Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 9/07

European Journal of Social Quality

Volume 4, Number 1/2 (2003)

Articles

• Social Quality, Employment and its Flexicurity
  Laurent van der Maesen

  Two Challenges
  The main task of this article is to introduce the social quality initiative and to link its recent outcomes to aspects of employment policy. The initiative was launched during the Dutch Presidency in 1997 as a new academic approach to the circumstances of citizens in Europe, the Member States, regions, cities and communities.The idea of social quality arose out of the conflict between European economic and social policy - more specifically, the subordination of the latter to the former - and the lack of any distinct rationale for social policies. Two studies published by the Foundation provided the basis for the initiative's development, and established the four objective conditional factors or components of social quality:

  • Socio-economic security
  • Cohesion
  • Inclusion
  • Empowerment

   

• Flexible and Secure: Adaptability and the Employment Relationship
  Joint Report Team

  Adaptability under the guise of management first addresses - for obvious reasons, it being management - the corporate agency, aiming at the level of biographical processes, while impacting on the level of societal processes through the health of communities as agencies (families,neighbourhoods and communal services, to the extent that they depend on the employment, and employment provisions, of a corporate agency).

• Working Time and Time for Care in Europe
  Joint Report Team

  This paper combines two documents on employment flexibility and security prepared in the context of the research project 'Social Quality and the Policy Domain of Employment', undertaken by the European Foundation on Social Quality. The first document relates to work time in Europe, its social distribution and its evolution - the crucial importance of work time for the approach of flexibility is not to be demonstrated, as it is one of the main factors, alongside other characteristics,such as skills and working conditions, that have been promoted under the general umbrella of 'employment flexibility 'as a panacea for bringing the 'Old Europe 'back in line with the successfully job-creating U.S. economy. At the same time, people at work themselves increasingly recognise work-time flexibility as a fundamental instrument of quality of life. To achieve such flexibility will require significant social investment,such as support from the Welfare State and a full regulation framework.

  The second document integrated in this paper starts from the fundamental point that, out of the sphere of work, the main time-constraining parameter in the quality of life of people is care. Indeed, availability of time (without losing too much income and future opportunities) and opportunities for organising one's time for looking after a relative - children, a spouse, an elderly parent or any other related person - is one of the main elements that make work possible.

• Social Quality and the Policy Domain of Employment in Belgium
  Jozef Pacolet and An Marchal

  What's in a name? 'Social quality' is an attractive yet vague concept. It has an appeal in the context of postindustrial aspirations to rise above the quantitative and the material, towards qualitative, immaterial goals; it emphasises 'social' aspects that lie beyond individualistic preoccupations and are oriented towards considerations of collectivity and solidarity. These aspects can be represented in terms of two dimensions (Figure 1), where the notion of social quality is situated in the upper left quadrant. But does this show the real content of this 'container concept', and does it reflect present everyday reality? The concept of social quality has been adapted (or rather adopted) in the context of the labour market in terms of the notion of 'flexicurity'. We shall discover that to an important extent this notion includes both ends of the dimensions; in other words, it is not what it seems.

  The second document integrated in this paper starts from the fundamental point that, out of the sphere of work, the main time-constraining parameter in the quality of life of people is care. Indeed, availability of time (without losing too much income and future opportunities) and opportunities for organising one's time for looking after a relative - children, a spouse, an elderly parent or any other related person - is one of the main elements that make work possible.

• Social Quality and the Policy Domain of Employment in Finland
  Pekka Kosonen and Jukka Vänskä

  Our standpoint is that temporary employment is also related to employment security, since an extensive use of temporary work (for a specified, often short, period) tends to increase insecurity of the workers. Another problem is connected to lay-offs. However, the most crucial question deals with the termination of employment contracts, in particular undetermined duration contracts. If this is made very easy for the employers, employment security is reduced. Finally, the conditions and levels of compensation in all of these cases are of importance in terms of income and employment security.

• Social Quality and the Policy Domain of Employment in Hungary
  Erzsébet Bukodi and Péter Róbert

  European labour-market patterns tend to contain a growing element of flexible employment, which deviates from the norm of the secure, lifelong career. What do we mean by flexible work? Dex and McCullogh (1997) offer the following definition: 'Flexible work _ is a description of a change in the distribution of labour market jobs, away from standard full-time permanent employee contracts, and towards a growth in various types of non-standard employment forms. 'Pollert (1988) argues that flexibility refers to a combination of different factors. It involves firms being flexible enough to be able to respond quickly and efficiently to technological and economic changes; it also refers to organisations that are flexible in terms of employee numbers. In addition, it refers to a workforce that is multi-skilled and/or flexible with regard to time. This may result in a trend for firms to retain 'core' employees who work flexibly, with a periphery of employees who are flexible because they are irregularly employed. The result of this process is that employment is no longer as stable as it was. The development of the new, flexible labour market undermines security, leading to the so-called 'risk society' (Crompton et al., 1996).

• Social Quality and the Policy Domain of Employment in the Netherlands
  Ton Korver

  1. Introduction: Flexicurity in Employment
  This report seeks to answer several basic questions concerning the employment situation in the Netherlands.The focus is on flexicurity, in other words the combination of secure and flexible employment from a lifetime perspective. Ultimately, secure employment comes down to employability, to a worker's employability throughout her career, whether she works for one employer or for more than one. A single career may span many employers and many functions and jobs, according to the preferences of workers and companies. Flexibility seeks to adapt employment to the needs of the employing organisation, and thus to provide three key elements: employability for the employee; adaptive employment for the company or organisation; a system of social security enabling the employee to make the required transitions. Employability requires training and development, work of a quality to improve the skills of the employee, and a balanced combination of work, care and leisure, enabling the employee to maintain continuous participation in both work and other areas of life. From this perspective social security should not merely make work pay, it should also make transitions pay, whether these are from one job to another, one employer to another, one level of skill to another or from one combination of work and care to another.

• Social Quality and the Policy Domain of Employment in Portugal
  Heloísa M. Perista and Pedro Perista

  This paper is organised into six main parts: first, this introduction outlines some general features of the Portuguese labour market; the second part deals with the main characteristics of employment relations; part 3, 'Working time', provides some further observations regarding employment, focusing on the number and distribution of working hours, and on workers subjective considerations; part 4, 'Income security', analyses a number of indicators concerning remuneration and social protection; part 5, 'Forms of care leave', further develops the issue of social protection in its specific relation to leave for care purposes, and the possibility of combining care responsibilities with professional activity; finally, part 6 discusses the issue of flexicurity in Portugal, and its trends. It should be noted that, due to the unavailability of harmonised European data for all the relevant issues, we have had to resort to national data. However, for some indicators (fortunately few), it was not possible to gather the appropriate data. In these cases, the unavailability of data is referred to in the text.

• Review: A Review of A. van Bruggen's Individual Production of Social Well-Being
  Jan Berting

  Van Bruggen's theoretical and empirical analysis raises many questions about research on subjective wellbeing. I concede that this can be seen as an important merit of her contribution. I hope that this observation will contribute to her own subjective well-being, which,according to her preface, has not always been enhanced by doing research in this area. But then such is the common fate of those who are engaged in research.