Labour Market Flexibility in the UK: Regional Variations and the Role of Global/Local Forces

Despite the interest in the issue of labour market flexibility, there is markedly little research attempting to measure, let alone evaluate, the extent to which flexible labour arrangements have penetrated labour relations in the UK and elsewhere. One of the implications of this is that little is known about the specific forms that labour market flexibility takes across and within each country. Given this, it comes as little surprise that the discussion about the link between globalization and flexibility has remained largely theoretical, with only a few references to usually incidental anecdotal evidence. This article exploits a unique set of labour market flexibility indicators that have been developed at the regional level for the UK over the period 1979-98 and examines empirically the relationship between globalization and flexibility. Through a spatial-temporal exploratory analysis, significant patterns of geographical and functional specialization (in levels and types of flexibility) are identified and then related to local structural factors and demand conditions and to global influences. Global forces are found to have played a significant role for the patterns observed. The implications of this finding are discussed in the concluding section.