Pathways to ‘Standard Employment’ in Modern European History

Workshop on the historical emergence of "standard employment" in Europe over the past century.

Normative horizon of our working lives and descriptive category of our labour markets, where does ‘standard employment’ come from? And what of its historical trajectory in various European countries over the past century - East and West, North and South? What elements of comparison between these regions could emerge once the notion of standard employment is historicized and opened up to a variety of national contexts beyond the enclave of Western Europe? This workshop brings together scholars from Europe and the United States to address these questions in a rigorously comparative and historically informed way. Presentations will focus on the emergence and consolidation of ‘standard employment’ in Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Romania, Norway, the Soviet Union, Greece and Poland, and will approach a range of historical processes: capitalism and democracy, socialism and economic development, labour law and the state, trade-unions and precarity. Exploratory on questions of methodology and sources, this workshop is inevitably interdisciplinary, summoning the social sciences and history to raise to the task of grasping the past(s) in our present.   

Organizer: Adrian Grama (IOS)