The Employable European Citizen: Beyond Gender, Class and Ethnicity?

(Fourth European Feminist Research Conference, 28 September –1^st October 2000, Bologna, Italy. Workshop 10: Ties that bind: the law, economics and the labour market)

1. Introduction

In the 1990s the social policy logics of EU member states have changed. Redistributive social policies are increasingly perceived as expensive and ineffective. The emphasis of the political discourse is shifting towards investment in the ability of individuals to survive in intensified international competition. Equality and justice are expected no longer from redistribution of individual means of consumption, but from investment in 'productive capacities'. Here the 'human capital' is considered a productive asset and becomes a public concern. The idea is, that investment in starting position of individuals as they face the the demands of the market would make ex post political redistribution largely redundant. Therfore instead of passive measures, so-called activating policies and in-work benefits are being promoted. They aim to remove existing barriers towards women's (and men's ) labour market participation. (see e.g. Lefresne 1999).

The new politcal key-word on the level of EU and member states programs is 'employability', which defines the responsability of public policy not in terms of de-commodification but in terms of recommodification. Thus the concept stresses not only the right but also the obligation to self-reliance through paid work . An optimistic label for this new policy profile could be 'supply-side egalitarianism', under which political capacities are deployed to improve and equalize the marketability of individuals and their ability to compete, instead of protecting them from the market (Cohen/ Rogers 1998).

Why is this shift in policies important and what does it mean for gender relations?

First, this shift is not singular, but can be observed in liberal as well as in conservative and social-democratic welfare states. It can be understood as the eclipse of the post-war consensus in Western Europe as it goes hand in hand with the breakdown or at least weakening of social contracts and institutional arrangements which had been commonly regarded as permanent features of the so called European social model: steady economic growth, expanding welfare entitlements, more or less institutionalized industrial relations and regulated labour markets and a level of social inequality which still allowed for social cohesion.

Secondly this new, individualistic 'supply-side egalitarianism', whether intended or not, puts into question the male breadwinner notion of most of the western European welfare state regimes. Indeed, it seems to correspond to structural changes in occupational systems, family forms and individual biographies: The so-called normal employment relationship of socially secured, lifelong, full-time employment for men is being eroded, and the standard, lifelong male breadwinner /female housewife family model is in decline. Increasing female labour market participation and the flexibilisation of work have widened labour market integration and multiply transitions into and out of the labour market. The expansion of higher education has increased the supply of mobile and flexible workers, apt for self-management of work biographies and for creating new patterns of work and life. The employment biographies of men and women are becoming more similar, since men, due to early retirement policies tend to stay less time in the labour market while women perform more continuous labour market participation. This more continuous participation often takes place in so-called non standard work forms, namley part-time work, self-employment and some kinds of illegal or non secured work like domestic servant work in private housholds.

So it seems as if the policies of recommodification are not only due to economic globalisation but also take into account - in a self- reflexive way as Beck would put it – that especially women as the latecomers of individualization are opting out of the dependency on the male breadwinner model (Beck 1992). If this is true, one might argue that we need not critisize the neoliberal bias of the policiy shift but could instead wellcome it as a due adaption to 'modern times'.

My argument however, is, that the story is more complicated especially if we look at women'a position in society and to social inequality. In the following I will refer to

two prominent features of change in employment patterns in Germany that reflect economic globalisation as well as ongoing individualization: the expansion of self-employment in cultural professions and the expansion of migrant domestic workers. Like in other European countries women have a great share in the expansion of these employment forms and they can serve as examples for a twofold more general trend: women's inroads in professional work and new forms of social segregation at the low skill services end of the job hierarchy, which together contribute to a mixed picture of more equality between middle class men and women and new forms of inequality among women along an ethnic line. I will argue, that both new patterns carry special social opportunities as well as new social risks, demanding new forms of risk-management on the part of the job holders. Secondly, I will discuss who these changes are met at an institutional level by the new philosophy of 'supply side-egalitarianism'. Here I will stress that the concept of 'employability', as long as it operates under the same resource and institutional constraints of the traditional redistributive social policies, might not be far-reaching enough to redress old and new social inequalities, especially those involving gender and care.

2. Self-employment in cultural professions: between privileged and precarious status

Dependent work as the dominant form of employment in industrialized western countries, incorporating a special seperation and standardized relation of work and life and the male breadwinner gender contract is in decline. With the ongoing flexibilisation of work in the service sector other forms of employment like contingent work, subcontract or contract work and free-lancing are expanding. In the political discourse conservatives, liberals as well as social-democratic leaders like Blair and Schröder have wellcomed the expansion of self-employment enthusiastically as 'a new entrepreneurship'. Social scientists are less optimistic about the social chances of this type of employment but like the politicians focus on this type of work as a new phenomenon due to new corporate rationalization strategies. The assessment of self-employment as 'brand new' however, is somehow misleading since there are labour and service market segments that already since the seventies operate on the basis of a combination of dependent work and contract work. What is new is the dynamic of expansion of this segment and the it's ambigous character between privilege and precarity.

This holds especially true for the cultural professions, that is journalists, translaters and interpreters, graphic artists and designers. These cultural professsions in most western countries typically can be performed as free-lance work as well as dependent work within large companies or smaller service bureaus. They expanded during the last twenty years, due to a culturalisation of capitalism with a special dynamic in self-employment. Drawing on recent research in this field and a case study in journalism I carried out (Gottschall 1999, 2000) I will now give a picture of the ambigous character of this type of work.

- The privilege aspect: professionalisation and sucessful managment of social risks

In Germany in the period from 1978 to 1995, the number of gainfully employed persons in the cultural professions roughly doubled up to more than 200.000 now. During the same period, the number of self-employed rose from about one third to nearly half. This, as well as the rapid expansion of these professions since the 1970s, were no doubt major reasons why they were open for women, especially for the growing group of academically trained women in the wake of the educational expansion. Indeed, the share of women in the quantitatively most significant cultural professions has risen steadily. In the mid-1990s women constituted 40% of journalists and 45% of graphic artists and designers. More often than their male colleagues they have university degrees and they concentrate in self-employment (Haak/ Schmid 1999).

A further particularity of the dynamic of the cultural professions lies in the fact that cultural professions during the last decades have become more professionalised. This is noteworthy since the historical well known patterns of expansion and feminization of occupations usually go hand in hand with deprofessionalisation or devalatuation of formal education. Indicators of the  professionalisation in journalism for example, are that in this field, that originally was a  typical field for occupational crossovers, now university degree programs and continuing education offerings have emerged. In addition  professional associations and unions have gained authority. They have developed successful strategies to secure professional autonomy as well as social standards, both for salaried and self-employed workers. A particular form of  social security for free-lancers was achieved in 1983 via the introduction of a nation-wide special social insurance scheme for artists. While in Germany social access to public social security is reserved to dependent workers, this scheme gives independently active artists and journalists, who have a maximum of one employee, access to health care and pension insurance. As the enormous rise in the participation in this scheme through the present day shows, this provision of socicl securitiy has mitigated the social risks associated with the low average incomes of cultural professions and has facilitated continuity of professional activity (Gottschall 1999).

Finally, it can be assumed that in the cultural professions, self-employment was and will be preferred by the jobholders not only for the sake of professional autonomy but also for the sake of the greater freedom it provides in combining work and life, especially work and family life.[1] Not only, but mostly women stress the fact that as freelancers, in being able to control and limit the volume of their work, they can much better combine work and family in such a way as to secure professional continuity (Wirths 1994). Indeed, part-time work, which constitutes 40% of freelance journalist positions, does not from the start carry the stigma of a so-called ‘mummy track’. Presumably in this kind of self-employment, a devaluation of professional competence can be avoided by the fact that the business and personal social contacts strongly overlap. Finally, on the issue of the gender-specific division of labour, the little available data suggests that in this and similarly highly qualified professions ‘dual earner patterns’ dominate, and democratic gender conceptions prevail, at least on a symbolic level. Nonetheless, the opportunity to pursue egalitarian living arrangements in the sense of a ‘dual earner/ male and female career’ pattern are used rather seldomly. Instead, we find ‘dual earner/ female part-time career’ or ‘dual earner and marketised carer’ patterns, a finding similar to studies in other countries (see Birkelund/Crompton 2000).

-The precarity aspect: exposition to market risks and little professional control

Up to now I have described self-employment in the cultural professions and it's attendant delimitation of the work and life spheres as a privilege. This is admittedly only half of the story. A closer look at the character of this privilege reveals that it is relative and that the path to a precarious status, particularly under changed market conditions, is very short.

The privileged status of the cultural professionals in Germany derives primarily from their ability to determine their own working hours and volume as well as the balance and linkage between their work and life spheres. This privileging is relative to the extent that here, in contrast to the true professions, the privileged status is not anchored in an institutionally secured economic monopoly. Instead, each professional’s market value must be reproduced ever anew in the relevant networks through the control of communication, trust and reputation. This negotiation through network structures makes the labour markets for cultural professions more open and flexible, but also more risky than labour markets in which the supply of labour and the demand for services is institutionally regulated, as in the case for example, of doctors. Successful market self-assertion in the cultural professions is predicated primarily on individual cultural and social capital and is at the same time susceptible to risk in the case of changes in the demand for services or in the labour supply.

Both parameters - the demand for services and the labour supply -  have changed since the beginning of the 1990s in Germany. The publicly financed cultural sector’s stagnation has been one factor in this, due to fiscal constraints or, in the case of public broadcasting, due to private competition and rationalisation pressures. At the same time, the private sector for culture and art has expanded. Here, employment and contractual conditions have admittedly been watered down, as can be shown in the field of journalism (Gottschall 1999). On the supply side, too, changes can be seen, due to the rising number of university graduates oriented toward the cultural realm. Thus there is a well-founded assumption that a portion of the rise in self-employment in cultural professions in Germany can be understood as a ‘second-best choice’: as a reaction to the threat of unemployment by occupational starters or by persons re-entering an occupation. In any case there are indications of growing income insecurity and social inequality. Self-employed artists and journalists earn less on average, for example, than their salaried colleagues, and income distribution is characterised by a strong polarisation between peak and low incomes (Haak/Schmid 1999:21f).

Involuntary self-employment also places the delimitation of life and work in a different light. In the case of involuntary self-employment the social, spatial and temporal flowing together of the work and life spheres is more an expression of market dictates than of individual freedom. In this respect- the market dictate of the self-mangment of work and life - social scintist see a pioneer role of self-employment, which could soon obtain not onlay for the self-employed but for all gainfully employed persons (Voss 1998).

So far I have argued that expanding professional fields have opened employment chances for women and contribute to more egalitarian living arrangements. This privileged pattern however, cannot be regarded as stable but already now is suceptible to sustantial social risks.

I will now turn to migrant domestic workers which form a new underprivileged labour market segment in most western countries. They somehow constitute the other side of the coin of the female professionals, I just talked about. And here, too the picture is ambigous, since we cannot reduce their status to precarity. My following remarks draw on the work of Helma Lutz (Coser/Lutz 1998; Calloni/Lutz 2000), the findings of a EU report on migrant domestic workes (Bridget Anderson and Annie Phizacklea 1997 ) as well as an on studies referring to the situation in Germany (Morocvasic 1993,1994; Friese 1996; Thiessen 1996; Rerrich 1997; Odierna 2000).

3. Domestic servants: Women as pioneers in globalized economic relationsships

In Europe, a growing number of female migrants are working in expanding fields of the service sector. The most obvious contemporary phenomenon is that migrant women are increasingly taking over the care of households as domestic servants, nannies, housekeepers, or nurses (Weinert 1991; Coser/Lutz 1998). The era of domestic staff usually is located hundred years ago. But contrary to the common expectation that housework could be reduced by technological infrastructure it does persist even in countries with a more modest tradition of houskeeping than Germany or France.

Several factors contribute to this development. First of all, with the increase of working women, especially female professionals, a new need for help in coping with the double burden of family care and career emerged. Secondly, the rapidly ageing population in Europe and the insufficiency of state care provisions for the elderly and the infirm create a private need for caring persons in many countries. Last but not least, the change in middle-class lifestyles has contributed to this sector’s growth as well: childcare is demanding, cleaning with environmentally-friendly products is time-consuming, the preference for clothing made of natural fibres necessitates more extensive care (hand washing and steam ironing), standards of cleanliness have risen (Gregson/Lowe 1994).

-The precarity aspect: semi-legal status , personal dependendancy and low income

The EU report points out that in the past decade the domestic servant sector has expanded immensely. The majority of domestic workers are migrant women in all countries, although the dominant groups vary by country: North Africans in France, Spain and Italy; Poles and other East Europeans in Greece, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The choice of recruitment areas often reflects former colonial ties. All countries have ethnic hierarchies legitimized by racist stereotypes (white and Christian at the top, black and Muslim at the bottom) that determine remuneration. In Germany, where about 2 to 3 million sub-mininum jobs (without any social security coverage) in private households are calculated (Rerrich 1997; Odierna 2000)[2]. the range is from working-class German women, through Turkish migrant women, ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, to Poles, Czechs and Russians, as well as women from Asia and Latin America. In the 1990s the Polish women were the highest paid domestic servants in Berlin, earning hourly wages of about DM 15. Next came the Latin American women. At the bottom of the hierarchy were women from the former Soviet Union, the Ukraine, Byelorussia and other East European countries (Anderson/Phizacklea 1997).

The vast differences in wage estimates suggest that many women do this work either semi-legally or illegally. Polish women in Berlin, for example, use the leeway provided by the German-Polish agreement and the relative geographic proximity to their home country to enter without visas as tourists and leave the city again after 2 months. Five or six share an apartment, work for several households and easily pass their work on to acquaintances or relatives from Poland (Margorzata 1998). The resulting rotation system is thus based on a jointly operated informal commuter network.

Characteristic for the work situation is a heterogeneity of tasks, which range from cleaning, washing and cooking through caring for children, the elderly and the infirm to assisting at family celebrations and corporate events. Corresponding we find a  employment situations (from a two-hour a week cleaning job to the 24-hour on-call service of the live-in maids).

Although the social situation and the legislative provisions for domestic workers vary throughout Europe in their report “Migrant Domestic Workers: A European Perspective” submitted to the European Commission’s Equal Opportunities Unit Bridget Anderson and Annie Phizacklea point out that there are the following common problems among domestic workes in all countries:

-unpaid hours

-low income, often less than the minimum wage;

-refusal by employers to arrange legal resident status (for tax reasons etc.)

-pressure to do additional work (for friends and colleagues)

-excessive workloads, especially where in addition to caring for children and elderly people they are responsible for all other household chores

-very intimate relationships between the domestic helpers and their employers

-control and sexual harassment (Anderson/ Phizacklea 1997).

-The contextualized 'privilege' aspect: temporary migration as social and cultural capital

So far we can state that today's maids emigrate to the centres of the wealthy world to support and sustain their families back home. Feminist authors stress that this trend reflects not only the worldwide feminization of migration and the international labour market’s globalization but also the shift of exploitation and dependence from a national to an international context. The maids issue has evolved from one of class to one of ethnicity and nationality (Calloni/Lutz 2000). We might argue that class is still involved if we look at the relation between femal professionals and their domestic helpers in our countries. A closer look at the social status of the modern domestic servants related to their homecountries however shows, the class issue has become more complicated.

In fact, domestic helpers of the 21st century are more educated than all their predecessors. Women wishing to be considered for work abroad need to be conversant in other languages or at least to be able to find their bearings in a foreign country. Such women include teachers, students, solicitors, physicians and nurses. As the example of the polish women working in Berlin shows, they are able to set up networks and handle legislative leeway patterns in a strategic way. They may use the money temporarily earned in Germany not only to support their families back home but also to set up own an own business in their home countries using their cultural and social capital. Looking at them as victims only, would mean to deny their capacity of sucessful self-managment of social risks and their capacity to care for a more secure future. I am highlighting this aspect, not because I want to belittle the social exclusion tendencies involved in this emploment pattern, but to make sensible for the complicated features of social inequality we are facing today.

4. The concept of 'employability' and reproductive work as an still unsolved and gendered issue

What does this mean for the concept of 'employabilty' and the future of reproductive work. As I indicated in the beginning the concept of 'employability' stresses a marketized pattern of self –managment and self-reliability that more and more people and especially women already arer practising throughout Europe. The evidence from different employment segments hwoever shows, that even those who fit the quest for flexibility, mobility and so on, even those cannot rely on their workforce alone as sufficient resource of a durable social security. Privileged workers like the cultural professionals are confronted with a small grade beteween pirvilege and precarity and those who are in a precarious status anyway as the migrant domestic servants have to face continuous risks of social exclusion.

The new social tandem of female professionals and their domestic helpers reveals the still unsolved and still gendered issue of reproductive work in modern market societies. While some women are able to free themselves of reproductive work by buying these services, other women, leaving their families, are doing this so called 'work of love' for them. They too, have a need for reproduction which they cannot marketize and here in turn family members and community networks in the poorer countries have to provide it. Thus the concept of 'employability' only pushes forward and delimits fundamental tensions inherent to capitalistic societies from the very beginning. The care question in the past has been solved by the male breadwinner model and a providing welfare state. This social model will not persist but the question who is caring and the acknowledgement of care as a prerequsite of formal work still remains unsolved. The marketizing and ethnisation of care work, the 'global care chains' (Hochschildt 2000) do not raise the value of this work nor do theyt free from the gender bias.

From this background the idea that the concept of employability would reduce the need for a providing welfare state seems flawed. Under liberalized market conditions the market will not be able to secure a living even for those who are able and willing to work, not to speak of those who need care. Thus the need for reproduction contexts will rise whereas at the same time the expanding marketisation of the human workforce weakens the capacities of traditional as as well as of new private networks for reproduction. The idea of equality as equality of initial endowment still refers to a 'male' citizin freed from reproductive work, thus denying fundamental social contextes modern societies based on a public/private seperation are relying on.

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