The state and class discipline: European labour market policy after the financial crisis

This paper looks at two related labour market policies that have persisted and even proliferated across Europe both before and after the financial crisis: wage restraint, and punitive workfare programmes. It asks why these policies, despite their weak empirical records, have been so durable. Moving beyond comparative-institutionalist explanations which emphasise institutional stickiness, it draws on Marxist and Kaleckian ideas around the concept of ‘class discipline’. It argues that under financialisation, the need for states to implement policies that discipline the working class is intensified, even if these policies do little to enable (and may even counteract) future stability. Wage restraint and punitive active labour market policies are two examples of such measures. Moreover, this disciplinary impetus has subverted and marginalised regulatory labour market institutions, rather than being embedded within them

Against disengagement: non-participation as an object of governance

The discourse of disengagement has achieved ascendancy just as young people’s employment prospects have declined – in many countries to crisis levels. Conceptualising and interpreting young people’s non-particiapiton in dominant modes of education, training and employment has been a preoccupation of academics, policy-makers and journalists. This paper offers a critical analysis of the discourse of disengagement. It queries the primacy of particiapiton as the dominant policy response to mass youth unemployment, identifies some paradoxes of this policy priority, and locates them within a political-economic analysis of youth unemployment. It proposes a view of prevailing policy responses as a mode of governance of problematised populations of young ‘non-participants’. By juxtaposing two ostensibly incompatible analytical frameworks, the paper draws attention to some potentially illuminating tensions between materialist and governmentalist analyses of dominant policy responses to ‘disengagement’, and considers how these might be exploited in researching and re-conceptualising non-participation

Inequality and the Fragility of Growth

International audienceOver the long run, sustained growth is central to poverty reduction. The rapid growth seen in much of the world over the past few decades — notably, but not only, in China and India — has led to an unprecedented reduction in poverty. And, in general, increases in per capita income tend to translate into proportionate increases in income of the poor. As Dollar and Kraay (2002) memorably put it, “Growth Is Good for the Poor.” All the more reason, then, to place sustainability of growth at the center of any poverty reduction strategy