Karl Hinrichs

STATISTICAL DISCRIMINATION AND EMPLOYERS' RECRUITMENT: Practices for low-skilled workers

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the recruitment strategies of employers in the low-skilled segment of the labour market. We focus on low-skilled workers because they are overrepresented among jobless people and constitute the bulk of the clientele included in various activation and labour market programmes. A better understanding of the constraints and opportunities of interventions in this labour market segment may help improve their quality and effectiveness. On the basis of qualitative interviews with 41 employers in six European countries, we find that the traditional signals known to be used as statistical discrimination devices (old age, immigrant status and unemployment) play a somewhat reduced role, since these profiles are overrepresented among applicants for low skill positions. However, we find that other signals, mostly considered to be indicators of motivation, have a bigger impact in the selection process. These tend to concern the channel through which the contact with a prospective candidate is made. Unsolicited applications and recommendations from already employed workers emit a positive signal, whereas the fact of being referred by the public employment office is associated with the likelihood of lower motivation.

Labour Market Flexibility and Pension Reforms: What Prospects for Security in Old Age?

Rarely has the incorporation of two words into an analytical as well as a political concept been as successful as the term flexicurity. The word developed as the catchword for an array of policies to increase labour market flexibility by imposing more risks on workers for the sake of expanded opportunities, while providing (social) security through a variety of instruments: robust income protection for the jobless; early activation of the unemployed; active labour market policies; and further measures that restore or maintain employability and prevent people from being trapped in poverty, low-wage jobs or other undesirable situations.1 This is why flexicurity generally has a positive connotation in the public debate, in contrast to the negative associations of stagflation, another neologism which emerged during the 1970s.

Flexible Today, Secure Tomorrow?

A quarter of a century ago, in his analysis of the ‘growth to limits’ of Western welfare states, Peter Flora (1986) identified three major challenges to existing social protection systems: (a) population ageing and the need to redraw the social contract across generations; (b) changes in the gender division of work that required a new contract between the genders; and (c) a shift in values that called for a new relationship between the State and citizens, with a stronger role for other institutions, primarily the market. These challenges were the consequence of several (more or less) slow-moving macro-transformations — such as slower economic growth, the emergence of a post-industrial economy, demographic shifts, female mobilization and increased education — as well as decisions by policy makers that led to an extraordinary expansion of the public sector and, finally, increased economic internationalization. All this required ‘long and complex processes of institutional adaptation’ (Flora, 1986, XXVI) in order to prevent system and social disintegration. In other words, in order to preserve the capacity of welfare states to ensure socio-economic security as well as equality, the institutional maladjustment of social security schemes to changed circumstances was to be tackled by a comprehensive restructuring of welfare arrangements.

Public pensions and demographic change.

The author describes the history of the public pension system in Germany over the past 100 years noting that it has exhibited remarkable continuity despite the radical political and financial upheavals that have occurred. He focuses on the implications of current population trends specifically demographic aging for the future of the pension system. Reasons for the apparent lack of concern about the need to change the present system are considered and the consequences of not making such changes are assessed. (ANNOTATION)

Sovereign Debt Crises and Pension Reforms in Europe

The 1990s and early 2000s have shown that in democratic polities reforms of pension systems — parametric (path-dependent) as well as systemic (path-departing) changes — were not impracticable as was suggested by research on the “new politics of the welfare state” (Pierson, 1994, 2001). Reforms came about when incumbent governments were able to shift or share the blame for retrenchments enacted, to hide the true impact of changes, or expected to reap credit for reforms that put pension systems on a more sustainable footing in view of advancing population aging (Hinrichs, 2011). After 2008, however, in the wake of the “Great Recession” in a number of European countries plagued with high budget deficits and mounting sovereign debt, pension reforms came to the fore that were different in two respects. First, their magnitude was large, particularly when the sequel of changes was added up. Sometimes even the hitherto pursued policy direction was moved, and the reforms (will) cause a substantial and immediate negative impact on the living conditions of present and future retirees. In a situation where austerity is no longer simply “permanent” but rather “pervasive,” it is hardly surprising that public pensions became a prime target for saving on expenditure because, almost everywhere, they are by far the largest item of welfare-state spending.

Rentner und Ruhestand

Als Rentner bezeichnet man die Bezieher einer regelmasig wiederkehrenden Geldleistung, die fur einen vorab bestimmten Zeitraum, haufiger jedoch bis zum Ableben des Empfangers gezahlt wird.