Download The European social model: juggling with demands for flexibility and

The EU: giving and taking opportunities for flexicurity policies
Mijke Houwerzijl
Abstract:
Since the 1980’s, (Western) European countries are faced with conflicting challenges: an
external challenge to keep up their economic competitiveness for the future and an
internal challenge to preserve their social achievements of the past. They have to boost
economic growth and employment on the one hand and social security and cohesion on
the other hand. In the field of labour market policies these challenges are often translated
in demands for flexibility (mainly from the employers side) and demands for security
(mainly from the workers side). Is it possible to reconcile demands for flexibility and
security, or, even better, to make win-win combinations of them? Over the past decade,
labour market policies in countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands have become
known for it. Such policies or social models are more and more labelled with the term
‘flexicurity’.
However, important social policy and labour market issues are not under
exclusive authority of European nation states anymore. First of all, ‘Europeanisation’ of
the labour markets takes place on the policy-level. The pursuit of a right balance between
flexibility and security on the labour market, has also reached this European stage and is
especially manifest within the European Employment Strategy (EES). ‘Flexicurity’ is
mentioned in guideline 21 of the newly integrated EES-guidelines. Moreover, the
European Commission recently published a Green Paper on the role labour law might
play in advancing a ‘flexicurity’ agenda.
Secondly, ‘Europeanisation’ of the national labour markets takes place in practice
as a result of increasing mobility of workers in the gradually expanding European Internal
Market of goods and services. This development is accelerated by the recent
enlargement of the European Union. It appears that tensions between the opportunities
for flexicurity policies and the limits thereof are emerging at the level of the Member
States. Especially the growing use of (posted) workers from one (new) Member-State to
provide services in another (old) Member-State is perceived as putting pressure on active
labour market policies targeted at vulnerable groups of domestic workers in the receiving
States. The question of service provision and its implications were very strongly debated
recently in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands regarding the so called (draft)
Services Directive. It was claimed that this ‘Bolkenstein’ Directive would permit
unregulated or badly regulated movement of service providers around the Union into the
Member States. These service providers would undermine national wage standards and
working conditions.
This paper tries to answer the following question: What are the legal and
empirical consequences of service provision liberalisation on the possibilities for
flexicurity policies on the EU- and national level? The original aspect of this paper is that
it brings together both the examination of flexicurity policies on the EU- and national level
and the aspect of cross-border movement of services workers in the EU. This is
necessary, because the separation of these two important areas of research results in an
uneven understanding of the field. The paper engages two levels of policy and regulation.
Firstly, (examples of) the national level (in countries mentioned above); secondly, the EUlevel. It consists of a socio-legal comparative study of legal and political developments
giving and taking opportunities for flexicurity policies. By looking at the developments
mentioned at several governance levels, this paper provides arguments relevant for both
the scholarly and the public policy debate about how to find a balance between the
ongoing demands for flexibility and security on European labour markets.