Contains analysis of, critical remarks on, and constructive suggestions to Towards common principles of Flexicurity of the European Commission (2007).

Flexicurity is a European policy agenda seeking to increase both flexibility and security in the labour-market. This book argues that it needs a revision: Although flexicurity is set out to change the way Europeans work and live, and even though it is being justified by workers’ needs, flexicurity lacks of a clear and democratically justified vision of society. Flexicurity is confronted here with Amartya Sen’s capability-approach, a paradigm of well-being evaluation. How is flexicurity related to a concept of employment as part of a way of life which people have reason to value? How capability-friendly are established flexicurity-indicators? It is thus shown how the capability-approach can be used in the field of labour-market and social policy.

In recent years, the concept of flexicurity has come to occupy a central place in political and academic debates regarding employment and social policy. It fosters a view in which the need for continuously increasing flexibility is the basic assumption, and the understanding of security increasingly moves from social protection to self-insurance or individual adaptability. Moreover, it rejects the traditional contradictions between flexibility and security, blending the two into a single notion and thus depoliticizing the relationships between capital and labour. This volume provides a critical discussion of the flexicurity concept, the theories upon which it is built and the ideas that it transmits about work, unemployment and social justice. It shows that flexicurity fosters the further individualization of social protection, an increase in precariousness and the further weakening of labour in relation to capital. The authors present a series of alternative theoretical, normative and policy approaches that provide due attention to the collective and political dimension of vulnerability and allow for the development of new societal projects based on alternative values and assumptions.

Professor emeritus at Osgoode Hall Law School and former president of Toronto’s York University, Harry W. Arthurs is one of Canada’s most widely respected scholars, educators, and policy makers in the world today. His enormous academic and institutional productivity has extended to administrative and labour law, legal pluralism and legal theory, and legal education. Bringing together scholars of law, history, and political economy, The Daunting Enterprise of the Law applies the framework of Arthurs’s extraordinary scholarship to a series of themes running through current legal, economic, and political thought. Contributors from around the globe engage with Arthurs’s work in several fields and sub-fields and consider the past and future of industrial democracy, globalization, labour law, legal education, and legal theory in the twenty-first century. Through the process of surveying, evaluating, and reflecting upon Arthurs’s ideas and intellectual contributions, they further advance the reader’s understanding of labour law and industrial relations. Remarkable in breadth and scope, The Daunting Enterprise of Law is both a celebration of Arthurs’s institutional achievements and policy leadership and an important contribution to contemporary scholarship.

This volume of 23 essays on diverse aspects of the complex and challenging concept of "decent work" has its inception in the "Impulses of Salzburg 2009". Questions of decent work and decent unemployment have become especially salient in times of an economic and financial crisis. The establishment of decent working conditions and decent unemployment provisions - a complex matter of securing the right ethical mix of security and incentives - are perceived as major challenges not only for developing and undeveloped countries, which still don't have stable economies and where the rate of poverty and corruption is still high, but also for "developed" societies themselves.