Labour Process and Occupations. A Critical Journey into the Sociology of Work (original) (raw)
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Since the early 1980s the post-fordist transition of advanced economies has triggered new labour market regulations and employment arrangements characterized by higher flexibility and reduced social rights. As the deregulation of the labour market in Europe leads to further flexibilization, employment status degrades especially in the less integrated EU economies such as Greece. Likewise, flexicurity – promoted to balance labour flexibility and labour security-and the recent recession, both determine a new uneven spatial division of labour and expansion of certain atypical employment forms across different regions, even within the same national jurisdictions. Encompassing these key-concepts our study empirically substantiates the main aspects of atypical labour geography in Greece. On this ground, the paper intends to capture late trends in flexible employment as these are defined by recent changes in productive, regulatory and social contexts. To this purpose, spatial patterns of atypical employment, specifically part-time, temporary, self-employment and family-helpers, are correlated to region-specific production systems and labour market changing structures. Results are mapped on NUTS-II level for 2005-2009, providing a spatially integrated illustration of the respective socioeconomic changes. The emerging regional typology reflects the manufacturing decline in the West and Central Macedonia regions, the congested tertiarization and declining construction and service sector in the Athens and Thessaloniki metropolitan regions, as well as tourism stagnation in the South Aegean region. In all explored Greek regions, increasing deregulation and flexibilization compress the socially embedded long-existing atypical employment forms and boost the expansion of more precarious ones. This is already illustrated in the severe decline of self-employment and family-helpers and the rise of part-time employment. Whilst the ongoing recession further dissolves employment structures in the name of competitive restructuring. 2
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