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The working poor in Western Europe: Labour, poverty and global capitalism

  • Winner of the CEP/CES-GPE 2013 Early Career Scholar Prize*
  • Published:
Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

This article analyses the re-emergence of the working poor phenomenon in Western Europe. Critically engaging with comparative welfare regimes literature on in-work poverty (IWP), it argues that an international political economy (IPE) perspective is key to understanding the economic and international dimensions of IWP. By focusing on three countries belonging to different welfare regimes, namely Britain, Germany and Italy, the article examines the relationship between production restructuring, IWP trends and the nature of work, with particular attention to working-hour dynamics. It argues that the increasing IWP observed in these countries since the outbreak of the global economic crisis is linked to long-term trends in the IPE and to the growth of new competitors, mainly from emerging countries.

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Notes

  1. In 2007, for example, the monthly poverty threshold for a single person amounted to €1494 in Luxembourg and to €74 in Bulgaria, but IWP was higher in Luxembourg than in Bulgaria (9.3 versus 5.8 per cent).

  2. For a review of the literature, see Crettaz (2013), Eurofond (2010), Frazer and Marlier (2010) and Peña-Casas and Latta (2004, pp. 1–3).

  3. This underestimation depends on a more restrictive criterion of employment than that of the US BLS; on the exclusive focus on declared incomes and the formal economy, and on a lack of attention to the specific condition of immigrant workers (Peña-Casas and Latta, 2004; Ponthieux, 2010, pp. 25–26; Alvarez-Miranda, 2011).

  4. The World Bank’s definition of poverty for ‘developing’ countries is not based on a relative monetary indicator, but on a $1 or $2 a day criterion.

  5. According to World Bank figures, between 1981 and 2004 extreme poverty increased when China is excluded, while ordinary poverty increased substantially in every developing region except East Asia (Ferreira and Ravaillon, 2008).

  6. The Family Resource Surveys from 1996–1997 to 2004–2005 confirm these trends. For the Institute for Public Policy Research 1998–2008 the number of working poor households increased from 2 to 2.5 million (Cooke and Lawton, 2008).

  7. The European Community Household Panel shows that from 1994 to 2001 IWP rates in Italy were substantially stable at around 10.2 per cent. The mean rate in the South (23 per cent), however, was more than five times that in North-Central regions (4.5 per cent). According to the EU-SILC, between 2004 and 2007 mean IWP rates in Italy increased from 9.4 to 9.8 per cent.

  8. Differently from all other EU-15 countries, in Germany between 2000 and 2008 real wages decreased (Lehndorff, 2015).

  9. In the United Kingdom employees working more than 40 h/w were 29 per cent in 1995, 26.7 per cent in 2000, 21.9 per cent in 2005 and 24.8 per cent in 2010 (EU-LFS). According to the Office for National Statistics October–December 2011, some 4.8 million people, nearly 1 in 5 employees, regularly worked more than 45h/w.

  10. For a discussion of trends in profit rates in Britain and Germany, see Vidal (2013, pp. 460–461). In Italy, after a relative recovery after 1975, the rate of profit started falling in the year 2000, and has fallen further since 2009 (Roberts, 2013a, 2013b).

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers from the networks ‘Comparative European Politics’ and ‘EU Integration and Global Political Economy’, and from Comparative European Politics for their comments. Thanks are also due to Gregory Schwartz, Laura Horn, Claes Belfrage, Ben Rosamond, Alex Callinicos, Michele Cangiani, John Smith, Fabio Perocco, Pietro Basso and Alfredo Saad-Filho for their comments on this article. The research for this article was undertaken during a postdoctoral research fellowship in sociology of economic processes and work at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari.

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  1. Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, Russell Square, London, WC1H 0XG, UK

    Lucia Pradella

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*An annual prize awarded by Comparative European Politics in conjunction with the Council for European Studies Research Network on European Integration and the Global Political Economy.

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Pradella, L. The working poor in Western Europe: Labour, poverty and global capitalism. Comp Eur Polit 13, 596–613 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2015.17

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