In recent decades, the share of service employment has increased greatly across Europe, fundamentally changing the structure of European labour markets and the nature of the economic risks that individual workers face. This book explores how far reforms to unemployment protection systems, which were introduced and consolidated in a very different labour market context, are responding to the particular challenges of post-industrial labour markets. It argues that adapting traditional systems of unemployment protection to the risk profiles of service-based economies requires a profound policy rea ... More

In recent decades, the share of service employment has increased greatly across Europe, fundamentally changing the structure of European labour markets and the nature of the economic risks that individual workers face. This book explores how far reforms to unemployment protection systems, which were introduced and consolidated in a very different labour market context, are responding to the particular challenges of post-industrial labour markets. It argues that adapting traditional systems of unemployment protection to the risk profiles of service-based economies requires a profound policy realignment, which can be summarized with reference to three overlapping processes of institutional change; the homogenization of unemployment benefit rights for different categories of the unemployed; the erosion of the institutional boundaries between benefit provisions for the unemployed and for other groups of working-age people reliant on state support; and the ever-closer operational integration of income maintenance policies and other forms of labour market support. Systematically comparing across twelve European welfare states over a period of twenty years, the book traces how these reform dynamics have played out in the context of political conflicts, institutional constraints, and changing macroeconomic conditions. While the book highlights that many differences continue to set the unemployment protection arrangements of different European countries apart, it also points to an emergent process of contingent convergence in conceptions of the risk of unemployment and of appropriate ways of regulating it.