Introduction

In the last few years, flexibility and security have become crucial issues in the employment policies of advanced political economies. This is clearly shown by the widespread use, within the European debate on the topic, of the concept of ‘flexicurity’, defined as an ‘integrated strategy for simultaneously enhancing flexibility and security in the labour market’ (European Commission, 2007, p 5).

Much emphasis has been put by international and supranational organisations on the idea of a virtuous combination between flexibility and security. In particular, new labour policy trends promoted by the OECD seem now in tune with positions expressed by the European Commission for over a decade. In recent years, the OECD has partially revised the views of its Jobs Study (OECD, 1994), which, as seen in Chapter 1, urged the deregulation of labour markets to try to curb high levels of unemployment and, at the same time, underlined the negative effects of income-maintenance schemes in case of non-employment. In fact, the OECD has more recently reasserted the need to reform the employment protection legislation (EPL) in several countries, but within a more considerate framework, capable of balancing the workers’ need for security and the employers’ need for flexibility (OECD, 2006). Hence, the OECD's position has now come closer to that of the European Commission, which has made the balancing of work flexibility and worker security a key topic in its reasoning on the modernisation of social and labour policies since the late 1990s and adopted eight ‘common principles of flexicurity’ in 2007.

More generally, in Europe and elsewhere, trying to reach a balance between flexibility and security can be seen as an update to the strategy, which characterised the golden age of industrial capitalism, of protecting workers from risks – or of compensating them for losses – deriving from the internationalisation of markets. This strategy was the basis of the embedded liberalism regime during the post-war era (Ruggie, 1982), in which the support for an international trade regime given by the citizens of advanced capitalist polities rested on the provision of social and economic security by their domestic governments. After the end of the golden age, a new competitive context developed, which characterised the international political economy from the 1980s onwards.