Book Review: Transforming Disability into Ability. Policies to Promote Work and Income Security for Disabled People

New state and market arrangements were twice imposed on the residents of the eastern part of Germany, once when Germany was divided in 1949 and again when it was reunified in 1990; these changes produced a unique natural experiment concerning the effect of policies and institutions on the gendered nature of work. This review synthesizes research on gender equality in paid and unpaid work in East versus West Germany during the decades immediately preceding and following reunification. We consider empirical evidence on gender equality in five major dimensions of work: the prevalence of labor market attachment, time spent in paid work, wages, employment sector and occupation, and time spent in unpaid work in the home. Taken together, developments across these dimensions suggest that, following reunification, the two parts of the country converged toward the gendered arrangement in which men are employed full-time and their female partners hold part-time jobs—with some evidence of continuing differences betwe...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/29737687.pdf

Gender and Work in Germany: Before and After Reunification

OECD. Sick on the job? Myths and realities about mental health and work.

Today, most modern welfare states face the challenge of an aging population and decreasing rates of labour force participation among older people. Despite increased life expectancy, improved living conditions, and better health status, the average time people spend in paid work is decreasing in most European countries.1–3 This rather paradoxical development is partly due to a delay of young people entering the labour market; however, even more important is that older workers are exiting the labour market in greater numbers. In most countries, the average age of permanent departure from paid labour is well below the statutory pension age. This development, the “early exit trend”, has been called “one of the most profound structural changes in the past 25 years”,1 a trend that is hardly sustainable because of growing financial pressure on governments. This trend is incompatible with anticipated labour shortages in the near future. Consequently, researchers and policy makers all over Europe are involved in studies and debates to find ways to “shift the vicious circle of early exit to the virtuous circle of active aging”.4

Leaving the labour market before old age pension requires alternative sources of income. Across Europe, there are many ways to bridge the time between early exit and old age pension. Depending on the configuration, availability, and generosity of such pathways, countries use different strategies of externalisation and integration of older and/or disabled workers. Integration strategies support employment among these groups, whereas externalisation strategies transfer the risk of old or sick employees to the social security system. Because of generous entering conditions in different social security programmes, many countries have adopted such an externalisation strategy. As a result, the number of premature labour market withdrawals has increased dramatically.

To a very high degree, this also applies to the social security …

https://oem.bmj.com/content/oemed/62/2/135.full.pdf

Retirement on grounds of ill health.

This paper provides an overview of the sequential shift towards activating labor market and social policy in Germany. It not only shows the changes in the instruments of active and passives labor market policies but also analyzes the implications of this change for the political economy, the governance and the legal structure of a "Bismarckian" welfare state. Our study points at the changes in Germany's status- and occupation-oriented unemployment benefit regime that has been relinquished for a larger share of dependent population. Unemployment insurance benefit duration is shorter now and newly created basic income support for needy persons is not earnings-related anymore. Pressure on unemployed to take up jobs has increased considerably while more persons than before have access to employment assistance. The paper also aims at a preliminary assessment of the effects of activating labor market policy on labor market as well as social outcomes and sets out probable paths of future adaptation.

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Activation Policies in Germany: From Status Protection to Basic Income Support

Over the past twenty-five years, unemployment has been growing continuously in West Germany. In this study one of the reasons for growing unemployment is analysed: unemployment of older people in their transition from employment to retirement. First, the different possibilities of transitions into retirement are explained within the framework of social security regulations. Taking this legal framework as a starting point, early retirement passages are then modelled with the IAB unemployment sub-sample. It will be shown that - due to the long duration of these unemployment episodes - early retirement contributed considerably to the rise of total unemployment. Early retirement patterns will be broken down by economic sub-sectors and establishment size. It turns out that this kind of unemployment originates primarily from large establishments in manufacturing and extractive industries. Multivariate analysis presented at the end of the paper also includes personal characteristics such as gender or skills and ...

Early exit from the labour force between exclusion and privilege: Unemployment as a transition from employment to retirement in West Germany

A comparison of unemployment rates in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, the UK and the United States suggests poor performance by the German labour market. The present study endeavours to show that a more sophisticated picture of unemployment can be drawn by taking into account additional forms of non-employment (such as incapacity, retirement or labour reserve). For this purpose, data from the ‘European Social Survey’ (ESS) and the survey ‘Citizenship, Involvement and Democracy’ collected in 2004 and 2005 have been analysed. While ‘unemployment’ plays a dominant role in Germany, people with comparable demographic characteristics and similar health status are more likely to identify themselves as ‘permanently sick or disabled’ and hence are classified thus in other countries. The results of this study underline that an international comparison of labour market performance, particularly a comparison of the effectiveness of labour market and social policy reforms, should not rely only on employment and unemployment rates. Taking alternate forms of non-employment into account can enhance one's knowledge and understanding of the functional differences between the labour markets in Europe and the United States.

Unemployment as an Institutional Construct? Structural Differences in Non-Employment between Selected European Countries and the United States

In the course of the transition from an industrial to a service economy, fundamental changes in the functioning of the labour market are expected to occur. A number of authors assert that these changes will result in an increasing external-numerical flexibility of firms which is assumed to affect labour market processes in terms of a generally higher labour market mobility and a decreasing employment stability (‘high-velocity labour market’). This paper examines the hypothesis of a growing importance of numeric-external flexibility, applying simple descriptive statistical methods to the event-history data of the IAB Employment Subsample for the West German labour market covering the years 1976 to 1995. There is no evidence for an acceleration of labour market ‘churning’, but rather for a stagnation or even slight decline of labour market mobility since the 1970s. Furthermore, job stability has not decreased over time, as one might have expected, but rather increased. In spite of these general results it m...

/pdf/in-search-of-turbulence-labour-market-mobility-and-job-4vod8frncw.pdf

In search of turbulence Labour market mobility and job stability in Germany

Previously a laggard in labor market policy reforms, Germany has combined a fundamental change of its benefit system with a reorganization of its employment services since 2005. The reform has resulted in a hitherto unresolved constitutional dispute that calls the “joined-up” governance of employment and municipal welfare services into question. The article endeavors to explain this outcome and the reform's uncertain destiny in terms of a dynamic version of path dependence theory.

Matthias Knuth

Papers

Early exit from the labour force between exclusion and privilege: Unemployment as a transition from employment to retirement in West Germany

Unemployment as an Institutional Construct? Structural Differences in Non-Employment between Selected European Countries and the United States

In search of turbulence Labour market mobility and job stability in Germany

Path Shifting and Path Dependence: Labor Market Policy Reforms Under German Federalism

Ältere Arbeitnehmer: Erwerbstätigkeit und soziale Sicherheit im Alter