‘Flexicurity’ as a policy strategy: the implications for gender equality

Abstract

The ‘flexicurity’ strategy reached the top of the European Union's policy agenda in the mid-2000s. The strategy assumes an adult worker model family and aims to promote better, as well as more, jobs and to ensure that policies should further both flexibility in the labour market and security for workers. The article explores, first, the meaning of internal and external flexibility, and of employment-based security and the different implications for men and women. While the policy documents assume that flexicurity will increase gender equality, the mechanisms have not been specified. In fact, as the article shows, women are often more ‘flexible’ workers than men, particularly regarding their contractual arrangements and hours of employment. However, they tend not to be economically autonomous and, we argue, the supply-side policies advocated on the security side of the flexicurity matrix are insufficient to improve their position, which is strongly related to the gendered divisions of paid and unpaid work.

Keywords:

• flexicurity
• labour market flexibility
• labour market security
• gender equality
• EU-level policy
• paid and unpaid work

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the financial support of the European Commission's FP6 programme, via the WORKFARE Coordinated Action led by Professor Claire Wallace at the University of Aberdeen.

Notes

1. For example, Barbier (2004) and many of the papers in Travail, Genre and Sociétés, 19 (2008).

2. Together with Schmid, Gazier has promoted the ‘transitional labour market’ approach to work/welfare reform, which has taken more note of the kind of transitions made by women between paid and unpaid work (Schmid, 1998, 2008; Schmid & Gazier, 2002).

3. The use of the term ‘combination’ is reminiscent of the Combination Scenario, which was developed by Dutch Social Democratic governments at the end of the 1990s and which advocated the sharing of paid and unpaid work between men and women (Plantenga, 2002).

4. European Social Survey data also indicate that this is true of men in the UK (Lewis, Campbell & Huerta, 2008).

5. The figure for Ireland is also low, but the data are unreliable and are certainly counter-intuitive.

6. Using US data, Correll, Benard and Paik (2007) have shown the overwhelming importance of workplace-based discrimination against mothers.

7. Activation ‘measures’ are defined in terms of participants in training, job rotation and sharing, employment incentives, supported employment and rehabilitation, job creation projects and start-up incentives. Eurostat also provides data on labour market policies that provide financial ‘support’, and which provide ‘services’ related to job-search.

8. The high figure for the UK women is surprising given the extent of part-time and low-paid, low-skilled employment.

9. Of course, contract workers (particularly numerous in Spain) and self-employed workers (particularly numerous in Greece) often have only limited rights to paid childcare leaves of any kind.

10. For example, see England, Budig and Folbre's (2002) analysis of the pay of childcare workers.