Towards Consistent Principles Of Flexicurity

Contains analysis of, critical remarks on, and constructive suggestions to Towards common principles of Flexicurity of the European Commission (2007).

Flexicurity is a European policy agenda seeking to increase both flexibility and security in the labour-market. This book argues that it needs a revision: Although flexicurity is set out to change the way Europeans work and live, and even though it is being justified by workers’ needs, flexicurity lacks of a clear and democratically justified vision of society. Flexicurity is confronted here with Amartya Sen’s capability-approach, a paradigm of well-being evaluation. How is flexicurity related to a concept of employment as part of a way of life which people have reason to value? How capability-friendly are established flexicurity-indicators? It is thus shown how the capability-approach can be used in the field of labour-market and social policy.

In recent years, the concept of flexicurity has come to occupy a central place in political and academic debates regarding employment and social policy. It fosters a view in which the need for continuously increasing flexibility is the basic assumption, and the understanding of security increasingly moves from social protection to self-insurance or individual adaptability. Moreover, it rejects the traditional contradictions between flexibility and security, blending the two into a single notion and thus depoliticizing the relationships between capital and labour. This volume provides a critical discussion of the flexicurity concept, the theories upon which it is built and the ideas that it transmits about work, unemployment and social justice. It shows that flexicurity fosters the further individualization of social protection, an increase in precariousness and the further weakening of labour in relation to capital. The authors present a series of alternative theoretical, normative and policy approaches that provide due attention to the collective and political dimension of vulnerability and allow for the development of new societal projects based on alternative values and assumptions.

Reconsidering the law through the work of a pre-eminent scholar.

This volume of 23 essays on diverse aspects of the complex and challenging concept of "decent work" has its inception in the "Impulses of Salzburg 2009". Questions of decent work and decent unemployment have become especially salient in times of an economic and financial crisis. The establishment of decent working conditions and decent unemployment provisions - a complex matter of securing the right ethical mix of security and incentives - are perceived as major challenges not only for developing and undeveloped countries, which still don't have stable economies and where the rate of poverty and corruption is still high, but also for "developed" societies themselves.

The book discusses how labour law and welfare systems will be affected by the ongoing transformation of work. The first section considers demography from two different perspectives. On the one hand, it focuses on chronic diseases and their impact on work, emphasising the role and the regulation of welfare systems. On the other, attention is given to youth unemployment and to those forms of employment which might have an impact on young people. Section II touches upon the relationship between the environment and industrial relations, while the third part broaches the topic of the impact of technology in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as Industry 4.0. As such, this volume provides an exhaustive picture of the changes currently underway, considering all the aspects which will affect work now and in the future.