Contingent Jobs Research Articles

“The Career Does Not Love You Back”: Impacts of Contingent Employment on Workers, Cultural Heritage Institutions, and the Archival Profession

ABSTRACT This article reports the findings of the 2021 New England Archivists Contingent Employment Study, which comprised a survey with eighty-three valid responses, fifteen interviews, and analysis of 250 job postings. The study found that although contingent employment often provides useful professional experience and mentorship, it can negatively impact archival workers due to low pay, inadequate benefits, and short term lengths. Additionally, many experience low morale and isolation due to their contingent status, and the inherent instability of contingent employment causes some to feel that they have little control over their careers and personal lives. Cross-tabulation analysis revealed that new professionals have more contingent positions than their mid-career and late-career counterparts, suggesting that contingent jobs and the challenges of protracted contingent employment have become more prominent over time. Participants were concerned that relying on contingent employment negatively affected their employers, particularly in terms of morale, high rates of staff turnover, institutional memory, and unstable funding. The study also documented perceived effects on the broader archival field, including causing burnout and attrition of archival workers; hampering efforts to recruit and retain a diverse profession; devaluing archival education and labor; perpetuating the reliance on unsustainable funding models; and preventing the development of robust, innovative, and inclusive professional communities. Using the study data and other research in the professional literature, the authors argue that there is an urgent need to address the issues raised in the study by improving working conditions for contingent workers and broadly reassessing the profession's relationship with contingent labor.

The impact of alternative arrangements, contingent jobs, and work secured through an app on the well-being of working age adults: Results from the California Work and Health Survey.

There is recognition of the growing prevalence of alternative work arrangements, contingent jobs, and work secured through an app. However, there have been few systematic efforts to understand the impact of these forms of work on individuals and households. The data derive from the California Work and Health Survey administered to a sample of the working age population of the state solicited through random-digit dialing of cell phone numbers. 4014 individuals completed the survey, 26% of those with an in-service cell phone number. We present odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals from logistic regression estimating the impact of being an independent contractor, in other forms of alternative work arrangements, in contingent jobs, and in work secured through an app, on economic and health status and working conditions in main jobs, with and without adjustment for covariates. Several of the forms of work analyzed are associated with lower earnings and higher rates of wage theft, household poverty, benefit recipiency, and expectation of hardships in food, housing, and medical care in the immediate future. Association between the forms of work and current health status is less consistent. However, several forms of work are associated with working conditions known to be risk factors for subsequent health problems. Public policy to mitigate the adverse impacts of work, largely developed in the 20th Century when there was an identified workplace, may be insufficient to protect workers' well-being for alternative work arrangements, contingent jobs, and work secured through an app.

Unclear Signals, Uncertain Prospects: The Labor Market Consequences of Freelancing in the New Economy

AbstractThe advent of various types of contingent jobs complicates selection criteria for full-time employment. While previous studies analyzed the penalties associated with other forms of contingent work, the labor market consequences of freelancing have been overlooked. I argue that freelancing works have features of both “good” and “bad” jobs, transcend the demarcation between “primary” and “secondary” sectors implied by segmentation theorists, and thus embed uncertainty around their categorization and meaning. Drawing on the “signal clarity” concept from management scholarship, I extend existing sociological works on employer perceptions of candidates by proposing a model to theorize how a history of freelancing affects workers’ prospects at the hiring stage. I present results from two interrelated studies. First, I use a field experiment that involves submitting nearly 12,000 fictitious resumes to analyze the causal effect of a freelancing work history on the likelihood of getting callbacks. The experiment reveals that freelancing decreases workers’ odds of securing full-time employment by about 30 percent. Second, I use data from 42 in-depth interviews with hiring officers to illustrate two mechanisms that could account for that observed effect. Interview data demonstrate that freelancing sends decidedly unclear competence signals: employers are hesitant to hire freelancers not because these candidates lack skills but because verifying these skills is difficult. Freelancing also sends clearer and negative commitment signals. This study sheds new lights on labor market segmentation theory and deepens our understanding of how nonstandard work operates as a vehicle for inequality in the new economy.

Relationships between individual characteristics and occupational possibilities for young adults with visual impairments

Individuals with disabilities highlight the importance of having career options, as these people are more likely to have narrowed occupational possibilities and to be employed in part-time and contingent jobs. This study explores (a) the range of occupational possibilities that according to Holland’s Self- Directed Search (SDS) Questionnaire most closely resemble the personality types of 55 young adults with visual impairments, b) the impact of individual characteristics on occupational possibilities, and c) the differences between sighted adults and adults with visual impairments regarding the SDS Questionnaire scores for the six personality types (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional). The research instrument was the SDS Questionnaire of Holland. The study results showed that the occupational possibilities for young adults with visual impairments relate mostly to social occupations. Individual characteristics also were found to be significant predictors of individual types according to the SDS Questionnaire. In addition, differences emerged from the comparison between adults with visual impairments and sighted adults in regard to the six personality types identified by Holland, based on the normative data. The study revealed that individual characteristics of young adults with visual impairments play an important role in their occupational possibilities.

A tale of two tracks

ABSTRACTWe provide a simple framework that helps explore the need for contingent (teaching) jobs in academia alongside the usual tenured-professorship positions. It also explains the coexistence of these two types of jobs in research universities as an equilibrium phenomenon. Imprecisions in the academic editorial process, combined with the increasing difficulty of producing academic research, is suggested as a possible explanation for the recent increasing trend in the share of non-tenure-track teaching jobs in academia as well as the widening wage gap between tenured-professors and teaching faculty. Alternative interpretations are explored.

Getting Lost in Gatlinburg: How Low‐Income Residents “Make Do” in an Appalachian Tourist Town

AbstractPerched at the edge of the most‐visited national park in the US—the Great Smoky Mountains—Gatlinburg, Tennessee, is a bustling tourist resort, filled with hotels, restaurants, and amusements. Every summer hundreds of people come to Gatlinburg looking for work, a place to stay, and a “fresh start.” Gatlinburg has become a place for those who want to relocate after experiencing life‐altering crises: job loss, domestic violence, addiction, bankruptcy, or the death of a loved one. Whatever circumstances propel them there, new arrivals inevitably face a critical housing shortage and a labor market dominated by low‐wage, contingent jobs. They confront these challenges by developing tactics for getting by in Gatlinburg. Borrowing a phrase from a long‐time Gatlinburg resident, I identify some of these tactics as “getting lost in Gatlinburg.” This paper presents two case studies of low‐income white women who make ends meet by using their obscurity in the face of neoliberal social institutions, including making use of their “white privilege” and detailed local knowledge. Understanding “getting lost” as a deliberate tactic reveals subtle and complex forms of agency in their efforts to move beyond the stigma of their current circumstances toward more personally fulfilling lives for themselves and their families.

Desperate Fortunes: Latina Warehouse Workers in the “Matrix of Domination”

Much recent labor research has highlighted the increasing reliance on contingent employment. We apply intersectionality theory and Collins’s concept of the “matrix of domination” to data from focus groups with immigrant Latina “perma-temp” warehouse workers ( n = 40), finding that the structural (dis-)organization of perma-temping serves as an instrument of domination and is crucial to our respondents’ experiences of work. However, the instability of these women’s contingent jobs entwines complexly with, and is compounded by, the subordination and decreased agency attached to their other minority statuses. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theory, future scholarship, and policy.

The Need for a Reduced Workweek in the United States

This paper argues that a reduced workweek offers a way to alleviate work-family conflict without exacerbating the sex-based division of labor in paid work and unpaid family work. We distinguish our position from two other approaches: (1) one that compensates unpaid family work directly (through such policies as traditional welfare provision, or alimony), policies we argue can discourage women from labor force attachment and contribute to sex-stereotyping and sex-segregated employment; and (2) an approach that spurs employers to accommodate workers' family responsibilities (through such policies as part-time work for parents), policies workers often avoid out of a well founded fear that they will be penalized unless all workers take advantage of them. Although there is room for supplemental policies such as paid leave, we argue that it is only by reducing the long hours required for many higher-paying full-time jobs - and increasing the hours associated with many lower-paying non-standard jobs - that post-industrial societies can actually create opportunities for both men and women to participate fully in paid employment and parenting. Requiring employers to pay premium wages or compensatory time, plus proportionally additional benefits, to people who work more than 30 to 35 hours a week could help eliminate current legal incentives for employers to overwork full-time employees, who are disproportionately male. Similarly, requiring employers to pay equal wages and proportional benefits to people who work less than 30 to 35 hours a week could eliminate the incentive for employers to create the part-time and contingent jobs in which women are disproportionately concentrated. Other policies, such as an expanded earned-income tax credit, could help men and women converge toward a more moderate workweek norm. Drawing on experience in Europe and the United States, we evaluate the likely effectiveness of various regulatory approaches. Although the matter is complex, the evidence suggests that it is possible to design policy approaches that could help achieve a more moderate workweek in the U.S. We conclude that, even though doing so would alleviate gender inequalities around paid work and unpaid family work, the current political and economic climate is not conducive to achieving such change. We call upon scholars, policymakers, and activists to study and press this issue further.

Shaping the Future: Ten Years of the Occupational Health Internship Program

The Occupational Health Internship Program (OHIP) was initiated in 2003 to recruit a new, diverse generation of occupational safety and health (OSH) professionals and to advance OSH within union and community-based initiatives. It retains the principles of the original OCAW/Montefiore internship program while adapting to the changed landscape of the 21st-century workplace. Case studies of OHIP projects illustrate how students have contributed to key OSH policies-to regulate silica exposure among construction workers, apply principles of green chemistry with Vietnamese nail salon workers, and integrate OSH into "green" jobs in the recycling industry. They have supported innovative campaigns with immigrant workers in contingent jobs-from taxi drivers to warehouse workers. The students, in turn, have been inspired to enter the OSH arena as professionals and worker advocates with the potential to contribute new energy to an OSH movement.

Better Off Jobless? Scarring Effects of Contingent Employment in Japan

Previous research fails to address whether contingent employment benefits individuals' careers more than the alternative they often face: being without a job. Using work history data from Japan, this study shows that accepting a contingent job delays individuals' transition to standard employment more than remaining jobless. Moreover, having a contingent job, rather than having no job, leads Japanese men to have lower occupational status after they transition back to standard employment. I argue that in a highly segmented labor market like Japan's, the strict separation of labor pools for standard and contingent jobs makes being labeled as a contingent worker particularly detrimental. Meanwhile, the legacy of Japan's welfare corporatism alleviates the stigma of unemployment, making individuals better off jobless than having a contingent job. This research thus demonstrates the importance of labor-market contexts in shaping the scarring effects of contingent work arrangements.

Are contingent jobs dead ends or stepping stones to regular jobs? Evidence from a structural estimation

The proportion of part-time, dispatch, and temporary workers has increased in many developed economies in recent years. These workers receive lower average wages and benefits, and are subject to lower employment stability. This paper analyzes the effects of initially taking such jobs on the employment careers of young workers. We build an on-and-off-the-job search model, using Japanese data to perform a structural estimation of the model parameters and simulate career paths, in order to study the effects of the initial choice of employment on the probability of having a regular job in the future and on the welfare of the worker. We find that although contingent jobs are neither stepping stones towards regular employment nor dead ends, starting a career in a contingent job has a lasting effect on the welfare of the individual in Japan.

Carceral Chicago: Making the Ex‐offender Employability Crisis

AbstractThis article explores the urban labor market consequences of large‐scale incarceration, a policy with massively detrimental implications for communities of color. Case study evidence from Chicago suggests that the prison system has come to assume the role of a significant (urban) labor market institution, the regulatory outcomes of which are revealed in the social production of systemic unemployability across a criminalized class of African–American males, the hypertrophied economic and social decline of those ‘receiving communities’ to which thousands of ex‐convicts return, and the remorseless rise of recidivism rates. Notwithstanding the significant social costs, the churning of the prison population through the lower reaches of the labor market is associated with the further degradation of contingent and informal‐economy jobs, the hardening of patterns of radical segregation, and the long‐term erosion of employment prospects within the growing ex‐offender population, for whom social stigma, institutional marginalization and economic disenfranchisement assume the status of an extended form of incarceration.Résumé La politique publique d’incarcération massive, aux implications largement préjudiciables aux communautés de couleur, affecte également le marché du travail des villes. Une étude de cas sur Chicago indique que le système pénitentiaire a fini par devenir une institution importante du marché du travail (urbain) dont les réglementations se traduisent à la fois par la production sociale d’une inemployabilité systémique pour une classe criminalisée de males afro‐américains, par le déclin économique et social hypertrophié des ‘communautés d’accueil’ vers lesquelles retournent des milliers d’ex‐prisonniers, et par l’accroissement impitoyable des taux de récidive. Malgré de forts coûts sociaux, le brassage de la population carcérale dans les niveaux inférieurs du marché du travail se combine à la dégradation accrue des postes occasionnels et offerts par l’économie parallèle, mais aussi au durcissement des types de ségrégation radicale et à une érosion durable des perspectives d’emploi au sein de la population grandissante des ex‐délinquants pour lesquels stigmatisation sociale, marginalisation institutionnelle et non‐reconnaissance économique revêtent une forme d’incarcération prolongée.

Mandatory or Not Mandatory - Is that the Difference? The Nature of Overtime Work by Characteristics of Workers, Jobs and Employers

Analysis of the 2002 General Social Survey (GSS) Quality of Work Life Module finds that 21 percent of full-time employees worked extra hours because it was mandatory and 28 percent face required overtime work as a working condition- a slight increase since 1977. Logistic regressions find that the likelihood of working mandatory overtime, relative to working overtime that is non-mandatory or working no overtime at all, is enhanced by having certain demographic, job and workplace characteristics. This includes being male, foreign-born and full-time, employed in nonprofits and certain industries and occupational classifications. It is further enhanced by several workplace and job characteristics. This includes having more inflexible work schedules, seniority, difficulty finding alternative jobs, bonus compensation structures, a poor relationship with and low trust of management. Some characteristics of workers and workplaces increase the likelihood of working overtime that is non-mandatory. These include being single, satisfied with one's job, a union member, employed in public sector and standard (rather than contingent) jobs and having say in one's job. Potential implications are discussed for organizations, labor relations and employment law as well as for expected occupational health and safety outcomes measured in the GSS.

The Role of Contingent Work in the War Against Poverty

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the success of work-based welfare reform in reducing welfare caseloads. While welfare reform was effective in lowering immediate welfare dependency, researchers have questioned its long-run success in alleviating poverty partially due to the precariousness surrounding the jobs held by welfare leavers. This paper addresses this concern by examining (1) the likelihood of taking a contingent job given one's welfare dependency and past poverty status; (2) the probability of being on welfare for different types of contingent workers relative to their non-contingent counterparts; and (3) the likelihood of living in poverty in the near future as a function of past employment in alternative types of contingent jobs.

The Influence of Regular Work Systems on Compensation for Contingent Workers

Using data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. establishments, this article explores how features of regular work influence outcomes for contingent workers. The results show that firms combine regular and contingent work in varied ways: Some managers design contingent work to achieve performance objectives not possible with the regular workforce, whereas managers in other cases create contingent jobs to reinforce the same goals as regular work. In the latter case, contingent workers are more likely to be integrated with regular workers and to receive benefits. Benefit provision for contingent workers is also influenced by traditional internal labor market rules and by spillover effects in which efficiency or regulatory requirements lead benefits to be extended to contingent staff once offered to regular workers.

Uncovering and Explaining Variance in the Features and Outcomes of Contingent Work

Existing research tends to depict contingent work either as having similar implications for firms and workers in all settings or as varying in its implications depending only on contingent workers' occupation or personal characteristics. In contrast, the author of this paper identifies systematic differences in contingent jobs across organizational contexts that are due to the strategies and practices of management. She uses internal labor market theory and data collected from two comparative case studies, both conducted in 1996–97, to develop four distinct models of how contingent work may be managed. Each of the contingent employment subsystems had distinct practices—related to job definitions, wage rules, and deployment through career ladders—put in place by management in response to technological factors and performance objectives. Each also raised challenges for integrating regular and contingent workers and generated trade-offs for both groups of workers as well as for the firm.

Uncovering and Explaining Variance in the Features and Outcomes of Contingent Work

Existing research tends to depict contingent work either as having similar implications for firms and workers in all settings or as varying in its implications depending only on contingent workers' occupation or personal characteristics. In contrast, the author of this paper identifies systematic differences in contingent jobs across organizational contexts that are due to the strategies and practices of management. She uses internal labor market theory and data collected from two comparative case studies, both conducted in 1996-97, to develop four distinct models of how contingent work may be managed. Each of the contingent employment subsystems had distinct practices - related to job definitions, wage rules, and deployment through career ladders - put in place by management in response to technological factors and performance objectives. Each also raised challenges for integrating regular and contingent workers and generated trade-offs for both groups of workers as well as for the firm.

Symposium on Unemployment, Job Insecurity and Health: Introduction

The December 2000 issue of Economic and Labour Relations Review (Volume 11 Number 2) contained first Symposium arising from Centre for Applied Economic Research's conference on Costs of Unemployment. In that symposium, it was shown that unemployment imposed significant costs to society as a whole, as well as to specific groups within it. General social costs, as well as impact on families, those of mature age and indigenous Australians, as well as costs arising from precarious employment were considered. However, one important omission that was noted in Introduction to Symposium, although it was touched on in some of papers, was relation between unemployment and health (Kriesler and Nevile 2000). The three papers in this Symposium redress that omission. The paper by Harris and Morrow surveys evidence on impact of unemployment on health of the unemployed, their families and society generally, and provides an overwhelming argument for a strong causal link running from unemployment to ill-health. This is exacerbated by intergenerational effects on health resulting from impact of unemployment on breakdown of family and loss of parenting skills, as was also documented in McClelland (2000). Given unfortunate reality that unemployment is likely to be with us for foreseeable future, paper presents a health promotion framework to help address some of health effects. Morrell, Page and Taylor examine link between unemployment and youth suicide. They note increase in youth suicides in Australia, and in other similar Western countries, since 1960s. Looking carefully at evidence for Australia, they conclude that there is a highly significant and strong correlation between unemployment and youth suicide rates, particularly for young men. This relationship is much stronger than relation between unemployment and suicide for rest of population, and has become much more significant since 1960s. Given that future of any country lies with its youth, conclusions of this paper provide harrowing reading, and highlights urgency and immediacy of problem. After noting evidence for causal link between unemployment and ill health, Bohle, Quinlan and Mayhew extend analysis to effects of job insecurity. The importance of this is apparent when it is realised that number of workers holding insecure or contingent jobs far outnumber unemployed and that proportion of labour force in these jobs is growing substantially. …

New Economic Challenge to Japan's Trade Union Movement

Precipitated by forces of globalization, a new economy is creating unprecedented challenges for working people everywhere. Japan's touted system of “lifelong” employment is eroding as growing numbers of contingent jobs are produced. Given the preponderance of key growth industries in Japan and the nation's increasing influence in Asia, the opportunity and necessity have never been greater for Japan's labor movement to exercise its considerable influence to the benefit of trade union rights and to organize these new workers.

Commentary. 'Work first': workfare and the regulation of contingent labour markets

The paper presents a critical review of UK and US welfare-to-work strategies, stressing their implications for changing forms of labour regulation. The favoured policy orientation - 'work first' - forcefully redistributes the risks and burdens of job-market instability from the state to unemployed individuals, the solution to whose 'welfare dependency' is presented in terms of a one-way transition into (low) waged work. At a systemic level, the analysis suggests that a regressive regulatory accommodation may be emerging between mandatory welfare-to-work programming on the one hand and the lowest reaches of deregulated, 'flexible' labour markets on the other, as the destabilisation of welfare via work-activation measures creates a forced labour supply for contingent jobs.