Glancing at the Past: An Agreement for the Markets of XXIst Century

The European Framework Agreement on Fixed-term Work signed by ETUC-UNICE-CEEP on 18 March 1999, represents a significant example of how European Governments and social parties are trying to regulate the new phenomena that are continuously evolving by using a juridical instrumentation which in many aspects is antiquated. Efforts are being made to govern the logic of the so called ‘new economy’ with rules and juridical principles which have been shaped by looking at the reality of the models of organisation in the fordist taylorist vein, when the confines of the State and those of the market still coincided. From this point of view, taking into consideration the radical changes that are characterising all western economies, the difficulties that face the supra-national actors are not so different from those that face the actors at the national or local level. At the European level, in reality, the task of the institutions called to regulate the labour markets of the XXIst Century is made even more complicated, not to mention, uncertain by the often denounced fragility of the European decision making process as regards the topic of labour.