An Argument and an Outline for a New Employment Scheme

Abstract

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p>Liberalism is celebrating triumphs in these years. As faith in the welfare state and Keynesianism began to crack in the 1970s, capitalist principles were revitalised and the old virtues and dogmas were found and dusted. Now all that restrained the free competition in the market were considered a danger to the growth and the welfare. The impact of trade unions on wage formation should be limited, the welfare state should be reduced, and ‘modernised’ and the incentive structure strengthened by reducing social policy standards. Unemployment was again considered a natural part of the economy where individual choices were crucial to whether you were unemployed or not: lower your wage claims and you would probably get a job. </p><p>As a part of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, a consensus between the representatives of capital and labor had to be invented. An ideal model for European employment policy should be found to supplement the strengthening of the internal market and the canonisation of the free movement of capital, labor, goods, and services. The result was the so-called social dimension, which could act as a counter weight for the employees. The Danish labor market policy from the 1960s became the prototype of the European employment policy and was called flexicurity, and from the late 1990s until the crisis’ breakout in 2008, flexicurity celebrated triumphs as a political-ideological construction for a common reference model (Larsson 1998).</p></div></div></div>