Paul de Beer

Three worlds of educational welfare states? A comparative study of higher education systems across welfare states

Although education is generally considered to be an important part of the welfare state, it is largely absent in the comparative welfare state literature. This article tries to fill this void by applying the central concepts of welfare state analysis of decommodification and stratification, as proposed by Esping-Andersen, to the field of higher education. The article tests whether there are systematic differences in higher education policies across 19 developed western countries that are usually categorized in a social democratic, a liberal or a conservative welfare regime. Based on a secondary analysis of the available literature and cross-country statistics, we construct indices for decommodification and for stratification in higher education. The countries studied cluster in three groups that correspond roughly with the classical categorization. The countries in these clusters do not, however, meet all expectations regarding the level of decommodification and stratification. We conclude that countries belonging to the social democratic regime follow the principles of the prototypical social-democratic welfare regime well with respect to higher education. However, the higher education systems in liberal and conservative countries only share some of the characteristics of a prototypical conservative or liberal welfare state. We conclude that including higher education in comparative welfare states analysis might result in a less clear-cut categorization of welfare regimes than when the analysis is restricted to social protection and labour market policies.

Why work is not a panacea: a decomposition analysis of EU-15 countries:

Summary Increasing the level of labour participation is one of the key objectives of the European Employment Strategy and the Lisbon agenda. Increasing the employment rate is generally considered crucially important to safeguarding the sustainability of the welfare state and achieving a number of other socio-economic objectives. This article examines the extent to which higher employment does result in lower unemployment, lower poverty rates, decreased dependence on social security and reductions in public expenditures on social protection. To this end, a decomposition analysis is performed concerning the evolution of the unemployment rate, poverty rate, benefit recipiency rate and social expenditure rate in the 15 original EU member states and the United States since the 1980s. Results of this analysis show that, in many cases, the favourable effects of increases in employment are partially (and sometimes even fully) offset by simultaneous changes in other variables, including labour supply, eligibility criteria, benefit generosity and the concentration of non-working people in work-poor households. The article concludes that increasing the employment rate is not a panacea for all socio-economic ills. European social policy should therefore focus less one-sidedly on employment and should address additional objectives, including benefit generosity and poverty. In addition, the process of benchmarking in the EU should be transformed from its current top-down character to one which proceeds from the bottom up.Increasing the level of labour participation is one of the key objectives of the European Employment Strategy and the Lisbon agenda. Increasing the employment rate is generally considered crucially important to safeguarding the sustainability of the welfare state and achieving a number of other socio-economic objectives. This article examines the extent to which higher employment does result in lower unemployment, lower poverty rates, decreased dependence on social security and reductions in public expenditures on social protection. To this end, a decomposition analysis is performed concerning the evolution of the unemployment rate, poverty rate, benefit recipiency rate and social expenditure rate in the 15 original EU member states and the United States since the 1980s. Results of this analysis show that, in many cases, the favourable effects of increases in employment are partially (and sometimes even fully) offset by simultaneous changes in other variables, including labour supply, eligibility criteria, benefit generosity and the concentration of non-working people in work-poor households. The article concludes that increasing the employment rate is not a panacea for all socio-economic ills. European social policy should therefore focus less one-sidedly on employment and should address additional objectives, including benefit generosity and poverty. In addition, the process of benchmarking in the EU should be transformed from its current top-down character to one which proceeds from the bottom up.

What Explains the Union Membership Gap between Migrants and Natives

This article explores the differences in unionization rates between migrant and native-born workers in 23 European countries. It explores whether individual characteristics or contextual factors explain the variation across countries in the degree of trade unions’ inclusion of migrant workers. The analyses show that individual characteristics cannot explain the variation in the difference between migrant and native unionization rates. Characteristics of the industrial relations regime in the country of destination, in particular the institutional embeddedness of trade unions, affect the likelihood that migrants join trade unions as compared to native workers.

The Disabling State of an Active Society

The dilemma of domestic work in postapartheid South Africa should not be viewed as an isolated phenomenon of marginal interest to sociologists. The globalization of paid domestic work means that hundreds of thousands of women from poor countries in the global South are living in a form of servitude, as they work for low wages, under abusive conditions in wealthier countries as part of a ‘‘global care chain.’’ In this brilliant study, Shireen Ally demonstrates how these relations of servitude have resisted change in ‘‘the national care chain’’ in contemporary South Africa. Post-apartheid South Africa is a contradictory place. On the one hand there is deepening inequality, poverty and widespread collective violence in the form of xenophobic attacks against foreigners and violent protests about the failure of the local state to deliver substantive social citizenship in the shape of access to housing, jobs, water, electricity and sanitation. On the other hand the new constitution embodies a powerful vision of participatory democracy, new institutions to protect human rights, and the redrafting of apartheid labor legislation included one of the most extensive and expansive efforts anywhere in the world to recognize paid domestic work as a form of employment. These state efforts to modernize and professionalize domestic work as a form of employment were remarkable. Existing labor legislation was extended inter alia to include a landmark national minimum wage, mandatory formal contracts of employment, extensive leave, formal registration, as well as access to unemployment insurance benefits, which Ally points out was a ‘‘world first.’’ However, a central thesis of the book is that the outcome has been disempowering for domestic workers. With analytical depth and sensitivity, Ally demonstrates the persistence of servitude. Paradoxically, the book suggests that domestic workers’ lives have not changed much under democracy and many feel that ‘‘things are worse than before.’’ While they are the beneficiaries of ‘‘an extensive democratic statecraft’’ attempting to turn ‘‘servants’’ into workers with the same rights as other workers, their social position as migrant ‘‘mother-workers,’’ often caring for their employers’ children at the expense of their own, has not been affected. Ally explains this paradox in the tension between the forms of formal power deployed by the post-apartheid state in its efforts to protect these ‘‘vulnerable’’ workers and the forms of informal power generated by the intimate nature of their work. This involves a ‘‘contradictory collision of depersonalizing rights and personalizing intimacy’’ (p. 187). In the absence of state protection under apartheid, South African domestic workers had elaborate ‘‘practices of power’’ rooted in their highly personalized relationships with employers, as a way to control their work. ‘‘In the absence of labor rights defining leave provisions, sitting down every morning with tea and talking to one’s employer about her problems became a way to ensure an extended Christmas vacation’’ (p. 13). These informal mechanisms for negotiating working conditions have continued and demonstrate these women’s creativity and assertiveness. Another paradox Ally identifies in this highly original exploration is that the political inclusion of domestic workers has ironically depoliticized them. Making domestic workers the subjects of rights through their construction as ‘‘vulnerable’’ defined their political status as incapacitated and inert. With the state positioning itself as the representative and protector of domestic workers’ interests, they were demobilized, their unions displaced and weakened and their voices muted. Thus Ally argues that ‘‘the attempt to turn ‘servants’ into workers through liberal democratic rights, rather

The Disabling State of an Active SocietyThe Disabling State of an Active Society, by HolmqvistMikael. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. 169pp.

The dilemma of domestic work in postapartheid South Africa should not be viewed as an isolated phenomenon of marginal interest to sociologists. The globalization of paid domestic work means that hundreds of thousands of women from poor countries in the global South are living in a form of servitude, as they work for low wages, under abusive conditions in wealthier countries as part of a ‘‘global care chain.’’ In this brilliant study, Shireen Ally demonstrates how these relations of servitude have resisted change in ‘‘the national care chain’’ in contemporary South Africa. Post-apartheid South Africa is a contradictory place. On the one hand there is deepening inequality, poverty and widespread collective violence in the form of xenophobic attacks against foreigners and violent protests about the failure of the local state to deliver substantive social citizenship in the shape of access to housing, jobs, water, electricity and sanitation. On the other hand the new constitution embodies a powerful vision of participatory democracy, new institutions to protect human rights, and the redrafting of apartheid labor legislation included one of the most extensive and expansive efforts anywhere in the world to recognize paid domestic work as a form of employment. These state efforts to modernize and professionalize domestic work as a form of employment were remarkable. Existing labor legislation was extended inter alia to include a landmark national minimum wage, mandatory formal contracts of employment, extensive leave, formal registration, as well as access to unemployment insurance benefits, which Ally points out was a ‘‘world first.’’ However, a central thesis of the book is that the outcome has been disempowering for domestic workers. With analytical depth and sensitivity, Ally demonstrates the persistence of servitude. Paradoxically, the book suggests that domestic workers’ lives have not changed much under democracy and many feel that ‘‘things are worse than before.’’ While they are the beneficiaries of ‘‘an extensive democratic statecraft’’ attempting to turn ‘‘servants’’ into workers with the same rights as other workers, their social position as migrant ‘‘mother-workers,’’ often caring for their employers’ children at the expense of their own, has not been affected. Ally explains this paradox in the tension between the forms of formal power deployed by the post-apartheid state in its efforts to protect these ‘‘vulnerable’’ workers and the forms of informal power generated by the intimate nature of their work. This involves a ‘‘contradictory collision of depersonalizing rights and personalizing intimacy’’ (p. 187). In the absence of state protection under apartheid, South African domestic workers had elaborate ‘‘practices of power’’ rooted in their highly personalized relationships with employers, as a way to control their work. ‘‘In the absence of labor rights defining leave provisions, sitting down every morning with tea and talking to one’s employer about her problems became a way to ensure an extended Christmas vacation’’ (p. 13). These informal mechanisms for negotiating working conditions have continued and demonstrate these women’s creativity and assertiveness. Another paradox Ally identifies in this highly original exploration is that the political inclusion of domestic workers has ironically depoliticized them. Making domestic workers the subjects of rights through their construction as ‘‘vulnerable’’ defined their political status as incapacitated and inert. With the state positioning itself as the representative and protector of domestic workers’ interests, they were demobilized, their unions displaced and weakened and their voices muted. Thus Ally argues that ‘‘the attempt to turn ‘servants’ into workers through liberal democratic rights, rather

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Since the 1990s it has become more or less conventional wisdom in most European countries that the predominant passive character of social policy should be replaced by more active measures. The welfare state that was built up in the post-Second World War period in Western Europe might have been quite successful in reducing poverty and providing income protection, but it proved unable to cope with the sharp rise of unemployment and the rapidly increasing numbers of benefi t claimants after the oil shocks of the 1970s. Moreover, in the 1990s it became widely accepted that the rising number of benefi ciaries was at least partly caused – or aggravated – by the passive character of the welfare state. From a failing solution to the problem of a malfunctioning economy, the welfare state became the problem itself. During the 1990s, two main approaches were advocated to tackle the problems of the welfare state. The fi rst was the (neo)liberal approach of welfare state retrenchment. To put it bluntly, this approach tries to remedy the fl aws of the welfare state by reducing it and creating more room for the market and the private provision of income insurance. The main weakness of this approach is, of course, that it neglects the reasons why the welfare state was introduced in the fi rst place, that is, to compensate for market failures. Shifting the responsibility for social protection from the state back to the market can give rise again to the unfavourable social consequences of market failures, such as high poverty levels, large income disparities and social exclusion of weaker groups. The second approach boils down to activating the welfare state. This approach was inspired by the alleged success of the Nordic welfare states, which for a long time were able to combine a high standard of social protection, low unemployment rates and high labour participation rates. The success of these welfare states is often attributed to their active labour market policies, which stimulate and