Abstract
Temporary work is common across Europe, especially among young people. Whether temporary employment is a transitory stage on the road to standard employment, and whether this varies depending on institutional contexts, is controversial. This article investigates variability in transition rates from temporary to permanent employment across Europe, and how this is related to employment protection legislation (EPL) and the vocational specificity of education systems. We utilize harmonized panel data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, covering 18 European countries and including 34,088 temporary workers aged 18–30. The results show that stricter EPL is associated with lower rates of transitions to permanent employment, while partial deregulation, with strict EPL for permanent contracts but weaker EPL for temporary contracts, is associated with higher transition rates. Vocationally specific education systems have higher transition rates, on average. Moreover, the role of EPL is conditional on the degree of vocational specificity.
Highlights
Temporary work is common across Europe, especially among young people
employment protection legislation (EPL) regulates the use of temporary contracts, as well as the incentives that employers have for using temporary as opposed to permanent contracts, while education systems are crucial for the human capital of young workers, and for their ability to participate in the labour market (Dieckhoff and Steiber, 2012; Shavit and Müller, 2000)
While the share remaining in temporary employment and the share moving to permanent employment largely mirror each other, the pattern for those transitioning to non-employment is less clear
Summary
Temporary work is common across Europe, especially among young people. Whether temporary employment is a transitory stage on the road to standard employment, and whether this varies depending on institutional contexts, is controversial. The aim of this study is to investigate how each nation’s EPL and the vocational orientation (specificity) of their education systems shape the chances of transiting from temporary to permanent employment among young workers in Europe. In line with much of the previous research on the role of institutions in creating labour market inequalities (Barbieri and Cutuli, 2016; Breen, 2005; Gebel and Giesecke, 2011, 2016), we use a cross-country comparative approach to analyse the importance of different institutional contexts for transitions between employment contractual states. With our large sample of country units, we can explicitly test the role of institutional context, and tease out the relative importance of different institutional factors
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