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This chapter elaborates the concepts that are central to the remainder of the book, namely ‘non-standard work’ and ‘labour market flexibility’. It delineates the ‘standard’ employment relationship and indicates how different forms of non-standard work diverge from this paradigm. The emergence and significance of the standard employment relationship in UK labour law is examined, focusing in particular on its embodiment in statutory measures first introduced in the 1960s. The chapter then analyses in detail the images of ‘flexibility’ that have featured in UK employment policy since the election of the ‘New Labour’ government in 1997, centring on the roles envisioned for non-standard working arrangements. It then turns to the government's understanding of the role of labour law within ‘the flexible economy’, and in particular its vision of how non-standard work should be regulated.

Analysis of flexibility and employment at times adopts a deregulatory stance, thus revealing the pervasiveness of the powerful flexibility discourse among labour economists, policymakers, and legislators concerned about high unemployment in Europe who have, over the latter decades of the 20th century, looked with envy at the achievements of the comparatively unregulated US labour market. The central argument here has been that the institutions and legislative interventions which figure so prominently in European economies impede the ability of the labour market to clear, and that market equilibrium in Europe can be restored through deregulation. However, the effect of institutions and regulations on labour markets and unemployment is enormously difficult to measure or predict. This chapter examines theories of unemployment and the main tenets of the labour market flexibility debate.

This chapter examines the political processes and outcomes of Japan's labor market reform over the past two decades. During this time, Japan has adopted more market-oriented principles in the labor market than before, such as the increase of labor market flexibility and the diversification of employment and working conditions. However, it did not conform to the neoliberal model of the labor market, represented by easy hiring and firing practices in response to the fluctuations of the business cycle. The institutional arrangements of employment protection systems and decentralized industrial relations affected the trajectory of Japan's reform by shaping the incentives and strategies of employers, workers, and policy makers; and leading to the formation of a political coalition in support of reform for outsiders, while retaining insider-favored social protections. Such institutional configurations transferred the costs of labor adjustments to an increasing number of outsiders, exacerbating inequality and dualism in the Japanese labor market.

This chapter examines labour market flexibility and restructuring through three sections. First, it looks at class struggle from above, as indicated in the ‘best practices’ that aim to cut labour costs (insinuation). Next, the chapter provides national snapshots of labour market dynamics just as the 2008 crisis was about to hit (institutionalization). Third, it details the actions and themes that make up the post-2010 austerity response: creating insecurity; attacking labour and collective bargaining; imposing outcomes on bargaining; bypassing (or effectively abolishing) social dialogue; and controlling unit labour costs in the name of competitiveness (insulation and exposure, institutionalization). The chapter concludes by once more summarizing how this relates to the varieties of austerity framework.

This chapter is a historical case study on management and labour at the Matsushita Group. A Chandlerian framework is applied to analyse the evolution of the multi-divisional structure and spin-offs from an early stage of the company's development. The Matsushita Union was established as an enterprise-wide union from the start. The company responded to corporate growth by extending its boundaries to include not only all the internal divisions, but also spin-off companies and subsidiaries. The resulting extension of the internal labour market gave much flexibility in securing stable employment, as uniform working terms and conditions facilitated the movement of workers between divisions and spin-off companies. But there was a gradual increase of diversity in working conditions within the company and the corporate group, culminating in the 2003 corporate restructuring and the planned break up of the Matsushita Union into fourteen separate unions in 2006.

The chapter compares employment structures in five Continental European welfare states, with a focus on private services. Despite a common trend to overcome institutional employment barriers by creating a more divided labor market, a closer look reveals considerable differences between national patterns of standard and non-standard work. We identify five transformative pathways towards a more flexible and cheaper use of labor in Continental European welfare states: 1. defection from permanent contracts, 2. from full-time employment, 3. from dependent employment, 4. growing wage dispersion, and 5. government-sponsored labor cost reductions. The chapter shows that by relying on one or several of these options, each country developed a distinct solution for the labor cost problem in the service sector, which corresponds to a particular form of dualization.

This chapter examines the deregulatory aspect of labor reform, especially during the years leading up to and during the regional financial crisis of the late 1990s. During the 1990s, China, Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines to varying degrees and in different ways pursued market-conforming policies of labor market deregulation, institutional devolution to local and private sectors, and market-oriented social-policy reform. This chapter first considers the role played by labor market deregulation in encouraging ever-more-shallow protections among previously protected formal-sector workers and in devolving regulatory authority to local levels. It then asks whether increased labor market flexibility, and a corresponding increase in employment contingency, implies an increase in informality as claimed by some critics of labor market reform. It also discusses the extent to which the Asian experience has modeled the precepts of market-oriented reform in the area of social reproduction and protection of labor. Finally, it explores educational reform and the implications of labor market deregulation for the labor process.

Although homeownership and social housing have positive sides, these are regarded as obstacles to labour market flexibility and full aggregate employment status. To establish empirical evidence, this chapter explores the housing market organisations of European countries, specifically Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Greece, France, United Kingdom, Denmark, Luxembourg, Ireland, Austria, and Spain. Other dimensions of the relationship between the housing sector and labour mobility, such as the issue of commuting, are not within the scope of this book. This chapter also gives some conclusions from gathered information — both statistical data and reviews of previous works.

This concluding chapter assesses the extent to which non-standard workers have been embraced by UK labour law. It recognises that their integration has gained momentum across the period in office of the New Labour government. The chapter cautions, however, against understanding the various ‘re-regulatory’ measures introduced as a comprehensive programme that has significantly reoriented labour law's treatment of non-standard work. It also highlights the differences in the regulation of each of the forms of non-standard work examined in the book, and highlights the inconsistencies and limitations of the approaches adopted. It ends by suggesting a number of themes that underlie the inchoate nature of the reforms to the regulation of non-standard work.

This chapter highlights the importance of deeply democratic alliances between domestic personal support workers and recipients that negotiate tensions at the intimate level of the labor process. Disabled people have long had support from their own advocacy organizations, like independent living centers (ILCs), on ways to be a fair employer and attain quality services. Yet, despite such support, informality can creep in to individual relationships due to the complexity of labor legislation in this sector and to the lack of enforcement. Alliances between recipient organizations and the labor movement could address these issues in creative ways. If the goal is security with flexibility, workers need critical education about how the locations of disability and age shape people's quest for ongoing input into their services, and they need training and support on how to negotiate this. What kinds of organizing models can engage deeply and continuously with workers and recipients to address tensions in the labor process? Community-based labor organizing provides inspiration.

This chapter examines the Direct Funding Program of Ontario's Self-Managed Attendant Services. The evident willingness of self-managers and personal attendants to engage in relational work and the still unmet labor market security of workers were both necessary for self-managers to realize the Direct Funding Program's promise of flexibility. However, within a context of insufficient funding and little to no collective backing, this program produced labor market insecurity for workers, in the form of insufficient hours, earnings, and protection. Moreover, the position of workers in the broader racialized and gendered labor market shaped their labor market choices, or lack thereof, and shaped their experience at the intimate level. Failing to address broader racialized and gendered labor market insecurity not only has implications for workers who are less able to negotiate what they do and how. It also limits the progressive potential to value all forms of intimate labor and to rethink skill.

This chapter examines how Japan's welfare through work system has been transformed since the 1990s by focusing on the major labor market reforms during the period. It considers the limits of welfare through work as a social protection system that became evident by the 2000s, along with the development of gender equality policy. It shows that progress was not able to counteract the effects of labor market flexibility and avoid further stratification among women. It also explains how labor market reform has reinforced, rather than modified or dismantled, the gendered dual system, thereby both creating and aggravating new social risks and resulting in a trade-off between employment protection and external flexibility. Finally, the chapter analyzes the increase in numbers of non-regular workers and how it has resulted in rising levels of poverty. The replacement of regular workers by non-regular workers debunked the myth of lifetime employment.

This chapter focuses on California's In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS). At the labor market level, both the Direct Funding Program (DF) in Ontario and the IHSS gave “consumers” the flexibility to hire their own “providers,” yet in IHSS the state was more involved in the employment relationship because it paid the provider rather than giving funding directly to the consumer. Many elderly IHSS consumers hire family, but when family is not available, immigrant seniors hire others from their language and ethnic group, and this goes for Pilipinx. Like in DF, labor market flexibility shaped negotiations in the labor process, but in IHSS it shaped it differently. While DF self-managers forged and embraced a friendly employment relationship, consumers in the IHSS context of paying family or co-ethnic fictive kin were more ambivalent about their employer role and used family ideals and family-like practices to negotiate possible tensions at the intimate level. The state's reliance on filial duty and ethnic community through IHSS may bolster flexibility and security at the intimate level in terms of mutually respectful negotiations of what is done, when, where, and how. Yet, as suggested in the previous chapter, collective backing is also important if the goal is flexibility with security. Indeed, another difference between DF and IHSS is that IHSS providers have a union.

This chapter studies Toronto's attendant services. In attendant services, workers had considerable labor market security through relatively high wages, benefits, and job protection. Managers did not willingly support workers' security but rather the union pushed them to do so. This security coincided with limited flexibility at the labor market level in that consumers had little influence over which attendant helped them on a given shift. Nevertheless, attendants and consumers alike gave many examples of bargaining for flexibility and security at the intimate level. Interviews with consumers, attendants, union activists, disability activists, and employers support the claim that, overall, attendant services included a process of collective negotiation marked by representative and participatory democracy for both groups and an outcome of compromises.

Three nations are studied in this chapter. These particular nations were chosen because of the noticeable relationship between employment and homeownership observed — these are Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. The chapter asserts that unemployment problems in European countries determine housing market conditions. For example a reduction in unemployment can be made possible by an increase in private renting, harmonious social networking, and a decrease in lodging tenure. When location change is relatively expensive, a high quantity of privately owned houses induces discrepancies between the workers' abilities and skills and the available careers. Bu when it is easier to source new occupations or move from one place to another without necessarily purchasing, building, or selling a new house, this situation allows individuals to become mobile and thus, this fosters labour market flexibility.

This chapter analyzes the quest for flexibility among personal support recipients, considering their experiences of impairment and aging and how these bodily realities clash with the value that North American culture places on independence and youth. Recipients sought flexibility in the labor market, which was a continuum ranging from hiring and firing power to a degree of say on who came into one's home to provide intimate support. Recipients also sought flexibility at the intimate level along two dimensions. The first was their ability to use their own knowledge to direct how their bodies were handled and their homes managed. The second dimension was their ability to influence and change which service tasks were provided, when, and where. This deep understanding of recipients' quest for flexibility, together with the account of workers' long-standing pursuit of security in the previous chapter, begins to reveal tensions between the two groups. Recipients' desire for flexibility in service tasks can be in tension with workers' efforts to gain security by defining the parameters of their job. At the labor market level, recipient flexibility to choose the worker can be in tension with worker's employment and income security.