This article examines nonstandard employment and precariousness in four Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway). Drawing on data from the Labour Force Survey from 1995 to 2015, the article investigates and compares recent developments of nonstandard employment in the countries and analyzes whether fixed-term contracts, temporary agency work, marginal part-time work and solo self-employment have precarious elements (measured as income or job insecurity). We conclude that nonstandard employment has remained rather stable in all four countries over time. However, although nonstandard employment seems to be largely integrated in the Nordic labor markets, it still entails precarious elements in certain countries in particular. Norway and Denmark stand out as having less insecure labor markets, while Finland and Sweden have more precariousness associated with nonstandard employment. We argue that these differences are explained by differences in the institutional contexts in the countries.
The development of service economies in the Western world has led to a debate on the quality of new service jobs as many are low-wage jobs with poor working conditions and career opportunities. Although the incidence of low-wage service work is somewhat lower in the Nordic countries than elsewhere in Europe, it is increasingly addressed and debated.Employees find it hard to make a living from their job and to work the working hours requested, whereas employers find it hard to attract and retain employees. This article introduces the concept of 'living hours' to capture the segmentation processes in low-wage service work in the private sector of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The concept of living hours is used to explain developments in low wage service jobs that are not explained by the concept of a living wage. On the basis of cross-sectional data from the European Labour Force Survey, the article demonstrates how the increasing use of part-time and Sunday work since the crisis interacts with the increasing shares of young workers and migrant workers. The analysis focusses on retail and hotels/restaurants, which employ the majority of low-wage service workers in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
Denmark is often highlighted as a good example of organised decentralisation in which employee bargaining power remains comparatively strong. However, comparative analysis of the Danish case rarely reflects how the social contracts between management and workers' representatives contribute to the bargaining outcome at company level. Drawing on 10 case studies in the German and Danish metal industries carried out in 2005, this article argues that the social contracts at the Danish case companies allow a more efficient use of company-level agreements on flexible working hours than the social contracts at the German case companies.
The regulatory setting and growing worker mobilization in the digital platform economy have recently attracted much political and academic attention. However, the perspective of platforms as employers and their role in regulating the online market are less researched. This article contributes with a fresh perspective on labour platforms as potential employers and their various strategies towards collective bargaining. Empirically, the article draws on in-depth case studies of three labour platforms operating in Denmark, but choosing very different strategies towards collective bargaining. The study identifies four factors impacting their choice of strategy: platform ownership, existing sector-level agreements, growth rates and customer base.
The discussion on digitalization of work has intensified in recent years. The literature points at two main trends that are accelerated by digitalization -the automatization of work which erases or changes job functions and the creation of work without jobs via digital platforms. This paper addresses the question as to how social partners define the digitalization of work and their perception of its consequences along with their recent responses to digitalization. Drawing on interviews with unions and employers´ organizations in Denmark, Sweden and Germany, it examines social partner initiatives at the unilateral, tripartite and bipartite arena in various forms of neo-corporatist labour market regulation. Focus is on private services, which is
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.