• to enhance the flexibility of the labour market, of work organisation and of collective employment relations,
• to improve job security and social protection, in particular for vulnerable groups within and outside the labour market

• Proactive and deliberate initiative on the part of various political and social actors
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• Developed and implemented in a coordinated and synchronic fashion, that is to say, with the action on flexibility linked to that on security: it is not therefore a question of finding, after the fact, protectionist ripostes to a labour market that has become increasingly flexible. On the contrary, it is a question of anticipating these flexibility constraints by compensating for them through a tailored and complementary form of employee securitisation.
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• Based on an exchange: The concept of flexicurity is based on a “win-win” approach to flexibility, and requires exchanges and compromise between all of the stakeholders. The intention is to depart from a Manichean approach attributing the wishes in terms of flexibility solely to the employers, and the wishes in terms of security exclusively to the employees. Within this view of flexicurity, the two parties are both looking for flexibility and security.
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• Prioritising vulnerable groups within and outside the labour market
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• Centred on moments of transition (between studies and first job, between one job and another, between unemployment and employment, etc.)
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• In search of coherence between forms of flexibility and systems of security: since flexibility and security are multidimensional realities, their connection through the implementation of flexicurity practices assumes a necessary degree of coherence between forms of flexibility and systems of security. Trade-offs must be made in the choice of forms of flexibility and of security to be promoted, so as to ensure correspondence between them.

To illustrate this last point, Wilthagen proposes a matrix for potential combinations of flexibility and security. This matrix, now known as “the Wilthagen matrix”, has a status of heuristic tool for use in the empirical identification of possible interconnections from a perspective of flexicurity strategy development.