Labour 'flexibility' is always a relation of class struggle. Historically, such flexibility has sometimes provided a bargaining weapon against capitalist work-discipline. Since the 1980s, however, labour has been newly flexibilised to intensify its exploitation. Often called casual labour or precarité, this flexploitation imposes insecurity, indignity and greater discipline (Gray, 1995).
As a cutting edge of neoliberalism since the mid-1970s, the British state disorganised and decomposed the industrial working class which had characterized the Fordist-Keynesian era. It impo…
