Precarious Work Leads to Precarious Lives: the Irish Experience and Policy Responses

Abstract

Precarious Work Leads to Precarious Lives: the Irish Experience and Policy Responses Sinéad Pembroke Paid work is an aspiration for many people. Many of us are thankful to have it, and it forms an integral part of our identity; often one of the first questions we ask a person is ‘what do you do for a living?’ When we reflect on the future of work, the focus is on robots being our biggest threat and taking away our jobs. Yet one of the biggest challenges for workers and the future of work is precarious work, signalled at a European Parliament level as a social and economic concern to be addressed.1 In-work poverty has been increasing amongst workers in Europe, and precarious work is a component of that trend.2 Recently, a report published by FEPS-TASC3 called, Precarious work precarious lives: how policy can create more security, looked at the effect that this type of work has on lives outside of the workplace.4 Central to the report is that precarious work is not just a labour market matter; it has farreaching consequences outside of the workplace. Focus groups conducted with precarious workers between the ages of 18 and 40 took place and interviews with twenty stakeholders whose expertise ranged from employment law to healthcare policy. The occupations of the focus group participants ranged from retail assistants to early years educators, home care assistants and university lecturers. To ensure representation of all paid precarious work and life situations, a sampling matrix was used. Participants were recruited who came from different life situations, such as those who were single, in a relationship, in a relationship with children and single with children. Participants also represented various paid precarious work situations, including temporary, marginal part-time, if-and-when (Ireland’s answer to the zero hour contract) and self-employment. All participants have been given a pseudonym in what follows here. What is precarious work? As the International Labour Organisation (ILO) explained, there is no agreed definition of precarious work.5 However, the main features include Studies • volume 108 • number 432 446 Sinéad Pembroke a combination of ‘work for remuneration characterised by uncertainty, low income, and limited social benefits and statutory elements’.6 The 2016 study by Broughton and others, produced for the European parliament,7 measured each employment relationship that exists in the EU against the risk of precariousness. The employment relationships with medium to high risk of precariousness are marginal and involuntary part-time work, temporary/ fixed term contracts, temporary agency work, self-employment, bogus selfemployment and zero hours contracts. Louise, a retail assistant, works part-time. The reality for Louise was that her hours were not predictable, yet she had to be one hundred per cent flexible: ‘I am ten years in retail and I started off on an eight-hour contract, went up to a twelve and then up to a sixteen … You never know from week to week what hours you are in. You are always in different hours on different days –sometimes four hours, sometimes six hours. But, you had to be one hundred per cent flexible’.8 Louise constantly reiterated that she wanted full-time work, and that her current work was very low-paid. These characteristics are what make parttime work precarious. Marginal part-time of course refers to the low-paid and low-hour nature of it, and involuntary part-time work refers to working part-time but wanting to work full-time. If-and-when and zero hour contracts are similar in that workers do not have guaranteed hours. However, they differ because an if-and-when contract has no mutuality of obligation. What this means is that there is no contract of service, whereas, a worker on a zero hours contract is available for work but their hours are not designated. In Ireland, workers on zero-hours contracts are protected by the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997. Section 18 of this Act stipulates that an employee with a zero-hours contract is entitled to compensation in situations where the employee is required to be available and works less than 25 per cent of their hours in a...