In the wake of the development of the market model that evolved as a result of the fall of socialism and the process of privatisation, the role of the state, which had played a dominant role during the socialist era in all areas, decreased gradually. Owing to the fact that neoliberal ideology gained ground, as well as to the economic effects of globalisation, this process intensified during the second half of the 1990s in Hungary just like in other countries. The effects of deregulation manifested themselves in almost all areas, but especially in the gradual erosion of the system of institutions that was meant to guarantee the security of the citizens, and in the fact that the labour market was becoming more flexible and, moreover, increasingly uncertain. In parallel to this process, a work-based society became ubiquitous, a wide range of welfare services appeared that were tied to ‘compulsory work,’ and this lead not only to the loss of social citizenship, but also to a reduction of the importance of the system of democratic institutions during recent years. Most social groups do not have well-developed and viable survival strategies that they could rely on in the face of the multi-dimensional uncertainty that affects increasingly broad classes of society, and that took the place of the social security that had existed earlier. Organisational structures or bodies representing the interests of marginalised groups, which could provide them with security and guarantees, are almost completely missing, and the constant state of transition, the loss of status and the lack of a future perspective make the frustrated masses more and more susceptible to extreme populism, which promises them order, stability and safety. The number of people who sympathise with extreme right-wing movements has grown considerably.
precarity, flexibility, employment policy, atypical employment, fixed-term employment, part-time employment.
The current study is a shortened version of a longer study. The original study published in Csoba Judit: Labour Market flexibility and precarity in Hungary // Herrmann P., Bobkov V., Csoba J. Labour Market and Precarity of Employment Theoretical Reflections and Empirical Data from Hungary and Russia Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung Bremen, 2014. Р. 67–150.
1. Appearance of the terms ’flexibility’ and ’precarity’, and the development of their meaning
The social inequalities that already received a lot of criticism in the West, and that were also present in socialist societies, as well as the spread of deviant behaviour that appeared along with these problems, were becoming too serious to be ignored by the politics of that time. At the end of the 70s a new governmental research programme was launched, under the control of the state ideology, with the goal of researching types of deviance. The phenomena under examination included suicide, alcoholism and mental disorders, which the authors tried to explain with individual reasons. By contrast, poverty and social exclusion did not belong to the range of areas that were allowed to be researched openly, although there were individual studies that concentrated on just these topics. These included, for example, the studies on the sociology of housing by Iván Szelényi and György Konrád at the end of the 60s (1969), the results of which triggered a considerable professional debate. This research made it obvious that the reasons behind the arising problems had been structural rather than individual. At this point we also have to mention the sociographic publications in the series «Magyarország felfedezése» (The discovery of Hungary), e.g. the study «Erdőháton, Nyíren» by Antal Végh (Végh 1972), which described in detail the undeniable deep poverty present in villages, or the book «Nagykőrös» by István Márkus, which documented the results of a study started in 1973 on the transformation of farming communities and their standard of living which was often below that of the rest of society. (Márkus 1979)
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