Governance and the European Social Dimension: Politics, Power and the Social Deficit in a Post-2010 EU by Paul Copeland

Author:Paul Copeland [Copeland, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Economic History, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351001748
Google: tb29DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-11-12T09:41:33+00:00

Active labour market policies and the commodification/ decommodification conundrum

In coding the CSRs, several issues need to be addressed. The first relates to the ideological direction of the policies emanating from Brussels, understood as categorising EU employment and social policy according to the traditional left-right political spectrum. Positioning individual employment and social policies on the classic political spectrum is not an easy task, particularly in the context of the reduced ideological differences between the centre-left and the centre-right across Europe over the last 30 years. For the purposes of analysing the EU employment and social policy within the European Semester, I therefore focus on the concepts of commodification and decommodification. The analytical focus on the two concepts breaks with the academic tradition of welfare studies established by Esping-Andersen’s (1990) seminal Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. In the latter, Esping-Andersen analyses the welfare state via its ability to decommodify the individual, but as I will argue, if we are to fully appreciate the welfare state, we also need to equally consider its ability to commodify, as the contemporary welfare state is a complex machine that has the power to both commodify and decommodify various aspects of an individual’s life.

Esping-Andersen bases his concept of decommodification on the works of Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi. The classical view of commodification is understood as policies designed to make wage employment and the cash nexus the linchpin of a person’s very existence within the capitalist system of political economy. Individual welfare, if not survival, depends on the willingness of someone to hire one’s labour power (Esping-Andersen 1990: 36). The commodification of the individual as a resource strengthens the power of capital over labour, but within the capitalist system, this is justified with reference to the freedom individuals are granted by being able to choose between different job roles/employers and leisure/work trade-offs. However, such freedom is fictitious as workers are not commodities like ‘true’ commodities, such as physical goods because they need to survive and reproduce. Unlike true commodities, labour cannot withhold its resource until the price being paid for it increases unless there is an alternative means of subsistence. For Esping-Andersen (1990), this is where the welfare state plays an important role – its ability to provide an alternative means of subsistence to paid employment and the extent to which it makes individuals more, or less, reliant of the functioning of labour markets. For Esping-Andersen (1990), the concept of decommodification refers to the degree to which individuals or families can uphold a socially acceptable standard of living independent of the market and it is the process and the extent of decommodification that is the central analytical focus in Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Importantly, decommodification should not be confused with the complete eradication of labour as a commodity; it is not an issue of all or nothing as labour is always commodified in the capitalist system. Rather, decommodification refers to the extent to which individuals or families can uphold a socially acceptable standard of living independently of the operation of the market.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.