FLEXIBILITY AND JOB CREATION POLICIES BARIŞ KILIÇ

wages and non-wage costs have a direct impact on employment growth.

reforms in labor legislation are promoted to increase the level of flexibility both at the beginning and at the end of the employment relationship.

What is new is the way these reforms are presented : they appear as employment promotion measures, as an instrument to promote the insertion in the labor market, as alternatives to traditional passive measures related to social protection of the unemployed.

This demand for flexibility is based on the promise that labor regulations upset the correct and efficient operation of general economy, of the management of enterprises and of labor market itself. According to this position, the labor market would be more effi­cient in the presence of less regulation, lower labor costs and, why not, less trade union power. This position obviously ignores other factors of no less importance : first, the posi­tive effects of labor regulation on economic performance and on social cohesion sec­ond, the lack of probative evidence of a direct correlation between the regulation of labor and unemployment levels in any given national system (because each econoy’s ability to create jobs does not ile in the labor market but in the general market instead)

labor law, without giving up its original function of protecting both work and the worker, must be much more watchful to the market and to the enterprise, in order to not impede job creation. Labor law is used as an instrument of economic policies, in order to reach certain economic objectives and job creation goals.

This new balance has been translated into a large number of diverse legislative measures: a more favourable attitude towards temporary work either fixed-term contracts or work through a temporary help agency; a complete set of new, flexible rules governing working time,

. A review of the regulation of firm re- structuring and collective dis­missal. Suppressing limits or applying old rules in a new way to extend the margin of managerial prerogatives

Labor law has always been open to the economic situation, as well as very reactive to the equilibrium of power between the actors in the industrial relations system

most of the basic elements of our discipline are still evident: - legal protection -freedom of association and of collective bargaining, -special labor courts and procedures, -public systems of social protection. -But it also true that some new corrective factors have been introduced in these elements well, in the common direction of strengthening managerial powers and reducing statutory protection of individual workers, some times with the balancing aspect of some stronger control by trade unions or workers representative bodies. The general objective of employment creation has altered,thus, even the most intimate and crucial principles of labor law, those which identify it as a distinctive branch of legal order.

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