Abstract
Sociologist Arne Kalleberg has probably done more than anyone else to popularize the notion of precarious work in the US academy: I count two books (not including this one) and eight scholarly articles since 2009 with “precarious” in their titles on his CV. But this past oeuvre, along with most research on precarious work, focuses on one country at a time. (His valuable co-edited special issue and book on precarious labor in Asia are collections of single-country analyses.) So Precarious Lives, a comparison of labor precarity in six wealthy countries, marks a welcome advance. Kalleberg compares work in Denmark, Germany, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, examining the extent and forms of precariousness along with its consequences for workers, their families, and society. The author’s main argument is that context matters, or as he more artfully puts it, “The extent and consequences of precarious work depend on social contexts such as a country’s social, legal, and welfare social protections.”
Precarious work is by construction a relative concept (precarious compared to some standard), and Precarious Lives is a model and a guide of how to think about this concept across countries, which in turn helps us to use it more analytically in any one country. Kalleberg’s analysis shines in the five empirical chapters that form the core of the book, in which he characterizes the employment systems of each country (Chapter 2), lays out the major indicators of job precarity (Chapters 3 to 4), and explores the broader impacts of precarious work on people’s lives (Chapters 5 to 7). Comparing six countries in depth can be a bit like juggling chainsaws, but he deftly identifies the main features of each country, keeps descriptions brief, and fashions a narrative that is brisk and lucid (aided by extensive use of charts). For those with a more technical bent, Kalleberg does provide difference-in-means tests and a small number of regression results, but he presents those results in chart format digestible by a general readership so that they become an aid rather than an obstacle to the book’s flow.
This discussion succeeds both in spotlighting important contrasts and in painting a big picture of how work is changing across the global North. Often, the spotlight’s targets make total sense once Kalleberg explains them. For example, it is not surprising—once pointed out to us—that the United States and the United Kingdom have lower rates of temporary agency employment than do the other countries, precisely because in those two countries, job security in the vast bulk of jobs is minimal, giving employers an avenue for flexibility without hiring temps. Or, that the collateral life damage from precarious work is far less in Denmark, whose “flexicurity” system combines less stable jobs with a sturdy safety net, than in other countries—especially Japan, where the main social security system has historically been long-term employment with a single employer. At the same time, on the big-picture end of the spectrum, the book’s portraits of the six countries offer a very useful general introduction to the employment relations and social welfare systems of each country, which I know I will be referring back to even when my interest is unrelated to labor precarity itself. Note that the comparisons in these chapters link those institutional differences to varying objective employment outcomes and also link both institutions and employment outcomes to broader life outcomes (such as young people’s ability to build independent lives and form families) and to subjective perceptions of economic security and well-being.
The first and last substantive chapters likewise have numerous merits yet, in my view, run into more problems—conceptual in Chapter 1, editorial in Chapter 8. Chapter 1 theorizes precarious work and offers a multifactor explanation of the rise of precarity in rich countries in recent decades. Kalleberg rightly points out that what he calls labor precarity was the norm worldwide for most of capitalism’s lifetime, that it has remained the norm in countries outside the North, and that even when a section of the working class escaped precarious work in a subset of countries, other workers in those same countries remained marginalized in precarity. Even so, the renewed expansion of precarious work in countries such as the six in Precarious Lives is a momentous reversal. In the Introduction, the author’s criteria for precarity specify “work that is uncertain, unstable, and insecure,” in which “employees bear the risks of work . . . and receive limited social benefits and statutory entitlements,” a widely shared definition. So far so good. But the definition becomes less clear as the book proceeds. In Chapter 1, precarious work expands to include “work that provides limited economic and social benefits” (emphasis added). Thus, when Chapter 5, “Economic Insecurity,” discusses wage levels, it is not obvious whether Kalleberg is presenting low wages as a defining characteristic of precarity, a common characteristic of precarious work defined otherwise, or an additional contextual element in describing work in the six countries. Including this element does not diminish the value of his empirical comparisons, but a sharper definition could have more effectively distinguished precarious work from a broader conception of “bad jobs”—a distinction Kalleberg endorses in Chapter 1.
Chapter 8 offers a discussion of the politics surrounding precarity and the policies to address precarious work. Every part of this chapter makes valuable points—particularly relevant to this US reader is the observation that growing precarity is felt most acutely by groups of workers who were previously most protected, notably prime-age, native-born males from the most favored ethnic groups. The empirical chapters that precede this one are taut and fast-moving, yet this chapter runs long and feels long, distracting from the chapter’s insights. In addition, Kalleberg’s even-handed presentation of how the left and right have responded to precarious labor across the six countries leaves unanswered the question of the likely economic and employment effects of the left’s social democratic proposals as opposed to the right’s nationalist, protectionist, and often openly racist policies.
Despite my criticisms, I am convinced that Precarious Lives should become, and will become, the leading monographic analysis of precarious work. It achieves significant conceptual advances over Kalleberg’s 2011 Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, itself a groundbreaking book on work in the United States in particular and that introduced many US readers to the notion of precarious work. The six-country comparative frame makes it clear that shifts such as neoliberalism, financialization, and globalization pushed work in a precarious direction across a wide range of wealthy countries. But even more important, the comparison allows Kalleberg to demonstrate that across varied aspects of work, the extent, forms, and consequences of labor precarity vary systematically depending on the country’s employment and social welfare institutions. This set of analyses provides us with tools to understand what is distinctive about each country’s experience, what policy leverage points hold promise for addressing precarity, and what possibilities exist for political movements to achieve policy changes. Though Kalleberg acknowledges in his Conclusion that given today’s economic and political landscape “it is relatively easy to envision a variety of dystopian [employment] futures,” he ends the book on a note that, even if not fully optimistic, urges us to use what we have learned to build a more optimistic future for work.