3 - Social investment and secure capabilities

Summary

Introduction

In 1994 the seminal OECD Jobs Study exposed the “dark side” of double-digit unemployment in many west European economies, suggesting the presence of a dire trade-off between equity and employment (OECD 1994). Fast-forward two decades to the OECD's landmark report on inequality, In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All (OECD 2015). Here we are confronted with a sea change in perspective. The imperative of “making work pay” by social retrenchment and market deregulation is replaced by a strong emphasis on “capacitating” policy efforts, whereby activating poverty relief, family services, gender-balanced leave provision, vocation education, training and employment services and public health, and even passive unemployment benefits, are appreciated as “crowding in”, rather than “crowding out”, private economic initiative, productivity, employment and growth (OECD 2015). This change in fact reflects long-term evolution in the spirit in OECD Jobs Strategy reports and other Employment Outlooks: as these gradually moved away from the sole objective of expanding job quantity through structural reforms, they started to emphasize the need for policies that foster job quality (OECD 2006), to eventually consider jobs as a constitutive part of wider well-being and resilient welfare state objectives (OECD 2020). Meanwhile, the European Union championed its new welfare edifice, most assertively in the Social Investment Package (SIP) for growth and social cohesion, published in February 2013. The key impetus, in terms of policy effort, was to “prepare” individuals, families, and societies to adapt to various transformations, such as changing household patterns and working conditions, the rise of the knowledge economy and population ageing (European Commission 2013). As the sovereign debt crisis came to a head, social investment renewal was put on hold in favour of fiscal consolidation. Yet many of the key ideas of the SIP were subsequently rekindled in the European Semester from 2014 to 2019, most precipitously with the endorsement of the European Pillar of Social Rights, at the Gothenburg European Council in November 2017 (see Chapter 4).