Mateo Alaluf

El empleo contra la cohesión social

This article interprets how the notion of ageing as a justification for a series of social policies has wielded with the resul * Universidad Libre de Bruselas. Articulo traducido por Pablo Meseguer Gancedo. 241 Mateo Alaluf ?El empleo contra la cohesion social? ting type of government that favours an «open method of coordination» in industrial relations. By placing the decisions taken at the last three European Councils in the framework of social policy, we will attempt to demonstrate how putting the accent on improving unemployment rates could, from that perspective, have a paradoxical effect on social cohesion. The problem of «ageing» presented at the last European Councils as an inexorable threat to the system of social protection makes employment an obligation which, below a semblance of participation, could also lead to exclusion and inequality.

L'europe a-t-elle fait perdre l'esprit au syndicalisme ?

Having strong international convintions from its origins, Unionism does not play in the construction of UE the same rol played at national level in its history. It was a central actor in the emergence of welfare state, but it is not so preminent in the same direction in UE. More than that, the european construction means also some kind of internal transformation inside the european unionism. If we go back in history, Unions were accepted as true partnairs in the institurional architecture of social concertation, in almost every country. But now things are changed. Of course, European Unionism is recognized as an interlocutor in social questions inside the European Institutions. But this “social interlocutor” is almost deprived of its claim capacity and its authonomy. In some sense, Unions have to “de-unionize” in order to to be accepted in the construction of UE.

La sociología del trabajo a través de una relectura de Claude Durand: situación de trabajo, cualificaciones, competencias y clase obrera.

Through a re-reading of Claude Durand, and reporting the identity between the goals of his sociology and those described by Salvaing as belonging to the PCF, we rebuild the debate between the school of Friedmann and the sociology of Naville, showing at the same time the continuity of that school regarding the qualification and the working class, and the current topics anchored in the mobilization of competences and the social cohesion. The discourses of the workers’ mobilization based on competence, far from discovering an alleged statement of a natural link between the workers and their work, individualise and naturalise the classifying results of the wage relations, thus showing the processes of social hierarchy as directly depending on the nature of the concrete activities. In this way, the social and political character of the processes of segmentation and stratification, both current and past, become invisible.