Flexicurity and Labour Law : Labour Market Segmentation, Precarious Work, and Just Distribution

Profound changes in the labour market that have accompanied the growth of the European internal market, deepening and expanding globalisation, and the deployment of new technologies. Yet despite the fact that it is the dominant approach to labour market regulation within the European Union, flexicurity’s precise meaning or content is contentious; the emphasis tends to oscillate from flexibility to security depending on the specific EU institution or actor endorsing it. My goal in this chapter is to probe the relationship between flexicurity, labour law and labour law market segmentation, focusing on women workers in precarious work in particular. To do so, I use the theoretical framework developed by Anna Christensen and Ann Numhauser-Henning under the umbrella of the Norma Research Programme (Norma). Norma’s interdisciplinary approach places legal norms and institutions in their social contexts; it is also historical and comparative, as it seeks to understand the relationship between social change and legal developments. I begin by outlining the key components of Norma’s theoretical framework that I will use to assess the European Union’s flexicurity approach. Having sketched this conceptual framework, I use it to examine the development of the EU’s commitment to flexicurity, beginning with the atypical work Directives in the late 1990s through to statements in the Europe 2020 Strategy, focusing on the relationship between flexicurity and modernising labour law. I concentrate upon a key theme in EU labour law, which is regulating atypical forms of employment that are located at the margins of labour law. I suggest that the strategy of increasing ‘flexibility at the margins’ — the loosening of restrictions on such non-standard or atypical contracts as part-time, fixed-term and through- agency work — runs the risk of reinforcing segmented labour markets, especially labour markets that are segmented on a gender basis. In the conclusion, I reflect on whether, and, if so, the extent to which the normative field of flexicurity has disrupted traditional normative patterns in labour law