Young Workerss Job Insecurity and Employment Uncertainty in Times of Crisis: Exploring the Impact of Governance, Economic Resources and Trust in Central-Eastern and Western Europe

Abstract

The paper is concerned with a better understanding of the job insecurity and labour market uncertainty youngsters confront on the labour market in Europe shortly before and during the Great Recession. The main thrust of the paper is to explore youth insecurity and uncertainty in notably the Central and Eastern European countries (CEE) compared to Western European countries with a particular focus for the role played by young people’s skills, the level of trust in society, and for the ways of governance as indicated by the social models the countries represent. We use the European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) and the European Social Survey (ESS). We ran discrete choice logistic and probit regression models on the three variables of interest: objective and subjective job and employment insecurity. At the individual level the findings substantiate the existence of strong correlates between people’s skills, their level of social and institutional trust and objective and subjective job and employment insecurity. At the country level we show that the observed insecurity gaps between insiders and outsiders are strongly skill-based notably in the Nordic countries as well as strongly age-based notably in the Southern regimes. The patterns of insecurity and uncertainty in the CEE countries are skill-based and age-based at the same time, and mirror their relative low levels of trust and their high levels of job insecurity in some countries and employment insecurity in others.