The Political Economy Of Work Security And Flexibility

This book casts light on the empirical relationship between labor market deregulation through non-standard contracts and the three main dimensions of worker security: employment, income and social security.

In a contemporary labour market that includes growing levels of precarious employment, the regulation of minimum employment standards is intricately connected to conditions of economic security. With a focus on the role of neoliberal labour market policies in promoting "flexible" employment standards legislation - particularly in the areas of minimum wages and working time - Mark Thomas argues that shifts toward "flexible" legislation have played a central role in producing patterns of labour market inequality. Using an analytic framework that situates employment standards within the context of the broader social relations that shape processes of labour market regulation, Thomas constructs a case study of employment standards legislation in Ontario from 1884 to 2004. Drawing from political economy scholarship, and using a qualitative research methodology, he analyses class, race, and gender dimensions of legislative developments, highlighting the ways in which shifts towards "flexible" employment standards have exacerbated longstanding racialized and gendered inequities. Regulating Flexibility argues that in order to counter current trends towards increased insecurity, employment standards should not be treated as a secondary form of labour protection but as a cornerstone in a progressive project of labour market re-regulation.

Insecure temporary employment is growing in Europe, but we know little about how being in such jobs affects political preferences and behaviour. Combining insights from psychology, political science and labour market research, this book offers new theories and evidence on the political repercussions of temporary jobs.

Increasingly flexible labour markets and reforms of old-age pension systems are still ranking high on the political agenda of European countries. This volume investigates whether, and to what extent, the interplay between pension reforms and the spread of 'atypical' employment patterns and fragmented careers has a negative influence uponeconomic security in old age. The volume, therefore, analyzes the flexibility-security nexus by focusing on the post-retirement phase, thus extending the conventional narrow concept of 'flexicurity'. The book also questions whetherreforms of public and private pension schemes compensate or aggravate the risks of increasingly flexible labor markets and atypical employment careers after retirement? Around this overarching research question, the various contributions in the volume employ the same analytical framework in order to map, and then compare, the developments in seven European countries - Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, and the UK which present different labour market arrangements and various degrees of flexibility, as well as diverse pension systems.

Flexicurity is a European labour market policy adopted in 2007 within the European Employment Strategy. This policy aims at combining the ongoing flexibilisation of employment relations with the traditions of the European welfare state. This book examines and summarises thirty empirical studies in flexicurity written by the author in 2004 and 2010. The book provides empirical evidence of increasing labour flexibility accompanied by a decline of social security. The author also shows that the countries with higher flexibility are more affected by the crisis. This is a serious warning against improper implementation of flexicurity and its one-sided use in favour of employers.

This book examines the relationship between job security and job flexibility. Through an innovative conceptual approach, the concept of job flexicurity is presented to highlight the labour market dynamics between job flexibility and employee security. The dynamics of labour market mechanisms are placed within ideas of rigidity, security, flexibility, and plasticity to explore the interplay between different employee considerations. Particular attention is given to the Romanian labour market with an empirical case study that expands upon the ideas discussed. This book aims to analyse how job security and flexibility impact worker well-being and happiness. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in labour economics and the job market.

As the percentage of people working in the service economy continues to rise, there is a need to examine workplace harm within low-paid, insecure, flexible and short-term forms of ‘affective labour’. This is the first book to discuss harm through an ultra-realist lens and examines the connection between individuals, their working conditions and management culture. Using data from a long-term ethnographic study of the service economy, it investigates the reorganisation of labour markets and the shift from security to flexibility, a central function of consumer capitalism. It highlights working conditions and organisational practices which employees experience as normal and routine but within which multiple harms occur. Challenging current thinking within sociology and policy analysis, it reconnects ideology and political economy with workplace studies and uses examples of legal and illegal activity to demonstrate the multiple harms within the service economy.

Flexibility is an ambiguous concept. This book contributes to expounding the importance of clearer concepts in the debates on economic systems, labour markets and work organization. The authors place 'flexibility' in a new theoretical context as juxtaposed to 'stability'. Much terminological confusion and is resolved by this suggestion.

First published in 1997. Politicians of all shades argue that the labour market should be more flexible and workers more mobile. But what does this mean in reality? How flexible and mobile are workers likely to be? Is there an ideological base to the language of flexibility? These are some of the issues covered in this book. Data from a large factory and office is used to argue that the macro labour market consists of non-competitive work groups where strongly held views and values represent a substantial barrier to simplistic definitions of flexibility and mobility. The analysis takes place in three chapters, dealing with recruitment for work, skills used in work and perceptions of different types of work and workers. The findings suggest that non-economic forces (such as institutional, social, historical and political phenomena) strongly influence the creation of separate work cultures. Furthermore, it is argued that the reason for differences between work groups being articulated in a defensive fashion reflects the climate of fear in the labour market, where flexibility is associated with a loss of the (often limited) power, control and influence workers have over their position in the labour market.