Collective bargaining is closely related to social policy making to the extent that the outcomes of the former inform and influence social policy agenda. It is widely held, however, that trade unions in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) do not have a strong bargaining position and thus exert little...

It is now a widely acknowledged fact that the low-skilled are facing important risks of labour market exclusion in modern economies. However, possessing low levels of educational qualifications leads to very different situations from one country to another, as the cross-national variation in the...

The concept of Flexicurity has been receiving much attention as the European social model. One of the most important concepts within the flexicurity approach is employment security, the security of having secure and continuous employment career, which may entail changing employers and jobs. How...

In particular due to increasing female employment over the last decades employment has become more flexible in regard to the contract form and we observe more discontinuous employment careers. This paper discusses in how far retirement pension systems in Europe are suited to cover the specific...

Different aspects of decisions regarding parenthood are analysed. From an institutional perspective, reconciliation policies and features of the female labour market are studied, as well as the values and life views that may affect the decision to become a parent. From a micro-perspective, a...

In this paper, we examine the domestic Europeanization of employment policy in two Continental countries — Germany and France. While both countries have experienced substantial labour market reforms in the last decade, the reform fields differ considerably. This paper argues that this is...

Though the response of trade unions to activation policies seems a crucial test of their capacity to adapt to the challenges of post-industrialisation, the issue has to date received little systematic attention in the welfare state or labour market policy literature. This paper takes a first...

The paper analyses the ‘Europeanization’ of policies concerning the reconciliation of work and family life in Hungary between 1998 and 2005. It looks at how politicians – in government or in the opposition – framed European requirements and/or standards and how they used references to...

There is still some lack of clarity regarding the question of what the Capability Approach actually is, how it should be interpreted and operationalised, and not least whether it is an adequate and useful concept for the analysis of social policy in Europe. Against the backdrop of these...

Active labour market policies have developed significantly over the last two decades across OECD countries, with substantial cross-national differences in terms of both extent and overall orientation. The objective of this paper is to account for cross-national variation in this policy field. It...