Smuggling Flexibility: Temporary Working Contracts and the 'Implicit Threat' Mechanism

Abstract

This paper deals with business and workplace management practices under the Post-Fordist production system. In particular, it focuses on firms’ ever-increasing search for flexibility – that is, ways of rapidly adjusting their activities to meet contingent business needs. This kind of flexibility is paramount in a system in which demand for goods and services is competition is incessantly pushing firms to reduce production costs. In these circumstances, firms have not only changed their production methods, but have also adopted new techniques of workforce management, significantly different from those which characterized the Fordist or Taylorist production systems. These techniques are challenging traditional categories of both employment law and industrial relations, which were constructed and construed with reference to the Fordist–Taylorist workplace.

Keywords: Labor Market Flexibility, Italian Labor Market, Relational Contracts Theory, Transaction Costs Theory, Temporary Working Contracts

JEL Classification: K31, K00, J40