De-commodifying social rights : welfare state policies in a multilevel perspective

Abstract

Over the last 30 years, European Welfare States have been subjected to a process of transformation within the context of globalization, political and societal changes. This work centers on the legal evolution of the systems of protection against unemployment in Spain, The Netherlands and Germany, three Welfare States which the litterature has classified as originally pertaining to the Conservative model, and analyses those changes from the point of view of de-commodification, within the context of the Europeanization of social policy and the idea of flexicurity. It is argued that those evolutions involve the re-commodification of social rights related to protection against unemployment. The multilevel perspective is reinforced by a study of regional and international social rights instruments as possible basis for the development of legal de-commodification strategies rooted in the understanding of human rights as indivisible rights, which involve the obligation of the States to guarantee sufficient protection of their citizens against the risk of unemployment, along the lines of the idea of “decent unemployment”.