Abstract
Transformation of work as a broad topic has received considerable attention in academic work for several decades. The book Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies contributes to this important and multi-faceted debate by offering an in-depth discussion of a particular aspect of this transformation. The book focuses on the rise of precarious work in advanced capitalist democracies; investigates the drivers of this rise also among workers’ groups that were not previously exposed to non-standard employment and job insecurity; presents evidence of the spread of precarious work; and analyses its impact on broader dimensions of well-being. The book adopts a comparative approach, covering several types of developed political economies: social democratic (Denmark), southern Mediterranean (Spain), coordinated (Germany and Japan), and liberal (United Kingdom and United States). While these types of economies laid different foundations for their social security systems and labour market institutions, the book argues that labour market liberalisation has affected all of them, and that precarious work, in the form of atypical and flexible working arrangements, temporary work, or involuntary part-time work, is on the rise, notwithstanding different economic and societal structures and welfare buffers. In turn, employment conditions have increasingly become insecure and uncertain, and this has further implications for well-being, such as objective and subjective economic insecurity, the transition to adulthood, family formation and happiness. Theoretically grounded in the multi-dimensionality of precarious work and institutional variation in social welfare and labour market institutions across developed democracies, the book also thematises various societal responses to the trend of rising precariousness and its effects on well-being. It examines the extent to which the trend of growing precarity in working life and well-being may facilitate a new social and political accord and enable us to redesign the roles and necessary (policy) responses of the state, employers, workers and civil society.
This argument is developed in several sections of the book, starting with the theoretical foundations of the new age of precarious work and the justification of the countries selected to capture institutional variation across Western democracies. This justification derives from two relevant streams of literature: varieties of capitalism (VoC) and power resources theory (PRT), on the basis that industrial relations, employment systems and labour market institutions have strong parallels in social protection and degrees of inequality (Thelen, 2014). In turn, there is substantial theoretical and empirical overlap between country differences in the coordination of production (as in VoC) and in the degree of egalitarianism and social protection (as in PRT) (p. 37). These foundations should determine how the impact of growing precariousness at work spills over to other dimensions of life and well-being.
The second part of the book provides comparative evidence of how precarious work is manifested along dimensions of non-standard work arrangements and job security across the studied countries. Evidence is contextualised in varieties of specific labour market institutions, such as education and skill formation systems and labour market policies, as well as in labour force demography (changing workforce structure, ageing and immigration), and welfare generosity. This context helps us to understand how and why precarious work has been spreading across the studied countries. The book shows that the incidence of temporary work varies across countries depending on their labour market institutions. For example, while in countries with a high level of employment protection for regular workers (such as Spain) employers are incentivised to create temporary jobs to maintain flexibility (p. 89), in liberal market economies (such as the United Kingdom and the United States) temporary workers are more likely to be able to transfer to permanent jobs. In the latter, temporary jobs may enable workers to develop sufficient skills and enjoy training opportunities. This is a paradox, as countries with stronger employment protection actually reinforce dualisation in the workforce structure, with more protected ‘insiders’ along flexible ‘outsiders’.
The third part of the book takes a closer look at the dimensions of well-being, namely, economic insecurity, transition to adulthood and family formation, and subjective well-being. Demonstrating that economic inequality is lowest in Denmark and Germany and highest in the liberal market economies of the United Kingdom and United States, the book reinforces the consistent argument that social welfare policies and institutions are important in shaping the consequences of precarious work for both objective and perceived economic insecurity (p. 128). In addition, life-course transformations such as entering the job market or establishing a household and family are also shaped by career and training opportunities and job stability in conditions of growing precarious work forms.
The book could have concluded with the above empirically informed argument. However, the author goes even further in offering a discussion of policy and societal responses to rising precariousness and its effect on well-being via electoral politics, labour market policies and the responses of social movements. The author explores whether the converging trend in precarious work, buffered by the institutional foundations of labour markets and welfare systems, resembles a new social and political accord that redefines the roles of the state, workers and employers. This discussion opens up a range of new issues for both academic discourse and policy-oriented research. These include strengthening safety nets, new ways of skill acquisition and education, necessary changes in labour legislation and a new take on flexicurity. The book concludes by summarising the effects of the transformation of work towards more precarious jobs and their impact at the macro, meso and micro-levels, ranging from state policies to the organised responses of stakeholders, such as workers and civil society, to micro-level effects on individuals and families.
Although the book was published in 2018, before the COVID-19 pandemic, the arguments developed by Kalleberg are more important today than ever. The pandemic, coupled with technological advancement, has further facilitated a widescale reconsideration not only of perceptions of standard employment relationships, but also of acceptance of a new normality in distant, hybrid, digital, flexible and atypical forms of work. The pandemic has also uncovered serious skill shortages in some jobs and sectors and redefined perspectives on what is essential work for the economy and society. Acknowledging these recent developments, the arguments developed in Precarious Lives could well serve as a framework and touchstone for a new research agenda on the capability of welfare states and institutional settings to define the new normality of work and jobs, and their convergence across developed democracies in the post-pandemic period.
While the author offers solid empirical grounding for the book’s argument, the manifestations of precarious work and the dimensions of well-being remain rather disparate, not really showing causality or providing an in-depth discussion of the extent to which the changes in well-being are really driven by the changing character of employment in the context of a wide range of societal, political, economic and cultural considerations. Rather than a shortcoming, however, this can be seen as an opportunity to drive new empirical research that would strengthen causal relationships between precariousness and well-being, focusing on post-pandemic labour markets in developed democracies, but also worldwide.
To conclude, the book is a timely and important contribution to the relatively large body of literature on precarious work (see, for example, Choonara et al., 2022). While focusing on the drivers and broader effects of precarious work on well-being, it leaves space for more research on the roles of agency and power resources in understanding why precarious work emerges and how it interacts with other aspects of well-being across different institutional settings. The book by Doellgast et al. (2018) partly does justice to the role of agency and power relations in understanding precarious work and solidarity across relevant stakeholders, but the existing body of literature on precarious work and its institutional and welfare buffers is certainly not exhaustive. Rather, it is gaining even more relevance with technological change, and changing paradigms of work, life, policy and institutions in post-COVID labour markets.