ABSTRACT
Western society is developing from a manufacturing economic system to a post-industrial, service-centered economic system. In the United States this process has been described by Bluestone and Harrison in their studies The Deindustrialization of America and The Great American Job Machine. This process of economic restructuring can partly be recognized in part in the economic developments in the Netherlands in the 1970s and 1980s. It is characterized by an unprecedented loss of jobs in several traditional industries; an unprecedented growth in other, new industries; and an evenly unprecedented dropout of people from the labor market. Due to economic restructuring in the Netherlands, which to a certain extent is similar to that in the United States, many Dutch workers have lost their jobs in manufacturing during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Between 1982 and 1985 in Amsterdam, the number of employees fell in virtually all industries except "other services," including health care, government agencies and cleaning companies.
