Abstract
Drawing on 2011 and 2016 European Quality of Life Survey data from eight European countries, this paper considers the importance of subjective indicators of employment conditions in impacting mental well-being. Among employment conditions, job insecurity has been discussed as having a negative impact on mental well-being by enhancing the worker’s sense of unpredictability. The idea of losing one’s job brings with it the fear of an uncertain or unclear future and the sense of lack of agency—i.e. feeling powerless with respect to the risk of becoming unemployed. Thus, we investigate two dimensions of job insecurity, namely ‘cognitive job insecurity’ and ‘labour market insecurity’. Our dependent variable is mental health well-being, measured using the 5-item World Health Organization Well-Being Index (WHO-5), which is a self-reported health scale validated by several studies and internationally adopted for measuring psychological well-being. We apply a fixed-effects model and use a set of individual control variables to obtain parameter estimates. Moreover, to control for country-level heterogeneity, two macro-level variables are considered: the type of welfare regime and employment protection. The novelty of this research lies in disentangling the concept of precariousness from the dichotomy of open-ended/non-open-ended contract and in including in the analysis subjective categories such as self-perceived job insecurity. The findings of our study suggest that self-perceived job insecurity is negatively related to mental well-being for both permanent and temporary workers, making this stressor an important feature in predicting the emergence of psychological distress (i.e. feelings of anxiety or depression) among the workforce.
Highlights
Over the last 20 years and at an even faster pace after the 2008 crisis which affected Western economies, the labour market has shrunk, and employment patterns have critically changed
Drawing on 2011 and 2016 European Quality of Life Survey data from eight European countries, this paper considers the importance of subjective indicators of employment conditions in impacting mental well-being according to Thomas’ theorem ‘if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas and Thomas 1928: 572)
Some pivotal quantitative studies on the relation between mental and physical well-being and employment conditions have been led by the GREDS-EMCONET research group which, to fulfil the existing gap in the scientific literature, analysed the way in which the increasing precariousness of work can be considered to be a social determinant in the production of health inequalities
Summary
Over the last 20 years and at an even faster pace after the 2008 crisis which affected Western economies, the labour market has shrunk, and employment patterns have critically changed. Terraneo gradually decreased, making way for more unstable forms of workforce contracts Terms such as insecurity, precariousness and vulnerability entered the employment-related lexicon and came to assume relevance in the scientific debate among sociologists (Anderson and Pontusson 2007; Juliá et al 2017), psychologists (Dooley et al 1987; Vander Elst et al 2014) and economists (Böckerman 2004; Origo and Pagani 2009; Böckerman et al 2011). Sennett uses a group of former IBM workers, an advertising agent who decided to leave her job because it was causing her frustration and a group of people working as bakers after losing the jobs they were trained for He argues that under the regime of flexibility, which is a common work condition in contemporary times all over the world, the production of subjectivities dramatically interplays with new forms of anxiety. A persistent high national unemployment rate has been proven to have a deep impact on cognitive job insecurity, where an abrupt rise in the unemployment rate tends to negatively impact labour market insecurity (Anderson and Pontusson 2007)
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