Flexicurity

Until recently, Mediterranean countries were called on by European Union officials to provide for a “less-rigid” regulatory framework, in order to enhance “flexicurity”. This paper critically examines post-2008 flexibilization trends by focusing on Spanish, Italian and Greek regions. Starting from a contextualization of atypical employment and security, it then moves in a twofold direction; firstly, it presents the Flexible Contractual Arrangements and Active Labour Market Policies composite indicators, calculated for the NUTS-II regions of 12 member states for 2008 and 2011. These indicators reveal the changing ranking, especially of the Greek regions, towards higher labour market flexibility and relatively low levels of employability security; secondly, it focuses on the changing forms of atypical labour in the six regions that host the capital and the most important port city of Greece, Italy and Spain, respectively, by offering data on the expansion of flexible arrangements therein. The uneven flexibilization trends found in the study regions are seen as an outcome of the interaction between the general devaluation trends, different backgrounds and regionally specific patterns of labour market adjustment, while employment is found to be neither “rigid” nor “flexicure”. The paper concludes with some remarks on the relation between post-2008 dismantling of local labour regimes, restructuring and flexicurity.

The article analyses the latest reforms in active and passive labour market policies (LMPs) in Germany, Italy and Denmark, within a European perspective. These Member States employ three of the various kinds of social security systems found in the EU-Continental, Mediterranean and Nordic-and provide an interesting example for comparison of differences/common trends in LMPs. This contribution focuses particularly on the principal characteristics of each protection system in the event of unemployment and on the relationships between unemployment benefits and activation policies and highlights the links between the European Employment Guidelines and the regulation under analysis.

La transizione dalla scuola al lavoro rappresenta per molti giovani un tunnel buio e lunghissimo, tanto lungo che non si sa mai quando avrà termine. Questo libro individua nella scarsa esperienza lavorativa dei giovani rispetto agli adulti la causa principale delle difficoltà che essi sperimentano nel mercato del lavoro sia in termini di prospettive occupazionali che salariali. Gli economisti si sono divisi sul come interpretare le cause e, naturalmente, su quali rimedi adottare per permettere ai giovani di acquisire un'adeguata esperienza lavorativa. I liberisti ritengono che il mercato debba risolvere la difficoltà dei giovani offrendo un salario d’ingresso per loro a conferma della loro minore produttività, maggiore flessibilità in modo da permettere più facilmente di passare da un lavoro all’altro fino a trovare quello giusto e lavori temporanei in particolare che sono l’unico modo per accumulare l’esperienza lavorativa di cui hanno bisogno. Gli interventisti, invece, criticano la flessibilità in entrata e i lavori temporanei. La prima funziona solo se accompagnata da altri strumenti. Altrimenti aiuta coloro che già hanno maggiore motivazione e un livello d’istruzione più alto. Il lavoro temporaneo permette di accumulare esperienza lavorativa generica, ma non specifica al posto di lavoro. La soluzione è invece un policy mix nel quale la flessibilità sia accompagnata da un sistema d’istruzione più democratico e da un sistema capillare di formazione professionale.

"Special attention in this paper is devoted to the question whether flexicurity policies can be successfully promoted in a national context characterised by segmented labour markets and widespread atypical and often unregulated employment, sub-protective welfare systems, a weak social consultation tradition, and the defensive responses of business to the challenges of globalisation. To this end, a considerable part of the work compares the experience of adopting flexibility and security measures in 4 EU countries (chosen on the basis of their distinct employment and welfare regimes and their vastly different degree of endorsement of flexicurity policies in their national policy agendas): 2 success stories - Denmark and the Netherlands - on one hand, and 2 reluctant supporters - Spain and Greece - on the other. The purpose of this comparative approach is to highlight the importance of institutional factors, as well as the (often under-estimated) key role of social attitudes and norms, in determining the direction and outcome of particular welfare and labour market initiatives.

Since the establishment of a European strategy to create more and better jobs at the end of '90s (EES – European Employment Strategy), Member States faced many efforts pursuing the target of high percentage of employed persons, target renewed with Europe 2020 strategy. In the same years many citizenship rights, universally recognized, started to be conditioned to the employment status: the " welfarism " was rapidly substituted with " workfare " , with the twin aims of encouraging activation of labour force and-less claimed – of cutting public expenses, especially in social services. In this paper we analyse trends and relations of certain dimension of employment to better understand the sustainability of this approach. We stressed out that in front of asymmetric reduction of unemployment among Member States, the " new " employment is more and more characterized by undermining factors: insecurity, precariousness, poverty. From this point of view, it seems that States pursuing active labour market policies, under a Flexicurity approach, besides a good labour market performance, are still facing with poverty and job insecurity of many workers. So that is even more true if we consider other variables like household indebtedness, the other dangerous drawback of welfare " commodification " processes. There is no one solution, beyond enforce Employment Protection Legislations, Basic income or Minimum wages, but changing the targets of European strategy with more social or qualitative components (e.g. quality of employment) and get over the Flexicurity approach could be a good starting point.

The article discusses a problem of application of the transitional labour markets instruments and concept for the flexicurity strategies in active labour market policies towards people at different stages of their career. The concept of transitional labor markets (TLM) allows to look more broadly at the role of active labor market policy and to go beyond the standard approach aimed at reducing the number of unemployed through subsidized employment, vocational training and retraining and other measures to improve the bargaining position of the unemployed in the labor market. In the initial phase of work life the TLMs offer measures for the transition from labour market to education. Next, they help to combine work with child-rearing responsibilities and to minimize the risk of social exclusion for the transitions between periods of various forms of work and unemployment. In the last phase they allows to extinct gradually the professional activity and transit to retirement.

the recently approved labour market reform in italy is clearly inspired by the danish flexicurity model. However, despite the noble intention and some improvements, the reform is failing to bring the long- hoped-for change, especially regarding the dualisation of the labour market and the universalisation of welfare provision.

The world of the workers is changing. In Europe, the national social protection systems have been developed basically to protect the workers in standard employment. But, this protecting system based on the old dogmatic framework of the labour law can’t handle those persons, who are the so called employee-like persons, or globally, the new forms of employment. In Hungary, the legislation has so far guaranteed labour law protection fundamentally to persons having employment status. But, as we have seen it, economic and social changes have, therefore, induced new working patterns that have led to the formation of different forms of employment. A significant part of
these forms is the issue of economically dependent self-employment, that is, a status of employee-like persons, which is one of the most important employment policy issues both in Hungary and worldwide. I mainly examine labour law protection for employee-like persons. There is a need to clarify the category of employee-like persons since as a stratum they are economically dependent on one or few clients and therefore have a demand for social protection, yet since their work is not
characterized by personal dependence, it is not considered as an employment relationship, therefore it is excluded from labour law protection. In this article I write about this topic, and how the stiuation is for these people in Hungary

Drawing on the concept of ‘flexicurity’, this paper aims to assess the role of sector-level institutions and social partners in shaping labour market flexibility and security in three countries: Italy, UK, and Denmark. Focusing on the chemical and pharmaceutical sector across different national contexts, this study identifies the extent to which policy-making processes - affecting the nature and degree of labour markets’ diversity - is determined by social actors at the sector level, the influence of employees’ organisations, and their ability to enter into credible commitments with employers’ associations. It is argued that employers and unions are more likely to develop shared understandings of what flexibility and security mean, and what forms of flexibility and security are appropriate to explore, where their relationship is more firmly institutionalised under the presence of sector bargaining. In the UK, the lack of collective bargaining in the chemical/pharmaceutical industry partly explains the ineffectiveness of social partners in addressing flexibility and security. While institutions featured by the same sector in Italy and Denmark clearly enable different forms of flexibility and security to be recognised and normed. In particular, such institutions exert some pressure on the actors involved in negotiations to improve/balance ‘productivity’ of companies (flexibility) and ‘employability’ (security) of workers. As a result, trade-offs between flexibility and security are more likely to be an outcome of company-level negotiations in Italy and Denmark than in the UK, where such institutional mechanisms are not existent.

The recent communication by the European Commission on flexicurity defines it as an“integrated strategy aimed at simultaneously improving flexibility and security in thelabour market” (European Commission, 2007a: 5). The academic studies that preceded theadoption of the communication dealt with the “flexibility/security” tandem as a virtuouscircle in which the two terms were conceived within a relationship of reciprocalprerequisites.While such a “win-win” approach should have earned general support, the Commissiondocument has received fairly strong criticism, basically due to the imbalance betweenflexibility and security (in favour of the former) and the weakness of the proposals made.These criticisms mainly come from the domain of the trade unions (see Keune and Jepsen,2007) and NGOs, particularly within the alter-globalisation movement (
3
).Our hypothesis is that this denunciation –by the essential partners in the implementation ofany flexicurity strategy- is based on the fact that the advance document of the specificproposals for “flexibilisation” and the deregulation of labour legislation does not draw up arenewed and inspiring framework for the social security system that could incorporate thenew risks and eventualities that European citizens have to face up to in their professionaland personal paths or trajectories. All things considered, one could make the sameobservation when examining the academic studies on the “protection of trajectories”:against the narrowness of the constraints of labour market policies or traditional ideasabout the social security system, most struggle to reinvent a social model that can providebasic security to people in their daily life, and real possibilities for them to develop withina globalised economy (see differing views in CEPS, 2007 and Vedrine, 2007).We would like to put the case for a renewed conception of “security”, in the light of the“negotiation of a new commitment that would guarantee the protection of life and work

paths thanks to a redeployment of public interventions and a new marking out of theresponsibilities of the State and the social partners” (Boyer, 2006).

La gobernanza económica es una prioridad en las políticas comunitarias especialmente hoy, ante una crisis que confiere una imprevisibilidad excepcional en el porvenir de la economía europea. El examen de las causas de la crisis ha destacado diversas debilidades del Modelo Social Europeo. Los instrumentos de gobernanza del MSE (directivas, Directrices Integradas, Método Abierto de Coordinación, Diálogo social, aprendizaje mutuo, programas comunitarios) deben revisarse para que sean pertinentes en la situación actual. La capacidad de la Unión Europea y los Estados miembros para prever, anticipar y adaptar las competencias requeridas a las necesidades del mercado de trabajo constituye una condición esencial para la elaboración de políticas de empleo eficaces. La evaluación puede aportar criterios e instrumentos útiles para desarrollar la capacidad de gobernanza de la política de empleo con el fin de hacer frente a las necesidades actuales del mercado de trabajo y posibles reformas.

Economic governance has become a priority in Community policies and more today, before the crisis, which confers a unique unpredictability of the future of the European economy. Examination of the crisis has highlighted several weaknesses in the governance of the European Social Model. The various policy instruments of governance in ESM (directives, Integrated Guidelines, OMC, social dialogue, mutual learning and community programs) should be reviewed to make them relevant in the current situation. The capacity of the EU and its MMSS to foresee, anticipate and match the required skills and the needs of the labour market is a sine qua non in developing effective policies in employment, education and training and the optimal personal career choices. The evaluation can provide useful tools for developing of EU governance capacity. In this article we examine the existing capacities within the EU to achieve an appropriate strategy for cooperation between MS in order to meet current needs of labour market.

Ce papier traite du travail dans sa dimension normative socio-historiquement construite. L'évolution du concept est retracée de l'Antiquité à aujourd'hui, démontrant comment le discours sur le travail en Occident est passé d'une négation totale de ses vertus à l'apologie de sa moralité. Un détour par d'autres civilisations démontre également que le travail tel qu'il est généralement conçu dans nos sociétés n'est pas une constante anthropologique. Enfin, le papier aborde le modèle de l'Etat social actif et la flexicurité, ainsi que la normativité moderne du travail qui y est propre.

The notion of flexicurity promotes the idea of compensation of labour market deregulation (= flexibilization) with advantages in employment and social security. The paper contains a brief history of the concept and its operational definition. To monitor effects of flexicurity policies in Europe, flexicurity indicators are constructed. The European flexicurity polices are analyzed in the neo-liberal perspective, from the trade-unionist viewpoint, and within the conception of European welfare state. The empirical investigation shows that, contrary to political promises and theoretical considerations, the deregulation of European labour markets is absolutely predominating. A contradiction between several European employment policies is suggested to surmount by introducing a so called flexinsurance, meaning that the employer's contribution to social security should be proportional to the flexibility of the contract/risk of becoming unemployed in conjunction with elements of the basi...

This working paper gives an overview of the diffusion and the effects of flexicurity labour market
policies in Europe. The description of the diffusion of flexicurity policies is split into three parts. First,
a broad overview of labour market policies in the EU- and OECD-countries is given, showing that – on
average – these countries spend more on passive than on active labour market policies and that active
labour market policies that are aiming to foster entrepreneurship so far only play a minor role in
labour market policy making. Second, we have a closer look at and compare the spread of start-up
incentives and training policies among these countries. Third, we describe recent developments and
perspectives of labour market policy making as the labour market policy reactions to financial crisis.
Fourth, we show that flexicurity policies have been adapted in various countries beyond the Danish
and Dutch pathway cases. The implementation of flexicurity was however not always successful or
effective since existing labour market institutions in Mediterranean countries and the lack of trust
between employer and employee organizations prevented flexicurity adaption beforehand or its
effectiveness in those countries, where they have been introduced. This way, existing labour market
institutions and corporatist structure constitute important context factors for successful implementation
of flexicurity policies. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings.

Within a very short period of time, the term flexicurity became popular in the labour market discourse. The term promises to meet the needs of employers by supporting labour market competitiveness while keeping workers security intact. The hope for this compromise is the main reason behind the positive reputation of flexicurity in the literature. Regardless of the many attempts that have already been done to instrumentalize the concepts ambiguity, the term flexicurity is still very open and leaves much room for interpretation. The present study focuses its attention on the case of Denmark which is considered as one of the birthplaces of the flexicurity concept. Denmark is seen as a model country for having already well functioning flexicurity arrangements in its labour market. With the highest employment rates in the EU and very low levels of unemployment, Denmark stood as the best reference of flexicurity in Europe. Since the emergence of the global financial crisis in 2008, a new discussion has reemerged on if and how flexicurity as a labour market strategy could tackle the rise of unemployment, precarious employment, and increasing poverty rates. Do flexicurity policies endure during the times of crisis, and can they shelter labour markets from economic shocks?

This dissertation critically analyses the flexicurity labour market reforms that have
taken place during the years of the crisis in Europe. The dissertation examines the
these questions, the cases of Greece, Spain, and France are presented. The dissertation
concludes that the reforms present an imbalance between flexibility and security and
subsequently quantity versus quality of employment. It is finally argued that those
reforms contribute to the reconfiguration of the whole European Social Model.

One of the final outcomes of extensive case-study research conducted in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Slovakia and Spain focused on finding out how employers in various sectors, including higher education and research innovation, promote and facilitate lifelong learning opportunities for their employees, and in turn, how employees perceive and take those opportunities in the workplace and beyond.

Until the current recession, academics and policy-makers across Europe have extensively debated on the need for labour markets to become more flexible, whilst also providing forms of security for the workforce (Bekker, Wilthagen et al. 2008, Commission 2008). However, most of their attention has been focused on national-level interventions which tended to neglect developments at both sector and company levels.

Yet over the course of the 2000s, issues of competitiveness, adaptability of firms, and employment security for the workforce have become increasingly prominent in the collective bargaining agenda (Ibsen and Mailand 2011, Marginson and Galetto 2013). Therefore, this paper is exploring the impact of collective bargaining over policies on flexibility and security in the chemical and pharmaceutical sector, a major manufacturing industry that is highly exposed to international competition and characterised by a long history of collaboration between social partners.

By focusing on collective bargaining in one sector of economic activity across two different countries, the primary aim of this study is to illuminate the role of sector and company-level actors and institutions in shaping regimes of flexibility and security (Burroni and Keune 2011). The second aim is to enlarge the scope of comparative institutional analysis beyond national-level institutions (Marginson and Galetto 2013).

Italy and Denmark are the selected country for this comparative analysis as they each answer to different industrial relations frameworks (Visser, European Commission 2008). A cross-national comparison of these particular countries helps to understand how various international trends - such as employers’ search for flexibility and collective bargaining decentralisation - are mediated by national and sector-specific institutional arrangements to result in different policies and practices of flexibility and security within companies.

The research design reflects the multi-level nature of this study in which companies are compared within their sectoral context and sectors within their national contexts. Accordingly, this paper draws on secondary sources such as academic literature, statutory provisions and legislation on collective bargaining, and formal regulation on non-standard employment contract and employment security. In addition, empirical research has been conducted both at the sector-level, in the form of in depth semi-structured interviews with employers organisations and trade unions, and at the company-level, following a case-study approach. Finally, all collective agreements signed between 1998 and 2012 at both sector and company levels have been collected and content-analysed.

The analysis of sector-level data shows that issues of flexibility and security have entered into sector-level collective bargaining in Italy and in Denmark. Nevertheless, in Denmark, the scope for external flexibility is wider than in Italy where the focus of social partners is primarily on the internal labour market. Furthermore, in Italy, the scope for job security is wider than in Denmark where employment security and combination security appear to be the only forms of security addressed by collective agreements.

Thus, a first important finding is that when similar sector-level institutional configurations are in place, cross-country variations in the extent and the way in which flexibility and security items enter into collective bargaining are due to national institutional features, for example, the role of labour law (individual dismissal in Italy) and social welfare (unemployment benefits in Denmark).

Second, the institutions framing the chemical and the pharmaceutical sector in Italy and Denmark exert some pressures on sector-level social partners to negotiate a variety of flexibility and security trade-offs that are consistent with the notion of flexicurity.
Finally, the two-tier bargaining system featured by the chemical and pharmaceutical sector in these two countries enables and constrains company-level bargaining on issues of flexibility and security. Provisions such as opening-clauses and derogation-clauses are in place to govern the relationship between the sector and the company-level. Therefore, trade-offs between flexibility and security are an expected outcome of negotiations also at the local level. Yet, the extent of cross-country variation in the nature of such trade-offs will only emerge from the analysis of the company-level data which is currently on-going.

RESUMEN: En un contexto de progresivo debilitamiento de la norma social de empleo carac-terística de las sociedades de trabajo europeas organizadas según alguna de los variados regímenes de bienestar, el modelo danés de mercado de trabajo, que parece combinar sinérgicamente flexibilidad y seguridad (flexicurity) se ha convertido en los últimos tiempos en objeto privilegiado de análisis. En este artículo se exponen las características fundamentales del modelo, se discute la posibilidad de su generalización al conjunto de la Unión Europea y se apunta una hipótesis sobre su posible evolución futura.
ABSTRACT: Within a context of the progressive weakening of the social regulation of employment characteristic of European labour companies, organized in accordance with one of the various welfare systems, the Danish model of the labour market, which appears to synergically combine flexibility and security (flexicurity), has become, in recent times, a privileged subject of analysis. In this article, we set out the fundamental features of the model, discussing the possibility of its generalization throughout the European Unión as a whole and proposing a hypothesis regarding its possible future evolution.