Flexible employment contracts: an international comparison.

Summary The back cover states: "To satisfy a pressing demand for flexibility, the "standard" full-time, open-ended employment contract has given way to a multiplicity of "atypical" contracts. The resulting fragmentation of situations and ever-increasing complexity, often described as a problem of "labor market segmentation," is a source of inequality and leads to the disappearance of the protections attached to standard contracts. This malaise is not a French exception. The flexibility of labor relations has become part of the labor contracts of many legal systems: subsidized contracts, apprenticeship contracts, internship contracts, casual contracts, and, among the most atypical, "zero hours" contracts, "mini-jobs" and, among the most recent inventions, the employee-shareholder contract. By proposing an international comparison of the law of flexible employment contracts, this book reveals their impact on the individual and collective rights of workers and shows how, throughout the world, different legal systems are striving, with varying degrees of vigor, to reconcile flexibility and employee rights."