The Origins of Dualism

Abstract

From Spain and Greece to Brazil and South Africa, dualized labor markets are a worldwide phenomenon. In many countries, workers are divided between those with permanent contracts that include valuable benefits and extensive labor market protections and those who work under contingent contracts or no contracts at all. This latter group receives few or no labor market protections and lower levels of social benefits. They are the world's labor market outsiders. Recent research has suggested that this pool of outsiders has important implications for the nature of democratic politics in the twenty-first century, an argument that is perfectly in line with the core idea of this book, namely, that coalitional alignments among different labor market groups are at the heart of postindustrial reform strategies.