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The globalization of economic activity is leading to upheavals in the world of work, creating new demands for productivity and adaptability in an increasingly deregulated labor market. The global employment situation looks grim: worldwide, about 150 million persons are actually unemployed (ie, seeking or available for work but unable to find it). 1 “Flexibility” in the job market has been proposed as a prerequisite for economic competition and also as a solution to current high unemployment rates. 2 While there is little agreement about what is meant by flexibility, the capacity of employers to ensure labor’s rapid adaptation to lowering wages, arduous working conditions, or displacement by new technology, including job loss, is typically implied by most definitions.

Conspicuous among the different types of flexibility has been the growth of atypical employment or underemployment, with reduced job security (eg, home …