Launch of the new Jobs Strategy: Good on objectives, ambiguous on policy

The new Jobs Strategy launched today has the advantage of broadening the OECD’s approach. Its focus is no longer only on quantity, but also on the quality of jobs and on more equal outcomes. Besides providing helpful messages on macro-economic demand-side policy, the OECD now explicitly recognises the value and benefits of labour market institutions such as minimum wages, collective bargaining, job protection and unemployment benefit systems.

At the same time, other parts of the new Jobs Strategy retain the traditional view of favouring labour market flexibility and policies that shift labour market risk from employers to workers, from collective to individual. Despite positive changes made at the level of objectives and general principles, part of its policy recommendations thus run contrary to the stated objectives of better job quality and less inequality. This concerns, in particular, some recommendations on minimum wages and collective bargaining. Overall, this makes the new Jobs Strategy to some extent ambiguous, enabling policy-makers to ‘pick and choose’ the type of policy orientation as they see fit.

TUAC and its affiliates will closely follow the implementation of the new Jobs Strategy in order to advance a policy agenda that brings excessive labour market flexibility back under control and rebalances the worker-employer relationship, after decades-long weakening of the bargaining position of labour

See attached for a more detailled analysis by TUAC.