Trade Union Responses to Precarious Work in Seven European Countries

KEYWORDS precarious employment, employment, low income, collective bargaining, trade union attitude, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain, United KingdoPrecarious employment is a major concern today in Europe's labour markets. In recent years, the percentage of employees working under precarious conditions has increased across the continent, accompanied by processes of segmentation and exclusion. Precarious employment refers to employment that combines some of the following characteristics: low levels of income and income security, low job and employment security, bad working conditions, limited access to training, limited social security rights and/or limited voice. Precarious employment affects not only the working situation of the person in such employment but also his or her household through, for example, deficient and volatile income, problems in accessing loans or high levels of insecurity.In very general terms, the growth of precarious employment is associated with several broad developments, including the rise of the service sector and the decline of industrial employment, changes in technology and work organization, changes in corporate governance and employers' strategies, declining trade union power, ongoing drives towards privatization and marketization and individualization.More specifically, a number of labour market developments have led to increased precarious employment. Recent studies indicate a polarization trend in the labour market of many European countries, following the growth in employment in both the highest-skilled and higher-quality (professional and managerial) and lowest-skilled and lowest-quality (personal services) occupations, and with declining employment in the middle of the distribution (manufacturing and routine office jobs) (Goos, Manning and Salomons, 2009; Fernandez-Macias and Hurley, 2008). Most recently, as a result of the crisis this polarization trend has increased with a growing number of European Union (EU) countries experiencing a downgrading of the employment structure through job destruction in the higher sections of the labour market, no growth in the middle, and a growth or relatively minor decline of jobs in the lower sections (European Commission, 2011). There is also a marked rise in various types of atypical, often flexible jobs, including fixed-term contracts, temporary agency work, (dependent) self-employment, project work, and (marginal) part-time contracts (Eichhorst, Feil and Marx, 2010). Such jobs, which first appeared in an expanding service sector, come with lower levels of job security, frequently provide only limited access to social security, may suffer from low rates of pay and worse working conditions, and generally offer only limited training opportunities (ibid.). As a result, work is no longer a guarantee against poverty, considering that in 2009, in-work poverty amounted to 8.5 per cent of the employed in the European Union (Frazer, Gutierrez and Pena-Casas, 2011). Finally, the quality of standard jobs is also under pressure in certain sectors, in particular in the service sectors that require little education and in the lower end of manufacturing, resulting in low wages and/or very high levels of flexibility. As a result of these developments, even though more people are in employment today than 20 or 30 years ago, for many workers the chances of getting a good quality job are bleaker today than they were then. Studies based on the European "Working Conditions Survey indicate that job quality has, at best, stagnated since the mid-1990s, that job precariousness is rising and that access to training and lifelong learning are worryingly limited (Pena-Casas and Pochet, 2009; Greenan, Kalugina and Walkowiak, 2010). Certain social groups (e.g. the young, women, the low-skilled and elderly workers) are over-represented and often trapped in the lower segments of the labour market.The rise of precarious employment is not simply the outcome of inevitable economic and technological developments; it is also the result of conflicts and choices both in the political sphere and in labour relations. …