Flexible Employment and Inequality in Europe

Abstract

Since the crisis of the Fordist ‘golden age’ with its corollaries of stable, full-time, full-life, (male) full-employment and of full-welfare entitlements, ‘flexibility’ has become a sort of ‘magic world’ to address almost all kind of welfare-and-labour market needs for re-equilibrium. As a matter of fact, flexibility is a multi-dimensional term. Following Atkinson (1984) we can briefly recall the four different types of labour market flexibility, indicating opposite goals and purposes. Numerical flexibility and functional flexibility do not need further explanation here (see Giesecke in this session). The two other forms are temporal flexibility, that is the possibility to adjust working time and working hours according to the needs of the employer or in theory also the employees, and finally wage flexibility that is a firm's possibility to adjust wage levels. Yet, these flexibility types are not seen as equally leading to insecurity; rather, some may introduce insecurity in individuals’ labour market careers, while others may play a crucial role in upskilling the workforce. While temporal flexibility has been mainly addressed in terms of part-time diffusion, the lion's share has been done by the trade-off between numerical and functional flexibility (that is, external and internal forms of flexibility). If the mainstream labour economics debate since the early 1980s has assumed numerical flexibility as proxy for labour market efficiency, the European socio-economic literature has pointed out that diversified quality production in small and medium size, highly innovative firms requires functional forms of flexibility to their skilled workforce [the reference here is to Piore and Sabel (1984) and the north-Italian district economy as well as the ‘Rhine model of capitalism’ as opposed to mass, ‘neo-Fordist’ low-quality production].