flexicurity means A welfare state model with a proactive labour market policy, combining easy hiring and firing (flexibility for employers) and high benefits for the unemployed (security for the employees). Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 93 out of 100.
Why this word is great
FLEXICURITY — [Noun] A socio-economic model that couples flexible labor laws, easing hiring and firing, with robust state-provided income security and retraining, aiming to reconcile market dynamism with worker welfare. Its etymology is a blend of the English words flexibility (from Latin flexibilis, "pliant") and security (from Latin securitas, "freedom from care"), coined in the 1990s by Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen. Unlike deregulation, which strips away rules with no promise of a net, or job security, which clings to the permanence of a single post, flexicurity is a calculated societal bargain: stability is detached from the employer and vested in the citizen. It is the impersonal efficiency of a severance package processed online, the government-funded classroom where a laid-off worker learns to code, and the unemployment office that functions as a bustling depot for redeployment—a systemic attempt to make precariousness feel like possibility, where the only permanent thing is the safety net.
noun
- A welfare state model with a proactive labour market policy, combining easy hiring and firing (flexibility for employers) and high benefits for the unemployed (security for the employees).