labour market flexibility

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline

by Russell Jones  · 15 Jan 2023  · 463pp  · 140,499 words

pages and was backed up by no fewer than eighteen supporting documents on subjects such as the monetary policy transmission mechanism, the cost of capital, labour market flexibility, and the euro area’s monetary and fiscal frameworks. In addition, and in contrast to the provisional 1997 appraisal, the Treasury also looked at the

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stagnated between 2003 and 2008, in a period during which real GDP grew by more than 10%. The economy had relatively full employment and a flexible labour market, but many of the jobs that were being created were lower-paying jobs. Around a fifth of UK workers earned less than two-thirds

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UK was one of the largest recipients of such inflows, with about 40% coming from other EU countries. The single market and the UK’s flexible labour market made it an attractive destination for multinational companies. However, FDI has slumped since the Brexit referendum, from all major source markets and especially where

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy

by Philip Coggan  · 6 Feb 2020  · 524pp  · 155,947 words

to bargain for higher wages. Inflation and unemployment could both be high. This analysis led some economists to argue that the problem in Europe was inflexible labour markets, which made it too expensive to hire workers (because of additional costs and taxes) and too difficult to fire them.9 That led to

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to the country’s success in exporting capital goods to China and the emerging markets, rather than the reforms themselves.11 Attempts to make the labour market flexible led to a long argument about whether it was better to reduce unemployment, even if the only jobs available had lower wages and reduced rights

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could be reduced by a quarter by 2025, global GDP would rise by $5.8trn, or 3.9%.12 The conservative renaissance The drive for labour market flexibility was part of a reaction against the policy consensus that had been in place since the end of the Second World War. Until 1970, conservative

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workers if they feel that tax and other social costs are high, and they will be unable to shed labour if conditions deteriorate. In an inflexible labour market, the risk is of a division developing between insiders who have lifetime jobs and outsiders who spend long periods in unemployment; that has been

Unhappy Union: How the Euro Crisis - and Europe - Can Be Fixed

by John Peet, Anton La Guardia and The Economist  · 15 Feb 2014  · 267pp  · 74,296 words

(ESM). This was followed by moves to encourage more structural reforms. Over two summits in March 2011 leaders agreed to a voluntary pact to promote labour-market flexibility and other action. It was first known as the Competitiveness Pact, then the Pact for the Euro and, in its final form, the Euro Plus

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year earlier than planned. It also set out a list of “significant measures to enhance potential growth”, including the liberalisation of professional services and more labour-market flexibility. In the longer term there had to be a constitutional reform to enshrine fiscal rules, an overhaul of the public administration and the abolition of

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can move your brush back and forth. If you don’t have an exchange rate, you have to move the whole house. Successful adjustment requires flexible labour markets and an open economy that can export its way back to growth, as well as a population willing to put up with the pain

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society

by Will Hutton  · 30 Sep 2010  · 543pp  · 147,357 words

a competition with the then Conservative opposition to fête the City of London. The factors that helped financial services – light-touch regulation, low taxes and labour market flexibility – allegedly helped all business. Governments should limit their intervention. Nor should they or society be concerned about City pay that was rising beyond the dreams

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minimum wage, and enlisting the private sector to improve public sector efficiency. Trade unions would be given rights for recognition, but nothing was to obstruct labour market flexibility. The rich, the City and the business sector would continue to operate as they had under the Tories. Peter Mandelson, Blair’s right-hand man

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also believed that lowering the top rate of tax would bring forth a new wave of entrepreneurship. Thatcher certainly succeeded in creating a more open, flexible labour market, which New Labour largely preserved. But entrepreneurship remained elusive beyond the spivvery of the City, while the cumulative impact of the Tories’ tax and

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class

by Guy Standing  · 27 Feb 2011  · 209pp  · 89,619 words

be done to maximise competition and competitiveness, and to allow market principles to permeate all aspects of life. One theme was that countries should increase labour market flexibility, which came to mean an agenda for transferring risks and insecurity onto workers and their families. The result has been the creation of a global

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accepted both the diagnosis and the prognosis. 6 THE PRECARIAT One neo-liberal claim that crystallised in the 1980s was that countries needed to pursue ‘labour market flexibility’. Unless labour markets were made more flexible, labour costs would rise and corporations would transfer production and investment to places where costs were lower; financial

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with others doing similar work and low opportunity in occupational terms. The number with a temporary tag to their job has grown enormously in the flexible labour market era. In a few countries, such as the United Kingdom, restrictive definitions of what constitutes temporary work have made it hard to identify the

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hear of the elite and celebrities breaking moral codes with impunity and when there is no shadow of the future in our dealings. In a flexible labour market, individuals fear making or being locked into long-term behavioural commitments, since they may involve costs and actions that could not be subject to

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-class areas, but it helped change official attitudes, providing an excuse to resurrect an image of the idle irresponsible poor. The real problem was the flexible labour market. If wages are driven down and more jobs become precarious, unemployment benefits become relatively more attractive. In recognition, governments in industrialised countries lowered benefits

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of insecurity and the indignity of constantly having to try to sell oneself to agencies and potential employers. Without an underpinning of economic security, the flexible labour market is bound to create those outcomes. The financial shock On top of the longer term changes towards the unemployed, the financial meltdown of 2008

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-thirds of young people say they would prefer to be ‘self-employed’, to work on their own rather than be in a job. But the flexible labour markets forged by the older generation of politicians and commercial interests condemn most youth to spending years in the precariat. Youth make up the core

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that hit from time to time, ranging from migraine and depression to diabetes and epilepsy. They are likely to be casualties of the world’s flexible labour markets, with employers reluctant to recruit and eager to dispense with the ‘performance impaired’. Many will drift into precarious jobs and a precarious cycle of

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was a reasonably accurate image in the pre-globalisation era. But queuing no longer operates, mainly due to labour market and social protection reforms. In flexible labour markets with porous borders, wages are driven down to levels only migrants will willingly accept, below what residents habituated to a higher standard of living

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class, displaying the modern utilitarians at their most opportunistic. It is not ‘laziness’ or migration that is at fault; it is the nature of the flexible labour market. Instead, migrants in public discourse are increasingly displayed as ‘dirty, dangerous and damned’. They ‘bring in’ diseases and alien habits, are a threat to

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, form filling, answering questions, answering more questions, obtaining certificates to prove something or other, all these are painfully time consuming yet are usually ignored. A flexible labour market that makes labour mobility the mainstream way of life, and that creates LABOUR, WORK AND THE TIME SQUEEZE 121 a web of moral and

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PRECARIAT deduction. Migrants could have taken jobs because they had particular skills or were prepared to work for lower wages or because, in an open flexible labour market, they happened to be in the right place at the right time. Some may even have gained jobs precisely because they were not citizens

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anti-migrant sentiments. The policies pursued by most European governments have created an environment conducive to populism. The United Kingdom is no exception. By favouring flexible labour markets, it has allowed the precariat to grow without responding to its insecurities or fears. It has shifted social protection decisively towards means testing, which

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ethnic minorities, the ‘white’ or ‘citizen’ inhabitants experience multiple fears, chiefly of losing what little they have. Condemning them for their reactions and behaviour, when flexible labour markets and means testing create those conditions, is a false morality. The responsibility lies with policy makers, whose policies have fostered tensions and engendered extremism

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Women’s Association of India). Others are emerging and should be supported by progressive politics. They will give new meaning to associational freedom. Above all, flexible labour markets and the overbearing state mean the precariat needs Voice inside policy agencies. The salariat knows how to defend itself against bureaucrats and complex administrative

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, 171 labour 13, 115, 161–2 labour brokers 33–4, 49, 110, 111, 167, 168 labour flexibility 23–4, 31–45 labour intensification 119–20 labour market flexibility 6 labour security 10–11, 10b, 31 Laos 112 lay-offs see furloughs Lee Changshik 21 legal knowledge 124–5 legal processing 50 Legal Services

Brave New World of Work

by Ulrich Beck  · 15 Jan 2000  · 236pp  · 67,953 words

fragments; old age poverty is programmed in advance; and the growing demands on welfare protection cannot be met from the empty coffers of local authorities. ‘Labour market flexibility’ has become a political mantra. The orthodox defensive strategies, then, are themselves thrown onto the defensive. Calls are made everywhere for greater ‘flexibility’ – or, in

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modernization’ with worldwide reach, indeed dominance. For many European countries, and especially for European corporations and business representatives, it is also the model of a flexible labour market – and one against which a European path, if there is one, has to differentiate itself. The US example also allows us to study, at

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. … On a political level there is little or no attempt to reconcile these tensions. One agenda exhorts us all to believe in the wonders of flexible labour markets, portfolio lives and transferable skills, while another howls about the destruction of the family and the need for more and better parenting. … The crucial

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as class and female employment and Fordism and freedom and equality and informalization of work and job insecurity ‘jobs miracle’ and labour market deregulation and labour market flexibility and neoliberalism and political action and social exclusion and technology and work and unemployment and poverty and university jobs work and democracy in Urry, John

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay

by Guy Standing  · 13 Jul 2016  · 443pp  · 98,113 words

held in check. The so-called Phillips curve has been used by central banks in operating monetary policy, and by governments to justify policies increasing labour market flexibility, on the grounds that more flexibility makes for a better unemployment–inflation trade-off. However, in recent years, falling unemployment has not put much upward

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’. The World Bank and IMF were joined by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and fledgling European Community institutions in pushing privatisation, labour market flexibility, lower public spending and so on. This was to lead to more inequality and more unemployment. Those bodies slowly became more intrusive and, by the

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Guardian, 11 August 2015, p. 35. 39 Standing, 2009, op. cit. Chapter 6 LABOUR BROKERS: THE PRECARIAT BEARS THE STRAIN Economic liberalisation, the pursuit of labour market flexibility and a technological revolution have brought profound changes in the nature of labour and work, a dismantling of the traditional firm and a shift of

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over to financiers. New Labour distanced itself from the trade unions that represented its old class base. Like most democratic parties elsewhere, it opted for labour market flexibility, which meant rolling back the labour-based securities unions had fought for over the previous century. As Blair was preparing his last speech as Prime

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to the Liberal landslide of 1906, after which the Liberals dwindled into insignificance. In the USA, Bill Clinton’s Third Way variant also opted for flexible labour markets that promised growing inequality and insecurity. The defining moment came in 1996 when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act to

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump

by Tom Clark and Anthony Heath  · 23 Jun 2014  · 401pp  · 112,784 words

, flexibility to hire and fire at will does not necessarily mean that workers will end up more insecure. After all, the avowed basis of the flexible labour market agenda is to give employers confidence to take on more workers. Where businesses are rendered unviable by onerous regulation then, in the end, all

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so different, but there is one fairly obvious place to look for answers: the welfare state and associated labour market protections. As we have emphasised, flexible labour markets are very much a shared Anglo-American approach, but it is an approach that has gone further in the US, where there are more

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startling and fairly unambiguous: in countries with strictly regulated labour markets, the distribution of household incomes is significantly more equal than in those countries with flexible labour markets.’11 In this book we have touched on suggestive evidence of the ‘social slump’ playing out less divisively in France and Germany than in

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the conventional wisdom, which concludes that – counter to that orthodoxy – regulation is relatively unimportant, see Howard Reed, Flexible with the Truth? Exploring the relationship between labour market flexibility and labour market performance, 2010, at: www.tuc.org.uk/extras/flexiblewiththetruth.pdf 10. After months of outrage about zero-hours contracts, and in the

Creating Unequal Futures?: Rethinking Poverty, Inequality and Disadvantage

by Ruth Fincher and Peter Saunders  · 1 Jul 2001  · 267pp  · 79,905 words

as models by some influential groups. As noted in Chapter 7, interest at the federal level in lowering wages as a way of creating increased ‘labour market flexibility’ draws on the United States experience as an example to follow. Increases in wage inequality and the creation of a group of ‘working poor’ are

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the heart of the vision is the desire to create a large low-wage sector in Australia. This is regarded as a sign of a ‘flexible’ labour market. We argue that this is not only undesirable, but it is unnecessary. Second, the economics behind this vision is impoverished analytically. Australia is currently

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sector job creation—can make a difference to the fate of the long-term unemployed (Stretton and Chapman 1990; Stromback et al. 1998). A more ‘flexible’ labour market, by itself, does not improve their competitive edge. The most likely outcome of steep reductions in wages is not a shift from one compartment

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. Only increased social security transfers could alleviate that level of family poverty. Yet the social security system would itself come under pressure once a more ‘flexible’ labour market became entrenched. This would happen because a wage cut in the order of 30 per cent would have a major impact on the monetary

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

by Ha-Joon Chang  · 1 Jan 2010  · 365pp  · 88,125 words

on inflation has distracted our attention away from issues of full employment and economic growth. Employment has been made more unstable in the name of ‘labour market flexibility’, destabilizing many people’s lives. Despite the assertion that price stability is the precondition of growth, the policies that were intended to bring lower inflation

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were more frequently redefined and work intensified for many jobs – all as a result of changes in labour market regulations that were intended to increase labour market flexibility and thus economic efficiency. The free-market policy package, often known as the neo-liberal policy package, emphasizes lower inflation, greater capital mobility and greater

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job insecurity (euphemistically called greater labour market flexibility), essentially because it is mainly geared towards the interests of the holders of financial assets. Inflation control is emphasized because many financial assets have nominally

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higher returns than the holders of other (physical and human) assets is their ability to move around their assets more quickly (see Thing 22). Greater labour market flexibility is demanded because, from the point of view of financial investors, making hiring and firing of the workers easier allows companies to be restructured more

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abandoned its interventionist, paternalistic economic system and embraced market liberalism that emphasizes maximum competition. Job security has been drastically reduced in the name of greater labour market flexibility. Millions of workers have been forced into temporary jobs. Ironically enough, even before the crisis, the country had one of the most

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flexible labour markets in the rich world, with one of the highest ratios of workers without a permanent contract at around 50 per cent. The recent liberalization

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by Otmar Issing  · 20 Oct 2008  · 276pp  · 82,603 words

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