Nicole Mayer-Ahuja, Sociological Research Institute (SOFI) e. V., Friedländer Weg 31, 37085 Göttingen, Tel.: 0551-52205-54, Fax: 0551-52205-88; mail: nmayer1@gwdg.de

Title of the dissertation thesis (submitted in 3/2002):
Learning to serve again? From western German “standard employment” to precarious labour (1973-1998)

Research questions
Which economic and political changes have resulted in the emergence of precarious labour? Has there been an increase of employment for those who are difficult to integrate into the labour market? What were the main characteristics of precarious employment and how did they change over time? These are the questions addressed in the study under review. According to the definition used in this project, precarious labour comprises a threefold exclusion from the group of “standard employees”: Exclusion by the undermining
 of material standards,
 of the legal standards defined by labour law, collective agreement or company agreement
 of the standards of “social” integration into a certain company.

Research design
In the first part of the thesis, the emergence of German “standard employment” as statistical normality as well as social and legal norm is reconstructed from a bird’s eye perspective, followed by an analysis of the slow erosion of this arrangement after 1973. Moreover, it is argued that during the 20th century, the majority of women never reached the level of integration common for their male contemporaries. Their careers remained less continuous, and the most important varieties of female employment stayed “atypical”, although women increasingly took to wage-labour, which was regulated by social policy in principle.
Part 2 focuses on the question, whether the expansion of precarious labour has resulted in additional jobs for groups with employment handicaps as promised by supporters of “low-wage strategies”. Because of the scarcity of data on the German low-wage sector as a whole, the analysis focuses on the cleaning trade, constituting a prototype of low-wage and low-skill employment because of its low wage-level, the flexibility of labour contracts and the lack of mutual obligation between employer and employee. The development of employment figures in the public cleaning sector, private cleaning companies and private households indicates only a slight increase of jobs between 1973 and 1998, however. Moreover, this increase was mainly due to splitting up full-time or part-time employment into several “minijobs” without social insurance protection. Hence, those employees who relied on cleaning jobs were increasingly prevented from earning a living during the period under review, as an analysis of cleaning staff’s social structure shows.
In part 3, the development of cleaners’ material, legal and “social” integration between 1973 and 1998 is reconstructed, drawing on information contained in the journals of trade unions as well as employers’ associations. Material standards were even undermined in the public cleaning sector, and the distance to “standard employment” increased when cleaners’ jobs were trans-ferred to private companies or private households, as collective agreements were more frequently ignored in the process of “double privatisation”. Legal standards were undermined by interrupting the payment of wages during illness or holiday, by denying cleaners with informal “marginal employment” their legal entitlements, or by making use of “atypical employment” in order to evade protection against unlawful dismissal. Finally, standards of social integration were undermined, because cleaners were excluded from “regular” working hours and places, their superiors applied less “care” and more control to the women concerned, and they could hardly integrate into structures of informal solidarity or formal interest representation in works council or trade union.

Precarious Labour and the Future of the “European Social Model”
The concept of an “European Social Model” implies that labour markets are more consequently regulated than in Anglo-Saxon welfare regimes, and that the system of social security is financed by the contributions of “standard employees”. Hence, expanding low-pay employment with flexible labour contracts and high turnover by means of government intervention would not only change the labour market’s structure fundamentally but would also mark a break with German principles of social security, which have functioned as an important point of reference for the “European Social Model” so far.