The European Commission’s ideas on integrating underrepresented groups into the labour market

ABSTRACT

The paper explores the European Commission’s ideas on social policy. It contributes to the debate on asymmetric economic and social policies in the EU from an ideational perspective. Analysing Commission reports on labour markets, employment, and social affairs over a fifteen-year period (2004–2018), I seek to understand what ideas on employment of underrepresented labour market groups are prominent in the reports and whether there is variation over time. To do so, I draw on the theoretical literature on ideas. The paper concludes that the Commission’s approach to underrepresented groups in the labour market has been and remains justified by an economic growth-discourse, leading to frames and policy ideas dominated by supply-side thinking. Thus, there has been a lack of new policy solutions to underrepresented labour market groups over the past fifteen years, revealing a lack of ideational innovation in the Commission’s early-stage policy formulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Ideas
• Social policy
• Labour market policy
• European Commission

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Eleni Tsingou, Janine Leschke, Christian Hendriksen, and the anonymous reviewers at European Politics and Society for invaluable feedback on this paper.

Notes

1 DGs often change name and area of responsibility when the Commission is reformed. This article analyses two DGs that have remained relatively stable over time. Thus, I do not mention such changes.

2 Based on discussions with DG EMPL and DG ECFIN officials in Brussels working on the ESDE and LMWD reports.

3 Based on discussions with DG EMPL officials in Brussels working on the ESDE report.

4 There was an additional, residual, category amongst the discourses.

5 In addition to the frames in this table, there were two additional frames in my content analysis. One was a residual category. The other was ‘deteriorations without explanations’, which captured when a reference gave no reason for the decline in employment/activity rate or increase in unemployment/inactivity rate.

6 Subsuming healthy ageing under active ageing is in line with Walker and Maltby’s (2012) understanding of active ageing.

7 According to Bengtsson, de la Porte, and Jacobsson (2017), the kinds of ALMPs identified here would fall into the category of ‘employment assistance’. ALMPs also include training or ‘upskilling’, which is covered by the policy idea ‘training, skills, and LLL’. ALMPS also include incentive reinforcements, covered by ‘reforming unemployment benefits’, although in my coding frame it covers reforms that make the unemployment benefit schemes more inclusive, whereas in Bengtsson et al.’s frame it is about tightening conditionality to ensure that unemployed are incentivised to find jobs. Finally, I have an additional subcategory called ‘Youth-focused initiatives’, which are also ALMPs, but specifically targeting the young.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the project ‘European Legitimacy in Governing through Hard Times’ (#649456-ENLIGHTEN), a European Commission Research and Innovation action under the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme 2015–2018.