Flexibility, quality and competitiveness are all hallelujah words in current debate about national economic per
formance. The achievement of more flexibility or higher quality or greater competitiveness, it is said, will help the
UK become a more successful economy. At the same time increased labour market flexibility and deregulation has
been seen by UK governments since the early 1980s as a means of creating jobs and tackling unemployment. In
following this line the UK government has looked to the North American example, and has suggested on numerous
occasions that overregulation and inflexibility in most European countries' labour markets has worsened unem
ployment. While the record of enhanced labour market flexibility in boosting employment is not the focus of this
article (for details of the debate, see Solow, 1998; Walwei, 1998), this job creation aspect of flexibility is important
because it has coloured discussions of flexible forms of employment in the UK and has often led to our conflating
flexibility with deregulation. As will be argued below, the evidence from Europe in fact suggests that the use of
some forms of flexible employment are not incompatible with relatively high degrees of labour market regulation.
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