‘Buying’ or ‘making’ decent work? Varieties of insourcing public services

Abstract

Bringing outsourced public services back in-house and thus ‘making’ instead of ‘buying’ decent work now features in policy debates and is a common policy priority of labour movements and unions with public sector membership. Theoretically at least, bringing workers (back) under the rules and standards governing direct public sector employment is a particularly effective and simple way of raising pay levels, improving work schedules and facilitating worker voice. In the past, public sector outsourcing took place within the framework of so-called ‘variegated neoliberalisation’. In a similar vein, current forms of organisational and institutional experimentation tend to be partial, fragmented processes of de-marketisation via insourcing. Drawing on empirical evidence from Germany, France and the United Kingdom, this article explores different trajectories followed by such partial re-insourcing processes and analyses how they are shaped by legacies of the past and how current conjunctural trends are to some extent aimed at correcting for these legacies.