1 / 15

Liberalisation of public services: Boosting precarious employment in Europe?

Liberalisation of public services: Boosting precarious employment in Europe?. Jörg Flecker & Christoph Hermann , FORBA Vienna Work, Employment and Society Conference 2010, Brighton. Public service liberalisation and precarious employment.

vian
Download Presentation

Liberalisation of public services: Boosting precarious employment in Europe?

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Liberalisation of public services: Boosting precarious employment in Europe? Jörg Flecker & Christoph Hermann, FORBA Vienna Work, Employment and Society Conference 2010, Brighton

  2. Public service liberalisation and precarious employment • Competition, shareholder value  restructuring and cost cutting • Fragmentation of bargaining systems • Non-standard work: ‚atypical‘ and ‚very atypical‘ jobs (Eurofound 2010) • Precarious: insecure work with low income and low levels of social protection (falling below societal standards) (ILO 1997, Dörre 2005, IAB 2010).

  3. The PIQUE Project • 3 year research project (2006-2009) • 6 countries: AT, BE, GE, PO, SW, UK • 4 sectors: • Electricity • Postal services • Local public transport • health services (hospitals)

  4. The PIQUE Project • Processes of liberalisation and privatisation, ownership and market structures, forms of regulation • Literature and data analysis on impacts on employment, industrial relations and productivity • Company case studies on company reactions and consequences for employment, productivity and quality • Representative survey on users‘ perspective

  5. MARKET AND OWNERSHIP STRUCTURES • Large variety of market structures • Shift towards highly competitive markets only in few sectors and countries • Concentration processes  public monopolies are replaced by private oligopolies • Move to private ownership stronger than towards competitive markets

  6. Evolution towards more competitive market structures (2006)

  7. Evolution towards private ownership (2006)

  8. COMPANY REACTIONS – Major strategies • From public to private law companies • Mergers and acquisitions • Private and foreign ownership • Subsidiaries and outsourcing • Internationalisation and diversification • Cost-cutting

  9. COMPANY REACTIONS – Cost cutting • Reorganisation and new technology • Reduction in employment • Intensification of work • Payment of lower wages • Non-standard employment

  10. EMPLOYMENT

  11. NON-STANDARD EMPLOYMENT

  12. EMPLOYMENT

  13. INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS • Fragmentation of public sector employment system • Differences between ‘old’ and ‘new’ employees • Differences between incumbents and new competitors • Differences between parent companies, subsidiaries and outsourced services • Emergence of two-tier labour relations systems • Evasion of collective agreements through self-employment

  14. Boosting precarious employment? • Cost cutting  employment cuts and non-standard employment • Non-standard employment: part-time, fixed-term, temporary, self-employment • Growing diversity of employment conditions (fragmented bargaining systems) • Country differences: more encompassing labour regulation in Sweden and Belgium • In most sectors/countries only some aspects of ‘precarisation’ apply • Widespread shift to precarious employment in postal services in Germany and Austria

  15. The PIQUE Consortium 15 www.pique.at Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University, UK Forschungs- und Beratungsstelle Arbeitswelt,Vienna, Austria Instytut Socjologii, Universytet Warszawski, Poland Instituut voor de Overheid, K.U.Leuven, Belgium Hoger Instituut voor de Arbeid (HIVA), K.U. Leuven), Belgium Wirtschaft- und Sozial- wissenschaftliches Institut (WSI) der Hans-Boeckler-Stiftung, Duesseldorf, Germany Institutionen för Arbetsvetenskap, Göteborgs Universitet, Sweden

More Related