In cooperation with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Social Europe project is running a project on the transformation of work. The final dossier with a large range of contributions features some surprising results.

The articles are available on the project’s theme page. In addition, they have been collated in a dossier which is available for free download here.

The future of work is an ever-present concern for workers in a globalised economy characterised by footloose finance, fickle supply chains and above all ‘flexible’ labour markets. Fewer and fewer workers enjoy regular labour contracts with associated social entitlements. The risk is increasingly displaced on to labour by the rise of short-term and zero-hours employment and notional self-employment at the behest of platform contractors.

These changes have been advanced as having a purely economic logic—replacing the ‘dead hand’ of the state with the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. Yet what has really been at stake is a decades-long shift in the balance of social and political power towards capital, reversing the gains for labour in western Europe and north America deriving from the postwar settlement.