Lançados dossiês
1. The coronavirus crisis and the welfare state
By Social Europe
The coronavirus crisis and the welfare state
Publisher: Social Europe (in cooperation with the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung)
Published: 16th January 2021
The coronavirus crisis has highlighted the flaws in European welfare states, which can spur their renewal and reinforcement after decades of cuts and privatisation.
It has foregrounded how increasingly threadbare social safety nets and precarious labour markets have left many marginalised and even destitute. This has strengthened the claim of those who have argued that we need a ‘social investment’ welfare state, rather than one focused on the rescue of individuals downstream. Universalism in welfare is also shining through, with social-insurance systems failing labour-market outsiders and market-liberal systems failing more still: Denmark has seen no excess deaths due to the coronavirus whereas the UK has suffered one of the highest excess-deaths ratio in the world.
The pandemic has further spotlighted the gender assumptions behind all welfare-state discussions. The fact that the home has been far from a safe haven during the crisis for women experiencing intimate-partner violence has only been one of the ways the interaction of the public and the private spheres has been made manifest. And with so many on short hours or ‘furloughed’, how non-socialised domestic labour is shared becomes a live issue.
This Social Europe Dossier addresses what a 21st-century welfare state should look like for all of Europe. Underpinning all these considerations is a vision of a welfare state which provides equal autonomy for all to pursue their life goals, in solidarity with others. That means developing a new progressive narrative which can consolidate a social coalition behind the new vision, in the way ‘the people’s home’ allowed Swedes to picture in their minds the national welfare state of their (then) future.
How can EU member states arrive at one such ideal form, given their different starting points, and how can the union offer a lead in getting there? Social policy has conventionally been seen as a matter for the member states but the European Pillar of Social Rights has at least provided a rhetorical commitment to a social floor for the whole of the union, through which none should fall.
With contributions by Mary Daly, Isabel Ortiz, Anton Hemerijck and Robin Huguenot-Noël, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, Olivier De Schutter, Esther Lynch, Mary Murphy and Michael McGann, Oliver Roethig and Adrian Durtschi, Stefanie Börner, Valeria Pulignano, Bharati Sadasivam and Kathleen Lynch.
CONTENTS
Prefacev
1.CARE, CAPITALISM AND POLITICS1Kathleen Lynch
2.GREATER EQUALITY: OUR GUIDETHROUGH COVID-19 TO SUSTAINABLEWELLBEING 7 Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson
3.THE GLOBAL FUND FOR SOCIALPROTECTION: AN IDEA WHOSE TIMEHAS COME14 Olivier De Schutter
4.IS THE CORONAVIRUS GOING TORESHAPE THE EUROPEAN WELFARESTATE?20 Stefanie Börner
5.FIXING CARE: REFOCUSING ON THOSEWHO NEED IT AND THOSE WHODELIVER IT 27 Oliver Roethig and Adrian Durtschi
6.WOMEN AND WELFARE: INTERVIEWWITH MARY DALY 34 Mary Daly
7.NEGLECTED, SACRIFICED: OLDER PERSONS DURING THE COVID-19 PA N D E M I C 49 Isabel Ortiz
8.THE COVID-19 WAKE-UP CALL TO BUTTRESS SOCIAL INVESTMENT 54 Anton Hemerijck and Robin Huguenot-Noël
9.MAKING WORK FIT FOR WORKERSAFTER COVID-19 61 Esther Lynch
10.RENEWING WELFARE THROUGH UNIVERSAL ENTITLEMENT: LESSONS FROM COVID-19 68 Mary Murphy and Michael McGann
11.INCLUDING THE PRECARIAT 76 Valeria Pulignano
12.SHIFTING THE BURDEN: CAN COVID-19 DO IT FOR WOMEN’S UNPAID WORK? 82 Bharati Sadasivam
Dossiê 02.
By Social Europe
The transformation of work
Publisher: Social Europe (in cooperation with the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung)
Published: 17th January 2021
The future of work is an ever-present concern for workers in a globalised economy characterised by footloose finance, fickle supply chains and above all ‘flexible’ labour markets. Fewer and fewer workers enjoy regular labour contracts—with associated social entitlements—and risk is increasingly being displaced on to labour by the rise of short-term and zero-hours employment and notional self-employment at the behest of platform contractors.
These changes have been advanced as having a purely economic logic—replacing the ‘dead hand’ of the state with the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. Yet what has really been at stake is a decades-long shift in the balance of social and political power towards capital, reversing the gains for labour in western Europe and north America deriving from the postwar settlement.
This steady erosion of worker security has been critically facilitated by the rise of digital technologies. These have allowed capital to reorganise labour on a scale never imagined by Frederick Taylor or Henry Ford—to make it merely another ‘just-in-time’ commodity to use up in the production process.
Yet this is a double-edged sword: ‘informational’ or ‘cognitive’ capitalism relies on the knowledge inside the heads of today’s ‘labour aristocracy’ of analysts, gleaned through public education rather than the tutelage of firm apprenticeships. Demands for greater control at work and even ownership are likely to rise accordingly. As is the right to do work that is socially useful—which is for the public good and at minimum does not generate ‘negative externalities’, such as contributing to climate breakdown or biodiversity collapse.
Were the pattern of recent decades to be sustained, a dystopia would hove into view of workers under ever-more tight monitoring and surveillance, with an intensified labour process, depressed incomes and no freedom from work demands even away from the workplace. Alternatively, however, the huge rise in productivity associated with digitalisation could be captured by empowered labour and used to seek shorter working time, greater flexibility from a worker’s point of view, more freedom to work from home, a better work-life balance, a genuine sharing of domestic labour and proper valuation of workers in socialised care.
CONTENTS
Preface v
1.THE INFRASTRUCTURAL POWER OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM 1 Funda Ustek-Spilda, Fabian Ferrari, Matt Cole, PabloAguera Reneses and Mark Graham
2.THE MANY WORLDS OF WORK IN THE 4.0 ERA 7 Werner Eichhorst
3.NEW FORMS OF EMPLOYMENT IN EUROPE—HOW NEW IS NEW? 14 Irene Mandl
4.TELEWORK AND THE ‘RIGHT TO DISCONNECT’ 20 Oscar Vargas Llave and Tina Weber
5.ENSURING TRADE UNIONS HAVE A SAY INTHE TRANSFORMATION OF WORK 26 Richard Pond and Jan Willem Goudriaan
6.GIG-LIFE BALANCE? 32 Agnieszka Piasna
7. AN INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE SYSTEMFOR DIGITAL LABOUR PLATFORMS 39 Thorben Albrecht, Kostas Papadakis and Maria Mexi
8.THE PLATFORM ECONOMY—TIME FOR DECENT ‘DIGIWORK’ 45 Maria Mexi
9.SHAPING THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACYAT WORK 51 Isabelle Schömann
10. THE TRANSFORMATIVE IMPACT OF TECHFIRMS’ TECHNOLOGIES 57 Ivan Williams Jimenez
11. THE RIGHT TO SOCIALLY USEFUL WORK 62 Kate Holman
12.A HUMAN-CENTRED APPROACH TO THE FUTURE OF WORK: TIME TO WALK THE WALK 68 Thorben Albrecht
13.MIND THE GAP 73 Oliver Suchy
14.INDUSTRY 4.0: THE TRANSFORMATION OFWORK? 79 Hartmut Hirsch-Kreinsen
15 .ENCLOSING THE MARKET 85 Philipp Staab
16.WORKERS’ RIGHTS: NEGOTIATING AND CO-GOVERNING DIGITAL SYSTEMS AT WORK 91 Christina Colclough
17.ANTICIPATING THE COVID-19RESTRUCTURING TSUNAMI 98 Judith Kirton-Darling and Isabelle Barthès
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