There is a widespread view that `jobs for life' and stable employment have been consigned to the past. The impact of technological and institutional changes are said to have eradicated traditional labour market patterns, brought about the destandardisation and individualisation of work and ushered in a new `age of insecurity'. The transformation of work, according to Sennet (1998), has witnessed the advent of a `New Capitalism' in which there is `no long term'. This paper is concerned with explanations for the paradox of pervasive insecurity and the rise in long-term employment in the 1990s in the UK. The analysis of long-term employment in the UK suggests that insecurity is not explained by compositional changes in the workforce or in terms of labour market restructuring. Instead insecurity is best understood in its institutional and ideological contexts, as the `manufactured uncertainty' that attends the greater exposure of the state sector to market forces, corporate restructuring in the private sector in terms of mergers, acquisitions and sell-offs and the diminution of social protection systems.
There is a widespread view that the permanent employment, associated with traditional employment patterns, has been fundamentally undermined with the advent of the ‘new economy’. Industrial restructuring and occupational change is said to have given rise to more precarious forms of employment characterized by insecure short-term jobs. Such widely held public perceptions are challenged by the analyses of long-term employment and industrial, occupational and compositional change in the European workforce. Contrary to the positions of Beck, Castells and Sennet and a host of high-profile commentators, the statistical evidence strongly suggests that contemporary labour market change in the European Union is moving in the opposite direction with significant increase in longterm employment across the member states
This paper is a product of the ESRC's Local Governance research programme which considers the employment implications of the introduction of market forces into the provision of local government services in the United Kingdom. It discusses the fragmentation of labour markets as both a process and outcome of the commercialization of local service provision. In contrast to privatization scenarios, marketization suggests the blurring of the distinction between public and private employment deriving from the commercialization of municipal services and the transmission of local authority work organization and culture into the private sector. An assessment of employment change, workforce recomposition and bargaining capacity is offered which leads to the development of new models for institutional restructuring. 'Sectoral de-differentiation' is a concept developed to address the evolution of new labour market patterns and a 'public capsule' model is offered to explain the locality and service variations in marketization outcomes. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997.
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