‘Flexibility’ only pretends to be a ‘universal principle’ of economic sanity, one that applies in equal measure to both the demand and the supply side of the labour market. The sameness of the term conceals its sharply different substance on each side of the divide. Flexibility of the demand side means freedom to move wherever greener pastures beckon, leaving the refuse and waste spattered around the last camp for the left-behind locals to clean up; above all, it means freedom to disregard all considerations except such as ‘make economic sense’. What looks, however, like flexibility on the demand side, rebounds on all those cast on the supply side as hard, cruel, impregnable and unassailable fate: jobs come and go, they vanish as soon as they appeared, they are cut in pieces and withdrawn without notice while the rules of the hiring/firing game change without warning – and there is little the job-holders and job-seekers may do to stop the see-saw. And so to meet the standards of flexibility set for them by those who make and unmake the rules –to be ‘flexible’ in the eyes of the investors – the plight of the ‘suppliers of labour’ must be as rigid and inflexible as possible – indeed, the very contrary of ‘flexible’: their freedom to choose, to accept or refuse, let alone to impose their own rules on the game, must be cut to the bare bone.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman