The state and class discipline: European labour market policy after the financial crisis

This paper looks at two related labour market policies that have persisted and even proliferated across Europe both before and after the financial crisis: wage restraint, and punitive workfare programmes. It asks why these policies, despite their weak empirical records, have been so durable. Moving beyond comparative-institutionalist explanations which emphasise institutional stickiness, it draws on Marxist and Kaleckian ideas to argue that, under financialisation, the state has been pushed to adopt disciplinary and destabilising policies which target the working class, as a means of bolstering the ‘confidence’ of capitalists in the short term. Wage restraint and punitive active labour market policies are two examples of such measures. We argue that this process is not embedded in existing institutions, but actively disrupts or subverts them