Neoliberalism’s Impact on Public-Sector Job Quality

Abstract Public-sector reforms over the last three decades have fundamentally changed working conditions in almost all OECD countries. This chapter compares the consequences for public-sector workers in the US, where reforms took hold in the 1980s, and Germany, where reforms began unfolding in the 1990s and early 2000s. After a short description of the pre-reform and post-reform structure of the public-sector work in these two poignant cases, we investigate the consequences for public-sector job security and pressure across countries and over time. Our analyses of part-time work, contractual protections, and overtime hours draw on data of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Results show a remarkable and nearly parallel shift from full to part-time work in both countries in the last 30 years, albeit time-delayed in the case of Germany. Contractual insecurity measured by at-will (US) and fixed-term (Germany) contracts increased in both countries, with somewhat steeper increases in the US. The share of public-sector workers working overtime hours has increased, again in nearly parallel fashion, in the US and Germany since the mid-1990s owing to public-sector reforms. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of such changes and future trajectories.