Employment Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

For nearly half a century, jobs have become increasingly characterized by employment insecurity. We examined the implications for sleep disturbance with cross-sectional data from the European Working Conditions Survey (2010). 24,553 workers between the ages of 25 and 65 in 31 European countries were asked to indicate whether they suffered from “insomnia or general sleep difficulties” in the past 12 months. We employed logistic regression to model the association between employment insecurity and sleep disturbance for all countries combined and each individual country. For all countries combined, employment insecurity increased the odds of reporting insomnia or general sleep difficulties in the past 12 months. Each unit increase in employment insecurity elevated the odds of sleep disturbance by approximately 47%. This finding was remarkably consistent across 27 of 31 European countries, including Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. These results persisted with adjustments for age, gender, immigrant status, household size, partnership status, number of children, child care, elder care, education, earner status, precarious employment status, workplace sector, workplace tenure, and workplace size. Employment insecurity was unrelated to sleep disturbance in 4 European countries: Malta, Poland, Portugal, and Romania. Our research continues recent efforts to reveal the human costs associated with working in neoliberal post-industrial labor markets. Our analyses contribute to the external validity of previous research by exploring the impact of employment insecurity across European countries.