This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in three arenas - industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. While confirming a broad, shared liberalizing trend, it finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the "Golden Era" of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.

The problem of mass unemployment in western Europe has persisted since the early 1980s. Clearly the policies implemented by national governments and the EU have not been successful in adequately tackling this important social, economic and political issue. The New Politics of Unemployment provides a thorough comparative analysis of the present situation. It looks at how the orthodox unemployment policies of contemporary governments have failed and what new policies might be introduced. A number of radical unemployment policies, from Germany, France, Italy, Britain, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and the EU, are outlined. These are investigated with a view to identifying the conditions under which they might become standard components of national and EU strategies to bring down unemployment. This book is the first comparative study of the politics of policy innovation in the area of unemployment. It will be an important addition to the literature of European public policy and important reading for students of comparative European politics and economics.

Integrating archival and documentary materials with an analysis of the sources of political support for work-welfare programmes, this work examines the reasons behind the lack of effective training and work programmes for the unemployed in Great Britain and the United States.

In Give a Man a Fish James Ferguson examines the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa, in which states make cash payments to their low income citizens. More than thirty percent of South Africa's population receive such payments, even as pundits elsewhere proclaim the neoliberal death of the welfare state. These programs' successes at reducing poverty under conditions of mass unemployment, Ferguson argues, provide an opportunity for rethinking contemporary capitalism and for developing new forms of political mobilization. Interested in an emerging "politics of distribution," Ferguson shows how new demands for direct income payments (including so-called "basic income") require us to reexamine the relation between production and distribution, and to ask new questions about markets, livelihoods, labor, and the future of progressive politics.

The idea of finding a 'third way' in politics has been widely discussed over recent months - not only in the UK, but in the US, Continental Europe and Latin America. But what is the third way? Supporters of the notion haven't been able to agree, and critics deny the possibility altogether. Anthony Giddens shows that developing a third way is not only a possibility but a necessity in modern politics.

Young People and Long-Term Unemployment examines the consequences of long-term unemployment for the personal, social, and political lives of young adults aged 18–34 across four European cities: Cologne (Germany), Geneva (Switzerland), Lyon (France), and Turin (Italy). Adopting a multidimensional theoretical framework aiming to bring together insights based on the contextual (macro), organizational (meso), and individual (micro) levels, and combining quantitative and qualitative data and analyses, it reaches a number of important conclusions. First, our study shows that the experience of long-term unemployment has a negative impact on different dimensions of young people’s lives. When compared to employed youth, unemployed youth are less satisfied with their lives, more isolated, and less independent financially. Second, however, there are important variations across the four cities. This means that, in spite of widespread retrenchments, in some places the welfare state still acts as a buffer against unemployment. Third, although young unemployed people participate in politics equally if not slightly more than employed youth, the young unemployed are often disconnected from politics. This is so even when they have important grievances to express in the face of high youth unemployment, precarious working conditions, and grim future perspectives on the labor market. This book will be useful for scholars interested in unemployment politics and youth politics, researchers and teachers in political science, sociology, and social psychology.

This book explores the new politics of class in 21st century Britain. It shows how the changing shape of the class structure since 1945 has led political parties to change, which has both reduced class voting and increased class non-voting. This argument is developed in three stages. The first is to show that there has been enormous social continuity in class divisions. The authors demonstrate this using extensive evidence on class and educational inequality, perceptions of inequality, identity and awareness, and political attitudes over more than fifty years. The second stage is to show that there has been enormous political change in response to changing class sizes. Party policies, politicians' rhetoric, and the social composition of political elites have radically altered. Parties offer similar policies, appeal less to specific classes, and are populated by people from more similar backgrounds. Simultaneously the mass media have stopped talking about the politics of class. The third stage is to show that these political changes have had three major consequences. First, as Labour and the Conservatives became more similar, class differences in party preferences disappeared. Second, new parties, most notably UKIP, have taken working class voters from the mainstream parties. Third, and most importantly, the lack of choice offered by the mainstream parties has led to a huge increase in class-based abstention from voting. Working class people have become much less likely to vote. In that sense, Britain appears to have followed the US down a path of working class political exclusion, ultimately undermining the representativeness of our democracy. They conclude with a discussion of the Brexit referendum and the role that working class alienation played in its historic outcome.

This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;

In the first political analysis of unemployment in a socialist country, Susan Woodward argues that the bloody conflicts that are destroying Yugoslavia stem not so much from ancient ethnic hatreds as from the political and social divisions created by a failed socialist program to prevent capitalist joblessness. Under Communism the concept of socialist unemployment was considered an oxymoron; when it appeared in postwar Yugoslavia, it was dismissed as illusory or as a transitory consequence of Yugoslavia's unorthodox experiments with worker-managed firms. In Woodward's view, however, it was only a matter of time before countries in the former Soviet bloc caught up with Yugoslavia, confronting the same unintended consequences of economic reforms required to bring socialist states into the world economy. By 1985, Yugoslavia's unemployment rate had risen to 15 percent. How was it that a labor-oriented government managed to tolerate so clear a violation of the socialist commitment to full employment? Proposing a politically based model to explain this paradox, Woodward analyzes the ideology of economic growth, and shows that international constraints, rather than organized political pressures, defined government policy. She argues that unemployment became politically "invisible," owing to its redefinition in terms of guaranteed subsistence and political exclusion, with the result that it corrupted and ultimately dissolved the authority of all political institutions. Forced to balance domestic policies aimed at sustaining minimum standards of living and achieving productivity growth against the conflicting demands of the world economy and national security, the leadership inadvertently recreated the social relations of agrarian communities within a postindustrial society.

This book discusses unemployment and its relations to economic, political and social aspects. The first chapter studies the relationship of unemployment to the level of confidence that characterizes some macroeconomic relevant agents, such as consumers or investors. Chapter Two investigates the effects of productivity growth shocks on unemployment, both in the short run and in the medium - long run. Chapter Three reviews finite sample inference for unemployment-inflation tradeoff. Chapter Four focuses on understanding how the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and/or long-term labor market changes may have separately or jointly affected health among employed workers in 2010. Chapter Five evaluates the persistence of the unemployment rate in the following emerging European countries: Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Cyprus, Malta, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Chapter Six discusses the case of election results on the political aspects of unemployment. Chapter Seven studies the relationship between unemployment and the (individual) perceived levels of well-being, such as life satisfaction or happiness. Chapter Eight assesses the association between homelessness and survival in a population of unemployed individuals in one region of northern Poland. Chapter Nine studies the impact that educational level and vocational training programmes had on the labour market of semi-peripheral EU countries, using Greece as a case study. Chapter Ten estimates the effects of area unemployment rate on smoking and drinking in China.