Rafael Ibáñez Rojo

From consumerism to guilt: Economic crisis and discourses about consumption in Spain

The economic crisis that Spain has been facing since 2008 has produced significant effects in the way citizens are dealing with consumption. Beyond austerity practices and concerns about an uncertain future, there is a rising anxiety about the sustainability of current consumption patterns. Moreover, it is interesting to analyse how consumption evolves in a situation in which the budget is highly constrained. How do people from different social classes perceive consumption under these circumstances? Our contribution deals with those issues using data from a focus groups based research project whose main goal was to map necessities and consumption practices in Spain, trying to assess the impact of the crisis. In this article we will discuss the results focusing on how different groups of interviewees elaborate a discourse about it which ranges from guilt to a strong moral discourse related to the adequate level of consumption. We consider that this paper might provide a deeper knowledge of the relationship between consumption and social class in a context of financial and economic crisis.

Austerity and collective bargaining in Spain: The political and dysfunctional nature of neoliberal deregulation:

This article focuses on changes in collective bargaining in Spain during the current phase of austerity. We evaluate how the decentralization and transformation of collective bargaining have affected industrial relations and forms of work and suggest that the policy reforms have led to a deterioration in working conditions and a weakening in collective regulation and trade unions. However, we emphasize the contradictory outcomes, which appear to be drawing the state into new more direct roles, bringing new actors (such as legal firms) into the deregulation of employment. This situation also raises a range of concerns among managers and employers at the repoliticization of industrial relations and generates further challenges to the ability of management and unions to sustain consensual forms of social dialogue.

The Expansion of Temporary Employment in Spain (1984-2010): Neither Socially Fair nor Economically Productive

Since the decade of the 1970s, the growth of non-standard employment (NSE) has become a key issue in Western societies, usually linked to the transition towards a post-industrial economy (Jessop, 1995; Kumar, 1995; Alonso and Martinez Lucio, 2006; Koch, 2006). Many Western countries have undergone major reforms in their labour market legislation, allowing the creation of new forms of employment that would help not only to improve flexibility in human resource management (HRM) but also to find solutions to the persistent problem of unemployment. These new policies have led to a more fragmented landscape in terms of contracts, conditions and arrangements in a process that, in the case of EU countries, has been widely supported by both national and supra-national institutions through various strategies such as flexicurity (Serrano Pascual and Magnusson, 2007). However, the design of non-standard work arrangements and the extent of their use varied notably in different national contexts and were influenced by far from linear trajectories of socio-economic development, which we understand as the results of social struggles in each one of these societies (Crouch, 1993; Ferner and Hyman, 1998; Olsen and Kalleberg, 2004). When considering EU statistics, one immediately notices that part-time jobs are very common in countries such as the Netherlands or, less so, Sweden, while temporary contracts represent approximately 25 per cent of the total labour force in Spain.

Young Workers and Unions in Spain: A Failed Meeting?

The decline in union membership in most of Western Europe has been widely discussed in the field of industrial relations (Fairbrother and Yates, 2003; Furaker and Berglund, 2003; Waddington and Kerr, 2002; Willman et al., 2007), with a dearth of research devoted to the situation of young workers, often poorly unionised. Some accounts have claimed that the low figures of membership to trade unions by young workers are the result of new individualist attitudes embedded in the transition to a Post-Fordist society (Pakulski and Waters, 1996). Such attitudes would become more common in working life, helping to disengage young employees from the collective values represented by the unions. However, recent research has suggested that the picture is somewhat more complex. Surveys carried out in different countries have shown that young workers maintain a positive view on unions when compared with other age cohorts, and the reasons why their membership figures are lower are the result of other factors, particularly their position in the labour market — linked to unstable jobs in the service sector (Furaker and Berglund, 2003; Tailby and Pollert, 2011; Vandaele, 2012; Waddington and Kerr, 2002). Therefore the poor unionisation of young employees is the result of a twofold process: on the one hand, their fragile position in the labour market, deeply affected by non-standard employment forms (Bradley and Devadason, 2008; Koch and Fritz, 2013), and the growth of precarious jobs (Kretsos, 2010; Standing, 2011); and on the other hand, the failure of trade unions to deploy strategies to engage and organise these workers (Johnson and Jarley, 2005).