Global competition and the restructuration of the labour market. Stepping in the German labour market

Intensified global competition has triggered a double process: on the one side it has changed employment strategies of firms, on the other side it has made precarious work and unemployment more likely for a growing number of employees. However, we assume that both types of precarious employment and groups affected by it will vary according to different national contexts. The article sketches this institutional dependency and empirically detects to which degree different categories of labour market entrants were affected by precarious employment and unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s in Germany. The analysis shows that members of both highly educated and low educated groups are over-represented among those with a fixed-term contract. Thus, the risk of being unemployed differs with respect to the level of education as well as classy position, ethnic origin, and region.