ABSTRACT
America’s employment experience throughout the 1990s gives us plenty of reasons to question the ‘end of work’ scenario we discussed in Chapter 2. While work and welfare developments in the United States point towards a different transformation path to that envisaged by the ‘end of work’ scenario, we would be hard pressed to say that the US model had resolved the many dilemmas still confronting employment. Even if we believed the US model offered the only possible path to full employment, continuing high levels of inequality and fragmented social policies for the working-age population confront our widely held sense of justice. A generation ago, when Claus Offe wrote about the options facing welfare states, he thought that any effort to re-establish full employment would be disastrous.1 Many agreed that re-establishing employment growth with tough pro-business economic and welfare policies would fare badly with the public, especially in Europe. In those English-speaking nations that have experienced more determined reform, the public has found policy change more acceptable: it may be that these nations have absorbed these reforms, and are now more tolerant of ‘jobs with inequality’ than policies that preserve joblessness. But when confronted with the choice between tolerating high unemployment and resolving it through measures that increase inequality, one might be excused for having little confidence in either work-based strategy.
