Introduction

For we who live in the mid 1990s, mass unemployment is a fixed feature of the economic, social and political landscape. The precise level fluctuates, but since 1980 average unemployment in European Union countries has never dropped below 8 per cent and each peak-and trough-has been higher than the last. Various policies have been tried to stem this rising tide, but even the previously successful low-unemployment regimes of Sweden, Austria and Switzerland, which resisted the general trend until the early 1990s, resist no longer: mass unemployment is now endemic.