How institutions and cultures shape labor markets has been a recurring theme in my research for many years. So too have been the topics of how political, economic, and social forces influence employment relations and individuals’ well-being. The concept of precarious work brings together all these themes and provides a narrative of how institutional and cultural forces have transformed employment relations and impacted individuals and families. These topics are both timely and important for debates in economic sociology; the sociology of work, occupations, and organizations; and the study of social stratification and inequality; to name only a few of the many areas of research for the questions raised by the new age of precarious work. The consequences of precarious work also underscore political and policy issues that need urgent action by governments, business, and workers.

In writing this book, I have benefitted from the advice and feedback of many colleagues and friends, who have been generous in sharing their knowledge. I owe a special debt to the Russell Sage Foundation for providing me with a year’s residency as a Visiting Scholar in 2016–17. There, I had the opportunity to work intensively on the book and receive very helpful feedback and advice from the other scholars and staff (and great lunches!).

My arguments were honed from the feedback I received from numerous presentations at seminars and conferences. In the United States, at: Columbia University; Duke University; Emory University; University of Hawaii; University of Michigan; New York University; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of Oklahoma; Princeton University; and Vanderbilt University; as well as at the Russell Sage Foundation and meetings of the American Sociological Association. At international venues: Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan; Alliance Manchester Business School, United Kingdom; Carlos II University of Madrid, Spain; Chung-Ang University, Republic of Korea; National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, Russia; Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen, Norway; Said Business School, Oxford, United Kingdom; Seoul National University, Republic of Korea; University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji; and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), Germany; as well as at annual conferences of the International Working Party on Labour Market Segmentation (in Athens, Greece and in Manchester, United Kingdom); and of the 8th Nordic Working Life Conference, in Tampere, Finland.

I was also fortunate to have been able to persuade colleagues to give me critical and constructive reviews on parts of the book. I am especially grateful to the extensive comments and incisive critiques by Heidi Gottfried, John Stephens, and Steve Vallas.

I am also indebted to many others who gave me helpful feedback and suggestions on various portions of the book, including: Kenneth (Andy) Andrews, David Brady, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Duncan Gallie, Kevin Hewison, Hande Inanc, Larry Liam Ching Liu, Sophie Moullin, John Myles, Jill Rubery, Michael Schultz, Guy Standing, and Leah Vosko. I also thank the reviewers for Polity (Harriet Bradley, Mary Brinton, Rachel Dwyer) for their perceptive and helpful comments. I owe special thanks to Galo Falchettore and Michael Schultz for their great help with the figures presented in the book. I also thank Jonathan Skerrett, my editor at Polity, whose combination of vision, persistence, and constructive feedback encouraged me to write this book and kept its completion on track.

Finally, I am grateful to my wife Judith. Her good sense and humor have been constant sources of support for more than a half-century. Together, we have experienced many of the changes that I’ve written about in this book. The era of precarious work presents new challenges for the young, and so we must look to them. In that spirit, I dedicate the book to my grandchildren: Elise, Margit, Jack, and Morgan.

Recent news reports and observations by social scientists have revealed some alarming facts about work and workers in various rich democracies. Here is a sampling:

• More than 40 percent of young people in Europe are caught in a cycle of low-paid, temporary jobs, leaving them with feelings of being excluded from society as well as suffering from severe stress, depression, and persistent self-doubts about their abilities and possibilities for the future, along with increasing the ranks of the working poor in Europe. Since 2012, just 20 percent of temporary workers have been able to find full-time jobs (Alderman 2017).
• A Gallup survey of employed US adults, aged 18 or older, found that about a third of them in 2013 were worried about being laid off, more than twice the number in 2008 (Saad 2013). This has raised alarms since enduring job insecurity and the associated stress have stronger negative effects on poor health than smoking or hypertension and can lead to coronary heart disease and cancer (Parramore 2012).
• Forty-five percent of United States residents do not have enough income to cover basic expenses, plan for college and other important life events, or save for unexpected health bills and other emergencies, according to a recent report. In addition, over half of children in the US live in families that do not earn enough to obtain economic security (Rich 2011).
• At least one million Japanese today – most commonly young adults and more often men than women – are socially withdrawn and live a tenuous existence. Called hikikomori, these individuals often remain in a single room disconnected from contact with others. A dramatic action by one who was detached from family and friends was committed by a 25-year-old temporary worker who was afraid he had lost his job and distressed by his job insecurity and precarious existence: he killed seven random people in the summer of 2008 in the Akihabara electronics district of Tokyo (Allison 2013: 3).
• In Tokyo’s Hibiya Park, 500 temp workers set up a tent village to protest the worsening of their precarious existence after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, thereby raising public awareness of the dire living conditions experienced by the growing numbers of precarious workers in Japan (Gottfried 2015: 112).
• In Japan, men who have non-regular, insecure jobs are only half as likely as regular workers to get married, since women disdain marrying these furita men (i.e., those with non-regular jobs) because they regard them as being unable to fulfill their obligations to provide economic security for the household (Allison 2013: 33).
• In South Korea, non-regular workers called public attention to the insecurity and oppressive nature of their jobs by demonstrating on top of factory chimneys, atop a 50-metre-high power transmission tower, on a bridge over the Han River, and on the roof of the National Assembly. Non-regular workers also staged a strike lasting more than five years as well as engaged in hunger strikes, hair shaving, and even suicide (Shin 2013: 350).
• More than 60 percent of Italians aged 18 to 34 are still living with their parents and a third of these are in their early thirties, which is three times the number in 1983 (Daily Mail 2010), giving rise to their being labeled bamboccioni or “big babies.” Moreover, 37 percent of men aged 30 in Italy today have never lived away from home. In Spain, 80 percent of youth under 30 still lived with their parents in 2015 (The Local.es 2016). In the United States, almost a third of young adults aged 18 to 34 lived with their parents in 2014, the highest rate since the Great Depression (Haynie 2016).
• The relative frequency of news coverage related to economic uncertainty was higher in January 2017 than at any previous time in the two decades during which the index has been computed, and was more than three times the average level of uncertainty during these two decades, according to the Global Economic Policy Uncertainty Index. This index is based on the archives from major newspapers in eighteen countries representing more than two-thirds of the global economy (Rampell 2017).
• EuroMayDay has become an annual event to protest the growing insecurities resulting from transformations in work. First held in Milan, Italy, on May 1, 2001, this yearly happening has since spread to dozens of European cities and to Asian countries such as Japan, and has attracted hundreds of thousands of people to the streets to call attention to the plight of millions of vulnerable workers and migrants who are subject to exploitation and discrimination in these countries.

These examples illustrate some of the consequences of the rise of precarious work in modern societies. By “precarious work” I mean work that is uncertain, unstable, and insecure and in which employees bear the risks of work (as opposed to businesses or the government) and receive limited social benefits and statutory entitlements (Vosko 2010; Kalleberg and Hewison 2013; Breman and van der Linden 2014). Precarious work has emerged as a serious challenge and a major concern in the contemporary world. It has widespread consequences not only for the quantity and quality of jobs, but also for many other outcomes, whether non-work individual (e.g., mental stress, poor physical health, uncertainty about educational choices), family (e.g., delayed entry into marriage and having children), or broader social (e.g., community disintegration and disinvestment). Moreover, precarious workers’ insecurities and fears have spilled over into forms of protest that call for political responses to address these concerns.

While work has always been to some extent precarious, especially for more vulnerable groups in the population such as women and minority men, there has been a recent rise in precarious work especially for majority men in rich, democratic, post-industrial societies. The growth of precarious work has also accelerated the exclusion of certain groups from economic, social, and political institutions, such as when people are unemployed for long periods of time, left outside systems of social protections, and disenfranchised from voting and participation in the political process.

The upsurge in precarious work in some rich democracies (such as the United States) began in the mid-to-late 1970s and 1980s, while it occurred a bit later in others. In all cases, the consequences of precarious work were exacerbated by the global economic crisis of 2008–9. Pressures on governments to implement policies of fiscal austerity and welfare state reorganization accompanied – and are partly responsible for – the rise in precarious work, as countries have struggled to respond to weakening financial situations and an increasingly fragile global economy. These developments have created challenges for state policies and for businesses and labor as they strive to adapt to the changing political, economic, and social environment. This also raises important questions for social scientists seeking to understand the sources of these changes in employment relations and their likely consequences for workers, their families, and societies.

The recent rise of precarious work is associated with major economic shifts in the global economy and, as is common in major transitions, has created a great deal of uncertainty and insecurity. Governments and businesses have sought to make labor markets more flexible to compete in an increasingly competitive world economy. This has also led to the retrenchment of welfare and social protection systems in many countries and to a reconfiguring of the relationships between national and local levels of government and between public and private providers of social welfare protections. This has shifted the risks and responsibility for many social insurance programs to individuals and families.

Why has there been a rise in precarious work in rich democracies, with their high standards of living and privileged positions in the world economy? How and why do people experience precarious work differently in countries with dissimilar institutions and cultures? This book addresses these puzzles as it describes and explains how institutions and politics have shaped precarious work and its impacts on individuals and their families in rich democracies.

I argue that while the growth of precarious work is common to these rich democracies, its incidence and consequences differ depending on the countries’ social welfare protections and labor market institutions. Relations between the state and markets are central to explanations of differences among employment relations, and hence to variations in the experience of precarious work. Social welfare protections and labor market institutions, in turn, result from a country’s political dynamics (Sabel 1982) and the power resources and relations among the state, capital, labor, and other civil society actors and advocacy groups (such as non-governmental organizations [NGOs]) that shape the degree to which workers can protect themselves and their families from the risks associated with work and flexible labor markets. Moreover, cultural variations in social norms and values – such as those underlying the gender division of labor, whether families are characterized by dual earners or a male breadwinner–female homemaker model, and the importance placed on equality and the desirability of collective as opposed to individual solutions to social and economic problems – help to generate and legitimate a country’s institutions and practices. Work and employment relations are also shaped by the demography of a country’s labor force, such as its age distribution and patterns of immigration.

I develop and demonstrate my thesis about the impacts of social welfare protections and labor market institutions on precarious work and its consequences by comparing six rich democracies: Denmark, Germany, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These six countries represent diverse models of capitalism: social democratic nations (Denmark); coordinated market economies (CMEs; Germany, Japan); Southern Mediterranean economies (Spain); and liberal market economies (LMEs; the United Kingdom and United States). These countries differ in their employment and social welfare regimes and exemplify the range of ways in which institutional, political, and cultural factors affect precarious work and its outcomes. They also typify dissimilar responses of governments, employers, and workers to the macrostructural economic, political, and social factors driving the growth in precarious work and creating pressures for greater austerity and reorganizations among welfare and labor market institutions.

Studying precarious work and its consequences for individuals and their families is both timely and urgent. Rising insecurity and austerity have led to a variety of protests, ranging from mass mobilizations (such as Occupy), to confrontations with governments and businesses sponsored by traditional unions, to more stable social movements based on identity groups such as immigrants, race/ethnic groups, and gender. The consequences of precarious work have also inspired populist political movements in all these countries, with accompanying threats to democracy. Coming as it does after years of relative stability and prosperity, the recent rise of precarious work and the rollback of workers’ hard-won gains during the post-World War II period also raises the menace of desperate actions by anxious people, such as by young adults who see little hope for the future. For these reasons, the recent rise of precarious work – along with its impacts on well-being – raises pressing political and policy issues that constitute a call to action on the part of governments, business, and workers.

Fortunately, the negative consequences of precarious work are not inevitable, as technology, globalization, or other inexorable forces do not determine them. Labor market and social welfare protection institutions are subject to the control of political actors, and, as I show in this book, some countries have been able to address the consequences of precarious work more successfully than others by re-establishing and expanding social safety nets, managing labor market transitions more effectively, and implementing social and economic reforms that are targeted at the needs and choices of increasingly diverse labor forces.

Research that examines how political, economic, and social institutions affect labor market outcomes and inequality typically makes trade-offs between specificity and generality. Some studies of precarious work and its consequences have tended to focus on specific countries, regions, or occupations and thus have been unable to assess how differences in a variety of macro-level structures and institutions affect these processes. Other studies compare relatively large numbers of countries, using typologies to distinguish distinct types that often gloss over important differences between countries within a given kind of employment or welfare regime.

My approach in this book, by contrast, is to consider a small number of countries that represent diverse models of capitalism. This strategy complements the more detailed and broadly comparative investigations of these countries, as it enables me to drill down on the features that may be distinctive to countries. By combining in-depth discussions of the labor market and social welfare contexts of these countries with quantitative empirical information on the extent of precarious work and indicators of well-being, I can observe the variability in precarious work and its consequences in these rich democracies.

The book provides evidence about precarious work, its relationship to social, economic, and political institutions, and its consequences for economic and non-economic forms of inequality. The book is not intended as a research monograph that furnishes detailed empirical analyses of these issues. Rather, I aim to offer an overview of the diversity associated with precarious work and its consequences and, by so doing, to identify key policy interventions needed to address precarious work and the actions on the part of social and political actors that could implement them. I also seek to contribute to the expanding body of empirical research by social scientists about how political, economic, and social institutions affect labor market outcomes and inequality.

Overview of the Book

I develop my argument about the rise of precarious work and its consequences for various aspects of well-being in rich democracies in four parts.

The first part provides the theoretical foundations for explaining precarious work and outlines the major differences among the six countries in their social welfare and labor market institutions and policies. Chapter 1 discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of precarious work and summarizes the reasons for its recent rise in rich democracies. The chapter also sketches the conceptual model that I use in subsequent chapters to examine how countries differ in precarious work and its consequences. This model is a multi-level one, linking macrostructural institutions and policies to mesostructural features of employment relations and microstructural outcomes for individuals and their families.

Chapter 2 summarizes how countries differ in their social welfare protection and labor market policies. People in countries with more generous social welfare benefits are likely to be more secure both in their jobs and in their economic situations. Two significant labor market policies are active labor market policies that are designed to help working-age people obtain jobs and transition from unemployment to employment; and employment protection laws and regulations that denote the extent to which employment of regular workers is protected and the use of temporary workers is restricted by labor and other laws. Country differences in these social welfare and labor market policies result from the political dynamics underlying employment relations, especially the degrees to which workers can obtain collective power resources and align with political parties to advance their interests (e.g., Huber and Stephens 2001).

The second part of the book looks at country differences in the manifestations of precarious work. Chapter 3 provides an overview of common indicators of precarious work: nonstandard work arrangements such as temporary and involuntary part-time work. I show that the incidence of temporary work is relatively low in the LMEs of the United Kingdom and United States, which have few employment protections and whose labor markets have historically been flexible. By contrast, precarious work (especially temporary work among young people) is relatively high in Spain, with its high levels of employment protections and fewer restrictions on the use of temporary work.

Chapter 4 discusses various objective and subjective indicators of job insecurity, which is the most direct individual-level expression of precarious work. I show that active labor market policies as well as high degrees of worker power (reflected in high union density and collective bargaining coverage) all tend to reduce objective and perceived job insecurity.

The third part examines country dissimilarities in three dimensions of well-being: economic insecurity; the transition to adulthood and family formation; and subjective well-being. Chapter 5 looks at country differences in economic insecurity, including earnings inequality, low wages and poverty, social wages, economic instability, and perceived economic insecurity. Variations in social welfare protection institutions and policies play a major role in explaining why countries differ in these components of economic insecurity.

Chapter 6 discusses how the difficulties faced by young people in finding stable, regular jobs impede their ability to gain a foothold in the labor force and to establish career narratives that enable them to form their own families. Youth unemployment is particularly high in Spain, with its high levels of employment protection that relegates young workers to temporary jobs. Difficulties establishing families are especially pronounced in Japan, with its male breadwinner–female homemaker family model and rigid markers of the transition to adulthood.

Chapter 7 considers country differences in subjective well-being, an overall indicator of the quality of life. The generosity of social welfare protections, along with high levels of active labor market policies, enhances subjective well-being in a country.

The final part of the book summarizes some of the responses to the rise of precarious work. Chapter 8 discusses the protests generated both “from below” by workers and social movements and by government policies enacted “from above” to try to address the negative consequences of precarious work. I also outline the elements of a new political and social contract between workers and their employers and government that has the potential to collectivize the risks raised by precarious work and the kinds of actions that are needed to implement such a contract.

The conclusion summarizes the main findings of the book and speculates on possible future scenarios for employment relations.