THE EUROPEAN WORLD OF TEMPORARY EMPLOYMENT

Abstract

Departing from growing concerns about in-work poverty and the proliferation of flexible employment, we investigate the association between temporary employment and poverty in a European comparative perspective. In doing so, we focus specifically on possible gender dimensions, because some are concerned that the impact of flexible employment on income security will be different for men and women and that gender inequality will increase. By means of a logistic multilevel model, we analyse recent EU-SILC data for 24 European countries. The results show that the temporarily employed have a higher poverty risk vis-à-vis permanent workers, mainly caused by lower wages. However, the risk factors to become working poor are similar. The poorly educated, young workers and those living in a single earner household with dependent children have an increased probability to live in poverty, whether they are employed on temporary or permanent basis. Differences between European welfare regimes demonstrate that policy constellations influence the magnitude of these risk factors. Counter-intuitively, temporary working women have a lower poverty risk than their male counterparts. They are better protected because they are more often secondary earners in a dual earning household, while men are more often primary earners. This article advances knowledge on the linkages between temporary employment, economic insecurity and gender differences in European welfare states.

Keywords:

• temporary employment
• nonstandard work
• in-work poverty
• gender
• Europe
• comparative

Notes

¹The household income is equivalized to adjust for household composition using the so-called modified OECD equivalence scale (which assigns a value of 1 to the household head, of 0.5 to each additional adult member and of 0.3 to each child under 14).

²An anonymous referee pointed out that it is unfortunate that we are not able to include the Danish case in our analysis, because that country is characterized by an Anglo-Saxon-like high level of flexibility of employment relationships combined with a high level of social protection, i.e., the paragon of what is called ‘flexicurity’.

³It was shown that the incidence of temporary employment is correlated with the stringency of employment protection legislation for standard working contracts, next to other factors. Anglo-Saxon countries indeed display comparatively low overall EPL whereas the Mediterranean (especially Portugal and Spain) have the highest overall EPL scores (OECD 2004).

⁴Estimates of the control variables are not shown in the models. They are available upon request.

⁵The high incidence of women and men living in single earner households could also be part of the explanation of the prima facie high poverty rates among the temporarily employed in the Northern countries.

⁶We modelled interaction effects between gender and living in a dual earner household. The results reveal that the protective shield of living in a dual earner household is indeed stronger for women.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wim Van Lancker

Wim Van Lancker is a PhD candidate in the Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His current research focuses on the social distribution of family policy in comparative perspective with attention for its effects on the redistributive capacity of welfare states and female labour market participation. He has published on basic income, poverty, employment issues, social Europe, and family policy