Social policy and the labour market in turbulent times: (no) need for change?

Demographic change, digitalisation and the need to achieve carbon-neutral growth not only have macro-economic consequences, but also have an impact on individual employment prospects and careers. Flexible employment might offer additional employment opportunities, but might also lead to interrupted employment careers with workers being less well protected against social risks and against old-age poverty. Technological change might decrease the labour demand particularly for medium and low-skill occupations. This might affect individual employment stability. Changing working conditions may demand new requirements on employees' qualifications and skills, leading to qualification policies reacting more flexibly to new requirements. The recent crises have also shown that certain population groups have limited access to benefits in existing social security systems. This particularly holds for those with non-standard employment (i.e. solo-self-employed, marginally employed). Conditionality and demanding elements are prevalent in most social security and minimum income systems. It is vital to understand consequences of these principles for the take-up of benefits as well as the employment prospects and social mobility of recipients.

Against this background, this workshop aims to improve the knowledge on welfare and unemployment dynamics and social security under different institutional settings. It is also about the question of how benefit recipients can be helped to leave benefit receipt permanently.

The workshop is open to empirical and policy-oriented single country studies or international comparisons from sociology, economics or political science based on quantitative empirical data. Contributions using different methods, for example sequence data analysis, duration analysis, causal analysis, and methods of policy analyses and microsimulation on one or more of the following questions are very welcome:

• How do the mentioned structural changes (e.g. technological change) affect individual employment prospects and economic situation? What is the impact on social inequality?
• What are typical labour market trajectories for different groups of unemployed individuals (e.g. vulnerable groups)?
• What role does atypical employment play? Have atypical employment relationships proved successful? How can upward mobility succeed?
• What role do education and training play? What are their long-run effects?
• Which experiences did welfare states make with the strategies of activation and social investment?
• Is providing a basic income instead of insurance based social security an adequate response to the trends?

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