Negotiating flexibility and security
Authors:   , van Veldhoven Jeroen 
Published: February 2025

The central research question of this dissertation is how (and why) political parties and trade unions have regulated nonstandard employment in the Netherlands between 1964 and 2023. Whereas the empirical objective of this analysis is to increase our understanding of the role of politics in the expansion of alternative work arrangements in the Dutch case, its theoretical goal is to contribute to the academic literature on country-specific variation in labor market segmentation by assessing the explanatory power of theories on party politics and union strategies. I conduct a process tracing analysis based on archival sources to achieve these research goals. Although agency, on-call, and own-account work preceded the second oil shock, I identify this economic crisis as the critical juncture for nonstandard employment development in the Netherlands. High labor costs, increasing interest rates, and decreasing demand pressured the profits and budgets of employers. In response, employers increasingly used alternative work arrangements to cut costs and pass on employment risks. Meanwhile, female labor market participation grew rapidly. Due to the burden of care tasks, scant childcare, tax incentives, and lack of work experience, many mothers who re-entered the labor market had to settle for precarious work arrangements, such as on-call contracts. The combination of inflation and unemployment also put into question the dominant policy paradigm. In the early 1980s, policymakers increasingly advocated supply-side policies in socioeconomic affairs. The supply-side policy paradigm shift particularly affected political preferences and behavior concerning the employment protection of labor contracts and the fiscal treatment of own-account work. Regarding on-call work, however, political support emerged for stricter regulation during the mid-1980s, contradicting the supply-side paradigm. Trade unions were seemingly unaffected by the policy paradigm shift, as they consistently opposed nonstandard employment. Due to concerns about legitimizing nonstandard employment, the largest union confederation, the FNV, did little to represent outsiders between 1976 and 1986. With increasing levels of nonstandard employment, the complete prohibition of alternative work arrangements became less plausible, while the pressure of nonstandard employment on the labor conditions of union members increased and FNV’s passive attitude excluded an ever larger group of labor market outsiders who could mitigate the confederation’s membership losses. These factors moved the FNV to take up outsider representation during the mid-1980s.
Pressures for the deregulation of labor contracts, stricter regulation of nonstandard employment, and the re-regulation of agency work paved the way for the Flexibility and Security Exchange (1996). Traditional power dynamics characterized the negotiations of the agreement, as the traditional representatives of capital and labor in party politics and industrial relations bargained for a compromise. Such dynamics were also typical of the Work and Security Act (2014). In the course of the 2010s, the dominant policy narrative on alternative work arrangements shifted. Increasing concerns about the differences in risks and costs between work arrangements affected attitudes across the political spectrum, particularly impacting the liberal D66 party. Consequently, consecutive cabinets dominated by liberal parties backed ambitious reforms of nonstandard employment regulation, such as the Labor Market in Balance Act (2019).