Job opportunities for whom? Labour market dynamics and service sector employment growth in Germany and Britain

This report examines structural change in employment and the development of servicesector jobs in Germany and Britain between 1993 and 2002. During this period the British labour market was buoyant, while the employment situation in Germany can only be described as dismal. There is much political interest in the potential for creating new jobs in the service sector. But these developments raise a number of controversial issues when this involves the potential expansion of low-skill, low-wage service jobs, especially in a country such as Germany which has traditionally enjoyed a high-skill, high-wage equilibrium. The project was designed to compare the characteristics of service employment, using comparable longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socio-Economic Panel. The analysis covered the different patterns of growth in service occupations and industries in the two countries and the quality of these jobs in terms of wages and working hours. We were interested in finding out what kind of jobs had been growing and what kinds of people have been taking them up. In particular, we were interested in tracking transition patterns between non-employment and employment, as well as in examining how far, and for whom, service employment is precarious.