Title: Can flexicurity make ethical sense? The 'terceisation function' as a moral lever for inter-organisational employment schemes

Authors: Virginie Xhauflair; François Pichault

Addresses: LENTIC, HEC Management School, University of Liège, Boulevard du Rectorat, 19, B51, 4000 Liège, Belgium; GREGOR, Sorbonne Graduate Business School, University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, 21 rue Broca, 75240 Paris Cedex 05, France. ' LENTIC, HEC Management School, University of Liège, Boulevard du Rectorat, 19, B51, 4000 Liège, Belgium; ESCP-Europe, 79, avenue de la République, 75543 Paris cedex 11, France

Abstract: An employers' alliance (EA) is a group of employers who team up to hire and share workers. It is presented as 'flexicurity in action', in other words, as a tool allowing employers and workers to find new win-win compromises at the company level. Even when motivated by the best of intentions and with all pre-conditions fulfilled, implementing such a new inter-organisational employment scheme might end in failure. We will describe such a failure with the help of a case study showing how employers considered the EA scheme as a possible solution for the informal multi-activity of their staff. We then explore some of the reasons for the failure in implementation and describe how a supporting third party function, which we call the terceisation function, could help the process to succeed and the EA to evolve towards a more equitable and sustainable flexicurity scheme.

Keywords: flexicurity; employer alliances; labour pool; workforce pooling; terceisation; third parties; inter-organisational employment; work innovation; labour market flexibility; employee security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWI.2012.047985

International Journal of Work Innovation, 2012 Vol.1 No.1, pp.65 - 78

Published online: 17 Sep 2014 *

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