Labour Market and Social Protection Reforms in International Perspective: Parallel or Converging Tracks? edited by Hedva Sarfati and Giuliano Bonoli, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2002, 494 pp., ISBN 0-7546-1926-5.

This is a sprawling collection trying to cover a sprawling reality : the interaction between recent and projected trends in the labour markets of the industrialized countries and current and anticipated changes in the existing systems of social protection. The book is the result of a project sponsored by the International Social Security Association and directed by the energetic former head of the ILO’s Industrial Relations and Labour Administration Department, Hedva Sarfati, with the help of Giuliano Bonoli, a social policy researcher at the University of Fribourg. The book brings together an international group of experts on labour markets and social protection to compare notes on this broad set of issues. Given its provenance, it is perhaps not surprising that there is also a clearly recognizable subplot : that recent trends in Europe refute the “standard interpretation” according to which there is an inescapable trade-off between low-quality jobs (the Anglo-Saxon model) and chronic unemployment (the European model), raising new hopes that Europe can have its social cake and eat it too, after all. In the opening chapter, the editors of the volume do an admirable job of surveying and documenting the most recent important trends in labour market and social protection policies. This will be useful and informative even for many experts as few of them will be fully on top of every one of the trends reviewed. Thus they remind us of how important the growth of service sector jobs has been in accounting for the “job miracles” in some countries and their absence in others, and how it has interacted with trends in female labour force participation to produce quite distinctive employment and participation patterns between otherwise roughly equally “developed” economies. The editors review the trends in (early) retirement and youth (un-)employment, including the looming pensions crisis. While discussing the “diversification” of employment forms at some length, they wisely steer clear of unguarded endorsements of the recent hype about the supposed rise in insecurity due to the spread of “non-standard” jobs. Unfortunately, not all contributors exhibit such restraint. Several of them happily parrot the latest inflated rhetoric about the impending demise of stable jobs as we used to know them. Thus, for instance, French economist Jacques Freyssinet serves up the standard litany of disappearing stable jobs, deteriorating social protection, diversification of lifestyles, and dramatic new requirements of the knowledge-based economy, without a shred of evidence, and then goes on to call for a totally new approach to linking social protection to work, without bothering with any details as to what exactly that might mean. Ironically, while bombarding the reader with a plethora of not always very readable graphs and tables documenting trends in unemployment, employment and demography, Futuribles consultants Hugues de Jouvenel and Alain Parant proceed to talk gravely of “the extension of McWorld” (p. 160) in which “atypical jobs foreshadow the jobs of the future” (ibid.), with only very little in the way of solid evidence. Similarly, Jean-Michel Belorgey, a high-ranking French official, takes all the loose talk about precarious jobs, diversifying lifestyles and declining social protection at face value in order to present a long list of vaguely worded desiderata and principles that are to ensure that everyone has access to work, a decent income, protection from undue risk, etc. Is there something of a Gallic pattern here? In any case, the repeated dishing up of such hype is a little surprising, particularly since the book also contains a short contribution by Auer and Cazes making their now familiar point that while the cognoscenti were busy pushing their sweeping claims, in reality, average job tenure rates …