Employment precariousness: a cross-national investigation of the pathways leading to health, socio-economic health inequalities and their evolution over time

Western labour markets have witnessed a decline of the standard employment contract (offering full-time, permanent employment), in favour of a rise in non-standard employment arrangements. In previous research adverse consequences for the health and well-being of employees resulting from non-standard employment arrangements have been shown. Nevertheless, in the research domain on employment conditions and health, it is often difficult to conceptualise "non-standard employment conditions" appropriately. In this postdoc proposal, by proposing employment precariousness as a multidimensional concept representing the departure of specific employment arrangements from the ideal standard employment contract, we want to surpass the existing conceptual problems. Using this concept of employment precariousness, the first central objective of the project is to study the pathways linking precarious employment conditions to adverse health and well-being in employees. Furthermore, we also aim to study how employment precariousness relates to socio-economic inequalities in the health outcomes that are studied and how the prevalence of employment precariousness and its associations with health and socio-economic health inequalities varies over time. The analyses will be performed on two existing cross-national databases: The European Working Conditions Surveys of 200011,' 2005 and 2010 and the data of the Psychological Contracts across Employment Situations-project.