In-work poverty, precarious work and indebtedness. The steady state European equilibrium?

Abstract

Since the establishment of a European strategy to create more and better jobs at the end of ’90s Member States faced many efforts pursuing the target of high percentage of employed persons, target renewed with Europe 2020 strategy. In the same years many citizenship rights, universally recognized, started to be conditioned to the employment status: the “welfarism” was rapidly substituted with “workfare”, with the twin aims of encouraging activation of labour force and - less claimed – of cutting public expenses, especially in social services. In this paper we analyse trends and relations of certain dimension of employment to better understand the sustainability of this approach. The “new” employment is more and more characterized by undermining factors: insecurity, precariousness, poverty. States pursuing active labour market policies, under a Flexicurity approach, besides a good labour market performance, are still facing with poverty and job insecurity of many workers. This is accompanied by growth of household indebtedness, the other dangerous drawback of welfare “commodification” processes. Beyond enforce Employment Protection Legislations, Basic income or Minimum wages, we should change the targets of European strategy with more social or qualitative components (e.g. quality of employment) and get over the Flexicurity approach