Nordic Relief Packages and Non-standard Workers: Towards Expanded Universalism and Institutional Inequalities

Has the Corona crisis triggered changes to Nordic social protection? We address this question by examining how Denmark, Finland, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden reacted to the crisis, which in many ways resembles a Litmus-test for Nordic social protection. Analytically, we draw on historical in...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Larsen, Trine P., Ilsøe, Anna
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Aalborg University, Denmark 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://tidsskrift.dk/njwls/article/view/135099
Description
Summary:Has the Corona crisis triggered changes to Nordic social protection? We address this question by examining how Denmark, Finland, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden reacted to the crisis, which in many ways resembles a Litmus-test for Nordic social protection. Analytically, we draw on historical institutionalism, welfare, and segmentation literature. We find that although the Nordic relief packages aim to create an encompassing safety net, the reforms expose and sometimes reinforce institutionally embedded cracks in the Nordic systems around the nexus of standard and non-standard work, leading to potential layers of institutionally embedded inequalities. The Nordic countries have expanded and adjusted their existing social protection, portraying strong elements of path dependency, but with examples of novel initiatives. Their mix of universal and targeted measures appears to reflect so-called ‘expanded universalism’, where targeted measures supplement the ‘ordinary’ Nordic social protection to cover the most crisis ridden, but not necessarily the poorest, groups.