Woe betide Europeans whose lot it is to be young, foreign or female. So says Anthony Giddens - Baron Giddens of Southgate, to the likes of you and I - who has spent the week in Brussels delivering his findings after a year probing the European social model.
The big problem for the European Union, says Giddens, who made his name as the architect of the Third Way theory that shaped the political vision of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, is its "radically divided labour markets". These are most gratuitously in evidence in Italy, Germany, France and Poland, where the jobs of an inner core of workers are treated as sacred.

If you are lucky enough to hold one of these jobs - which range across sectors but are largely white-collar - you’re laughing. Your position will be almost inviolable. You can expect to retire with decades to live and to receive a pension to keep you in the manner to which you will doubtless have become accustomed. For this you can thank rigid employment laws and intractable working hours, unreconstructed unions and governments whose conservatism is drowned out by sly rallying calls to protect "social" Europe.
If, however, you have failed to penetrate this inner sanctum, you will effectively be cannon fodder for the buffets of globalisation. "Radically divided labour markets mean all the burdens of insecurity fall on the young, ethnic minorities and women," Lord Giddens concludes. 
He resists demonising the fashion for labour-market "felxicurity", the principle of fostering an adaptable workforce capable of adjusting to the changing needs of the modern services economy, which has caused a lot of rumpus, especially over the French first-employment contract.
All of which helps to explain why European women are not having babies and why ethnic minorities are being marginalised, Giddens posits. And keeping pension arrangements as they are is a non-starter if Europe wants a modicum of social justice - and, indeed, if it hopes to compete globally. "Europe has been spending too much on the old and not enough on the young," is Giddens’ verdict. If there is one political sideshow that needs to take centre stage, he argues, it is childcare.
The difficulty for Brussels as it unveils a blueprint for decent work and improved social safety nets, is that its competences to regulate the internal market far outweigh its powers to influence social protection, even if it wanted to.
This, says Giddens, is the contradiction at the heart of the Lisbon Agenda, Brussels’ vaunting ambition to make the EU’s economy more competitive. Some Europeans are, as planned, becoming fabulously knowledgable and out-doing their peers in highly-skilled sectors, particularly information and communications technology. By contrast, those at the shallower end of the skills pool are offered scant protection as their jobs migrate eastwards.
And yet more trouble may be in store, if we heed the warnings of Princeton’s Alan Blinder, whom Giddens describes as one of very few people to have said anything novel about globalisation in recent times.
It may be that the Lisbon Agenda’s faith in churning out professionals - accountants, lawyers, spinners - is misplaced, if, as Prof Blinder augurs, we are entering a new phase of globalisation. In a thoroughly networked world, it will not be manufacturing jobs that are outsourced, but high-skill jobs, the reasoning goes, taking as its first portent the boom in sub-continental call-centres.
This, Giddens and his fellow penseurs suspect, will mean an end to international competition between sectors. Instead, wealth will be dispersed on the basis of competition between individuals. In Europe, the individuals who cannot compete to provide a particular service under a particular contract will be in need of lower-skilled jobs to tide them over - exactly the kind of labour Europe is merrily doing away with.
Tom Burgis

December 6th, 2006 in Economic policy | Permalink