides of the social partners’ negotiating table are essential for counterbalancing the dominance of economic surveillance in the European Semester. The efforts to increase the importance of better working and living conditions in EU policy, together with the launch of the European Pillar of Social Rights, are a much anticipated and welcomed step in this direction. However, the precedence given to flexibility and the persistence of the logic of flexicurity require that a more radical change is, of course, still needed before job quality becomes a concrete and measurable target in the EU’s employment policy.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received funding from the Chilean National Science Council, Conicyt [Fondecyt Project Number 1171025] and from the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion, COES [Conicyt Fondap Project Number 15130009].

Notes

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