Flexibility and security: an asymmetrical relationship?
unions- leading to the abolishment of discriminations against part-time workers and the provision of
entitlements to employment and social security benefits (Karamessini, 2008b:519-520).
The labour market legislative framework in Greece has over a long period been one of the most
restrictive and outdated in Europe. Whilst providing a high degree of protection to those already
in employment, it left outside the scope of regulation a significant number of informal or atypical
working arrangements and considerably restricted access to employment to first-time job seekers. It
also formally allowed firms and organisations little room for functional as well as numerical and wage
flexibility.
The successive labour market reforms introduced during the period 1990-2005 were an attempt
to strike a balance between employment growth and competitiveness by increasing labour market
flexibility. It must be stressed, however, that these legislative initiatives were not the result of pres-
sures on behalf of firms, but rather of the external coercion to bring into line the obsolete national
regulatory framework with developments in the EU. The main labour market legislative initiatives
included: the annualisation of working time (with workers’ councils’ consent), the encouragement of
part-time work61, the reduction of indirect labour costs for low paid workers, the rationalisation of
the collective dismissals’ system, the introduction of fixed term work62, telework, interim work and
alternate work and the establishment of private employment agencies and temporary work agencies.
However, a significant number of more innovative and employee-friendly flexible working patterns
that are widely used in other EU countries have not yet been introduced in Greece, such as work-
ing time accounts, job rotation, voluntary reduction of working time, partial early retirement, etc.
The main form of flexibility remains overtime work: employers prefer it because it costs less to pay
overtime, even at a premium rate, than recruit new personnel; employees are keen to work overtime
because they can top up their low wages. The popularity of overtime amongst workers also explains
the failure of all the attempts to promote the annualisation of working time: unions are not interested
61 Part-time work remains unpopular both with employers and employees (organisational problems for the former,
extremely low remuneration —even below the UB- for the latter).
62 Fixed-term contracts have been widely used in the public sector to provide jobs to favoured groups, especially before
elections, but also to by-pass restrictive recruitment procedures and criteria. In the private sector, their incidence has
been declining since 2004, owing to the stricter regulations in their use imposed by the EU directive on fixed-term
contracts (up to 2 renewals and up to 24 months of cumulative duration).
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