“Dominant Fictions”: The Making of Standard Employment in Portugal and Romania (1920s to 2000s)
Final Report Abstract
“Dominant Fictions” took its cue from concerns about the transformations of labor markets that animated labor law scholars and labor sociologists but also policy-makers during in 1980s and 1990s in core European country. In France, Germany or Italy, the last decades of the twentieth century gave rise to vibrant debates about mounting precarity at work, trade-union retrenchment, rising unemployment and the overall unrevealing of the postwar consensus around standard employment. Varying in diverse national contexts, these debates had a clear understanding of what constituted standard employment, an employment relationship largely defined by open-ended, full-time and stable contracts, underpinned by access to social security. What they lacked was a sense of historical background and more so an explanation of how this particular type of employment came to be taken as standard, informing both state policy and the normative imaginary of ordinary employees. “Dominant Fictions” set about to provide this necessary historical background through a bundle of research questions: how did standard employment shape the normative horizon of policy-makers, legal experts, employers, trade-unions and ordinary employees? What drove these historical actors to push for the implementation of this specific employment relationship at the expense of others? The project approached these questions with empirical material collected on the margins of twentieth century Europe, in countries up until today largely ignored in the literature on employment systems. The project thus set up for comparison Portugal and Romania, two peripheral countries, with a long history of authoritarian political system and laggard national economies. Yet both displaying in spite of these features a long process of standardization of employment, involving a whole range of social actors. In the first results of the project, I identified four key historical dynamics that shaped the process of standardization of employment in both countries and opened the research agenda for yet another one. First, I showed that from the 1920s up until the 1960s, labor markets were segmented by labor law, and more precisely by what I called “original dualisms”. The levelling of these dualisms – for instance, the distinction between manual and intellectual work – was an essential component of standardization. Secondly, I argued that in various industrial sectors, standard employment was not always and not necessarily willed by most employees, many preferring not so much a stable employment relationship as better working conditions and even self-employment. Thirdly, the imbrication of labor and penal law also shaped standard employment, a phenomenon more relevant for Romania than Portugal. Fourthly, after the revolutions of 1974 and 1989, the development of standard employment cannot be understood outside of a process of de-politicisation, which took different routes in both countries. Finally, all these empirical investigations leave open the question of the moral or political foundations of standard employment and its justification in a world, as contemporary Europe surely is, facing a demand for flexible employment arrangements.
