The paper analyses the relationship between life and working times and the transformations that have occurred in the passage from the Fordist, post-Fordist to today’s «globalised» society. The main contradictions that stem from the requirements for hyper-flexibility of working hours (synchronisation and desynchronisation, relocation of temporal rigidity and life quality, uncertainty, market risk and precariousness, the need for emergent security and the crisis of the system of guarantees) are listed. The matter of temporal flexibility is placed in relation to the other three dimensions of work flexibility: functional, numerical, wage. Some policy-making implications are developed from the concept of sustainable flexibility.only subscribers can see the full article