Spatial Mismatch, Different Labor Markets and Precarious Employment: The Case of Hong Kong

PurposeRetirement protection has been widely debated in Hong Kong over two decades. The debate about the relationship between social insecurity and retirement protection, and provoked consideration of a choice between a rights-based universal retirement system and means-tested protection for senior citizens are still contested. This study aims to explore the understanding and behaviours of young workers regarding retirement planning, their difficulties and worries with the implementation of providing support for their parents' retirement.Design/methodology/approachThis was an exploratory study to target young workers aged 20–34 years to participate. Qualitative data presented in this study were drawn from 16 young workers. Seven were female and nine were male young workers.FindingsThe research found that young workers who have a relatively low level of income, particularly for non-standard workers and the self-employed, both are likely to find difficulties to contribute to their own retirement planning and their parents' retirement with the emerging problems of job insecurity and instability. Young working people in lower socio-classes have further limited choices and control over their own retirement planning, as well as providing support for their parents' retirement that may cause a breach of intergenerational contract.Originality/valueWith the increasing number of young workers with precarious employment or unemployment, this study has contributed to a shift in views regarding intergenerational contracts, particularly in the need to support other generations of family members in a contemporary Hong Kong society.

Download Full-text

Autonomous precarity or precarious autonomy? Dilemmas of young workers in Hong Kong

The Economic and Labour Relations Review ◽

10.1177/1035304619838976 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 30 (2) ◽

pp. 241-261 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Victor Wong ◽

Tat Chor Au-Yeung

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Career Paths ◽

Complex Relationship ◽

Transitional Stage ◽

Young Workers ◽

Employment Relations ◽

Jel Codes ◽

Precarious Employment ◽

Alternative Pathways ◽

Work And Life

Informed by autonomist perspectives on precarious work and labour subjectivity, this article discusses the dynamics between autonomy and job precarity. Based on purposive sampling, the qualitative findings, drawn from interviews with precarious workers aged 18–29 years in Hong Kong, reveal tensions among four types of aspirations. First, the desire for achieving freedom and individual ambition in work made the respondents critical of the notion of employment-related stability. Second, a determination to break with mainstream career paths empowered young people to take alternative pathways to new modes of work and life. Third, precarious employment was seen as a stepping stone for realising plans for travel or study. Finally, tolerance of precarity was perceived as a transitional stage in their striving for future stability. However, the findings also show the structured dilemmas experienced by young workers regarding the complex relationship between autonomy and precarity in a neoliberal labour market. Some young workers pursued work–life autonomy, constrained by precarious employment relations, acknowledging and bearing the costs, while some strategically used precarity in individual negotiations with employers to realise their goals. This article analyses young workers’ subjectivity through the lenses of autonomy and age and pushes the boundary of precarity studies beyond an implicit dichotomy between determinism and voluntarism. JEL codes: I38, J38, J62

Download Full-text

“The lottery of my life”: Migration trajectories and the production of precarity among Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore's construction industry

Asian and Pacific Migration Journal ◽

10.1177/0117196818780087 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 27 (3) ◽

pp. 249-272 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Grace Baey ◽

Brenda S. A. Yeoh

Keyword(s):

Labor Markets ◽

Construction Industry ◽

Migrant Workers ◽

Labor Migration ◽

Legal Status ◽

Construction Workers ◽

Host Society ◽

Precarious Employment ◽

Employment Conditions ◽

Migration Industry

Within the scholarship on precarity, low-waged contract-based migrants are recognized as centrally implicated in precarious employment conditions at the bottom of neoliberal capitalist labor markets. Precarity as a socially corrosive condition stems from both the multiple insecurities of the workplace as disposable labor, and a sense of deportability as migrant subjects with marginal socio-legal status in the host society. Our study of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore contributes to refining understandings of precarity by approaching labor migration as a cumulative, intensively mediated process, whereby risks and vulnerabilities are compounded across different sites in migrants’ trajectories, even as they enact themselves as mobile, aspiring subjects. As a condition-in-the-making, precarity is experienced and compounded, through a continuum beginning in pre-migration indebtedness, multiplying through entanglements with the migration industry, and manifesting in workplace vulnerabilities at destination. It is most finely balanced when predictability and planning yield to arbitrary hope.

Download Full-text

Exit strategy or exit trap? Basic income and the ‘power to say no’ in the age of precarious employment

Socio-Economic Review ◽

10.1093/ser/mwaa002 ◽

2020 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Simon Birnbaum ◽

Jurgen De Wispelaere

Keyword(s):

Labor Markets ◽

Effective Strategy ◽

Basic Income ◽

Exit Strategy ◽

Precarious Employment ◽

Exit Option ◽

Exit Trap

Abstract An increasingly influential claim is that exit-based empowerment through an unconditional basic income offers the cornerstone of an effective strategy for supporting precarious workers in contemporary labor markets. However, it is plausible to assume that supporting the ‘power to say no’—to avoid or leave unattractive jobs—will empower precarious workers only to the extent that it offers the basis of a credible exit threat. In this article, we argue that a basic income-induced exit strategy amounts to a hollow threat. In light of a realistic understanding of how labor markets operate and how the opportunities of disadvantaged workers are presently structured, we show that the basic income-centered exit option can easily become an exit trap rather than an empowered fallback position.

Download Full-text