flexibility or misuse of labour force?
2. Unusual working conditions in Europe
The term “precarious work” is used in several different interpretations across studies. The most limited approach identifies this issue as unsecure, unhealthy, risky and unstable working environment where rights and physical safety of em-ployees are in danger. From a legal and economic point of view, this interpretation could go further, and the term “contingent work” is also used. The use of contract labour and precarious work seems to be the part of a global business strategy to cut labour costs and substitute “decent” work through labour market “flexibiliza-tion” or casualization. Therefore, we may consider that different agreements with
“zero” working hours as the default, or “contractualized” service agreements between an enterprise and a labour force lending company and other similar solu-tions may all lead to an elevated level of risks for the involved labour force. This type of work is increasingly being used to replace direct, permanent jobs, allowing employers to reduce or even abandon their responsibility to workers. In such cases, the labour agreements are replaced by commercial service contracts be-tween the former employer and the firm that provides the labour force. The entire ideology of labour law was based on permanent contracting and dismissal rules between an employer and its employees, and the mutual liability of them in such a longer-term relationship. This historical fundament is largely or completely missing in this frame of employment solutions, so labour law is also facing chal-lenges there.
To have a broader view on the unsecure terminology of precarious work, in the frame of a European study by McKay et al. (Mckay et al., 2012) a survey was carried out in 12 of the EU member states, and answers were collected from more than 260 subject matter specialists and civil organizations involved in labour issues. As a result, they created a broad term of precarious work, containing the elements indicated in the next Table 1.
We are able to state for first sight, that the upper four issues (missing rights, missing social protection and actual health and safety risk at work, insufficient income) are widely interpreted as precarious, while there seems to be a second group of still important, but less weighted factors (planning inability, instability, temporariness of work). The third group shows factors that were considered the least relevant, however, with some outliers concerning lack of training in Germany or being “non standard” in Greece. The sometimes very different judgements on elements are the results of different work traditions in countries.
According to Eurostat, in 2010, the ratio of part-time employees for example in Bulgaria were only 2.2% of the total employed, while employees in the Netherlands with such conditions topped at 48.3% among EU member states (Koncz, 2012). After 2010, a significantly growing demand for additional workforce emerged at the European labour market. The needs were served mainly
Table 1. Elements comprising the ‘most precarious’ work in 12 Member States, surveyed in 2011, by country (%)
Source: McKay et al. 2012 p. 90, shaded cells are values over row average.
in three ways. First, the number of employed third-country labour force grew heavily. Eurostat data show that the increase of third-country (non-EU member state) workers aged 15–39 grew radically between 2006 and 2016, by additional two million persons, while the total number of employed in the age group has decreased by almost 600 thousand people in the so called Core10 EU member states (Artner, 2018). Offering additional advantages for women to return to the labour market received special attention in some countries, and finally, leading back the elder aged to active work became also a common sign of additional labour force demand. As an interesting effect, at the same time, the average healthy life-years of adults has decreased from 62,2 in 2010 to 61,5 in 2013 in European average (Artner, 2018). The increasing employment figures can be interpreted in a positive way, certainly, but they also easily camouflage the detectable erosion of working conditions and the growing importance of unusual or atypical employment.
In the EU average, the number of low-paid employees also grew between 2010 and 2016. A report to the European Parliament (EUPARL 2016) stated the main element of precariousness in the European labour market is still the low payment level in full-time jobs. As Figure 1 shows below, full time jobs are still in majority,
Figure 1. Decreasing share of full-time open-ended employment in Europe based on 2003, 2008 and 2014 Labour Force Survey data
Source: EUPARL 2016.
but in general, their share from the labour market has significantly decreased in all EU member states.
Low wages result in the so-called “risk of in-work poverty” which is a standard element of European Living Condition Statistics (EU-SILC). Eurostat data also showed that the relationship between the risk of in-work poverty and temporary jobs is many times higher. In those countries where the general level of wages is lower than the EU average, the exposure to such risks is the highest. 2014 data show that mostly southern and eastern countries are exposed to such risks.
Luxembourg is a very unique exception, where the significant in-work poverty risk is the result of the large ratio of third-country, low-paid workers and the very high standard level of living costs in the country. Figure 2 shows a comparison of EU member states.
Low pay is particularly prevalent for workers in the care, cleaning, hospitality and construction sectors. Other issues affecting vulnerable workers include lack of awareness of employment rights and lack of enforcement of these rights (for example, rights to claim unfair dismissal), and lack of collective, trade union support. Marx and Nolan state at the same time, that most low-paid workers in the EU do not live in households in financial poverty, but that it is individuals who live in a specific household configuration, such as a lone breadwinner with multiple children, who are more likely to suffer from in-work poverty: “Trends in
Figure 2. In-work risk of poverty rate for permanent and temporary employees, 2014 Source: EUPARL 2016
in-work poverty vary across countries, and in-work poverty is strongly associated not so much with low pay as with single-earnership and low work intensity at the household level, linking in turn to institutional settings and structures in the labour market, tax and benefit system and broader welfare state”. In terms of the minimum wage, they argue that this can usually only prevent single households from in-work poverty, but cannot prevent this in the case of family households with only one person working: “Even in countries where minimum wages are comparatively high they do not suffice to keep sole breadwinner household out of poverty, especially when there are dependent others or children” (Marx, Nolan, 2012, 38). As a strong example, the EU Parliament study stated that 15 per cent of employees in the United Kingdom earn less salary (on different contracting reasons) than the full-time minimum wage in force in the country (EUPARL, 2016). Involuntary part-time employment is one significant reason here. Eurostat data show that more than 60 per cent of part time workers in Italy, Greece, Spain and Bulgaria didn’t have a choice when entering part time jobs.
The picture is getting worse if we take a closer look at other elements of precarious working conditions. Fixed term contracts, job-sharing (when a full-time job is filled by two or more employees in part full-time agreement) and employ-ment through temporary work agencies became a structural part of the labour market in several countries. Temporary work agencies move around 3.7 million people in the EU, where some of their employees do not even know what or where to work on the next day. The highest ratio of employees subject to such conditions applies to Slovenia (5.2%), the Netherlands (4.1%) and Spain (3%) while the lowest is in Norway (0.2%) and Hungary (0.3%) (Eurostat, 2018). The share of
fixed-term contracts (excluding apprenticeships and trainees) of total employment is at average about 7% in Europe and has not changed significantly in most countries (EUPARL, 2016, 97). The length of fixed term contracts is usually short. Most such contracts cover 3 or 6 months periods. A further element of precariousness is the existence of “zero working hours” contracts. In this case, the employer is not liable for giving effective work for the employee, thus also meaning that there is no obligation to pay a salary for the standby period. Cyprus, Malta, Finland, Sweden, Ireland and the United Kingdom apply this form of employment as a standard option (KBS, 2017). These working conditions give limited access to healthcare, limited participation in trade union movements and in general, they are considered more risky by the employees. There are more and more complaints on physical working risks as well, which are monitored from a healthcare-point of view.
A further phenomenon in some EU countries is the strongly growing number of persons working in a second job as well. In most developed member states like Germany or France, more than 2.3 million second jobs were officially established additionally, resulting in that currently about 7.5 million people in Germany have a low paid secondary job besides a “regular” job. There is a layer of employees where the people are not able to reach their expected standard of life in one single job (White, 2014). Changes in the officially reported working hours also occur.
While the ratio of persons working full time, more than 44 working hours a week on EU28 level has decreased slightly (from an average of 38.2% to 37.1 between 2002 and 2016, in some countries the ratio of persons working during the weekends has strongly increased. Reasons for the latter are “commercialized”
weekends: shopping and accessing other services is becoming a family fun activity, and, tourism.
3. Conclusion
The European labour market shows several tendencies that can be considered as risky for the employees. We are witnessing a very strong and growing demand on the market while the solutions invented for the additional workforce supply seem to have mixed consequences. There is a growing risk of social exclusion which is the result of the growing number of low-paid jobs on the one hand, while the
“alternative” forms of employment have less legal support on the other hand and grant less rights for workers against employer misuse. Current data show that although there is a kind of growing flexibility of employees, but it is hardly identifiable if this flexibility is a natural phenomenon in the circle of younger generation employees or it is an involuntary response to the worsening working conditions. It is worthy to examine the phenomena in several groups of countries
in the future, since the labour markets of member states show a few identifiable patterns, which are rather different from each other. The directions for future research should lead to: a deeper analysis of the elements of the definition of precarious jobs with inevitable focus on how the employees themselves think about their own working conditions. A stratification of countries could further detect the differences in the level of risks in the European Union.
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