The third sector and labour market policy in Germany.
German Policy Studies › Vol. 1 Nbr. 2, May 2000
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Extract
The third sector and labour market policy in Germany.
Abstract
For a long time, the general public and the policy experts alike have neglected Germany's third or nonprofit sector. However, the recent years have given abundant evidence of the fact that the sector constitutes a major force in the country's economy. Particularly the results of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project show a sector that is contributing significantly to the German labour market, leaving behind the forprofit as well as the public sector in terms of job creation. This prompts the question whether the German nonprofit sector might offer new ways to cope with unemployment as one of the most urgent problems of Germany's society. Introduction Modern societies are based primarily on employment (Esping-Andersen 1990). Therefore participation in the labour market is fundamental for social integration, while unemployment represents a main cause of social exclusion and societal deprivation. Throughout the past two decades, Continental Europe has been plagued by mass unemployment (Schmidt 1999; Fiedler 1999; Neugart 2000). Searching for new avenues of approach to the dramatic economic and societal problems connected with unemployment, policy experts have started to take a closer look at the nonprofit or third sector (Rifkin 1995; Giarini/Liedke 1998; Beck 1997; Strasser 1999). However, they come to very different evaluations with respect to the sector's labour market potential. Whereas post-modernist sociologists perceive the sector as a very dynamic force within the labour market (Beck 1997; Rifkin 1995), others come to a more sceptical assessment of the sector's importance for labour market issues (Bauer 1998; Bode 1999; Evers 1998). Due to a lack of reliable data, it has until now been difficult to decide whether the third or nonprofit sector has the potential to develop into a job generator of gainful employment for Germany. By the same token scholarly discourse on the "future of labour", discussing the relevance of the sector as an channel for social integration (Beck 1997), is also lacking empirical foundation. In other words: There is very little knowledge about the nonprofit sector as a terrain for gainful employment, because labour market research has almost systematically neglected the topic of work in nonprofit organisations. Accordingly the potential of the sector to serve as a "transitional labour market" (Schmidt 1997, 1998, 1999a, b) has not yet been discussed. Transitional labour markets is providing training and education facilities for those who are temporarily unemployed as well as for those who are at a particular stage of their life-cycle, such as the transition from school to professional life, or from ful...See the full content of this document
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