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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Employment relations in advanced, post-industrial democracies have become increasingly insecure and uncertain as the risks associated with work are being shifted from employers and governments to workers.
Arne L. Kalleberg examines the impact of the liberalization of labor markets and welfare systems on the growth of precarious work and job insecurity for indicators of well-being such as economic insecurity, the transition to adulthood, family formation, and happiness, in six advanced capitalist democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Spain, and Denmark. This insightful cross-national analysis demonstrates how active labor market policies and generous social welfare systems can help to protect workers and give employers latitude as they seek to adapt to the rise of national and global competition and the rapidity of sweeping technological changes. Such policies thereby form elements of a new social contract that offers the potential for addressing many of the major challenges resulting from the rise of precarious work.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Overview of the Book
Part I Theoretical Foundations
1 The New Age of Precarious Work
Precarious Work: Theoretical Foundations
Explaining the Recent Rise of Precarious Work
Causes and Consequences of Precarious Work: A Conceptual Model
Summary and Conclusions
Notes
2 Social Welfare Protection and Labor Market Institutions
Classifying Institutional Differences Among Countries
Varieties of Liberalization of Social Welfare Protection and Labor Market Systems
Worker Power Resources
Labor Force Demography
Social Welfare Protection Policies
Labor Market Institutions
Summary and Conclusions
Notes
Part II Manifestations of Precarious Work
3 Nonstandard Employment Relations
Employment Relations
Nonstandard Work Arrangements
Temporary Work
Involuntary Part-Time Work
Summary and Conclusions
Notes
4 Job Insecurity
Objective Job Insecurity
Perceived Job Insecurity
Summary and Conclusions
Notes
Part III Dimensions of Well-Being
5 Economic Insecurity
Earnings Quality and Inequality
Low-Wage Jobs
Poverty
Social Wages
Economic Instability
Perceived Economic Insecurity
Summary and Conclusions
Notes
6 Transition to Adulthood and Family Formation
Transitions to Adulthood
Gaining a Foothold in the Labor Force
Family Formation
Summary and Conclusions
Notes
7 Subjective Well-Being
Measuring Subjective Well-Being
Country Differences in Subjective Well-Being
Summary and Conclusions
Notes
Part IV Responses to Precarious Work and Lives
8 Politics and Policies of Precarious Work
Protests and Politics
New Employment Relations, New Risks
Elements of a New Social and Political Employment Accord
Implementing a New Social and Political Accord
Summary and Conclusions
Notes
Conclusion
Plausible Futures
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Figures
1.1 Conceptual model
2.1 Union density and collective bargaining coverage, 1980, 2010, and 2013
2.2 Private and public mandatory social expenditures (% of GDP), 1980, 2004, and 2011
2.3 Public expenditures on active labor market policies (% of GDP), 1985, 2004, and 2011
2.4 Employment protections: regular and temporary workers, 1985 and 2013
3.1 Percentage of workers in temporary employment, 1985, 2007, and 2014
3.2 Percentage difference between temporary workers and permanent workers in the probability of having received employer-sponsored training, 2012
3.3 Transitions from temporary employment to permanent employment: share of temporary employees in year t who transit to a permanent job in year t+1, 2007, 2012, and 2013
3.4 Percentage of workers in involuntary part-time employment, 2000, 2007, and 2014
4.1 Average job tenure for men aged 30–50, 1992 and 2014
4.2 OECD labor market insecurity, 2007 and 2013
4.3 Perceived job insecurity, 2004 and 2010
4.4 Effect of temporary employment on perceived job insecurity, 2004 and 2010
4.5 Perceived job insecurity concerns and unemployment rates, 2005 and 2015
5.1 OECD earnings quality, 2005 and 2012
5.2 Poverty rate (50 percent of median household income, post-taxes and transfers), 2000 and 2011
5.3 Economic well-being indices, 2007–2008
5.4 Perceived economic insecurity, 2004 and 2010
6.1 Percentage of young workers (15–24) unemployed, 1985, 2007, and 2015
6.2 Percentage of young people (15–24) not in employment, education, or training (NEET), 2007 and 2012
6.3 Predicted probability of marriage by work–school measures, Japanese men and women
7.1 Life satisfaction, 2016
7.2 Perceived subjective well-being, 2004 and 2010
7.3 Effect of job insecurity and economic insecurity on subjective well-being, 2004 and 2010
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Precarious Lives
Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies
Arne L. Kalleberg
polity
Copyright © Arne L. Kalleberg 2018
The right of Arne L. Kalleberg to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0653-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kalleberg, Arne L., author.Title: Precarious lives : job insecurity and well-being in rich democracies / Arne L. Kalleberg.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017050804 (print) | LCCN 2017054523 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509506538 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509506491 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509506507 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Precarious employment--Social aspects--Developed countries. | Job security--Social aspects--Developed countries. | Manpower policy--Developed countries. | Public welfare--Developed countries.Classification: LCC HD5858.D43 (ebook) | LCC HD5858.D43 K35 2018 (print) DDC 331.25/96--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050804
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Acknowledgments
How institutions and cultures shape labor markets has been a recurring theme in my research for many years. So too have been the topics of how political, economic, and social forces influence employment relations and individuals’ well-being. The concept of precarious work brings together all these themes and provides a narrative of how institutional and cultural forces have transformed employment relations and impacted individuals and families. These topics are both timely and important for debates in economic sociology; the sociology of work, occupations, and organizations; and the study of social stratification and inequality; to name only a few of the many areas of research for the questions raised by the new age of precarious work. The consequences of precarious work also underscore political and policy issues that need urgent action by governments, business, and workers.
In writing this book, I have benefitted from the advice and feedback of many colleagues and friends, who have been generous in sharing their knowledge. I owe a special debt to the Russell Sage Foundation for providing me with a year’s residency as a Visiting Scholar in 2016–17. There, I had the opportunity to work intensively on the book and receive very helpful feedback and advice from the other scholars and staff (and great lunches!).
My arguments were honed from the feedback I received from numerous presentations at seminars and conferences. In the United States, at: Columbia University; Duke University; Emory University; University of Hawaii; University of Michigan; New York University; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of Oklahoma; Princeton University; and Vanderbilt University; as well as at the Russell Sage Foundation and meetings of the American Sociological Association. At international venues: Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan; Alliance Manchester Business School, United Kingdom; Carlos II University of Madrid, Spain; Chung-Ang University, Republic of Korea; National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, Russia; Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen, Norway; Said Business School, Oxford, United Kingdom; Seoul National University, Republic of Korea; University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji; and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), Germany; as well as at annual conferences of the International Working Party on Labour Market Segmentation (in Athens, Greece and in Manchester, United Kingdom); and of the 8th Nordic Working Life Conference, in Tampere, Finland.
I was also fortunate to have been able to persuade colleagues to give me critical and constructive reviews on parts of the book. I am especially grateful to the extensive comments and incisive critiques by Heidi Gottfried, John Stephens, and Steve Vallas.
I am also indebted to many others who gave me helpful feedback and suggestions on various portions of the book, including: Kenneth (Andy) Andrews, David Brady, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Duncan Gallie, Kevin Hewison, Hande Inanc, Larry Liam Ching Liu, Sophie Moullin, John Myles, Jill Rubery, Michael Schultz, Guy Standing, and Leah Vosko. I also thank the reviewers for Polity (Harriet Bradley, Mary Brinton, Rachel Dwyer) for their perceptive and helpful comments. I owe special thanks to Galo Falchettore and Michael Schultz for their great help with the figures presented in the book. I also thank Jonathan Skerrett, my editor at Polity, whose combination of vision, persistence, and constructive feedback encouraged me to write this book and kept its completion on track.
Finally, I am grateful to my wife Judith. Her good sense and humor have been constant sources of support for more than a half-century. Together, we have experienced many of the changes that I’ve written about in this book. The era of precarious work presents new challenges for the young, and so we must look to them. In that spirit, I dedicate the book to my grandchildren: Elise, Margit, Jack, and Morgan.
Arne L. KallebergUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Abbreviations
AfD
Alternative for Germany
CME
coordinated market economy
DPJ
Democratic Party of Japan
DPP
Danish People’s Party
EPL
employment protection legislation
ESS
European Social Survey
GDP
gross domestic product
IEWB
Index of Economic Well-Being
ISSP
International Social Survey Programme
LDP
Liberal Democratic Party of Japan
LME
liberal market economy
NEET
not in education, employment, or training
NGO
non-governmental organization
OECD
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
PRT
power resources theory
SER
standard employment relationship
SMEs
small and medium-sized enterprises
TANF
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
UBI
universal (or unconditional) basic income
UI
unemployment insurance
VoC
varieties of capitalism
WVS
World Values Survey
Introduction
Recent news reports and observations by social scientists have revealed some alarming facts about work and workers in various rich democracies. Here is a sampling:
More than 40 percent of young people in Europe are caught in a cycle of low-paid, temporary jobs, leaving them with feelings of being excluded from society as well as suffering from severe stress, depression, and persistent self-doubts about their abilities and possibilities for the future, along with increasing the ranks of the working poor in Europe. Since 2012, just 20 percent of temporary workers have been able to find full-time jobs (Alderman 2017).
A Gallup survey of employed US adults, aged 18 or older, found that about a third of them in 2013 were worried about being laid off, more than twice the number in 2008 (Saad 2013). This has raised alarms since enduring job insecurity and the associated stress have stronger negative effects on poor health than smoking or hypertension and can lead to coronary heart disease and cancer (Parramore 2012).
Forty-five percent of United States residents do not have enough income to cover basic expenses, plan for college and other important life events, or save for unexpected health bills and other emergencies, according to a recent report. In addition, over half of children in the US live in families that do not earn enough to obtain economic security (Rich 2011).
At least one million Japanese today – most commonly young adults and more often men than women – are socially withdrawn and live a tenuous existence. Called
hikikomori
, these individuals often remain in a single room disconnected from contact with others. A dramatic action by one who was detached from family and friends was committed by a 25-year-old temporary worker who was afraid he had lost his job and distressed by his job insecurity and precarious existence: he killed seven random people in the summer of 2008 in the Akihabara electronics district of Tokyo (Allison 2013: 3).
In Tokyo’s Hibiya Park, 500 temp workers set up a tent village to protest the worsening of their precarious existence after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, thereby raising public awareness of the dire living conditions experienced by the growing numbers of precarious workers in Japan (Gottfried 2015: 112).
In Japan, men who have non-regular, insecure jobs are only half as likely as regular workers to get married, since women disdain marrying these
furita
men (i.e., those with non-regular jobs) because they regard them as being unable to fulfill their obligations to provide economic security for the household (Allison 2013: 33).
In South Korea, non-regular workers called public attention to the insecurity and oppressive nature of their jobs by demonstrating on top of factory chimneys, atop a 50-metre-high power transmission tower, on a bridge over the Han River, and on the roof of the National Assembly. Non-regular workers also staged a strike lasting more than five years as well as engaged in hunger strikes, hair shaving, and even suicide (Shin 2013: 350).
More than 60 percent of Italians aged 18 to 34 are still living with their parents and a third of these are in their early thirties, which is three times the number in 1983 (
Daily Mail
2010), giving rise to their being labeled
bamboccioni
or “big babies.” Moreover, 37 percent of men aged 30 in Italy today have never lived away from home. In Spain, 80 percent of youth under 30 still lived with their parents in 2015 (
The Local.es
2016). In the United States, almost a third of young adults aged 18 to 34 lived with their parents in 2014, the highest rate since the Great Depression (Haynie 2016).
The relative frequency of news coverage related to economic uncertainty was higher in January 2017 than at any previous time in the two decades during which the index has been computed, and was more than three times the average level of uncertainty during these two decades, according to the Global Economic Policy Uncertainty Index. This index is based on the archives from major newspapers in eighteen countries representing more than two-thirds of the global economy (Rampell 2017).
EuroMayDay has become an annual event to protest the growing insecurities resulting from transformations in work. First held in Milan, Italy, on May 1, 2001, this yearly happening has since spread to dozens of European cities and to Asian countries such as Japan, and has attracted hundreds of thousands of people to the streets to call attention to the plight of millions of vulnerable workers and migrants who are subject to exploitation and discrimination in these countries.
These examples illustrate some of the consequences of the rise of precarious work in modern societies. By “precarious work” I mean work that is uncertain, unstable, and insecure and in which employees bear the risks of work (as opposed to businesses or the government) and receive limited social benefits and statutory entitlements (Vosko 2010; Kalleberg and Hewison 2013; Breman and van der Linden 2014). Precarious work has emerged as a serious challenge and a major concern in the contemporary world. It has widespread consequences not only for the quantity and quality of jobs, but also for many other outcomes, whether non-work individual (e.g., mental stress, poor physical health, uncertainty about educational choices), family (e.g., delayed entry into marriage and having children), or broader social (e.g., community disintegration and disinvestment). Moreover, precarious workers’ insecurities and fears have spilled over into forms of protest that call for political responses to address these concerns.
While work has always been to some extent precarious, especially for more vulnerable groups in the population such as women and minority men, there has been a recent rise in precarious work especially for majority men in rich, democratic, post-industrial societies. The growth of precarious work has also accelerated the exclusion of certain groups from economic, social, and political institutions, such as when people are unemployed for long periods of time, left outside systems of social protections, and disenfranchised from voting and participation in the political process.
The upsurge in precarious work in some rich democracies (such as the United States) began in the mid-to-late 1970s and 1980s, while it occurred a bit later in others. In all cases, the consequences of precarious work were exacerbated by the global economic crisis of 2008–9. Pressures on governments to implement policies of fiscal austerity and welfare state reorganization accompanied – and are partly responsible for – the rise in precarious work, as countries have struggled to respond to weakening financial situations and an increasingly fragile global economy. These developments have created challenges for state policies and for businesses and labor as they strive to adapt to the changing political, economic, and social environment. This also raises important questions for social scientists seeking to understand the sources of these changes in employment relations and their likely consequences for workers, their families, and societies.
The recent rise of precarious work is associated with major economic shifts in the global economy and, as is common in major transitions, has created a great deal of uncertainty and insecurity. Governments and businesses have sought to make labor markets more flexible to compete in an increasingly competitive world economy. This has also led to the retrenchment of welfare and social protection systems in many countries and to a reconfiguring of the relationships between national and local levels of government and between public and private providers of social welfare protections. This has shifted the risks and responsibility for many social insurance programs to individuals and families.
Why has there been a rise in precarious work in rich democracies, with their high standards of living and privileged positions in the world economy? How and why do people experience precarious work differently in countries with dissimilar institutions and cultures? This book addresses these puzzles as it describes and explains how institutions and politics have shaped precarious work and its impacts on individuals and their families in rich democracies.
I argue that while the growth of precarious work is common to these rich democracies, its incidence and consequences differ depending on the countries’ social welfare protections and labor market institutions. Relations between the state and markets are central to explanations of differences among employment relations, and hence to variations in the experience of precarious work. Social welfare protections and labor market institutions, in turn, result from a country’s political dynamics (Sabel 1982) and the power resources and relations among the state, capital, labor, and other civil society actors and advocacy groups (such as non-governmental organizations [NGOs]) that shape the degree to which workers can protect themselves and their families from the risks associated with work and flexible labor markets. Moreover, cultural variations in social norms and values – such as those underlying the gender division of labor, whether families are characterized by dual earners or a male breadwinner–female homemaker model, and the importance placed on equality and the desirability of collective as opposed to individual solutions to social and economic problems – help to generate and legitimate a country’s institutions and practices. Work and employment relations are also shaped by the demography of a country’s labor force, such as its age distribution and patterns of immigration.
I develop and demonstrate my thesis about the impacts of social welfare protections and labor market institutions on precarious work and its consequences by comparing six rich democracies: Denmark, Germany, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These six countries represent diverse models of capitalism: social democratic nations (Denmark); coordinated market economies (CMEs; Germany, Japan); Southern Mediterranean economies (Spain); and liberal market economies (LMEs; the United Kingdom and United States). These countries differ in their employment and social welfare regimes and exemplify the range of ways in which institutional, political, and cultural factors affect precarious work and its outcomes. They also typify dissimilar responses of governments, employers, and workers to the macrostructural economic, political, and social factors driving the growth in precarious work and creating pressures for greater austerity and reorganizations among welfare and labor market institutions.
Studying precarious work and its consequences for individuals and their families is both timely and urgent. Rising insecurity and austerity have led to a variety of protests, ranging from mass mobilizations (such as Occupy), to confrontations with governments and businesses sponsored by traditional unions, to more stable social movements based on identity groups such as immigrants, race/ethnic groups, and gender. The consequences of precarious work have also inspired populist political movements in all these countries, with accompanying threats to democracy. Coming as it does after years of relative stability and prosperity, the recent rise of precarious work and the rollback of workers’ hard-won gains during the post-World War II period also raises the menace of desperate actions by anxious people, such as by young adults who see little hope for the future. For these reasons, the recent rise of precarious work – along with its impacts on well-being – raises pressing political and policy issues that constitute a call to action on the part of governments, business, and workers.
Fortunately, the negative consequences of precarious work are not inevitable, as technology, globalization, or other inexorable forces do not determine them. Labor market and social welfare protection institutions are subject to the control of political actors, and, as I show in this book, some countries have been able to address the consequences of precarious work more successfully than others by re-establishing and expanding social safety nets, managing labor market transitions more effectively, and implementing social and economic reforms that are targeted at the needs and choices of increasingly diverse labor forces.
Research that examines how political, economic, and social institutions affect labor market outcomes and inequality typically makes trade-offs between specificity and generality. Some studies of precarious work and its consequences have tended to focus on specific countries, regions, or occupations and thus have been unable to assess how differences in a variety of macro-level structures and institutions affect these processes. Other studies compare relatively large numbers of countries, using typologies to distinguish distinct types that often gloss over important differences between countries within a given kind of employment or welfare regime.
My approach in this book, by contrast, is to consider a small number of countries that represent diverse models of capitalism. This strategy complements the more detailed and broadly comparative investigations of these countries, as it enables me to drill down on the features that may be distinctive to countries. By combining in-depth discussions of the labor market and social welfare contexts of these countries with quantitative empirical information on the extent of precarious work and indicators of well-being, I can observe the variability in precarious work and its consequences in these rich democracies.
The book provides evidence about precarious work, its relationship to social, economic, and political institutions, and its consequences for economic and non-economic forms of inequality. The book is not intended as a research monograph that furnishes detailed empirical analyses of these issues. Rather, I aim to offer an overview of the diversity associated with precarious work and its consequences and, by so doing, to identify key policy interventions needed to address precarious work and the actions on the part of social and political actors that could implement them. I also seek to contribute to the expanding body of empirical research by social scientists about how political, economic, and social institutions affect labor market outcomes and inequality.
Overview of the Book
I develop my argument about the rise of precarious work and its consequences for various aspects of well-being in rich democracies in four parts.
The first part provides the theoretical foundations for explaining precarious work and outlines the major differences among the six countries in their social welfare and labor market institutions and policies. Chapter 1 discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of precarious work and summarizes the reasons for its recent rise in rich democracies. The chapter also sketches the conceptual model that I use in subsequent chapters to examine how countries differ in precarious work and its consequences. This model is a multi-level one, linking macrostructural institutions and policies to mesostructural features of employment relations and microstructural outcomes for individuals and their families.
Chapter 2 summarizes how countries differ in their social welfare protection and labor market policies. People in countries with more generous social welfare benefits are likely to be more secure both in their jobs and in their economic situations. Two significant labor market policies are active labor market policies that are designed to help working-age people obtain jobs and transition from unemployment to employment; and employment protection laws and regulations that denote the extent to which employment of regular workers is protected and the use of temporary workers is restricted by labor and other laws. Country differences in these social welfare and labor market policies result from the political dynamics underlying employment relations, especially the degrees to which workers can obtain collective power resources and align with political parties to advance their interests (e.g., Huber and Stephens 2001).
The second part of the book looks at country differences in the manifestations of precarious work. Chapter 3 provides an overview of common indicators of precarious work: nonstandard work arrangements such as temporary and involuntary part-time work. I show that the incidence of temporary work is relatively low in the LMEs of the United Kingdom and United States, which have few employment protections and whose labor markets have historically been flexible. By contrast, precarious work (especially temporary work among young people) is relatively high in Spain, with its high levels of employment protections and fewer restrictions on the use of temporary work.
Chapter 4 discusses various objective and subjective indicators of job insecurity, which is the most direct individual-level expression of precarious work. I show that active labor market policies as well as high degrees of worker power (reflected in high union density and collective bargaining coverage) all tend to reduce objective and perceived job insecurity.
The third part examines country dissimilarities in three dimensions of well-being: economic insecurity; the transition to adulthood and family formation; and subjective well-being. Chapter 5 looks at country differences in economic insecurity, including earnings inequality, low wages and poverty, social wages, economic instability, and perceived economic insecurity. Variations in social welfare protection institutions and policies play a major role in explaining why countries differ in these components of economic insecurity.
Chapter 6 discusses how the difficulties faced by young people in finding stable, regular jobs impede their ability to gain a foothold in the labor force and to establish career narratives that enable them to form their own families. Youth unemployment is particularly high in Spain, with its high levels of employment protection that relegates young workers to temporary jobs. Difficulties establishing families are especially pronounced in Japan, with its male breadwinner–female homemaker family model and rigid markers of the transition to adulthood.
Chapter 7 considers country differences in subjective well-being, an overall indicator of the quality of life. The generosity of social welfare protections, along with high levels of active labor market policies, enhances subjective well-being in a country.
The final part of the book summarizes some of the responses to the rise of precarious work. Chapter 8 discusses the protests generated both “from below” by workers and social movements and by government policies enacted “from above” to try to address the negative consequences of precarious work. I also outline the elements of a new political and social contract between workers and their employers and government that has the potential to collectivize the risks raised by precarious work and the kinds of actions that are needed to implement such a contract.
The conclusion summarizes the main findings of the book and speculates on possible future scenarios for employment relations.
Part ITheoretical Foundations
1The New Age of Precarious Work
[I]t is the insecurity of the present and uncertainty about the future that hatch and breed the most awesome and least bearable of our fears. (Zygmunt Bauman 2007: 26)
[T]he more work relations are “deregulated” and “flexibilized,” the faster work society changes into a risk society incalculable both in terms of individual lives and at the level of the state and politics, . . . one future trend is clear. For a majority of people, even in the apparently prosperous middle layers, their basic existence and lifeworld will be marked by endemic insecurity. (Ulrich Beck 2000: 3)
Though it may start in one place, precarity soon slips into other dimensions of life. Insecurity at work, for example, spreads to insecurity when paying bills, trying to keep food on the table, maintaining honor and pride (in one’s community or head of household), finding the energy to keep going. It is not only a condition of precarious labor but a more general existential state – a state where one’s human condition has become precarious as well. (Anne Allison 2013: 9)
These quotations speak to a widespread concern about the lack of predictability, uncertainty, and insecurity in work, the family, and society that characterize rich democracies. Much of this insecurity and uncertainty is rooted in precarious work, which has far-reaching consequences for people’s lives.
In this chapter, I provide an overview of precarious work and reasons for its recent rise in post-industrial capitalist democracies. I argue that precarious work is an increasingly important aspect of employment relations that has pervasive effects on job and economic insecurity, the transition to adulthood, family formation, and overall well-being. My conceptual model identifies ways to study empirically the manifestations and consequences of precarious work. I also provide an overview of how and why countries are likely to differ in the incidence and consequences of precarious work.
Precarious Work: Theoretical Foundations
Two general theoretical perspectives underlie social science studies of precarious work (see Kalleberg and Vallas 2018). The first, largely contributed by economic and organizational sociologists, uses the term “precarious work” to denote the many and various forms of work that may not be “new” but are redefined by employers and used by them in new contexts of production and in ways that cheapen the cost of labor, increase employers’ flexibility, reduce the permanent workforce, shift employment risks to workers, and, perhaps not coincidentally, reduce labor’s capacity for organization. As a general way of referring to the risks and insecurities connected to the complexities of contemporary work arrangements, the notion of precarious work offers advantages over commonly used but more specific designations, such as the dichotomies between formal and informal or standard and nonstandard work.
Precarious work arrangements include a variety of ways in which individuals are connected to work and employment, all of which are generally uncertain and often lack social protections. Major types of precarious work arrangements include: temporary work; contract work (comprising both independent contractors and employees of contract companies); involuntary part-time work; irregular and casual employment; and own-account self-employed persons (those who are classified as self-employed and do not have any employees themselves). The varied terms used to describe these types of precarious work include: contingent work; non-regular work; atypical work; market-mediated work arrangements; alternative work arrangements; nontraditional employment relations; flexible staffing arrangements or work practices; vulnerable work; disposable work; and new forms of employment.
The idea of precarious work is of course not new. It was intimately related to Marx and Engels’s notion of a reserve army of labor, which was integral to Marx’s critique of capitalism in Volume I of Capital. Indeed, Marx referred to the proletariat as a class that was typified by precariousness. The recent emergence of the emphasis on precarious work dates to the European responses in the 1950s and 1960s to poverty and low-wage work, though it became linked to politics through the radical Italian Autonomia movement, which emphasized the idea of precarious work as part of its analysis of the changes in production that led to new working-class politics based on the idea of immaterial labor (i.e., services that are not material goods) (Hewison 2016). It grew in prominence in the early 2000s as a rallying and organizing cry for social movement struggles, especially in Western Europe (Neilson and Rossiter 2005; Casas-Cortés 2009), where workers felt increasingly vulnerable to the consequences of neoliberal economic reforms that demanded the implementation of more flexible labor markets. Feeling deserted by unions and devalued by businesses, and struggling with a shrinking welfare system, Europeans began to organize around the concept of precarious work, which denoted a situation of living and working without stability or safety net. The concept of precarious work then spread to the United States, the industrial countries of East Asia (e.g., Japan, Korea, Taiwan), Australia, and elsewhere, as all these countries have undergone similar pressures for greater labor market flexibility and the resulting transformation of work and employment relations.
Precarious work, especially as conceptualized by European social scientists, has a normative bias that suggests a negative set of affairs (Mitropoulos 2005). It is often seen as a loss of social protections or other benefits associated with the so-called standard employment relationship (SER) that were once provided by employers or governments (e.g., Stone 2012; Adams and Deakin 2014). This defines precarious work against a normative state of affairs that departs from the post-World War II norm of secure employment with an employer, in which work is done full-time, full-year, on the employer’s premises under his or her supervision, enjoying extensive statutory benefits and entitlements, and having the expectation of being employed indefinitely (see chapter 3 for a fuller discussion of the SER). Precarious work thus falls below socially accepted normative standards by which workers have certain rights and employment protections associated with economic life. Precarious workers lack a secure work-based identity and their jobs provide few benefits and low pay, and offer little hope for advancement to better jobs. Precarious work is also often equated with poor-quality, “bad” jobs and thus has been used as a synonym for poor job quality, highstress jobs and working conditions, and so on. However, job quality is a much broader concept and while bad jobs are usually precarious, equating these concepts detracts from the uncertainty, riskiness, and other features that are distinctive about precarious work.
Viewing precarious work as the shifting of risks to workers regards it as a process – namely a swing in power relations from labor to capital, generally mediated by the state – rather than as a specific condition. For this reason, precarious work is sometimes seen as a useful concept in Europe, the United States, and the more developed countries of Asia, where there have previously been social protections and where the notion of standard work retains some of its normative value. In other countries in Asia (as well as Africa, parts of South America, and other less developed areas of the world), however, where precarious employment has always been the norm, this terminology may be less relevant. Even in many developing economies, though, being locked into precarious work with little opportunity to obtain better and more secure work can also viewed as a loss, in this case, for the chance to obtain the benefits of modernization and development. In these ways, precarious work reflects both changing employment conditions and the loss of conditions held or aspired for.
While linking precarious work to departures from a SER might be reasonable when considering the kinds of rich democracies examined here, it is important to recognize that this view is limited historically and cross-nationally. The SER was never the modal type of work arrangement in any society at any time; it was only slightly realized in advanced industrial countries and was uncommon in other areas of the world. Thus, most of the work relations under Fordism were outside the SER and excluded large groups of the population in these countries, such as women and immigrants, being predicated on the assumption of a male breadwinner–female homemaker model of the family (Neilson and Rossiter 2005). Moreover, wage relations have historically taken many forms besides the SER, such as the cottage industries in pre-industrial economies and in the Third World generally.
Furthermore, the concept of precarious work is not tied to a specific form of employment but encompasses the range of factors that contribute to whether a type of work exposes the worker to employment instability, a lack of legal and union protections, and social and economic vulnerability. Rodgers (1989) was one of the first in the academic mainstream to examine the nature of precarious work, as he identified four major dimensions of precarious work related to the employment relationship: (1) temporal (related to the continuity of employment); (2) organizational (control over work and its scheduling, working conditions); (3) economic (pay); and (4) social (welfare and legal protections). Vosko, MacDonald, and Campbell (2009), among others, extend this definition, incorporating self-employed workers and different forms of work-related insecurity. Building on these and other foundations, I emphasize three key aspects of precarious work.
Work that is
insecure
and
uncertain
, two aspects of the temporal dimension. Job insecurity implies a high risk of job loss and a future orientation characterized by expectations of not being able to find other, comparable jobs. Uncertainty denotes unpredictability on the job, such as having irregular and volatile work schedules, that is rooted in workers’ lack of control over the conditions and terms of work.
Work that provides
limited economic and social benefits
, such as a living wage as well as health insurance or retirement benefits. This also has a temporal component, as precarious workers have little potential for advancement to better jobs and thus the prospects are bleak for improved economic and social rewards.
Work that has limited
statutory entitlements
provided by labor laws, regulatory protection, and labor rights.
1
The extent to which work is precarious depends largely on the power of workers, as I will argue in the next chapter, and so I expect these three dimensions of precarious work to be generally positively interrelated. In cases where workers have high levels of collective market power, for example, they are likely to be able to pressure employers and governments to provide work that is relatively secure, well-paying, and protected by regulations and rights. This is especially likely during periods of high economic growth that are accompanied by high demand for labor, a situation that tends to enhance the power of workers. By contrast, in cases where workers have little power or control, jobs are apt to be characterized by high levels of precarious work on all three of these dimensions.
A second, broader, theoretical perspective on precarious work is that adopted by many foremost contemporary social science thinkers, who have used a more general ontological concept of precarity to describe a new phase of capitalism characterized by a lack of predictability or security. In their view, precarity results from forces such as globalization, rapid technological advances especially in information and communication, and political and economic policies related to the neoliberal revolution characterized by privatization, deregulation (and re-regulation) of markets, and a continued decline in the power of labor relative to capital.
This broad view of precarity was coined by Pierre Bourdieu (1998: 85), who saw précarité as a new form of domination in contemporary capitalism that is a permanent state designed to force workers to submit to their exploitation. He saw precarity as transforming society and as the root of problematic social issues in the twenty-first century that required the strengthening of the nationstate to combat.
In a similar vein, Giddens (1991) saw “reflexive modernization” as creating an “ontological insecurity” in social life, or an increased awareness of risk and insecurity that is largely produced by modern science and technological advances. Beck (1992, 2000) too maintained that rapid technological change and features of modern society such as global terrorism and the rise of radical Islam, economic crises and political decisions to promote austerity, climate change, and turbulence in financial markets have created a second age of modernity and a new political economy of insecurity, or a “world risk society” that is characterized by precarity, in which, among other things, work in developed countries of the West will increasingly take on the features usually associated with the informal economies of developing countries, which he termed the “Brazilianization of the West” (Beck 2000). He argued that this second modernity – typified by growing social inequalities, ecological crises, and an increasing individualization of work – represented a shift from the first modernity which took institutional shape in Europe in the post-World War II period and which was centered on paid employment and typified by the standardization of work, full employment, the welfare state, and exploitation of nature.
Moreover, Bauman (2000, 2007) identified a new era of “liquid modernity” whereby globalization, rapid technological change, and growing marketization have undermined the solid, stable institutional structures of work, society, power, and politics. This has led to the destruction of social bonds and unmooring individuals from social institutions, and so modern life is characterized by temporariness, vulnerability, and constant change, making “uncertainty the only certainty.”
Further, Butler (2004) pointed to precariousness as a fundamental condition of life in the post-9/11 era that denotes the shared vulnerabilities that underscore the fragility of human existence. More recently, she argues (2015) that precarious economic conditions are not temporary but a new form of domination over ever-larger portions of the population (cf. Bourdieu 1998). This suggests that we are now observing a new stage in the political economy of modernity, replacing “organized capitalism” (Lash and Urry 1987).
The plight of the persons most affected by globalization and the other macrostructural changes was recently popularized by Standing’s (2011) notion of the “precariat,” a portmanteau word combining “precarious” and “proletariat” that refers to the broad group of people who lack key citizenship rights along with the various forms of security that formed the basis of the World War II citizenship agenda: job, employment, labor market, representation, income, and skill reproduction security. Those most likely to belong to the precariat are the young, women, the old, and immigrants (who are both a major reason for the growth of the precariat and its main victims). The precariat has minimal trust relationships with capital or the state and experiences anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation. Precarity breeds a pessimistic view of life and the future, a loss of individual well-being, and disruptions in the transition to adulthood and family formation as people lack an ordered life plan. As Standing (2011: 24) describes this group:
It [the precariat] is being in a status that offers no sense of career, no sense of secure occupational identity and few, if any, entitlements to the state and enterprise benefits that several generations of those who saw themselves as belonging to the industrial proletariat or the salariat had come to expect as their due.
The broader conception of precarity embraced by the second set of theorists identifies many of the social, economic, political, and cultural forces that have led to a pervasive sense of vulnerability and insecurity in contemporary capitalist nations. Manifestations of precarity are the general anxiety experienced by people resulting from events such as the terrorist attack in the United States on 9/11 and more recent acts of violence in France and other European countries, the specter of climate change, and the disruption produced by rapid technological changes, among many others. The resulting politics of fear that are rooted in these forms of precarity are reflected in the rise of right-wing, anti-immigrant parties and sentiments in countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Nordic countries, and the United States, to name a few.
My arguments about precarious work draw on both of these general theoretical perspectives, which complement each other in important ways. The first, grounded in the dynamics associated with the transformation of employment relations in post-Fordism, provides the conceptual basis for understanding how economic and political factors – such as the spread of neoliberalism – have led to the emergence of precarious work. This perspective also lends itself more to empirical analysis and, as I will show in subsequent chapters, there has been a decline in long-term employment relations and a rise in nonstandard work arrangements of various kinds in the rich democracies, among other indicators of precarious work. By contrast, the writers I have cited who adhere to the second, broader and more abstract, perspective have produced little empirical support for their claims. Nevertheless, this second view is useful as it alerts us to the widespread effects of precarious work on individuals’ well-being and its profound impacts on far-reaching social, economic, and political events. Both theoretical approaches underscore the necessity of comparative research in order to appreciate how macro institutions and structures shape precarious work and its consequences.
Explaining the Recent Rise of Precarious Work
[U]nemployment and underemployment – or, to use the nicer-sounding modern terms, . . . precarious forms of work and income – were historically the rule. (Ulrich Beck 2000: 13)
Why has precarious work become such a focus now, when capitalism has had continual crises and work and life have always been to some extent uncertain and insecure? As I noted in the previous section, precarious work was integral to Marx’s critique of capitalism and work has always been insecure for both capital and most of the population in any society, as noted in the quotation here from Beck. Precarious work existed long before World War II and, while work is more precarious now for some people than it was in the early postwar period (especially for majority-group men in a society), it is undoubtedly less precarious for minority-group men and women than it was before World War II. We should therefore not romanticize about the security and advantages associated with work in the Post-World War II Golden Age of Capitalism, especially for those women and minorities, who have always been more subject to uncertain, insecure, and risky work relations.
The rich democracies that I focus on in this book represent a relatively privileged set of countries. The concept of precarious work means different things in developing and less industrial countries. While I argue that work has become more precarious in rich democracies in recent years, work in these countries is not nearly as precarious as in countries in the developing world and the Global South as well as in pre-industrial times.2
Precarious work is thus an old phenomenon that has re-emerged as a concern in the rich democracies over the past three decades. The latest rise in precarious work is a return to a more “normal” situation that characterized work for much of human history. The shift from the postwar “age of security” to the “age of flexibility” that began in the mid-1970s in the United States (and later in some of the other countries discussed here) can usefully be described by Karl Polanyi’s notion of a “double movement.” In The Great Transformation (1957 [1944]), Polanyi explained the organizing principles of industrial society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in terms of a struggle between unfettered markets and social protections. One side of this double movement was guided by the principles of economic liberalism and laissez-faire that supported the establishment and maintenance of free and flexible markets (i.e., the first Great Transformation in the nineteenth century). The other side of the double movement was dominated by pressures toward establishing social protections to help people cope with the psychological, social, and ecological disruptions that unregulated markets imposed on people’s lives. Precarious work thus ebbs and flows and this has a lot to do with the kinds of social protections and state supports that are available at various time periods.3
The latest upsurge of precarious work in rich democracies was fueled by a variety of macro-economic, political, and sociological forces that challenged the postwar Keynesian institutional structure that emerged in industrial capitalist countries after World War II. This “Second Great Transformation” (e.g., Webster, Lambert, and Bezuidenhout 2008) fundamentally altered the postwar institutional structure of the labor market and transformed the traditional employment relations of the postwar period (see Kalleberg 2009, 2011; Levinson 2016).
