The Future of Work - the IPSP Chapter on Employment

The world of work is constantly changing. Demographic shifts, technological innovations, institutional reforms and global economic integration affect the way people work. Both the demand and the supply of labor is fundamentally different from earlier times. Over the last decades, the global labor force has increased, and it has become more diverse in terms of age, gender and ethnicity. Technological innovations have a major impact on occupations and industries, changing the ways economies in different world regions, in both developed and developing countries, work along with new division of labor that are facilitated by global economic integration. Taking a global perspective we can also see growing diversity in terms of job types ranging along the whole continuum from permanent formal employment to different forms of non-standard work, in particular part-time work, fixed-term contracts and agency work to on-call work and the large segment of informality. Increasing flexibility can also be observed with respect to working time and mobile working. While today’s labor markets can probably create more jobs than in earlier decades, the issues of unemployment, worklessness, exclusion and discrimination are far from being solved, neither is the potential physical and mental health hazards involved in some work environments. Against this backdrop, policy choices at the global, national, regional or sectoral level are essential, taking into account the different context conditions. Therefore, core policy areas such as education and training at different stages in life, collective bargaining and wage setting, but also the role of labor market regulation, social protection and active labor market policies needs to addressed, trying to strike a new balance between flexibility and security in order to stimulate the creation of more good jobs for all.

This paper is joint work of the following lead authors:

Coordinating Lead Authors:
Nadya Araujo-Guimaraes (University of São Paulo, Brazil)
Werner Eichhorst (IZA, Germany)

Lead Authors:
Pierre Cahuc (CREST, France)
Didier Demazière (CSO, France)
Colette Fagan (University of Manchester, UK)
Huiyan Fu (Regent’s University London, UK)
Arne Kalleberg (University of North Carolina, USA)
Alan Manning (London School of Economics, UK)
Frances McGinnity (Economic and Social Research Institute, Ireland)
Andre Portela de Souza (FGV-EESP, Brazil)
Hillel Rapoport (University of Paris I, France)
Phil Scranton (Rutgers University, USA)
Johannes Siegrist (University of Düsseldorf, Germany)
Kathleen Thelen (MIT, USA)
Jelle Visser (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)