Long-Term Health Effects of Work Trajectories Among Middle-Aged and Older Adults: The Mediating Role of Work, Material, and Social Environments.

Using data from 14 waves (2003-2016) of the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS) (N = 1,627 individuals aged 45-64; 22778 observations), in this study, we conducted sequence analysis and a multi-categorical variable mediation analysis (1) to examine to what extent long-term work histories exhibit varying degrees of de-standardization and precariousness using sequence analysis (2) to explore the potential mediating effects of work, material, and social environments in the association between multiple work sequences and self-rated health. We found the coexistence of a relatively stable long-term employment pattern and a high prevalence of precariousness. The health and economic risks of precarious work fall disproportionately on older workers. Future researchers should continue to analyze whether the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to long-term changes in the workforce to improve our understanding of and response to working in later life and its health effects.

Community support workers' experiences of working during the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper investigates the way in which COVID-19 has exacerbated the poor work conditions within community support work in Aotearoa-New Zealand. It examines the invisibility of care work in New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic, in terms of Government policy and communication, societal recognition of care work, and the spatially hidden nature of the work. It does so within the of gender norms in the socio-cultural, socio-spatial and socio-legal spheres that render this work and workers invisible. This paper documents the experiences of community support workers and contributes to our theoretical understanding of frontline health workers' experiences of work during a global public health crisis. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The future of work in shaping the employment inclusion of young adults with disabilities: a qualitative study

PurposeThe world of work is changing and creating challenges and opportunities for the employment inclusion of young people with disabilities. In this article, the perceptions held by young adults with disabilities regarding participation in the future of work are examined.Design/methodology/approachOne-on-one interviews were conducted with Canadian young adults (ages 18–36 years) living with a disability. Participants were asked about their thoughts regarding the impact of the changing nature of work on their labor market involvement and career aspirations. A thematic analysis was performed to identify and examine emergent salient themes.FindingsIn total, 22 young adults were interviewed;over half held secure employment. Career aspirations and work-related decisions were primarily shaped by a participant's health needs. The future of work was seen as a more proximal determinant to employment. Digital technologies were expected to impact working conditions and create barriers and facilitators to employment. Participants who indicated being securely employed held positive expectations regarding the impact of digital technology on their work. Participants working precariously held negative appraisals regarding the impact of digital technologies on employment opportunities. The role of technological and soft skills was critical to participating in a labor market reliant on advanced technology. Participants reported barriers to developing job skills related to their disability and their work arrangements.Originality/valueThis research highlights the importance of considering changes in the future of work, especially the digital transformation of the economy, in the design of initiatives which promote the employment inclusion of young adults with disabilities. Despite the significance of the changing nature of work, supporting health needs and encouraging access to secure work arrangements also remain paramount.

"It's Not Like Chasing Chanel:” Spending Time, Investing in the Self, and Pandemic Epiphanies

The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly impacted the labor market and given rise to the Great Resignation. Drawing on a mixed methods panel study of 199 precarious and gig-based workers, we analyze how a changing conception of free time during the Covid-19 pandemic led low-wage service workers to seek more fulfilling careers. Whereas most workers initially perceived free time in terms of opportunity costs, they later reconceived this time as enabling an investment in personal growth, moving from "spending time” making money to "investing time” in themselves. This shift in temporal experience is expressed through the adoption of a "work passion” logic and "pandemic epiphanies” that motivated respondents to seek self-affirming and potentially more lucrative work opportunities.

Inequality, worker mobilisation and lessons from history: Australia 1788-1900

Neoliberalism has wrought fundamental changes in the world of work, leading to rising inequality, substantial weakening of organised labour and a decline in industrial relations as a field, especially in relation to teaching. Drawing on historical ‘big data' this paper argues that examining the history of worker mobilisation provides a better understanding of these developments, including the importance of considering diverse forms of organisation and action as well as multi-pronged methods built around a key set of issues. It can also inform efforts to address challenges posed by neoliberalism. We conclude by arguing that an historical perspective can better equip the field of industrial relations to meet challenges extending beyond the world of work. © 2022 AIRAANZ.

No choice but to be essential: Expanding dimensions of precarity during COVID-19

Under COVID-19, low-wage service sector workers found themselves as essential workers vulnerable to intensified precarity. Based on in-depth interviews with a sample of 52 low-wage service workers interviewed first in Summer 2019 and then in the last two weeks of April 2020, we argue that COVID-19 has created new and heightened dimensions of precarity for low-wage workers. They experience (1) moments of what we call precarious stability, in which an increase in hours and predictable schedules is accompanied by unpredictability in the tasks workers are assigned, (2) increased threats to bodily integrity, and (3) experiences of fear and anxiety as background conditions of work and intensified emotional labor. The impacts of COVID-19 on workers' lives warrant an expanded conceptualization of precarity that captures the dynamic and shifting nature of precarious stability and must incorporate workers' limited control over their bodily integrity and emotions as core components of precarious working conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Validation of a COVID-19 Job Exposure Matrix (COVID-19-JEM) for Occupational Risk of a SARS-CoV-2 Infection at Work: Using Data of Dutch Workers.

OBJECTIVES: A COVID-19 Job Exposure Matrix (COVID-19-JEM) has been developed, consisting of four dimensions on transmission, two on mitigation measures, and two on precarious work. This study aims to validate the COVID-19-JEM by (i) comparing risk scores assigned by the COVID-19-JEM with self-reported data, and (ii) estimating the associations between the COVID-19-JEM risk scores and self-reported COVID-19. METHODS: Data from measurements 2 (July 2020, n = 7690) and 4 (March 2021, n = 6794) of the Netherlands Working Conditions Survey-COVID-19 (NWCS-COVID-19) cohort study were used. Responses to questions related to the transmission risks and mitigation measures of Measurement 2 were used to calculate self-reported risk scores. These scores were compared with the COVID-19-JEM attributed risk scores, by assessing the percentage agreement and weighted kappa (κ). Based on Measurement 4, logistic regression analyses were conducted to estimate the associations between all COVID-19-JEM risk scores and self-reported COVID-19 (infection in general and infected at work). RESULTS: The agreement between the COVID-19-JEM and questionnaire-based risk scores was good (κ ≥ 0.70) for most dimensions, except work location (κ = 0.56), and face covering (κ = 0.41). Apart from the precarious work dimensions, higher COVID-19-JEM assigned risk scores had higher odds ratios (ORs; ranging between 1.28 and 1.80) on having had COVID-19. Associations were stronger when the infection were thought to have happened at work (ORs between 2.33 and 11.62). CONCLUSIONS: Generally, the COVID-19-JEM showed a good agreement with self-reported infection risks and infection rates at work. The next step is to validate the COVID-19-JEM with objective data in the Netherlands and beyond.

The Politics of Prevention: Polarization in How Workplace COVID-19 Safety Practices Shaped the Well-Being of Frontline Service Sector Workers

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically reshaped the labor market, especially for service sector workers. Frontline service sector workers, already coping with precarious working conditions, faced proximate risks of COVID-19 transmission on the job and navigated new workplace safety measures, including masking, social distancing, and staying home while sick, all in a polarized political environment. We examine polarization in the effects of COVID-19 workplace safety measures on workers' feelings of safety and well-being. Specifically, we examine how support for former President Trump moderates the relationship between COVID-19 safety practices (masking, social distancing, staying home while sick) and workers' feelings of safety and well-being. To do so, we draw on novel data collected by The Shift Project from 2,039 service sector workers at 89 large firms during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that workplace safety measures are positively associated with workers' self-assessments of feeling safe and with mental health, but only for Biden voters.

The Measurement of Precarious Work and Market Conditions: Insights from the COVID-19 Disruption on Sample Selection

The precarious work construct combines employment instability and employment-contingent outcomes. Yet, I argue that confining the scope of the investigation to employed individuals creates a sample selection that disguises the heterogeneous nature of employment instability. The COVID-19 skyrocketing unemployment rate provides both a compelling motivation and a unique opportunity to revisit the construct of precarious work. Using pre-COVID and COVID-19 era data of the working-age population in Israel, the results demonstrate that by pushing less stable individuals out of employment, the COVID-19 recession strengthened the negative relationship between volatility and employment opportunities and accentuated sample selection. Because the selection into employment was not random, this introduces a bias into the measurement of precarious work, one that is more severe during a recession than in a full-employment market. The discussion highlights the broader significance of this lacuna and suggests a way to hone the conceptualization and operationalization of the precarious work construct.

Precarious and non-precarious work in the informal sector: Evidence from South Africa

The research analyses the precarious and non-precarious work practices within the informal sector. Labour in the informal sector and in regions without strong labour relations is not uniformly precarious but is categorised by a bimodality of incomes, citizenships and conducts. This creates opportunities for insurgent modes of counter-conduct in the interstices of regulations and social conventions, but has also resulted in exclusive local citizenships and revanchist strategies. From numerous in-depth interviews, the study found that the Covid-19 lockdown and economic recession led to a new dialectical relationship between long-term residents and a precariat in-group of non-propertied actors, recent migrants and immigrants in the informal sector. Long-term residents with local citizenship aggregated formal and informal incomes and secondary incomes within the household, elevating them out of precariousness, although primarily active in the informal sector. These included strategies of adverse incorporation and revanchist conducts to maintain incomes for non-precarious workers. Marginalised precarious workers shifted to modes of counter-conduct, hiding the true nature of the business, evading strict social conventions on local trade and pursuing new inter-ethnic citizenships based on strategic partnerships. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR]

Living with liminality: Reconceptualising music careers education and research

One of the many lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the nature of it: it has been, and still is, an evolving situation in which there are many questions, but not always immediate or easy answers. Some of the pandemic experience has been shared, as almost 1.6 billion learners' educations have been disrupted and teachers have reported increased work-related stress, anxiety, and burnout. Billions of dollars in music industry income have been lost and patterns of music engagement and consumer spending appear to be significantly altered. Other aspects of the pandemic have highlighted deep inequalities. The vulnerability of creative workers at a policy level, for example, reflects the precarity of a specific group of people, and the enormous complexity and uncertainty that shapes their personal and professional circumstances. Although some musicians have reveled in the opportunity to reinvent themselves through new sites for their work, for many, work in music has gone from challenging to untenable resulting in altered priorities. In this paper, I explore the pandemic experience through the concept of liminality and offer three approaches for framing a paradigm shift in music careers education and research: things to think about, things to leave behind, and things to do differently. © The Author(s) 2023.

On the Margins of Employment, in the Centre of the Pandemic: Experiences of Unprotection and Social Vulnerability in the Great Lockdown

Permanent insecurity and social deprotection have become structural in the labour market. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed and aggravated these processes, which are at the origin of the accumulation of multiple socio-economic, relational and existential vulnerabilities. The lockdown period led to situations of labour stagnation. Inequalities and vulnerabilities, still arising from the Great Recession, were aggravated through the social dichotomy between those workers considered as either essential or non-essential. The article analyses the recent dynamics of this phenomenon from the life trajectories of workers in Portugal. Based on their experiences, collected from 53 in-depth interviews and a follow-up of 14 cases during the pandemic, it is aimed at reflecting on the multidimensional effects that emerge from these trajectories of participation in the labour market. © 2022 Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra. All rights reserved.

Temporariness made interminable: Pacific Islander farmworkers in Australia and the enduring crises of global agricultural production

Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork with Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) workers in south‐east Australia, I reflect in this paper on the experience of interminable temporariness and on its implications for the structural conditions underpinning contemporary horticultural labour in Australia. Although in many ways reflective of the specificities of a unique historical moment, the interminable temporariness experienced through the COVID‐19 pandemic also speaks to broader, enduring conditions produced within contemporary Australian agriculture. Here, the restructuring of the agri‐industry produces for many what Lauren Berlant describes as the “impasse” or “crisis ordinariness” of life under neoliberalism. At the same time, logics of development—including racialized imaginaries and border regimes—articulate with agricultural guest worker schemes in ways that seek to fix whole populations and regions in relations of suspended hope. In this context, I argue, the pandemic exposed and intensified structural vulnerabilities and unequal distributions of risk, which are encoded in the political economy of farm work in Australia, while also cleaving open new, if tentative, possibilities for agency and solidarity. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization, political, economic changes and digitalization, factors of the emergence of precarious work. Case study - COVID 19

The economic and social changes of the mid-1970s, following the development process, had significant effects on the structure and dynamics of the standard employment contract. European countries have been forced to cope with the high level of unemployment and the imbalance that has been created on the labor market. Thus, the globalization of markets and the development of labor relations have increased the level of competitiveness, unpredictability and insecurity among companies. Therefore, only companies that have been able to adapt to these changes, that have become innovative and that have implemented flexible work schedules, have been able to survive and cope with the growing demands of customers.

The Measurement of Precarious Work and Market Conditions: Insights from the COVID-19 Disruption on Sample Selection

The precarious work construct combines employment instability and employment-contingent outcomes. Yet, I argue that confining the scope of the investigation to employed individuals creates a sample selection that disguises the heterogeneous nature of employment instability. The COVID-19 skyrocketing unemployment rate provides both a compelling motivation and a unique opportunity to revisit the construct of precarious work. Using pre-COVID and COVID-19 era data of the working-age population in Israel, the results demonstrate that by pushing less stable individuals out of employment, the COVID-19 recession strengthened the negative relationship between volatility and employment opportunities and accentuated sample selection. Because the selection into employment was not random, this introduces a bias into the measurement of precarious work, one that is more severe during a recession than in a full-employment market. The discussion highlights the broader significance of this lacuna and suggests a way to hone the conceptualization and operationalization of the precarious work construct. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Work & Occupations is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

“It’s Not Like Chasing Chanel:” Spending Time, Investing in the Self, and Pandemic Epiphanies

The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly impacted the labor market and given rise to the Great Resignation. Drawing on a mixed methods panel study of 199 precarious and gig-based workers, we analyze how a changing conception of free time during the Covid-19 pandemic led low-wage service workers to seek more fulfilling careers. Whereas most workers initially perceived free time in terms of opportunity costs, they later reconceived this time as enabling an investment in personal growth, moving from “spending time” making money to “investing time” in themselves. This shift in temporal experience is expressed through the adoption of a “work passion” logic and “pandemic epiphanies” that motivated respondents to seek self-affirming and potentially more lucrative work opportunities. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Work & Occupations is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

The futures of industrial relations in times of plague(2)

In this paper, I offer a reading of the European context in the third decade of the twenty-first century. I discuss, first, how far ' varieties of capitalism ' persist, and the implications of changes in industrial relations regimes for trade unions. Second, I consider some of the ambiguities of EU regulation. Is ' Social Europe ' (still) a bulwark against market liberalisation? Third, I draw on Polanyi to examine the rise of precarious work situations, including the emergence of the ' platform economy '. Fourth, I comment on the impact of Covid-19 and the climate crisis, before some brief final remarks about trade union responses.

Wealth Inequality, Precariousness, Household Debt, and Macroeconomic Instability

U.S. wealth inequality has arisen alongside slow economic growth and more economic and financial instability. We consider how these factors are connected in this article. We draw on the existing literature, supplemented with data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts, and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. We show that the United States experiences a vicious cycle of continued wealth inequality in the context of unequally distributed economic risks that impede savings by those who already have little wealth to begin with. The result are greater indebtedness and more widespread macroeconomic instability. These factors perpetuate wealth inequality and economic instability. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated these linkages, but we highlight that the underlying trends have existed for decades. Breaking this cycle requires several policy steps to build reduce wealth inequality. © 2022, Journal of Economic Issues / Association for Evolutionary Economics.

Precarious Work in Turkish Basketball Leagues

Precarious work is not limited to certain professions or market sectors but involves many fields of work. One such area is a professional sport that has become an economic field of work on a global scale. It has done so by becoming more professional since the 19805. In the Global Dialogue Forum titled Decent Work in the World of Sports organized in 2020, the International Labor Organization (ILO) highlighted the problems of precarious work in professional sports. it emphasized the necessity of regulations to be implemented in line with the solution of the problems. in this study, the author aimed to shed light on the regulations to be promulgated regarding the problems by demonstrating the problems of precarious working in professional sports determined by the ILO (2020) in Turkish Basketball Leagues from the perspective of basketball players employed by sports clubs. in this effort, the author employed a semi-structured interview technique, one of the data collection types of qualitative research method, with ten professional basketball players employed by sports clubs in Turkish Basketball Leagues and benefited from the audio and visual materials related to the problems provided by basketball players in the interviews. Findings were reached by interpreting and summarizing the data obtained through descriptive analysis. In this context, the precarious working problems of basketball players in Turkish Basketball Leagues have given rise to wage disparities, disability and incapacity issues, unregistered and uncompensated work, occupational health and safety problems, weekend vacation, psychological harassment, discrimination, physical violence, union representation, education, uncertainty about the future, and problems related to the Covid-19 process.

Inequality, worker mobilisation and lessons from history: Australia 1788-1900

Neoliberalism has wrought fundamental changes in the world of work, leading to rising inequality, substantial weakening of organised labour and a decline in industrial relations as a field, especially in relation to teaching. Drawing on historical 'big data' this paper argues that examining the history of worker mobilisation provides a better understanding of these developments, including the importance of considering diverse forms of organisation and action as well as multi-pronged methods built around a key set of issues. It can also inform efforts to address challenges posed by neoliberalism. We conclude by arguing that an historical perspective can better equip the field of industrial relations to meet challenges extending beyond the world of work.