Abstract

Many labour economists claim that the developed countries’ employment structures have been polarising, during the last years, due to several change forces, like technological change and globalisation. In this paper, the attention is focused on Sweden: it seems to have experienced not a process of polarisation but upgrading in the employment structure. This could be due to several elements of the institutional context, such as the labour market policies model. Through it, the Swedish economy welcomes change, and guarantees labour flexibility. Job Security Councils (JSCs) are institutions born from the social partners, and support laid-off workers in the re-employment process. We analysed individual-level data on assistance provided in a re-employment process to a sample of blue-collar workers that belong to the JSC Trygghetsfonden (TSL). All the workers received coaching support, some of them also joined training courses (“treatmentµ). Using IPWRA models, a differential treatment-effect analysis is carried out to empirically investigate whether the action of the labour market institution could contribute, albeit limitedly, to the upgrading trend of the employment structure. The results in terms of re-employment probability and re-employment quality (upgrading in terms of wage and job qualification) are very good, nevertheless they cannot be attributed to the “treatmentµ training, because it is not significant for the outcomes