Disability and Precarious Work

This chapter examines the prevalence, causes, and consequences of precarious work among people with disabilities. New US evidence from the government’s Current Population Survey, and reviews of prior studies, show that workers with disabilities are more likely than those without disabilities to be in precarious jobs. This is explained in part by many people with disabilities choosing precarious jobs due to the flexibility these jobs can provide. Other people with disabilities, however, face prejudice and discrimination in obtaining standard jobs and must resort to taking precarious jobs with less security, lower pay and benefits, little or no training and opportunities for advancement, and few, if any, worker protections. Workers with disabilities tend to have worse outcomes on these measures than workers without disabilities in every type of employment arrangement. The disability pay gap is higher in precarious jobs than in full-time permanent jobs. The mixed evidence suggests that precarious jobs create good employment outcomes for some workers with disabilities but bad outcomes for others. While continued efforts are needed to decrease barriers to traditional employment for people with disabilities, efforts are also needed to bring higher pay and greater legal protections to precarious workers, which would especially benefit workers with disabilities.

Walking on broken glass: gender as predictor of job precariousness among young people in Spain

Previous evidence reveals that socioeconomic factors, such as contract duration, occupation, activity sector, age, training, nationality, marital status or gender, lead to precariousness. This research looks into the intersectionality of inequalities in order to explain the impact of precariousness among young people based on gender. Data from the Spanish Labor Force Survey (EPA) from 2005 to 2016 has been analyzed using logistic regression and hierarchical segmentation. Results suggest that the economic crisis has widened the gender gap in precarious jobs, such that currently, young women are more likely to face precarious situations as compared to young men.

The ‘Gender Face’ of Job Insecurity in France: An Individual- and Organizational-Level Analysis

Admittedly, women have a more precarious situation on the job market than men, which would suggest that they feel more insecure. However, literature on subjective job insecurity (JI) is contradictory about the effect of gender on JI. This could be explained by both individual characteristics and labour market gendered segregation – the companies in which women and men work do not have the same characteristics, particularly in terms of strategy and workforce management. Previous literature on JI rarely addresses this phenomenon. We propose to better understand the ‘gender face’ of subjective JI combining individual and organizational characteristics. We utilize data from the 2017 REPONSE survey and generalized linear models, notably multi-level models. Our findings reveal that, although women hold more precarious jobs, they work in more protective organizations. Consequently, while women report an average lower level of JI, this difference disappears when controlling for individual and organizational variables.

Academic identities and sense of place: A collaborative autoethnography in the neoliberal university

Neoliberalism, precarious jobs, and control of work have multiple effects on academic identities as our allegiances to valued social groups and our connections to meaningful locations are challenged. While identities in neoliberal universities have received increasing research attention, sense of place has passed unnoticed in the literature. We engage with collaborative autoethnography and contribute to the literature in two ways. First, we show that while academic identities are put into motion by the neoliberal regime, they are constructed through mundane constellations of places and social entities. Second, we elucidate how academic identities today are characterized by restlessness and how academics use place and time to find meaning for themselves and their work. We propose a form of criticism to neoliberal universities that is sensitive to positionalities and places and offer ideas on how to build shared understandings that help us survive in the face of neoliberal standards of academic “excellence.”

Labor market effects of a work-first policy for refugees

This study estimates the labor market effects of a work-first policy aimed at speeding up the labor market integration of refugees. The policy added new requirements for refugees to actively search for jobs and to participate in on-the-job training immediately upon arrival in the host country, Denmark. The requirements were added to an existing policy that emphasizes human capital investments in language training. The results show that the work-first policy speeded up entry into regular jobs for men, but they find work in precarious jobs with few hours. Long-run effects are uncertain since the policy crowds out language investments but raises enrollment in education. The policy had no or very small effects for women, which is partly explained by a lower treatment intensity for women.

The Legacy of the Heisei Era, 1989–2019

During the three decades that have passed since Japan’s huge financial crash in 1990, the country has been politically stable and its geopolitical circumstances have barely changed. But it has seen fundamental economic and social changes which have left it vulnerable: the move from a relatively young population to be the world’s oldest society, with total population shrinking every year since 2010; the move from being an economic growth champion to a relative laggard, with slow annual productivity growth; the transformation of the Bank of Japan from being an economic disciplinarian to being the enabler of a huge public debt and financing public spending by printing money; the emergence of a deeply divided, dual labour market in which two-fifths of the workforce are in lowly paid, precarious jobs with little skill development; a decline in the rate of marriage and of fertility; and yet simultaneously a dramatic narrowing of the gender gap in tertiary education as female entry into four-year university courses grew remarkably during the 1990s and 2000s. This leaves Japan with eroding male human capital, increased insecurity, and under-employed female human capital.