Austerity stabilised through European funds: the impact on Slovenian welfare administration and provision

• Author: Barbara Samaluk
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12168
• Published date: 01 January 2017
• Date: 01 January 2017

Austerity stabilised through European

funds: the impact on Slovenian welfare

administration and provision

Barbara Samaluk

ABSTRACT

The article explores how austerity stabilised through European funds affects institu-

tional change, work organisation and employment relations within Slovenian welfare

administration and provision. It shows that increasing dependence upon European

funds turns the state into an intermediary characterised by project modes of work

organisation that weaken human resource and financial capacities for domestic policy

development and provision. It uncovers that project modes of organising, tradition-

ally present within non-governmental sector, are also entering the public sector. This

shift increases the vulnerability of third and public sector workforce and frustrates

young and excluded workers’transition into permanent jobs.

1 INTRODUCTION

An increasing body of research demonstrates that a move of European social models

towards workfare has resulted predominantly in increasing flexibility, diminished

security and growing precarity across Europe (Greer, 2015; Greer and Symon,

2014; Heyes, 2011). This move also entailed a multilevel, multidimensional and

multistakeholder coordination, which poses significant challenges to administration

and provision of welfare as it requires new capacities in the form of sufficient financial

and staff resources, differentiated and flexible procedures and new professional norms

(Heidenreich and Rice, 2016). These pressures and challenges have further intensified

after the global economic crisis that contributed to even stricter economic and budget-

ary surveillance and fiscal discipline of member states, accompanied by even tighter

workfarist social policy prescriptions supported by European funds (Erne, 2015;

Heyes, 2011; Heyes and Lewis, 2015).

Europeanisation research has already scrutinised the impact of EU financial re-

sources (both European funding and budgetary constraints) upon national and local

actors in welfare administration and provision (Bonnet, 2016; Catalano and Graziano,

2016; Nay, 2002; Verschraegen et al., 2011). It demonstrates that European funds act

as the main EU financial resource that reinforces centralisation, turning the state into

an intermediary in need of a changed state apparatus that administers and manages

these funds and their project forms (Catalano and Graziano, 2016; Nay, 2002).

❒Barbara Samaluk, Work and Employment Research Unit, University of Greenwich, Business School,

Old Royal Naval College, 30 Park Row, London SE10 9LS, UK. Correspondence should be addressed

to: Barbara Samaluk, Work and Employment Research Unit, University of Greenwich, Business School,

Old Royal Naval College, 30 Park Row, London SE10 9LS, UK; email: b.samaluk@greenwich.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 48:1, 56–71

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2017 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Nevertheless, its explanatory power does not capture how these resources affect work

organisation and employment relations.

By contrast, (comparative) employment relations studies have shown the implica-

tions of funding regimes on labour-management relations and growing precarity

within the welfare sector (Cunningham, 2008; Cunningham et al., 2013; Greer

et al., 2010; Greer et al., 2014), but they have focused solely on western European

countries that were less impacted by EU financial resources.In this regard, the re-

search highlights the specificity of new post-socialist EU member states that were dur-

ing and after the enlargement much more pressured to engage in institutional

reorganisation in order to use European funds (Bonnet, 2016; Catalano and

Graziano, 2016; Meardi, 2016). Moreover, the Lithuanian case study demonstrates

that with the economic crisis, European funds began to act as a stabiliser for

EU-induced austerity measures (Juska and Woolfson, 2015). This article examines

the case of Slovenia that has faced increasing budgetary pressures to introduce fiscal

discipline and adopt austerity measures after the economic crisis, which has caused a

decline in welfare spending and an increased dependence upon the European Social

Fund (ESF) in welfare administration and provision (Kobal-Tomc et al., 2015;

Smolej-Ježet al., 2015). It examines how austerity, stabilised through European funds

(especially the ESF), affects institutional change, work organisation and employment

relations within the Slovenian welfare administration and provision.

It has already been well documented how project financing increases precarity within

the non-governmental sector (Cunningham, 2008; Cunningham et al., 2013), but there

is still little understanding of how this impacts the public sector. In order to fill this

void, this article also draws on scholarship that explores the shift from bureaucratised

to project-based modes of work organisation and how this imposeschanges on the wel-

fare state and translates into a person’s ability to extract value in terms of salaries and

other rewards (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007; Kristensen, 2013). While there is some

evidence that austerity, stabilised through European funds, creates a new privileged

type of public servants (Juska and Woolfson, 2015), there is still little known about

what human resource challenges the ESF projects bring and how they affect workforce

within the public and third sector welfare administration and provision.

This article demonstrates that austerity measures, stabilised through EU funds,

have increased the intermediary role of the state and changed its mode of organising

for the purpose of administering and managing EU funded projects. Consequently,

this has altered human resource composition and spread insecure project-based

modes of work organisation to all segments of welfare administration and provision.

It shows that EU-funded precarious project work characterises not only non-profit

providers but also public-sector providers and, together with austerity measures, in-

creases the precarity of their overall workforce and frustrates young and excluded

workers’transition into permanent jobs. The following sections present a theoretical

underpinning of this research and a discussion of the methods and sample used. This

is followed by the presentation of findings, and finally, the conclusion summarises the

article’s main arguments, contributions and implications.

2 THE IMPACT OF EUROPEAN FINANCIAL RESOURCES ON WELFARE

ADMINISTRATION AND PROVISION

The Europeanisation literature has already examined how the EU has changed na-

tional, regional and local political configurations by providing both material and

57Austerity stabilised through European funds

© 2017 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd