Restructuring Organisations While Striving for Flexicurity: A European Perspective

Abstract

This paper deals with the topic of company restructuring from a European flexicurity perspective. We first describe the European discourses on flexicurity and company restructuring. This shows that the emphasis lies especially on employment security and income security, which in the case of restructuring is combined with external numerical flexibility. The EU, however, also calls for anticipation and positive management of restructuring, which necessitates early intervention, for instance by training employees or facilitating their transitions to other companies. The EU codifies its ideas concerning employment policy among others in employment guidelines. These are based on the labour market challenges of Member States and are thus also a reaction to their past employment policy efforts. Our data analysis shows that there were very different flexicurity efforts at the national level amounting to different challenges for balancing flexibility and security in case of company restructuring. Such differences are important, because they determine the context in which companies restructure. Given the available national facilities such as a good social security system or a well functioning labour market, employees can find securities outside the company borders. These securities may be strengthened if companies actively cooperate with stakeholders at the regional or sector level, such as social partners, local governments, or organisations that facilitate the transitions between jobs. Moreover, these actors can seek other possibilities to combine flexibility and security.