Casual catastrophe or contentment: is casual employment related to ill-health in young South Australians?

Abstract

The past two decades have seen Australia experience a trend of workforce casualisation, which is particularly high amongst young people, alongside claims that casual employment is a form of low-quality employment that erodes workers’ physical and mental health. Although current literature in this area is growing, it is still dominated by international research that is not easily generalisable to the Australian context, and is characterised by simplistic measurements of employment status that may not adequately capture its complexities. This study used a cross-sectional sample of 453 recent South Australian school-leavers, aged 19–20 years, to examine the relationship between employment status (casual, permanent or full-time study) and ill-health in young people. Job insecurity, job dissatisfaction, financial strain and low social support were tested as moderators and as a means to move beyond only taxonomic measures of employment status. The results indicated that employment status was not associated with ill-health. No interaction between employment status and the moderator variables was found. Instead, the moderator variables alone were better predictors of non-optimal mental health and job stress. The results suggest that for young people at least casual employment is not associated with poorer health.