Long-term Employment and the Restructuring of the Labour Market in Europe

There is a widespread view that the permanent employment, associated with traditional employment patterns, has been fundamentally undermined with the advent of the ‘new economy’. Industrial restructuring and occupational change is said to have given rise to more precarious forms of employment characterized by insecure short-term jobs. Such widely held public perceptions are challenged by the analyses of long-term employment and industrial, occupational and compositional change in the European workforce. Contrary to the positions of Beck, Castells and Sennet and a host of high-profile commentators, the statistical evidence strongly suggests that contemporary labour market change in the European Union is moving in the opposite direction with significant increase in longterm employment across the member states

The global subject of precarity

Peer reviewedPostprin

The Marketization of Local Services and the Fragmentation of Labour Markets

This paper is a product of the ESRC's Local Governance research programme which considers the employment implications of the introduction of market forces into the provision of local government services in the United Kingdom. It discusses the fragmentation of labour markets as both a process and outcome of the commercialization of local service provision. In contrast to privatization scenarios, marketization suggests the blurring of the distinction between public and private employment deriving from the commercialization of municipal services and the transmission of local authority work organization and culture into the private sector. An assessment of employment change, workforce recomposition and bargaining capacity is offered which leads to the development of new models for institutional restructuring. 'Sectoral de-differentiation' is a concept developed to address the evolution of new labour market patterns and a 'public capsule' model is offered to explain the locality and service variations in marketization outcomes. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997.