Germany: Precarious employment and the rise of mini-jobs (original) (raw)
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Precarious Employment, Education and Gender: A comparison of Germany and the United Kingdom
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During the last decades most industrialised countries have experienced a massive educational expansion. Corresponding to this development there has been an increase of female employment which is, however, to a large extent part-time. At the same time, the attempts of firms to achieve more employment flexibility -facilitated by government intervention to deregulate the labour market -has contributed to the growth of precarious jobs, such as, fixed-term, (certain types of) part-time jobs and self-employment. This has been true in particular for the United Kingdom.
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2018
This is the first quantitative comparative study that examines the relationship between paid domestic labor and precarious employment on the microlevel. Using the Luxembourg Income Study 2013/2014, it shows that across welfare regimes, domestic workers have a higher probability of working in precarious employment settings compared to other industries. Furthermore, the overlaps of two or more precarious employment settings are significantly more common in domestic work than among other industries in all countries examined. This is an important finding as it proves the high insecurity of the formal domestic labor industry even in countries with specific regulations regarding domestic work.
Social Sciences
This research article presents an empirical model that takes economic vulnerability into consideration to measure and address the phenomenon of precarious work and precariousness. In order to achieve this, three satisfactory indicators were formulated, consisting of both individual and institutional levels and taking into account the country-specific relationships among the variables, depending on country-specific conditions. Based on this, the choice of homeownership is introduced instead of the eligibility for employment benefits. In this way, precarity has been examined as a condition in which precariousness and economic vulnerability intersect and interact. In Cyprus, 9.5% of the workers in Cyprus were classified as precarious, while 4.4% were classified as being in precarity (i.e., precarious and economically vulnerable). The empirical findings revealed that precariousness was related to gender, migration, and the employment sector, which is consistent with the well-known liter...
Conference paper : Job security and precarity in Europe
Workshop on Economic change, unequal life chances and the quality of life (CHANGEQUAL), Mannheim, 10-12 avril, 2003
Team 1 "Skills and the quality of work" WORKSHOP 1 "State of the art" on Economic change, unequal life chances and the quality of life (CHANGEQUAL) Manheim 10-12 avril 2003 1 A survey of the use of the term 'précarité' in the French economics and sociology can be found in (Barbier, 2001). 2 The literature on part-time employment is also already analysed in Section 5 by S. Scherer on the issue of "Work and family". 3 The exact definition is "A job may be regarded as temporary as if it is understood by both employer and the employee that the termination of the job is determined by objective conditions such as reaching a certain date, completion of an assignment or return of another employee who as been temporarily replaced. In the cas of a work of limited duration the condition for its termination is generally mentioned by the contract. To be included in these groups are : a) persons with a seasonal job; b) persons engaged by an employment agency or business and hired out to a third party for the carrying out of a "work mission" (unless there is a work contract of 5 Each survey consists in approximately 1000 face-to-face interviews per member State, except Germany (2000), Luxembourg (600) and United Kingdom (1300, including 300 in Northern Ireland). 6 The oversample (300 respondents per country with the exception of Luxembourg and Northern Ireland) includes unemployed persons and full time housewifes/husband aged 15 years over, however excluding students and retired.
The characteristics of workers on low wages- Research note 9/2015
This Research Note has two main aims. The first is to examine the characteristics of employees with low pay, which is defined in the main part of the study as those with hourly earnings of less than 50% of the average. The second is to compare the EU-SILC with the Labour Force Survey (LFS) as a source of data on the characteristics of the low-paid in order to assess their consistency. This is an important prelude to using the EU-SILC as the basis for examining the extent to which low pay is a major determinant of low household income and, accordingly, the strength of the link between low pay and in-work poverty. Since the LFS covers a much larger sample of households than the EU-SILC, it should be a more reliable source of data on the characteristics of those in employment. A comparison between the two in terms of low-wage earners, therefore, provides a check on the reliability of the EU-SILC data. In order to identify the low-paid in terms of their earnings relative to the average, the data on net monthly earnings reported by the LFS, which is in the form of deciles, is converted into monetary amounts using the EU-SILC, on the implicit assumption that the distribution of earnings according to the two surveys is similar. Earnings are then converted into hourly amounts on the basis of the LFS data on usual hours worked. The characteristics of the low-paid examined consist of gender, age, educational attainment levels, hours of work, the type of employment contract, occupation, sector of activity and country of birth (to reflect migrant background).
What has been analysed in France mainly under the term "précarité de l'emploi" over the past 30 years was mostly dealt with differently in other countries (atypical, non-standard employment). Research on these issues dates back to the 1970s in sociology and institutional economics. More recently some political scientists have endeavoured to link up the labour market theme with developments in systems of social protection and they are talking about "dualism" and "dualization". Despite the constant intellectual investment put into the topic, it is striking that indicators for comparative measurement of the phenomenon have remained rather unsophisticated, as the basic opposition between what Eurostat names "temporary contracts" and "open-ended contracts". On the other hand, because of the spreading of the effects of work and employment flexibilisation into new countries, new categories are appearing since the early 2000s (Prekariat,...
In-work poverty, precarious work and indebtedness. The steady state European equilibrium
Since the establishment of a European strategy to create more and better jobs at the end of '90s (EES – European Employment Strategy), Member States faced many efforts pursuing the target of high percentage of employed persons, target renewed with Europe 2020 strategy. In the same years many citizenship rights, universally recognized, started to be conditioned to the employment status: the " welfarism " was rapidly substituted with " workfare " , with the twin aims of encouraging activation of labour force and-less claimed – of cutting public expenses, especially in social services. In this paper we analyse trends and relations of certain dimension of employment to better understand the sustainability of this approach. We stressed out that in front of asymmetric reduction of unemployment among Member States, the " new " employment is more and more characterized by undermining factors: insecurity, precariousness, poverty. From this point of view, it seems that States pursuing active labour market policies, under a Flexicurity approach, besides a good labour market performance, are still facing with poverty and job insecurity of many workers. So that is even more true if we consider other variables like household indebtedness, the other dangerous drawback of welfare " commodification " processes. There is no one solution, beyond enforce Employment Protection Legislations, Basic income or Minimum wages, but changing the targets of European strategy with more social or qualitative components (e.g. quality of employment) and get over the Flexicurity approach could be a good starting point.