Chloe Thurston
"Drifting Towards Non-Standard Employment?: The politics of employment regulation and social policy in Western Europe."
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Abstract
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My dissertation will examine patterns of non-standard employment and social policy coverage across continental European democracies. What constitutes “non-standard” employment varies somewhat by country, but can broadly be defined as any employment arrangement that deviates in practice from at least one of the three assumptions underlying the post-World War II standard employment contract (Normalarbeitsverhältnis): a full-time workweek, indefinite duration of contract, and a direct employer-employee relationship (Kalleberg 2000). For my dissertation, I propose to trace the evolution of two types of policy whose efficacy relies on the satisfaction of these standard employment assumptions: unemployment insurance and workforce training. Unemployment benefits typically depend on some minimum basic criteria with respect to previous employment. Workforce training and education policies often (and especially in the continental European countries) assume that workers invest in training for long-term careers, making these policies less relevant for the short-term tasks that often characterize non-standard employment arrangements. Thus, the question that will guide my research is: what is the relationship between the growth of non-standard employment and the adaptation (or lack thereof) of policies to align with the changed nature of employment? This subject is particularly important in light of the disproportionate representation of women, ethnic minorities and immigrants in non-standard work arrangements, and the distributional consequences this entails. Preliminary work on the topic suggests that one of the major determinants of policy evolution in response to changes in employment practices is whether the costs of maintaining the original policy fall more onto the individual or the state. Predissertation research in Europe will provide essential help as I pursue this topic, by helping me to determine proper case selection, to gauge data availability and to establish communication with relevant researchers and experts in Europe.
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