Post on 20-Dec-2015
description
The Competitiveness of the Nordic Countries – from flexicurity to mobication
The report argues that high labour mobility and a flexible education system directly
supported by government policies may be crucial for the competitiveness and future
prosperity of the Nordic countries. In recent years, flexicurity has emerged as a central
concept in the debate on how regulation of work and welfare could ensure consistency
between supply and demand of labour.
However, the current crisis has shown that the positive effects of the so-called
Danish flexicurity model can be questioned. Furthermore, other dynamics ensuring high
levels of employment seem to be present. For instance the development in policy formulation
- especially at the European level - suggests that tomorrow's competitive advantage depends
on the ability to ensure a high labour mobility through comprehensive and flexible
educational systems. It is this relationship between mobility and education that we
term mobication. The term implies that skills are systematically used to promote mobility
within and between labour markets. Mobication assume that tomorrow's job openings will be
even more changeable and unpredictable than today. This emphasises the challenge of
combining a flexible labour market with a high level of security for employees. Flexibility
must ensure that employees are moving to where the job openings are. In the flexicurity
debate the security aspect has been focused on the possibility to obtain various forms of
benefits if one is made redundant. Mobication suggests that security primarily comes from
continuous education and training, meaning that the individual employee will have access to
further training and/or re-skilling in all stages of working life. The overall aim is to obtain
fewer and shorter periods of unemployment for each employee, in spite of restructuring,
introduction of new technologies, plant closures, etc. In this sense mobication is an attempt to
further develop the Danish flexicurity model.