EU attack on job security
WORKERS, APR 2007 ISSUE
The European Union is gearing up for massive changes in the way workers across its member states are employed – those that are employed, of course: unemployment in the Eurozone, for example, is running at 7.4 per cent. The changes are foreshadowed in a Green Paper, "Modernising labour law to meet the challenges of the 21st century", which was launched in autumn 2006.
Consultation on the Green Paper ended on 31 March, and the European Commission will now decide how to take its ideas forward into law. The consultation is part of the EU's Social Agenda 2005-2010 and dovetails with several other Commission initiatives on the wider topic of flexicurity, one of the big new European buzzwords.
The Commission is due to issue a communication on what it calls "flexicurity" in June. Some inkling of the kind of proposals we will see is given by the history of the Green Paper. It was originally entitled "Adapting labour law to ensure flexibility and security for all", but employers didn't like to see the word "security" in black and white. Instead, we have this idea of flexicurity, which – if it means anything – is bound up with the idea that job security is an old-fashioned concept.
The European employers' federation Business Europe believes that "people feel secure because it is relatively easy to find a job rather than because they are safeguarded by employment legislation. Labour law reforms must therefore focus on facilitating the creation of new jobs as opposed to trying to preserve existing ones." In other words, job security is not about feeling that your job is secure. In fact, in the strange world of ideas that employers inhabit, job insecurity is the basis of job security. The Green Paper asserts, "The focus is mainly on the personal scope of labour law rather than on issues of collective labour law." It claims, "Overly protective terms and conditions can deter employers from hiring during economic upturns." Aah. It all becomes clear.
And so the report concludes, "The recent Employment in Europe 2006 report refers to findings that stringent employment protection legislation tends to reduce the dynamism of the labour market, worsening the prospects of women, youths and older workers. The report underlines that deregulation 'at the margin', while keeping stringent rules for regular contracts largely intact, tends to favour the development of segmented labour markets with a negative impact on productivity. It also stresses that workers feel better protected by a support system in case of unemployment than by employment protection legislation. Well-designed unemployment benefit systems, coordinated with active labour market policies seem to perform better as an insurance against labour market risks."
Expect more upside-down thinking in the Commission's June communication.