“Dominant Fictions”: The Making of Standard Employment in Portugal and Romania (1920s to 2000s)

• Applicant: Adrian Grama, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 432635820

The standard employment relationship is both a legal construct defined by stable, full-time, long-term, dependent and socially protected employment and a category of practice for employers, employees, trade-unions, international organizations and the state. Scholars commonly explain the emergence and development of standard employment through a complex set of factors including Fordism, collective bargaining and the welfare state and locate its historical matrix in postwar Western Europe. This project argues that the standard employment relationship also developed on the Southern and Eastern periphery of Europe throughout the past century, in circumstances defined by low-wage industrialization, labor incorporation, and the progressive juridification of labor relations under both authoritarian and democratic political regimes. Taking Portugal and Romania as case studies, this project investigates how domestic policy-makers, legal experts, trade-unionists and international organizations contributed to making standard employment standard by way of extending this specific employment relationship to the majority of the active working population. Drawing on archival and published sources, this project contributes an empirically rich and theoretically informed longue durée historical perspective on the dynamics that inform current debates about the precarization of employment and the flexibilization of labor markets in Europe and beyond.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants