Abstract
ABSTRACT How can labour market institutions make workers confident about their economic future? While quantitative studies have repeatedly shown that countries’ labour market regulations and policies are related to variations in workers’ perceived job security, these studies did not explain how these institutions affect workers’ perceptions and expectations. This study seeks to close this gap by analysing qualitative interview data collected on employees in Germany and the U.S. during the great financial crisis (2009–2010). The study's main finding is that policies vary in their effectiveness at making workers feel secure about their jobs. While unemployment assistance can reduce workers’ worries about job loss, dismissal protection does not seem to effectively increase workers’ confidence that their jobs are secure. Overall, employees know relatively little about the policies and regulations that are meant to protect them and have limited trust in their effectiveness. Individual and organisational characteristics seem to be more relevant for employees’ feelings of job security than national-level policies. In particular, comparisons with others who have lower levels of protection increase workers’ perceived security. These insights are particularly important in light of the ongoing changes in the world of work that are making workers’ lives more uncertain and insecure.
Highlights
The world of work is changing in important ways
By going back and forth between the data and the emergent themes, I discovered and refined both the conceptually distinct responses and the differences between respondents and countries. This iterative process for developing the relevant codes helped me discover new analytical categories and relationships between categories (Ragin, 1994; Weiss, 1995). When they talked about work-related anxieties and expectations, respondents in both countries implicitly distinguished between cognitive job security, perceived labour market security, and affective job security
In Germany, only temporary employees anticipated leaving the organisation after their contracts expired, while none of the permanent employees interviewed for this study expected to lose their jobs, as the following quotation by a female administrative assistant on a permanent contract illustrates: ‘I am pretty sure that I can stay here until I retire, if I want to
Summary
Employment trajectories are becoming more unstable due technological advances, and employers’ as well as employees’ demands for more flexibility are continuously growing (Kalleberg, 2009; Kalleberg & Vallas, 2018). Governments and organisations have been concerned about the adverse effects of growing insecurities on economic success and individual well-being. Workers who believe that their jobs are endangered (even if they are not) suffer from poor health Burgard, Brand, & House, 2009) and are less happy than workers who feel economically secure L. HIPP turnover rates when workers feel insecure about their jobs (Benito, 2006; De Witte, 2005; Klandermans & Van Vuuren, 1999; Sverke, Hellgren, & Näswall, 2002). Governments and organisations need to understand the forces that make workers confident about their economic future in order to design effective policies
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