Precarious Lives

Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies

Arne L. Kalleberg

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509506507, 9781509506491
• eBook ISBN: 9781509506538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

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.

Part I
Theoretical Foundations

1
The 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Theoretical Foundations
• Part II Manifestations of Precarious Work
• Part III Dimensions of Well-Being
• Part IV Responses to Precarious Work and Lives
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement