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CHAPTER I

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effects appear on average to be ąuite modest, labour policies appear to have, instead, quite relevant effects in other areas, such as social relations (faraily and households patterns, sti gnati zation processes, ...), insti tutional changes (the role of training, the involvement of the sphere of education and the transfornat1ons occurring therefrom, the delegation of .new tasks to local conaunitiesthe functloning of the labour market (new hiring patterns, new foras of labour segmentation,...), and industrlal relations (the weakening of labour unions, the upsurge of concession bargaining,...), the personnel nanageaent strategies (restriction of the area of internal. labour markets, new forms of labour organization,...), the distribution of incoaes (between eaployers and employees, anong employees, between workers and the rest of people,...). And many of these effects appear to have been somewhat negative.

Some of the attempted measures appear to have had positive occupational effects upon the directly affected youth; however, direct and indirect evidence tend to show that this is likely to depend either on what we could cali a 'disguise' effect (people are induced to ąttend additional and special programmes for further training or education), or on heavy *substitution' effects. Those who are hired because of the labour policies are actually sąueezing out from employment some other people; and this perception is consistent with the feeling that the overall effects of labour policies are rather aodest .

Such substitution effects put into light a rather new and worrying aspect of the whole issue: employment is becoming a new 'distributive ' problem, similar but distinct from that of the distribution of income and wealth; distinct, in so far as the status of being employed is still, in our societies, a crucial, though too often overlooked, factor of social integration, and work is, for many, a source of satisfaction in i tself .

When, during the second half of the seventies, youth unemployment began to worry the governments, most of European countries were still pursuing progressive policies in the domain of transition from school to work. The well Consolidated German system -which was itself in the way of changing because of the imp1ementation of previously conceived improveaent8- performed someway, directly or indirectly, as a reference model. In countries such as GFR, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and France, the upsurge of youth unemployment tended to manifest itself as an i 11 — functloning of the mechanisms of transition from school to work. Many of the provisions which attempted to cure youth unemployment through the strengthening of the training efforts, and which were later on widely limited in other countries, were born in such a perspective.

This is a good example of the superficial, short sighted and naive attitude which policy makers, social parties and the vast majority of public opinion took with respect to the