Table 4 - uploaded by David Rueda
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In this article we aim to return labor (particularly the most vulnerable members of the labor market) to the core of the comparative political economy of advanced democracies. We formulate a framework with which to conceptualize cheap labor in advanced democracies. We propose that to understand the politics of cheap labor, the weakest members of th...
Citations
... Successive oil shocks, rising inflation, technological change, the saturation of product markets and the international mobility of capital and labour created a global economy beyond the nation-state. In this era of post-industrial welfare capitalism, there was a shift from a predominantly industrial society to a tertiarisation of the employment structure, an expansion of higher education -which promoted a wide range of professional and managerial occupationsand a feminisation of the labour force (Esping-Andersen, 2009;King & Rueda, 2008). In this new era, the state abandons its political commitment to guarantee full employment and establishes new connections between passive welfare measures, active labour market policies and economic development. ...
This working paper analyses the nexus of the labour market and social protection system dualization in the 21st century, highlighting its institutional roots and societal implications. Our analysis, grounded in an extensive literature review, underscores the institutional structures and regulatory mechanisms that have historically stratified social protections and rights according to the form of employment, perpetuating inequality between insiders and outsiders of the social protection system. We aim to scrutinise the multifaceted dimensions of dualization processes. By adopting the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, our methodological approach ensures a thorough examination of dualization's extent within welfare states. Our findings reveal the complex dynamics favouring insiders (winners) at the expense of outsiders (losers), enlightening the differentiated access to welfare benefits and services. The working paper's significance lies in its contribution to understanding the institutional foundations of labour market dualization and its broader implications for social equity. Our analysis maps the evidence of dualization across various contexts and underscores the pivotal role of policy interventions in addressing the deep-rooted divides between insiders and outsiders. Consequently, this working paper offers valuable insights for policymakers, scholars, and practitioners aiming to foster more inclusive and equitable labour markets and social protection systems.
... Both compulsory activation and benefit sanctions have received increasing attention from scholars in recent decades (Pattaro et al., 2022;Raffass, 2017;Vooren et al., 2019). King and Rueda (2008) argue that highly regulated labor markets, such as the Norwegian one, would promote non-standard employment as cheap labor, and that workfare policies play an important role in this regard. Further, Rueda (2015) argues that activation policies have become especially common in generous welfare states. ...
... plays a role within more critical views, such as King and Rueda's (2008) and Rueda's (2015) description of workfare, where the purpose of (mandatory) activation is to push individuals into (any form of) employment or activation measures by reducing the attractiveness of welfare benefits (Rueda, 2015, p. 298). In this latter view, the unintended consequence for young individuals with weak labor market attachment is that their employment status is likely to be a precarious one characterized by lowwage and nonstandard employment relations. ...
Since the early years of activation and workfare in the 1990s, the use of welfare conditionality and benefit sanctions has been proposed among the necessary solutions to ensure the efficiency of welfare policy by reinforcing individual economic incentives. Using rich administrative registers from Norway, we produce micro-level quantitative evidence on compulsory activation for young recipients of social assistance. The empirical challenge is that activation through the threat of benefit sanctions is not a feature that unambiguously emerges from observational data, except for when sanctions indeed take place and benefits are reduced. To overcome this barrier, we introduce a novel methodology to identify individual-level effects of activation on young welfare recipients, exploiting municipal variation in the introduction of compulsory activation. More precisely, we study whether individuals who are residents in municipalities that have introduced compulsory activation display a stronger relationship between their labor market status (activation) and their benefit size (because sanctions being in place) compared to individuals residing in municipalities where activation has not been made compulsory. Our results show that there is no different relationship between social assistance benefits and passive labor market status for individuals living in municipalities that practice activation compared with individuals residing in municipalities in which activation is not yet mandatory. In other words, there is no visible effect of sanctions for passive recipients.
... Many contemporary political economies have dual labour markets, which are characterised by a primary sector providing secure jobs with relative high wages and generous social protection and a secondary sector predominated by precarious employment contracts, low wages, bad working conditions and no or very rudimentary social protection. Migrant workers are disproportionally employed in the secondary sector (Piore 2008;King and Rueda 2008;Emmenegger et al. 2012). In the EU, mobile or migrant workers from poorer Member States disproportionally take up employment in the secondary labour market sector of the more affluent Member States. ...
Enforcement is a crucial aspect for understanding labour market hierarchies in Europe and exploitation of mobile and migrant EU workers. Whereas most literature on intra-EU mobility and enforcement has focused on posted workers, this paper sheds light on enforcement in seasonal agriculture and forestry where posted work is very uncommon yet mobile workers overrepresented. The EU continues to have very limited enforcement capacities and competencies and enforcement highly depends on Member States' policies and measures. We therefore explore how labour rights, and specifically wages, are enforced across four EU Member States with different enforcement regimes, namely Austria, Germany, Sweden, and the UK. In line with existing research, we expect that enforcement will be more effective also in agriculture/forestry where it is organised mainly through industrial relations, as opposed to administrative or judicial enforcement. Nevertheless, our review of enforcement practices suggests that seasonal agricultural and forestry workers' rights are neglected across countries, irrespective of enforcement regime. We argue that the scant efforts made to enforce these workers' rights amounts to institutionalised exploitation of labour market outsiders and that administrative enforcement is necessary to ensure hypermobile workers' rights. We also draw attention to the contradictory role of the EU and its simultaneous attempt to strengthen and weaken enforcement. Acknowledgments: We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer, Jens Arnholtz, and Janine Leschke , and Roland Erne for helpful comments and suggestions.
... Empirical research on party system change in advanced democracies increasingly agrees that focusing on voters' objective and immediate socioeconomic status (for example, current income or employment status) is insufficient for explaining radical versus mainstream voting. Against many of the early hypotheses in this literature, according to which the unemployed, the poor and nonstandard 'cheap labour' was the recruiting ground for radical challenger parties (for example , Betz 1993;Esping-Andersen 1999;King and Rueda 2008;Lubbers, Gijsberts, and Scheepers 2002;Mughan, Bean, and McAllister 2003), we now know that the economic situation of voters needs to be theorized in their temporal and cross-sectional context. Accordingly, a burgeoning literature has adopted a more contextualized perspective on how socioeconomic circumstances might shape electoral choices. ...
Recent studies take increasingly refined views of how socioeconomic conditions influence political behaviour. We add to this literature by exploring how voters' prospective evaluations of long-term economic and social opportunities relate to electoral contestation versus the stabilization of the political-economic system underpinning the knowledge society. Using survey data from eight West European countries, we show that positive prospects are associated with higher support for mainstream parties (incumbents and opposition) and lower support for radical parties on all levels of material well-being. Our results support the idea that ‘aspirational voters’ with positive evaluations of opportunities (for themselves or their children) represent an important stabilizing force in advanced democratic capitalism. However, we also highlight the importance of radical party support among ‘apprehensive voters’, who are economically secure but perceive a lack of long-term opportunities. To assess the implications of these findings, we discuss the relative importance of these groups across different countries.
... At the individual level, this is connected to several elements that comprise precarity. At the structural level, the relationship can be explained by how the labor market values part-timers compared to full-timers (King & Rueda, 2008). ...
... Within political science, King and Rueda's (2008) 'cheap labor' hypothesis states that all industrial countries need cheap labor of different kinds. States with stronger labor market regulations that do not support cheap labor through standard employment (such as the Nordic nations) will support part-time and other non-standard work as a source of cheap labor. ...
... The results add to the fact that in addition to the in-work poverty risk of part-time employment (Horemans et al. 2016), the out-of-work repercussions are more serious for individuals who had part-time jobs than those who worked full-time. The societal ramifications suggest that although part-time work can serve as a profitable form of employment for the labor market (King and Rueda, 2008), there are consequences that are not necessarily as advantageous in the eyes of the individual. If the outcome of part-time work is an increased risk of receiving long-term welfare, this should induce a debate on the societal trade-offs between flexibility for employers and the cost for many part-time employed. ...
This article argues that part-time employment has several features of precarity tied to both institutional and individual factors. The consequences can be increased inequality, insecurity, and instability. It studies the relationship between part-time employment for individuals with weak labor market attachment, with periods of social assistance reception in Norway. The article used Norwegian register data to analyze this relationship. Findings show that individuals with a low employment percentage have significantly longer social assistance recipiency compared to those who work full-time, prior to social assistance reception. The empirical evidence supports an individual risk from part-time employment in this group, as well as the claim that non-standard employment is associated with increased vulnerability for individuals with weak labor market attachment. The findings relate to theoretical framework regarding the precarity and mechanisms of the labor market on several aspects, especially how institutional and individual elements link part-time employment to economic and social insecurity.
... Segmentation theory suggests that permanent contracts dominate the well-paid primary segment, whereas temporary jobs dominate the low-paid secondary segment (Doeringer and Piore, 1971;Kalleberg, 2000;Barbieri and Scherer, 2009). Segmentation coincides with a dualization of the workforce (Rueda, 2005;King and Rueda, 2008). Efficiency wage theory argues that employers pay higher wages for permanent contracts as incentives to overcome difficulties in monitoring and firing permanent workers (Gü ell, 2000). ...
... unions represent collective interests of permanent workers (Lindbeck and Snower, 1989;King and Rueda, 2008). There is the contrasting perspective that unions compress the wage distribution to the favour of temporary workers (King and Rueda, 2008;Ryu, 2018) and that unions became inclusive and supportive for temporary workers (Fervers and Schwander, 2015;Benassi and Vlandas, 2016;Simms et al., 2018). ...
... unions represent collective interests of permanent workers (Lindbeck and Snower, 1989;King and Rueda, 2008). There is the contrasting perspective that unions compress the wage distribution to the favour of temporary workers (King and Rueda, 2008;Ryu, 2018) and that unions became inclusive and supportive for temporary workers (Fervers and Schwander, 2015;Benassi and Vlandas, 2016;Simms et al., 2018). We utilize union density to measure union power, which indicates the proportion of dependent employees who are members of a union (from ICTWSS database, Visser, 2019). ...
This study investigates the hourly wage gap between 25- and 55-year-old temporary and permanent employees across 30 countries worldwide based on Luxembourg Income Study data from 2000 to 2019 supplemented by other survey data. Two-stage multilevel regressions reveal wage disadvantages for temporary workers, particularly for prime-age workers and those working in medium-/high-level occupations. There is no evidence that a stronger institutional dualization in terms of stronger employment protection for permanent contracts increases the wage gap. Instead partial deregulation matters: In countries where permanent workers are strongly protected, the wage gap is larger if the use of temporary contracts is deregulated. Moreover, results suggest that the larger the size of the temporary employment segment the larger the wage gap. Thus, our findings indicate that stronger institutional and structural labor market dualism amplifies labor market inequality in terms of wage gaps between temporary and permanent workers.
... Some perspectives stress global differences in wage-levels and prosperity between countries and processes of empire as central to explaining migrants' place in Western labor markets; firms in the global North pursue strategies of "labor arbitrage" at home for jobs that they haven't been able to outsource to countries with lower wages, and gain access to cheaper labor via migration (Wills et al., 2009;Smith, 2016). A significant amount of these migrant workers are used as a source of "cheap labor": for jobs with low levels of pay, benefits, and employment protection (King and Rueda, 2008;Emmenegger and Careja, 2012). King . ...
... King and Rueda describe how for several reasons "cheap labor" often fails to develop political strength and identities based in occupation, but instead according to their migration status, gender or ethnicity (King and Rueda, 2008, p. 293). This is said to be due to their political weakness in capitalist democracies, because they often move rapidly between jobs and don't have time to build ties, and how they have become politicized and treated as suspects of ideological extremism or objects of hostility from anti-immigrant movements (King and Rueda, 2008). identify migrants' limited political and civil rights, widespread discrimination and language problems as micro-level processes that form migrant workers into a qualitatively distinct group on the labor market. ...
Migrants play a significant role in European labor markets and are used as sources of "cheap labor"; often being disproportionately represented in low-wage, poor conditions, or otherwise precarious positions. Past research has suggested that the process of migrants being filtered into these low-end occupations is linked to institutional factors in receiving countries such as immigration policy, the welfare state and employment regulation. This paper calculates the extent of migrant marginalization in 17 European countries and uses qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and regression modeling to understand how institutional factors operate and interact, leading to migrant marginalization. The QCA showed that when a country with a prominent low skills sector and restrictive immigration policy is combined with either strong employment protection legislation or a developed welfare state, migrants will be more strongly marginalized on the labor market. The results of the statistical analysis largely aligned with the idea that restrictive immigrant policy by itself and in combination with other factors can increase marginalization.
... Some perspectives stress global differences in wage-levels and prosperity between countries and processes of empire as central to explaining migrants' place in Western labor markets; firms in the global North pursue strategies of "labor arbitrage" at home for jobs that they haven't been able to outsource to countries with lower wages, and gain access to cheaper labor via migration (Wills et al., 2009;Smith, 2016). A significant amount of these migrant workers are used as a source of "cheap labor": for jobs with low levels of pay, benefits, and employment protection (King and Rueda, 2008;Emmenegger and Careja, 2012). King . ...
... King and Rueda describe how for several reasons "cheap labor" often fails to develop political strength and identities based in occupation, but instead according to their migration status, gender or ethnicity (King and Rueda, 2008, p. 293). This is said to be due to their political weakness in capitalist democracies, because they often move rapidly between jobs and don't have time to build ties, and how they have become politicized and treated as suspects of ideological extremism or objects of hostility from anti-immigrant movements (King and Rueda, 2008). identify migrants' limited political and civil rights, widespread discrimination and language problems as micro-level processes that form migrant workers into a qualitatively distinct group on the labor market. ...
Migrants play a significant role in European labor markets and are used as sources of “cheap labor”; often being disproportionately represented in low-wage, poor conditions, or otherwise precarious positions. Past research has suggested that the process of migrants being filtered into these low-end occupations is linked to institutional factors in receiving countries such as immigration policy, the welfare state and employment regulation. This paper calculates the extent of migrant marginalization in 17 European countries and uses qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and regression modeling to understand how institutional factors operate and interact, leading to migrant marginalization. The QCA showed that when a country with a prominent low skills sector and restrictive immigration policy is combined with either strong employment protection legislation or a developed welfare state, migrants will be more strongly marginalized on the labor market. The results of the statistical analysis largely aligned with the idea that restrictive immigrant policy by itself and in combination with other factors can increase marginalization.
... Following the reason of its advocates, increased welfare conditionality is intended to clarify the role of economic incentives and thereby support young individuals by improving their labor market status (the social investment perspective). Welfare conditionality also plays a role within more critical views, such as King and Rueda's (2008) and Rueda's (2015) description of workfare, where the purpose of (mandatory) activation is to push individuals into (any form of) employment or activation measures by reducing the attractiveness of welfare benefits (Rueda, 2015, p.298). In this latter view, the unintended consequence for young individuals with weak labor market attachment is that their employment status is likely to be a precarious one characterized by low-wage and nonstandard employment relations. ...
Since the early years of activation and workfare in the 1990s, the use of welfare conditionality and benefit sanctions has been proposed among the necessary solutions to ensure the efficiency of welfare policy by reinforcing individual economic incentives. Using rich administrative registers from Norway, we produce micro-level quantitative evidence on compulsory activation for young recipients of social assistance. The empirical challenge is that activation through the threat of benefit sanctions is not a feature that unambiguously emerges from observational data, except for when sanctions indeed take place and benefits are reduced. To overcome this barrier, we introduce a novel methodology to identify individual-level effects of activation on young welfare recipients, exploiting municipal variation in the introduction of compulsory activation. More precisely, we study whether individuals who are residents in municipalities that have introduced compulsory activation display a stronger relationship between their labor market status (activation) and their benefit size (because of the threat of sanctions being in place) compared to individuals residing in municipalities where activation has not been made compulsory. Our results show that there is no different relationship between social assistance benefits and passive labor market status for individuals living in municipalities that practice activation compared with individuals residing in municipalities in which activation is not yet mandatory. In other words, there is no visible effect of (the threat of) sanctions for passive recipients.
... Indeed, the (few) studies that connect the two processes implicitly or explicitly tend to consider globalization losers as roughly congruent with outsiders (e.g. Lubbers et al. 2002;King & Rueda 2008), a thesis that is explicitly contested by Häusermann (2020, p. 381). Moreover, it is unclear whether the offshorability risk on the one hand, and the atypical employment and unemployment risks on the other hand, are associated, so that being exposed to increasing economic competition increases the probability of being hired under atypical or temporary contracts or of being unemployed. ...
In post-industrial and globalized economies, socio-economic risks have become ubiquitous for workers. Two segments of the labour force seem particularly exposed: namely, outsiders (atypical workers and unemployed individuals) and globalization losers (unskilled workers in offshorable employment sectors), with relevant consequences for party competition in Europe. The coexistence of these two segments of vulnerable workers has brought conceptual ambiguity. Using the original 2019 REScEU Mass Survey on ten European countries, we firstly clarify that outsiders and globalization losers do not constitute the same socio-economic group. Secondly, we look into the micro-foundations of outsiders' and globalization losers' redistributive preferences and political behaviours by showing that outsiderness, rather than exposure to international competition, constitutes a significant driver of income and employment insecurities, and of dependency on social protection and family financial aid.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11135-022-01414-9.
