"Reconfiguring Work and Welfare in the New Economy: A Transatlantic Dialogue"
May 10-12, 2001.

An Academic Workshop, Public Conference, and Edited Book

Few problems loom larger in contemporary European policy debates – or in US perceptions of the EU – than the interrelationship between labor market institutions, public welfare policies, and employment. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic point to Europe’s supposedly “inflexible” labor markets and “excessively generous” social welfare systems as reasons why Europe has higher levels of unemployment and lower rates of job creation than the United States. Many fear too that European Economic and Monetary Union will exacerbate such disparities by integrating within a single currency zone countries with widely different standards of wages, productivity, and social benefits but without US levels of job mobility and interregional transfers to compensate for asymmetric shocks.

Yet a growing body of scholarship suggests that European realities may be more complex.  Not only are average levels of earnings inequality much lower in most EU member states than in the US, but there appears to be no close statistical correlation within Europe itself between high levels of employment protection or social welfare provision on the one hand and high rates of unemployment on the other. A number of European countries have sharply reduced unemployment to near-US levels during the late 1990s without sharp increases in inequality through various combinations of consensual wage restraint, negotiated reform of public welfare programs, labor market activation policies, and intensive training/retraining efforts. While the EU and its member states undoubtedly have much to learn from the United States’ extraordinary record of job creation, they may also be able to teach the US a lot about the role of labor market equity and social protection in sustaining popular support for continued deepening of international economic integration.

Following a highly successful planning workshop in April 2000, the European Union Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison will hold a major academic conference on this theme in Madison on May 10-12, 2001, with participation from a leading group of European and American scholars. The revised conference papers will form the basis of a collective volume, to be edited by the center directors Jonathan Zeitlin and David Trubek for eventual publication by a major university press.

Participants in the May 2001 workshop.

Europe

Adalbert Evers (Professor for Comparative Health and Social Policy at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen)

Maurizio Ferrera (Professor of Administrative Science, University of Pavia/Director of the Center for Comparative Politics “Poleis”, Bocconi University, Milan/Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute)

Anton Hemerijck (Professor of Comparative Public Policy, University of Leiden/Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne)

Ida Regalia (Professor of Sociology, University of Milan/Vice President, Institute of Economic and Social Research [IRES], Lombardy)

Martin Rhodes (Professor of Public Policy, European University Institute, Florence) 

Robert Salais (Director, CNRS Research Group on Institutions and Historical Dynamics of the Economy/École Normale Supérieure de Cachan)

Alain Supiot (Professor of Law, University of Nantes)

US

Laura Dresser (Research Director, Center on Wisconsin Strategy, UW-Madison)

Joel Handler (Professor of Law, UCLA Law School/Professor of Policy Studies, UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research)

Alan Hyde (Professor and Sidney Reitman Scholar at Rutgers University School of Law in Newark)

Jim Mosher (Doctoral Candidate in Political Science, UW-Madison/Jean Monnet Research Fellow, European University Institute, academic year 2000-2001)

Paul Osterman (Professor of Human Resources and Management, Institute for Work and Employment Research, Sloan School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Joel Rogers (John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology, Law, and Political Science and Director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, UW-Madison)

Charles Sabel (Professor of Law and Social Science, Columbia University)

David Trubek (Dean of International Studies, Voss-Bascom Professor of Law, and Co-Director of the European Union Center, UW-Madison)

Louise Trubek (Clinical Professor of Law, UW-Madison)

Jonathan Zeitlin (Professor of History, Sociology, and Industrial Relations, and Co-Director of the European Union Center, UW-Madison)