From the viewpoint of Scandinavian welfare flexicurity defines what already exists, namely an awareness that equality and efficiency go hand in hand. But the idea of flexicurity introduced in the ‘90s along the lines of neoliberal thought in order to redefine something that already existed, has another direction. It ruptures the "ideology" of the virtuous embrace between efficiency and equality, and affirms the principle of the need to make equality depend on efficiency. Thus a parity relationship is transformed into one of dependency. The welfare measures for the unemployed, conceived within the system of protecting citizens’ earnings, the right to citizenship income asserted by the Danish social system reform in the ‘70s, are re-interpreted in a system of relationships functioning in terms of the requirements of firms.
The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the social costs of this efficiency of the economic system, both for quality as well as dimension; if they are sustainable in a political and cultural context such as in Denmark, characterised by a high level of social discipline and cohesion due to the homogeneity of its population, it is not said that they may easily be reproduced elsewhere.