2009-2012 | FWO
Research problem and research aims During the past decades, the classic employment relationship has undergone fundamental changes. These have put pressure on the psychological contract between employer and employee, leading to a decline of what is considered as the "standard employment relationship", offering employees "relatively permanent employment in exchange for adequate task performance" (Cooper 2002). These changes in the standard employment relationship should be taken into account when studying the association between work and health (Benach et al 2002). In the past decades, research efforts were mostly concentrated on the effects of the labour process itself: physical exposures, work stress as a consequence of work demands and work control, etc - a.o. within the framework of the Demand-Control-Support (DCS) model (Karasek 1979). The transformation of the employment relationship is compelling the need for scientific research on the health consequences of the employment relationship itself. The few empirical studies that have considered the health effects of changing employment relationships have broadly adopted two specific perspectives. In the first, the focus is on the relationship of new categories of employees, such as temporary or part-time employees, with the classic characteristics of the labour process. Empirical evidence suggests a higher risk of health-reducing physical and psychosocial working conditions, less employment benefits, etc. in these new categories (Quinlan et al 2001, Goudswaard & Andries 2002). A second perspective did address the employment relationship. Among others, the health-damaging effects of work insecurity have been shown (Ferrie 1999, D'Souza et al 2003). Recently, research has also focused on the health effects of temporary employment and other non-standard employment contracts (Benach et al 2004, Virtanen et al 2005), showing rather inconsistent findings (De Cuyper et al 2008). Both research perspectives have obvious limitations: the first ignores health risks related to important transformations in the employment relationship. The second approach is too much focused on specific categories of non-standard employees, characterized by considerable internal heterogeneity, thereby hampering (especially cross-national) comparisons. Furthermore, the second approach focuses too little on the underlying causes of health consequences of non-standard employment. Indeed, job insecurity or work of low quality can be both characteristics of contemporary non-standards jobs and of old type standard jobs - while, in addition, not all non-standard jobs have the same characteristics in terms of their degree of insecurity or the content of the tasks to be performed (De Cuyper et al 2008). According to Clarke et. al. (2007) future research should address both the labour process and the employment relationship simultaneously when studying the association between work and health. In that respect it is important to use a more general approach of the health consequences of non-standard employment. Benach et al (2007) are suggesting to use the concept precarious labour as a criterion to address and qualify current atypical employment relationships. Contrary to specific nonstandard types of work, precarious labour has a broader meaning can be qualified on multiple dimensions: temporariness and insecurity, powerlessness, levels of reward- and protection and material insecurity (Fudge & Owens 2006). This perspective allows jobs to be positioned on a continuum, with the standard employment relationship as the point of reference (Hadden et al 2007). Such a more general account of contemporary employment relationships would also facilitate international comparisons (De Cuyper et al 2008). Crossnational research is very important in order to disentangle the macro-effects, like labour market regulations, social services, social protection, etc. - who are shaping the specific content of precarious working conditions within nation states - and by extension, also their potential health-damaging effects (Vosko 1998). The central aim of this proposal is to test indicators of the precarious nature of employment relationships with regard to their mutual associations and effects on health outcomes within a representative sample of the European population at working age. This will lead to a more general concept for precarity in the employment relationship and its health consequences. Next, associations between such a concept of precariousness and indicators for the conditions of the labour process, general living conditions and macro-level indicators will be analyzed. This general aim can be translated into six more specific aims: (1) Measurement and estimation of the prevalence of a number of indicators for precarious employment in the dataset; (2) Estimation of the associations between indicators of precariousness and health and social characteristics (o.a. gender, age and socio-economic position); (3) Construction of a multidimensional concept of precarious employment relationships; (4) Testing of the associations, complementarity and possible interactions between the concept of precariousness and physical and psychosocial characteristics of the labour process, as well as characteristics of (precarious) living conditions; (5) Estimation of cross-national variation in the relationship between the concept of precariousness and self-reported indicators of health; (6) When cross-national variation is significant: testing the explanatory power on this cross-national variation of selected country-level characteristics.
