•Prevalence of employment precariousness is higher among temporary workers.•A positive gradient exists between poor mental health and employment precariousness.•Precariousness among permanent workers ...have stronger impact on poor mental health.•Multidimensional Employment Precariousness Scale is useful for health research.•Monitoring employment precariousness is a priority to reduce health inequalities.
Employment precariousness (EP) has expanded over recent years. The aim of this study is to test the existence of a general precarisation of the Spanish labour market and its association with mental health for different types of contract.
On the subsample of salaried workers from the second Psychosocial Work Environment Survey and using the revised Employment Precariousness Scale (EPRES-2010), we calculated the prevalence of EP and poor mental health for salaried workers. We created six groups of workers according to their levels of EP and types of contract. We used Poisson regressions, stratified by gender, to examine associations between belonging to the different groups of workers and poor mental health.
Although temporary workers had a higher prevalence of EP and poorer mental health than permanent workers, we found that the association with poor mental health was unexpectedly stronger in permanent workers with high precariousness (2.97, IC95% 2.25–3.92 in men and 2.50, 1.70–3.67 in women) than in temporary workers (2.17, IC95% 1.59–2.96 in men and 1.81, 1.17–2.78 in women). A gradient of poor mental health existed by EP score for both men and women and permanent and temporary workers.
The Spanish labour market is highly affected by employment precarisation. Using the multidimensional EPRES is more informative and a better tool for mental health research than type of contract alone. Creating a surveillance system to monitor the magnitude and evolution of EP has to be a priority in order to reduce health inequalities and to evaluate the impact of policies and programs.
Government officials and representatives of corporations and international organisations promoting oil palm argue this crop brings development by creating numerous jobs for the rural poor, even ...through large-scale plantations. This study critically assesses this narrative as deployed in Mesoamerica and analyses oil palm labour regimes in two study regions in Mexico and one in Guatemala where both smallholders and private sector plantations are producing oil palm. Following a political ecology framework, we analyse labour practices as embodied and political, taking into account larger processes of agrarian change. Based on interviews and surveys of producers and field labourers, we found oil palm production was characterised by low employment rates (one job or less for every 10 hectares of land) and flexible labour regimes under which field labourers face uncertain, poorly paid and risky circumstances at work. The palm oil industry defines development narrowly, as access to income without social change, while it profits from contemporary and historical inequalities that have turned young men, many of them indigenous Maya, rural women, and Guatemalan peasants into cheap labour. However, in oil palm production, profit oriented neoliberal arrangements by the private sector clash with a peasant moral economy that emphasise the value of physical labour and smallholder-worker solidarity. Despite being highly profitable, the palm oil industry offers limited livelihood opportunities for field labourers.
•Oil palm provides one job or less per year for every 10 hectares planted with this crop.•Labour for oil palm cultivation is provided by landless peasants (often young indigenous men and sometimes women).•Workers in oil palm production are often hired as casual day labourers.•Neoliberal arrangements by the private sector clash with a peasant moral economy shared by workers and smallholders.•The palm oil industry offers limited opportunities for field labourers.
The mobilisation of new distance-based technologies that permit the governance of platform workers’ behaviour constitutes a watershed in the organisation of work and a transformation of the grammar ...of wage-earning society. Employing a qualitative methodology, this article analyses Spanish riders’ (delivery couriers) experiences of these psychopolitical mechanisms. The results show that the neoliberal and entrepreneurial dispositive deployed by digital platforms induces new rationalities of self-governance that are characterised by productive self-optimisation and self-surveillance. However, the analysis also found that the interpellation of the dispositive and its technologies of subjectivation were not homogeneous across all of the study participants. The article describes the characteristics and argumentative positions of three groups of riders whose sociostructural position shaped their experiences and engagement with the platforms as well as resistance to control mechanisms and disciplinary processes.
The gradual retreat of many governments from actively supporting secure labour relations and social security through welfare arrangements, and the related normalisation of precarious conditions, goes ...hand-in-hand with a promise of the attainability of 'the good life' through work. Workfare programmes are at the centre of this, as they are aimed at 'improving' welfare clients and their position in society through performing precarious work. Based on an ethnographic study of group workshops in three Dutch workfare programmes, this article shows how welfare clients are taught the promise of upward mobility through waged labour and are required to give 'the right' performances that might (in principle if, often, not in practice) potentially enable them to be successful on the post-Fordist labour market. I argue that these workshops function as temporal spaces of imagination in which adherence to the promise of upward mobility through paid work can best be understood as a form of post-Fordist affect, one that enacts, albeit temporarily, a resolution that is frequently lacking in real life.
The Mexican state has been an active agent in the construction of cultural institutions and infrastructure for more than a century. But the symbolic and political currency of the cultural sector is ...not reflected in stable conditions for creative workers who exist precariously. In this article, we explore a manifestation of the simultaneous state of prominence and precarity in procurement regimes implemented by federal government agencies before the Covid-19 crisis, and support programmes from the federal and local government of Mexico City to employ creative workers during the early phases of the pandemic. We examine the content and arguments of these programmes to highlight how cultural policies and institutional structures developed by the government are a continuation, and even a deepening, of the already precarious work opportunities in the cultural sector. Through policy analysis and qualitative interviews, we contrast the officially stated goals of government institutions with the lived experiences of creative workers.
The Austrian Academy of Sciences considerably increasing competition for academic positions/funding as well as managerial control of academic work are two key features of the contemporary university. ...Both developments result in and are amplified by increasing performance pressures and precarious employment. Combined with a vocational work ethic, these neoliberal dynamics are turning the academic profession into an increasingly greedy and (self‐)exploitative endeavour. While allowing employers/funding bodies to ask for much while offering little in return – that is to siphon off the symbolic and economic ‘profit’ generated by academics’ free or under‐paid work – the current working conditions leave early‐career academics in particular in a highly vulnerable position.
Une cupidité insatiable : pression de performance et précarité dans l’université néolibérale
La concurrence accrue pour des postes universitaires et des financements pour la recherche, ainsi que le contrôle de la gestion des travaux universitaires sont deux aspects caractérisant l’université contemporaine. Ces évolutions sont le résultat des pressions croissantes sur les performances et l’emploi précaire et sont amplifiées par celles‐ci. Associées à une éthique de travail professionnel, ces dynamiques néolibérales transforment la profession académique en une entreprise de plus en plus avide dans laquelle on s’exploite. Permettre aux employeurs/organismes de financement de demander beaucoup tout en offrant peu en retour – c’est‐à‐dire de siphonner le « profit » symbolique et économique généré par le travail non ou mal rémunéré des universitaires – implique que les conditions de travail actuelles mettent les universitaires en début de carrière dans une position particulièrement vulnérable.
This article explores how the vulnerabilities of Syrian refugees influence their integration into Turkish labour markets, in particular the agricultural sector. ‘Vulnerable integration’ refers to the ...inclusion of the most vulnerable migrant labour – women and children – in the face of rivalry among different segments of the precariat to obtain existing agricultural jobs. With a focus on intersectional vulnerabilities and the feminisation of precarisation of Syrian labour in Turkey, I aim to highlight the interconnectedness between women’s production and social reproduction. Therefore, I develop a sociological multidimensional dynamic way of thinking about the integration of Syrian refugee labour in Turkey’s seasonal agricultural labour markets.
Feminisms have had a significant impact on social work discussions in Latin America in recent decades. However, the gap between academic discussions and professional practice remains wide. Based on a ...qualitative study that included 69 semi-structured interviews with social workers in Chile, in this article, we focus the analysis on the experiences of women social workers implementing mental health programmes. These are women – professionals facing extremely precarious working conditions – who work with other women who, while below the poverty line, are users of state health policy. The findings suggest that in these highly precarious spaces, the division between professional and the user is blurred, producing what feminist philosopher María Lugones calls ‘liminal space’. Professionals and users establish alliances and practices of resistance from that liminal space to challenge the oppressions they experience. Drawing upon a decolonial feminist perspective, we identify challenges for social work such as problematising professional bonds, incorporating structural readings of precariousness and feminised resistance, and repositioning the value of frontline social workers’ and users’ knowledge. We can learn from these women's experiences that question the deepest foundations of colonial and patriarchal capitalism still present in training and professional practice.
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