Young people’s ways into and through the labour market – work transitions – lengthen, diversify, and become reversible. They are characterized by heterogeneity in terms of work relations used, educational and training pathways frequented, periods of job search, and back-and-forth between such arrangements. For example, consider the many work relations, often also relating to training, of young people: be it traineeships, apprenticeships, au pair relations, platform, fixed-term or part-time work to name but a few. While these work relations face different regulatory challenges, they share a crucial common feature. Ultimately, young people’s work transitions have been individualized over the past decades by regulators emphasizing individual responsibility to find work – often no matter its type. Public regulators’ and private employers’ roles, conversely, have been concealed, despite structural pressures on those transitioning to work. Transitions’ fragmentation can moreover be linked to instability in access to work, and to low-quality, or even precarious work relations. At the same time, work remains not only essential for providing one’s economic means of subsistence, but also stays a clear, sociological marker for a person to be considered as integrated into adulthood and, thus, society. Labour and the ways in which it is accessed and carried out are right at the roots of social inequality.
This short paper’s objective is to first contextualize how the past decades’ understanding of labour regulation has individualized work transitions. Second, I reflect on the concept of ‘transitions’ itself to show how it, instead of having an individualizing effect, can justify using labour law and regulation to foster access to work while promoting quality work. I therefore rely on the youth’s specific case, but similar reflections are necessary regarding other groups and types of transitions, e.g, concerning care duties or professional reorientation.
What are work transitions indeed? In a first perspective, work transitions could be understood as belonging to three groups: access to work, including first-time access, transitions in the labour market of those having already a link to the world of work, or transitions out of work, e.g., back into education or related to care duties. These groups of transitions are, however, much more blurred than appears at first sight. For instance, does a young person having carried out a short-term traineeship fall into the second category, despite their still much instable link to the world of work? Doesn’t someone losing employment resemble those seeking their first job? What about the stability of secured links to work and the quality of work relations?
In a second, distinct perspective, a stream of scholarly research called transitional labour markets, prominent in the 2000s and early 2010s, distinguished five types of labour market transitions: education and work; family and work; work and retirement or disability; employment and unemployment; and within the labour market. According to this theory’s proponents, regulatory intervention in transitions is to address the social risks created by them envisioned in terms of risks to personal income, e.g., to provide skills during education to strengthen individual capacity to earn income once in the labour market; to provide income security when changing between work relations: or to support income where personal availability is limited, such as by care duties. This stream of research has been highly influential on European labour regulation by justifying the regulatory concept of ‘flexicurity’ (here, and here), that is to provide flexibility in entry into and exit from the labour market, while supposedly ensuring the types of income security during the transitions mentioned above.
The ideas of transitional labour markets and flexicurity, however, face at least two major hurdles if looked at through the lens of quality work: first, focusing labour regulation only on this vision of transitions conceptually struggles to target quality work. This objective simply lies on the sidelines of a regulatory strategy, which, on one hand, targets access to work, albeit broadly understood, while, on the other hand, may remove quality safeguards to individual work relations to flexibilize the labour market’s set-up, such as dismissal regulation or by creating novel work relations on the boundaries of labour law. For young people, this strategical flaw links to work transitions’ individualization. Regulators have increasingly understood young workers as mainly improving their ‘employability’ since the 1990s, i.e., their capacity to earn later. This idea has also been streamlined through EU sources, such as the European Employment Strategy (e.g., the New Start Guideline in here), and most compellingly euro-crisis financial assistance (e.g., here). Employability then justifies the emergence of a new divide in the labour market: the distinction between young people acquiring ‘work experience’, e.g., through traineeships, active labour market policies or other types of ‘aspirational work’, and those carrying out real ‘work’. Although the work relations of young people considered to acquire ‘work experience’ may resemble those of others considered ‘work’, at least concerning their economic aspects, the concepts of employability and work experience have justified young workers’ exclusion from existing labour rights and restraint in the alternative specific regulation of these many new work schemes. They place the responsibility to find work on young individuals, which moreover must pass a long and winding road to secure a lasting link to work if ever they are successful (consider the persistence of young workers over average engaged in temporary work). The quality of their work is moreover not at the centre of this regulatory strategy.
Second, how flexicurity was realized also stands in the way of simultaneously promoting quality work. Many authors have criticized that EU flexicurity focused on flexibilization, i.e., removal of quality safeguards in work relations, while neglecting transition security. This phenomenon has even more prominently hit young workers, in particular during the euro-crisis’ austerity years where deregulating young people’s work relations became prominent among European regulators to allegedly fight soaring youth unemployment. In sum, this understanding of labour regulation and labour market transitions traces the individualization of young people’s work transitions.
Sociologic research, however, illustrates that a much closer look at work transitions – and at a more holistic understanding thereof – is necessary to devise suitable regulatory strategies to simultaneously promote access to and quality of work. Young people’s work transitions have indeed changed and diversified drastically over the past decades (a useful classification in here). While predictable, structured, and early work transitions characterized the post-war period, the advent of youth unemployment since the mid-1970s spearheaded strong changes. Initially, youth unemployment settled in European labour markets, while secondary training was prolonged. Ever since the 1990s, heterogeneity has been the hallmark of work transitions, such as their further lengthening, e.g., through the on-going rise of tertiary education or the emergence of aspirational work; or their growing reversibility, e.g., through an increased back-and-forth between work and other arrangements relied on for a link to work. Young people experience transitions in increasingly different, individual ways. While heterogeneity and individual experiences are in principle a welcome feature as they may give increased opportunity for individual agency and personal development, their advent has also been paired with the above-discussed individualization of young people’s work relations and rising issues with precarious links to the labour market and to work relations. It is also concerning to see that young workers continue to be often excluded from participation in the regulatory process (e.g., here and here) and struggle to enforce existing labour rights (illustrated here for the case of internships).
A more holistic view of work transitions is therefore necessary for finding a way out of the individualizing approach to their regulation. How could such a more holistic approach look like? While it should first and foremost be the outcome of democratic deliberation through collective regulation and/or public institutions, there are some components that may be discussed with a view to simultaneously promoting access to and ensuring quality of work in work transitions. First, the starting point of regulation can be adjusted to limit exclusion from labour rights from the outset. By limiting, preferably abolishing the often-arbitrary distinction between work and work experience, regulators can start their activity from the principle of young people’s inclusion into labour rights, at the very least concerning their work relations’ economic aspects. Second, work transitions involve a multitude of risks faced by those in transition. This, however, does not justify individualization. Instead, a holistic regulatory approach must highlight shared responsibility in work transitions that may at times indeed involve young workers in a perspective of personal development, but importantly relies on public regulators and private employers in addressing structural pressures on transitions. The latter’s responsibility should identify the existing risks and adapt regulation to their intrinsic and considerable heterogeneity where necessary. This offers indeed an avenue of specific regulation but should also constitute an exception to the principle of inclusive regulation. Finally, any holistic regulatory approach can only become fully effective and appropriate to young workers’ needs where all workers, including the young, are enabled to participate in the regulatory process and can effectively enforce their rights.
In sum, this paper contests the understanding of labour regulation as aimed at a vision of transitions that is limited to the access to work. The concept of work transitions – if re-envisioned and more holistically developed – may equally justify and promote an approach to labour regulation that simultaneously fosters access to and quality of work. In any event, it is necessary to question and review our understandings of transitions in labour regulation for promoting social justice.
Art by Tomoko Nagao
Il quarto stato with motta, campari, pirelli, armani, prada, chicco, alitalia and visa at piazza duomo
2016 Digital contents
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