Employment Policy

Abstract

For Britain, as for other European countries, the chief labour market problem in the 1990s has been unemployment, and most employment policies have focused on how this might be contained. In academic and political terms, labour markets and employment are commonly viewed as the remit of economic policy. Recent and current unemployment crises appear as a residual of a poorly functioning economy – where the production of goods and services is insufficiently competitive, high taxation discourages entrepreneurship, labour costs are too high and other market ‘rigidities’ prevent the production and sale of commodities at a commercially viable price. From this perspective, labour is a commodity much like any other, whose attractions for employers depend on its skills, mobility and the wage it commands.