Aliki Mouriki
poor in recent years, in most European countries (see Pena-Casa and Latta, 2004, in Eurofound,
2007).
The widespread use of certain forms of flexibility is often the result of labour market rigidities.
When employment protection is strong for the permanent workers, companies and organizations
are motivated and inclined to have greater recourse to atypical workers, in view of increasing their
numerical and wage flexibility.7 The core workforce thus retains its high degree of protection and
employment and social security rights, to the detriment of the weaker segments of the workforce that
are usually deprived of both. As a result, flexibility is concentrated at the margins of the workforce,
thus reinforcing the divide between a privileged core of permanent employees with full employment
and social security rights and an underclass of marginalized, casual workers with few if any basic
rights and career prospects, often trapped into poverty. This is particularly the case of dualist labour
markets with a strong “insiders-outsiders” effect.
Finally, one must also bear in mind that even the protected section of the “core” workforce is
not immune from the precariousness of the working conditions of “peripheral” workers; contingent
work and involuntary turnover of the permanent workforce are positively and significantly corre-
lated. On the other hand, empirical evidence from the U.K. indicates that part-time workers, contrary
to popular notions, do not experience more job insecurity than full-time workers, which suggests
that one cannot readily lump them together with temporary workers as contingent, precarious and
numerically flexible labour (European Commission-EU research, 2005). It appears that the security
dimension is increasingly becoming the new dividing line between “good” jobs and “bad” jobs. An
example of this new division is that a low-skilled and poorly remunerated job in a protected segment
of the labour market is more secure, and hence more appreciated, than a well-paid highly skilled job
in a volatile sector of activity.
2.2. Implications for companies and organisations
Greater flexibility is not always translated into enhanced economic efficiency for companies and
organizations. Often, a high degree of flexibility, especially in the form of lower employment protec-
7 A typical example of this is the recruitment of temporary and part-time personnel in the public sector, to offset the
rigidities associated with the employment status of the tenured personnel.
Page • 18