Editorial and Introduction

One of the greatest risks affecting workers on today’s labour markets is unemployment. Losing one’s job usually entails not only the loss of one’s main source of income, but also psychological consequences resulting, for example, from the loss of colleagues and satisfying work tasks (Jahoda, 1982). While a short time in unemployment, with a swift return to new employment, is less disruptive to a worker’s life situation, the longer the unemployment persists the stronger the pressure to find new employment. As a consequence, the likelihood increases that workers will accept jobs that are worse in terms of wages, skill level and work environment than their previous job. From a trade union perspective, unemployment constitutes a challenge in several respects. On the one hand, a worker’s reservation wage – the lowest acceptable wage in a job offer – tends to decline with longer spells of unemployment as financial hardship tightens. Consequently, rising unemployment in combination with insufficient mitigating mechanisms (such as unemployment insurance) puts downward pressure on wages and weakens unions’ general bargaining power (Rothstein, 1990). Moreover, strikes become less efficient as a tool of collective action in situations of high unemployment, as a ‘reserve army’ of workers is willing to accept wages below union demands, and public support for industrial conflict is more difficult to organise. From this perspective, it is easy to understand Shapiro and Stiglitz’s (1984) rather cynical description of unemployment as ‘a worker discipline device’. As unemployment has been a living experience and threat for workers since wage labour became the dominant form in industrial societies, however, unions and their members have tried – in an act of solidarity – to mitigate its perils. As early as the 19th century, unions started unemployment funds based on members’ contributions as a sort of self-help to mitigate unemployment (Alber, 1981). These benefits also became an important tool for recruiting new members. Union unemployment funds spread over large parts of Europe, thereby creating the prerequisite for more generous unemployment insurance to come. The employer side was sceptical of and even hostile to unemployment benefits for a long time. From the employers’ perspective, such benefits potentially decrease workers’ dependence on paid work, foster idleness and strengthen the unions’ capacity for collective action. Compared with other forms of insurance that were regarded as essential for the welfare state, such as pensions, sickness and work-injury insurance, unemployment insurance was a late comer in welfare development (Alber, 1981). The first more general schemes in Europe were introduced at the beginning of the 20th century, building on the infrastructure of the union unemployment funds. The best-known example, which gave its name to a whole genre of unemployment insurance, originated in the city of Ghent in Belgium, which started to subsidise the union funds, making them more generous and enduring (Vandaele, 2006). In the first decades of the 20th century, the so-called ‘Ghent system’ became the model for a modern unemployment insurance system, and national Ghent-style systems were established in several countries, including France (1905) and the Netherlands (1916) (Rasmussen and Pontusson, 2018). A special feature of the Ghent system compared with other welfare systems was that membership of the insurance scheme was voluntary and, while state-subsidised, the system was administrated by private organisations – the unions. As a consequence of the Ghent system’s design, the state even supported union membership with its subsidies. 110600711060071106007 TRS0010.1177/10242589221106007TransferBerglund and Müller research-article2022