Providing flexible labour

Practicing flexible working
Advancing employee flexibilization
Working under atypical arrangements

Description

Pursuing a more individual approach to work by employees; or the ability of workers to adjust their labour situation in a flexible and adequate way to their (changing) personal living circumstances. Employees seem to be interesting chiefly in flexible working time, both its length and its adjustment to personal needs.

Context

The regular labour pattern may be defined as having the following characteristics: (a) full-time; (b) working hours between 08:00 and 18:00; (c) employment contract of unlimited duration; (d) function consisting of a limited number of clearly described tasks; (e) fixed or structural wages. Employment contracts are flexible if the duration, the scope and the wages vary in time or between (groups of) employees.

Claim

Better working circumstances have improved the welfare of employees. The role patterns are changing. More and more women are gaining access to the labour market and the number of two-income families is increasing. This has made it possible to choose between leisure and labour. The individual can make a conscious choice between the quantity of time he or she wishes to spend on obtaining a given buying power. Changing patterns of life require new forms of flexible work. In two-person and two-parent families, flexibility may be required in consideration of their private division of roles, such as fetching a child from school or shopping. Single parents and individual workers will present both similar and different preferences for ordering their paid work with their career planning, leisure, family life and other activities.