Youth unemployment remains a significant problem in most EU countries. In this paper we explore the dynamics of this problem by comparing young people's transitions from unemployment to employment in nine member states. Using the first two waves of the European Community Household Panel, we follow the progress of 14,600 young Europeans over a two-year period. We examine how the employment prospects of young unemployed people are affected by their country of residence and by their personal characteristics such as age, gender, parenthood and educational attainment as well as by previous work experience and unemployment duration. We attempt to unpack the cross-national differences in the underlying transition rate by substituting country names with macro/institutional level variables such as youth long-term unemployment rates, active labour market policy expenditure, employment regulation regimes and benefit provisions for unemployed young people.

This paper explores changes in employment policies and practices that are typically associated with the classical ‘model’ of the internal labour market. Drawing on documentary information and interviews with managers in four large organisations in the UK, the evidence suggests that many of the ‘traditional’ pillars of the internal labour market have been dismantled. New policies around training, recruitment, pay, job security and career progression have been introduced in response to pressures and opportunities for change, both internal and external to the organisation. Changes in the external labour market involve a shift in the balance of power between labour and capital, coupled with a weakening of the mechanisms which coordinate and regulate labour market exchange. Within the organisation, there are a range of pressures to transform production, or service delivery, including the restructuring of traditional forms of work organisation, the extension of working-time and changes in organisational structure. This paper analyses evidence of new employer-led ‘market solutions’ to this range of conflicting pressures. The aim is to highlight the tendency for contradictory outcomes as new policies capitalise on changing external conditions, but at the expense of meeting organisational demands. Also, new policies implemented by individual employers may be unsustainable where, on aggregate, they fail to develop workforce skills or to fulfil career expectations.

Since the beginning of the 1980s students' labour market participation in the Netherlands has increased enormously. The first part of this article offers a description of the changed labour market position of students in the Netherlands. It demonstrates that this is the result both of changes in the system of student financing and of an increased use of flexible staffing arrangements by employers. The second part of the paper concentrates on the question whether the displacement of workers with lower levels of education was caused by an increasing labour market participation of students. It finds that the labour market participation of lower educated workers dropped at about the same time as students started to enter the lowest job levels, which were the former stronghold of the lower educated workers. Since many of the jobs at this level ask for part-time or temporary work, students have a competitive advantage in comparison to lower educated workers.

Although the populations of the richest advanced industrial societies have achieved unprecedented levels of formal credentials, analysts report on the massive scale of underutilisation of knowledge and skills in current market economies. This paper describes the underemployment situation in the Netherlands (1977–95). We show by different methods that the ‘education-jobs gap’ has widened increasingly. The return to credentials of Dutch employees has diminished for every educational category. Within the total labour population, an increasing share of employees can be considered as underemployed and deal with credential inflation. At the lower levels of education men have suffered from credential inflation more than women. At the higher levels of education it is the reverse. It also appears that young people deal with a ‘waiting-room effect’: they enter the labour market at relatively low skill levels, given their educational level and gender. A further breakdown by educational specialisation shows that employees with an educational background in health care or technical studies have suffered relatively more from credential inflation compared to those with a commercial education. We conclude by stating that in spite of much rhetoric about the skill deficiencies of the current workforce, the lack of decent jobs has caused basic allocation problems at the Dutch labour market. From a human resources perspective, the growing wastage of employees' potential should not be underestimated or dismissed. We argue that an effective allocation of knowledge and skills to occupations will be the basic tenet of labour market policy and new forms of work organisation.

This article investigates the restructuring process of the East German employment system after German unification. It raises the question of whether and how job mobility has contributed to coping with rapid change in the occupational structure. In particular, it explores the importance of occupational credentials in these mobility processes in East Germany. The empirical analysis is based on retrospective life histories of East German men and women belonging to three birth cohorts (1939–41, 1951–3 and 1959–61). The main result is that vocational certificates have driven occupational matching in East Germany after 1989. Thus, change in the employment structure was achieved by ‘credentialised’ exclusion and inclusion processes and, moreover, the efficacy of occupational credentials even increased after 1989. Beyond the East German case, the paper provides interesting insights in the social value of occupational credentials and the relationship between labour market regulation and social change.

In the intense debate around questions related to labour market flexibility one of the contested issues has been the relationship between temporary work and unemployment. Temporary work has here been regarded either as a precursor to recurrent unemployment, or as an entry port to stable employment. Little is however known about actual mobility patterns, including whether or not temporary employment can act as a stepping stone out of unemployment. Using a sample of initially unemployed, this is here examined through an analysis of the relationship between temporary employment during a one-year observation period and employment and unemployment during a subsequent twelve-month long follow-up period. The results evince the great overall vulnerability of the unemployed, but also that the permanent and temporary jobs obtained by unemployed differ relatively little in the employment security they offer. This suggests that the type of employment contract is of minor importance for the long-term employment prospects of the unemployed. This holds for women as well as for men, contradicting some earlier conjectures about gender specific mobility patterns.

Recent debates surrounding the future of work and non-standard forms of employment have, especially in the United States, used the film industry as an exemplar and signifier of future industrial change. Much research conducted in the film industry implicitly or explicitly draws on the flexible specialisation framework to understand industrial organisation and labour market operation. It is the contention of this paper, however, that the dual labour market analysis associated with flexible specialisation explanations is too simplistic, failing to reflect the range of factors affecting labour market organisation and operation. The resulting static and atomised analysis is, as such, ill-equipped to conceptualise the complex patterns of organisation and movement evident in the highly uncertain context of film making. Furthermore, the operation and organisation of the labour market cannot be understood independently of the management of labour within the labour process. Production company management set the context and targets of work (in terms of work scheduling, pay, and conditions) and departmental heads retain method autonomy and control the recruitment and performance of ‘their’ group members. However, this is the case within a context in which people need to continually re-secure work and maintain positions within groups and contacts. Therefore, a seeming lack of control over tasks at the point of production is reinforced by the use of labour market mechanisms and influences their form.

Labour market analysis conventionally distinguishes amongst employees according to whether their contract of employment is ‘permanent’ or ‘temporary’. The permanent contract of employment, best understood as a contract for an indefinite term, is the central form. It has served as the crucial pivot in the development of ‘industrial citizenship’ during much of the twentieth century. Most advanced capitalist societies, apart from isolated exceptions such as the United States, have followed a parallel historical course, whereby permanent employment – in particular in its full-time form – was installed both as the dominant form of employment and as the standard entry-point for access to a comprehensive set of industrial rights and benefits, including minimum wages and standardised working-time arrangements (Streeck 1992).

S. Aronowitz, From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America's Future, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, $25.00, 246 pp.

K. Bronfenbrenner, S. Friedman, R. Hurd, R. Oswald and R. Seeber (eds.), Organizing To Win: New Research on Union Strategies, Ithaca: ILR Press, 1998, $19.95 xii+370 pp.

Jo-Ann Mort (ed.) Not Your Father's Union Movement: Inside the AFL-CIO, London: Verso, 1998, £13.00, paper xii+237 pp.

B. Nissen, (ed.) Unions and Workplace Regorganization, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997, paper $22.95, 240 pp.

B. Nissen (ed.), Which Direction for Organized Labor? Essays on Organizing, Outreach, and Internal Transformations, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999, paper, $28.95, 260 pp.

R. M. Tillman and M. S. Cummings (eds.) The Transformation of US Unions: Voices, Visions and Strategies from the Grassroots, 1999, Boulder: Rienner, 1998, paper $22.50 vi+296 pp.

For much of the postwar period, the American trade union movement provided a largely negative model of organisation and strategy to British trade union activists. The practice of business unionism ceded workplace control to employers; the unions were frequently anti-democratic, anti-communist and repressive of any internal dissent; and these latter policies were replicated in relations with trade unions internationally, where the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO) was widely regarded as an extension of American foreign policy.