Flexibility and Precarity
Post-war employment in Europe was Fordist, based on mass production and secure male-breadwinner wages. Key theorists tracked its decline:
- Piore and Sabel: showed the shift toward flexible specialisation.
- John Atkinson: modelled firms split into a stable core and a flexible periphery.
- Richard Sennett: analysed how insecure careers corrode personal character.
- Guy Standing: argued these workers form a new class called the precariat.
Platform work renewed this debate. For instance, Spain introduced its rider law in 2021 to classify delivery couriers as employees.
The Gendered Labour Market
Gender divides work along two distinct dimensions:
- Horizontal segregation: distributes men and women into different occupations.
- vertical segregation: concentrates men in higher ranks within the same occupation.
- The glass ceiling: metaphor from the 80s for barriers blocking women from senior roles across the Union.
The gender pay gap measures these disparities across Europe using Eurostat data. Post-childbirth earnings diverge via the child penalty, leaving mothers behind. Women also perform the domestic second shift after paid work.
Common pitfall: treating the adjusted pay gap as the only real measure. It controls for occupation, masking segregation. Both adjusted and unadjusted numbers answer valid sociological questions.