Precarious Working Conditions Research Articles

Precarious Work and Housing for Michigan Farmworkers During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond

ABSTRACT Objectives Farmworkers in Michigan face precarious and exploitative labor conditions that affect their access to affordable, fair, and quality housing, which are key social determinants of health. We sought to assess the health, working conditions, and housing access, affordability, and quality of farmworkers living in and outside of employer-provided housing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We conducted a mixed methods cross-sectional study in collaboration with community partners from the Michigan Farmworker Project and the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. We assessed housing, labor conditions, and general health through in-depth phone interviews with seasonal, migrant, and H-2A farmworkers (n = 63) during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2021) in Michigan. Descriptive analyses of these data included comparisons by type of farmworker and type of housing (employer-provided or other). Results The majority of farmworkers interviewed were women and seasonal farmworkers and spoke primarily Spanish. A significant share of farmworker participants reported living in poverty (38.3%) and had low or very low food security (27.0%). Nearly half of farmworkers (47.6%) rated their health as “fair” or “poor” during the year prior to the interview, and more than a third reported 3 or more chronic conditions (39.6%) and lack of health insurance coverage (38.7%). Among the 43 workers tested, 25.6% reported testing positive for COVID-19. Farmworkers reported experiences of objectification and dehumanization. Three-quarters of workers reported feeling that they were treated as less than human by supervisors and one-third reported verbal abuse. Farmworkers also experienced challenges exacerbated by their social vulnerability that impeded them from finding affordable, quality housing. Regarding housing quality, the majority of workers (80.6%) reported one or more environmental hazards around their residence, and about a third reported not having air conditioning (33.%) and lacking a functioning washing machine (33.9%). Concerns about the quality of drinking water accessible to workers and exposure to chemicals were shared by participants. Conclusion This study adds valuable knowledge to the understanding of the systemic barriers to housing and work conditions for female and male seasonal, migrant, and H-2A farmworkers in Michigan. Shortcomings in the regulatory and policy environment result in precarious housing and work conditions, including exploitative labor practices. These conditions negate equality, fairness, and health equity, important tenants for public health.

Shortage of nurses in Spain: from the global case to particular situation. SESPAS Report 2024

The nursing shortage is a multi-causal phenomenon that affects all countries and currently a global concern. The shortage of nurses jeopardizes the sustainability of health systems and the population health outcomes. Spain has historically had no difficulties in attracting new generations of nurses. The shortage of nurses is caused by the precarious working conditions and lack of professional development that have led to episodes of high international migration and abandonment of the profession. In this paper we focus on the evolution of different indicators of the working conditions of non-specialist nurses, who make up the bulk of the profession. These indicators allow us to analyse the abandonment of the profession, the duration of contracts, their full-time or part-time dedication and the excessive hiring. We have analysed the effect of COVID-19 and the labour reform on these indicators. COVID-19 reduced the abandonment of the profession and is currently at its lowest level, it has also accelerated the need to improve working conditions by increasing the percentage of permanent contracts and reducing the multiplicity of contracts in the same month. The labour reform has helped reduce the percentage of temporary contracts until reaching around 80% of the total contracts, and has reduced the number of nurses in Spain with more than one contract in the same month to below 3000 nurses on a sustained basis.

The duality of reputation portability: Investigating the demand effect of imported ratings across online labor markets

Online labor platforms have been criticized for fueling precarious working conditions. Due to their platform-bound reputation systems, switching costs are prohibitively high and workers are locked-in to the platforms. One widely discussed approach to addressing this issue and improving workers’ position is the portability of reputational data. In this study, we conduct an online experiment with 239 participants to test the effect of introducing reputation portability and to study the demand effect of imported ratings. We find that the volume of imported ratings stimulates demand, although to a lower degree than onsite ratings. Specifically, the effect of imported ratings corresponds to about 35% of the effect of onsite ratings. The results imply the possibility of unintended cross-market demand concentration effects that especially favor workers with high rating volumes (“superstars”).

“A Hard Road With Personal Costs”: How Digital-First Nonprofit News Founders Navigate Precarity

As the journalism industry descends further into economic collapse, precarity has become an increasingly useful concept in studies of newswork. While a growing body of literature has begun to consider how founders of startup journalism outlets navigate their own precarious self-employment, the existing scholarship pays little attention to journalists working at digital-first nonprofit newsrooms. This study draws on a political economic framework and in-depth interviews with founders of nonprofit news organizations in the United States to understand how these newsworkers experience and navigate various forms of precarity. Findings from this research confirm that precarity is ubiquitous among nonprofit news founders, and that financial precarity is particularly acute. Founders rely heavily on their personal and professional communities for support in navigating their precarious working conditions, and find great satisfaction in providing high-quality news and information to their communities. This study adds to growing calls for a labor turn in journalism studies and contributes to the literature on journalistic precarity by extending the concept to examine nonprofit newsrooms and their founders. Additionally, these findings provide insight into specific ways in which the burden of precarity on founders can be reduced.

The search for meaningful work under neo-bureaucracy: Work precarity in freelance TV

Drawing from a qualitative, empirical study of the working lives of freelance television workers, we explore the experience of ‘meaningful’ work where aesthetic considerations are attractants to the industry. Such aesthetic considerations – and the glamorous nature of the work – attracted both older and younger freelancers. However, whereas the older cohort had entered the industry in a previous era governed by bureaucratic forms, the younger cohort had entered an already fragmented workplace marked by neo-bureaucratic forms. This shift for freelance workers generally entailed precarious working conditions, long hours, sometimes unpaid and often uncertain jobs: the dark side of meaningful employment. While older freelancers had acquired social networks through their work with large broadcasters, the younger freelancers lacked such networks, making career entry more difficult and uncertain, particularly as neo bureaucratic forms became looser. Widespread exploitation/self-exploitation characterized both groups as they completed work ‘for the love of their art’. Our findings suggest that, theoretically, discussions of meaningful work should be nuanced based on an understanding of organizational form, such as transitions from bureaucratic to neo-bureaucratic governance that impact freelance workers.

“You know, there are ‘hidden rules’”: Chinese female journalists’ gendered experiences in different work settings

ABSTRACT This study explores the gendered experiences of 17 Chinese female journalists across different working environments (i.e., party news outlets, commercial news organisations, and the freelance market). It found that female journalists employed by news organisations suffered from and were variously implicated in workplace sexual harassment and assault, a lack of professional autonomy in regard to women’s issues, and institutional discrimination due to pregnancy and motherhood. Freelance female journalists, by comparison, while largely escaping the negative impact of gendered workplaces, face other forms of sexual harassment and sexism due to precarious working conditions (e.g., gendered earning uncertainty, a lack of institutional and social security, and harassment from male sources and readers which is often sexual in nature). Here, gender and unstable working arrangements interact. Providing first-hand accounts of these issues, these interviews allow us to understand how Chinese female journalists’ gendered experiences are shaped by the environments in which they work. This article thus argues that such gender issues should not be viewed in isolation, but rather analysed in relation to the nature and structural environments of female journalists’ specific work units.

INFORMAL ECONOMY, ISLAMIC FINANCE DEVELOPMENT, AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN MUSLIM-MAJORITY COUNTRIES

The paper focuses on the impact of informal economy and Islamic finance development on sustainable development using a panel dataset of 15 Muslim-majority countries from 2016 to 2022. The results based on the feasible GLS and panel quantile regression methods reveal that Islamic finance development has a positive impact on sustainable development. Meanwhile, the informal economy has a negative impact on sustainable development. Assessing the components of Islamic finance development, we further note that only quantitative development/financial performance and knowledge indicators are effective in achieving sustainable development. Besides these key results, GDP per capita, trade openness, and foreign direct investment emerge to be positive factors while the natural resource rents a negative factor in sustainable development. We reason that low productivity and precarious working conditions associated with informal economy may have hindered economic, social, and environmental wellbeing. The positive contribution of the Islamic finance development especially those related to Islamic financial performance and knowledge sharing to sustainable development hints the importance of further development of the Islamic financial sector in these countries.

The social reproductive labour of university students with hostile Jobs

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the social reproductive labour of one group of young people - university students who hold hostile jobs. Engaging in paid work while studying full-time has become common for university students. Despite the desire for high-quality work-integrated learning opportunities, many working undergraduate students face precarious working conditions in service sector jobs. Full-time undergraduate students at two Canadian universities who engaged in term-time paid work participated in focus groups, life mapping, interviews, and audio diaries. The data revealed that more than half of the students experienced hostile work that is characterized by precarious conditions, intensified working pace, erratic scheduling and discrimination. We explore three kinds of social reproductive labour done by young working university students in hostile jobs – the labour of navigating their job conditions, the labour of juggling work and study, and the labour of striving for control and well-being. Our analysis suggests the need to broaden the recognition of the work of working students and to ensure better quality work for young people. Conceptually, the paper is informed by feminist political economy, particularly debates on social reproductive labour.

Housing Informality and Labor Informality in Space: In Search of the Missing Links

AbstractThis paper analyzes the relationship between informal housing and labor informality at the intraurban level, considering these two phenomena' simultaneity and spatial dimensions. Our analysis focuses on the context of a city in a developing country, Medellín (Colombia), characterized by significant housing precariousness and low employment quality, where space seems to play an essential role in understanding this relationship. Using data from 176 analytical regions in Medellín for 2017, we estimate a series of spatial simultaneous equation models that consider the potential cross-equation correlations in the error terms. The results show that these two types of urban informality are highly persistent in space, with noticeable spatial clusters observed in the peripheral and marginalized areas of the city. Additionally, the estimated econometric models reveal that precarious working conditions are key to explaining the spatial choice of housing and its characteristics, and vice versa. These findings emphasize the need for place-based policies that specifically target disadvantaged areas and help improve residents' working and housing conditions to address urban informality.

Psychosocial work factors affecting safety incidents of long-distance bus drivers in Ghana: Mediating role of psychological well-being

BackgroundImproving psychosocial work environment of long-distance bus drivers is essential for their psychological well-being and on-the-road safety. Despite the importance of the work environment of bus drivers, it has received little research attention in Ghana and other developing nations. Hence, this study examined the influence of psychosocial work factors (job demands and job resources) on safety incidents of long-distance bus drivers and how psychological well-being mediates this association. MethodsThis cross-sectional survey sampled 7315 long-distance bus drivers who commute from the cities of Accra and Tema to other parts of Ghana and other cities in the West Africa sub-region. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to test four hypotheses. FindingsThe results suggest that job demands and job resources have direct association with safety incidents of the long-distance bus drivers. The psychological well-being of the bus drivers played a partial mediation role in the association between psychosocial work factors and safety incidents of the drivers. ConclusionThe job demand-resource model provides a useful model for understanding the impact of the work environment on driving performance among these long-distance bus drivers. Providing the drivers with high job control and supportive work culture can equip and support them to value the critical roles they play in the transport sector. Managers of bus transport companies and individual bus owners should implement effective communication strategies like the bottom-up communication approach, conduct periodic assessments to identify and address drivers’ precarious work conditions, create safety on the road, and reduce crashes and associated fatalities.

Work precarity, employment characteristics and health among Canada's long-term care and seniors' home workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted several issues among health care workers in Canada's long-term care and seniors' (LTCS) homes, including labour shortages, staff retention difficulties, overcrowding, and precarious working conditions. There is currently a lack of information on the health, well-being and working conditions of health care workers in LTCS homes - many of them immigrants - and a limited understanding of the relationship between them. This paper examines differences between immigrant and non-immigrant workers' health outcomes and precarious working conditions during the pandemic. The data were from the 2021 Survey on Health Care Workers' Experiences During the Pandemic, which collected information on LTCS home health care workers' (n=2,051) health, employment or work experiences, and working environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Summary statistics and multivariable logistic regressions were conducted to examine the association between precarious work and workers' health (life stress, mental health and general health), stratified by immigrant status. Selected working characteristics were included in the regression models as covariates, namely occupation, number of locations worked, facility ownership status and number of years worked. Immigrant health care workers were more likely than non-immigrant health care workers to experience precarious work in LTCS homes. Precarious work - characterized by income loss, reduced hours of work, and unpaid leave - was associated with stress and poor general health among immigrant and non-immigrant workers in the sector. Employment precarity was also associated with poor mental health for immigrant workers, but there was no association for non-immigrant workers. Employment precarity and the health and well-being of health care workers warrants further attention, in particular among immigrants employed in the LTCS residential care sector.

Material precarity, performative imperative, and burnout from resilience: surfacing the dark side of resilience laboring in women’s entrepreneurial stories

ABSTRACT Drawing from U.S. women entrepreneurs’ narratives of how they enacted resilience, the current study focuses on the dark side of resilience laboring – when individual resilience efforts and expectations become exploitative, unsustainable, and complicit to maintaining inequitable power structures. Women entrepreneurs’ narratives revealed that their resilience laboring, while contributing to the survival of their businesses, also led to continued struggles in precarious work conditions, well-being crises, and burnout from prolonged resilience practices. To challenge the patriarchal neoliberal values that contribute to the dark side of resilience and advocate for alternative framings and collective praxes, we propose three interconnected lenses to study resilience: a material lens to acknowledge accesses and resources requisite of resilience laboring; a tensional lens that exposes the constant negotiations of unrealistic and paradoxical resilience scripts anchored to identities; and a temporal lens to call out the hegemonic temporal norms prescribed to the ‘successful’ performance of resilience.

Bringing to light the shackles of the past: reflections on labor under conditions analogous to slavery in the context of SDG 8

The effective implementation of the SDGs requires coordinated action among governments, the private sector, civil society, and other stakeholders, along with comprehensive mobilization of financial, technological, and human resources. It is crucial to integrate economic, social, and environmental aspects to achieve the objectives of the 2030 Agenda. This qualitative article, utilizing literature review and document analysis, examines challenges and progress related to SDG 8 fulfillment in the Brazilian context, identifying factors impacting the effective eradication of slave-like labor and proposing potential strategies to achieve these goals. The targets of SDG 8 (Promoting sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all) have regressed in Brazil and worldwide. Forced labor, exploitation, and precarious working conditions persist, necessitating the implementation of stricter laws, strengthening of monitoring mechanisms, and a unified commitment from all involved actors for the effective eradication of this abhorrent practice.

Measuring employment precariousness in gig jobs: A pilot study among food couriers in Brussels1.

Within the extensive literature on precarious working conditions in the gig economy, remarkably little attention has been paid to how we can formally assess precarity. The few existing measurement instruments that seek to capture precarity in the gig economy assess the characteristics of platforms as job providers, but do not consider the situation of individual gig workers. Moreover, these approaches do not account for the different employment statuses of gig workers. This research's objective was to adapt, test and validate the Employment Precariousness Scale (EPRES) to the context of food couriers in Belgium. Fieldwork observations were combined with primary survey-data (N = 123). The scale was validated by testing reliability and external validity. Although the small sample size requires caution, the EPRES-gw (i.e., our adaptation for 'gig work') indicated sound reliability through sufficiently high internal consistency. The scale also showed good external validity through a significant positive correlation with poor well-being. The scale's characteristics in empirical analyses compare to previous research using the EPRES among employees. The EPRES-gw is therefore a promising instrument for studying employment precariousness in gig jobs.

Petites mains féminines, vulnérabilité professionnelle et pratiques conjointes de compensation financières dans l’administration publique universitaire au Cameroun

This article aims to conduct an ethnographic study on small female hands in the administration of the University of Yaoundé II in order to see to what extent the use of the concept of financial resilience makes sense. As a result, located in positions of administrative inferiority, small female hands, temporary administrative contract workers or with default status, seem more exposed to the pressures resulting from the various socio-political, health, economic and management hazards that may be faced the university institution. By taking into account the Covid-19 crisis as a temporal reference point, this study highlights the different financial strategies and practices mobilized by these agents to circumvent and confront the difficulties to which their socio-professional condition predisposes them. As such, it must be considered that these income compensation practices reflect the capacity of this category to adapt to the degrading developments which determine their precarious working conditions. They provide good information about their realities as resilience entrepreneurs. We can therefore link the financial resilience of small hands to legitimate socio-professional conditioning. One that promotes, as a position of action, the compensation of their income through the diversification of income-generating activities and the establishment of mutual aid and solidarity systems within the institution.

“Being pretty does not help your success”: Self-representation and aspiration of China’s female showroom livestreamers

China’s showroom livestreaming is highly gender-segregated, in which young women working as showroom livestreamers are often stigmatized and criticized as hypersexual or vulgar. Situating female streamers’ practices in the sociocultural environment of contemporary China and comparing them to other wanghong creators such as fashion or beauty bloggers in China’s digital economy, we investigate how female streamers construct a particular type of gendered entrepreneurial subjectivity. In this research, we selected 90 short videos that are produced by three female streamers on the social media platform Douyin to examine their self-representations and discursive practices around showroom livestreaming production. In the analysis, we unravel three major interconnected narratives: enduring the behind-the-screen hardship of livestreaming is worthy; navigating heterosexual relationships with viewers is part of showroom livestreaming work; and professional skills and knowhow are provided for those who truly aspire to success. These narratives commonly form a discourse of showroom livestreaming as good work for ordinary working-class or underclass women to achieve social and economic advancement in contemporary China. Moreover, these narratives render young women as autonomous agents with free choices to hustle in the world of showroom livestreaming, normalizing the precarious working conditions as well as gender power imbalances.

Time-Based Stress and Procedural Justice: Can Transparency Mitigate the Effects of Algorithmic Compensation in Gig Work?

The gig economy has led to a new management style, using algorithms to automate managerial decisions. Algorithmic management has aroused the interest of researchers, particularly regarding the prevalence of precarious working conditions and the health issues related to gig work. Despite algorithmically driven remuneration mechanisms' influence on work conditions, few studies have focused on the compensation dimension of algorithmic management. We investigate the effects of algorithmic compensation on gig workers in relation to perceptions of procedural justice and time-based stress, two important predictors of work-related health problems. Also, this study examines the moderating effect of algorithmic transparency in these relationships. Survey data were collected from 962 gig workers via a research panel. The results of hierarchical multiple regression analysis show that the degree of exposure to algorithmic compensation is positively related to time-based stress. However, contrary to our expectations, algorithmic compensation is also positively associated with procedural justice perceptions and our results indicate that this relation is enhanced at higher levels of perceived algorithmic transparency. Furthermore, transparency does not play a role in the relationship between algorithmic compensation and time-based stress. These findings suggest that perceived algorithmic transparency makes algorithmic compensation even fairer but does not appear to make it less stressful.

DIGITAL LABOR UNDER THE STATE/CAPITALIST DUOPOLY: STATE LABOR AND PLAYFUL WORKAHOLICS IN CHINESE DIGITAL SPACE

With the rise of Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs), Chinese digital creative industries are no longer a realm of self-entrepreneurship but are dominated by professional service agencies and platforms. At the same time, the Chinese-style market economy and state-led platformization have spawned a unique platform ecology, shaping Chinese digital creative industries and labor subjectivity in its own unique way. This study contributes to digital entrepreneurship in a non-Western context by exploring the characteristics and risks of Chinese digital laborers amid state-led platformization. Through a qualitative analysis of 203 recruitment advertisements of major MCNs in China, the finding reveals that Chinese digital laborers are trapped in a state/capitalist duopoly. On the surface, recruitment advertisements posted by MCNs create a low-threshold, flexible working environment. But in essence, they reflect the precarious working conditions of contemporary digital laborers under MCNs’ systematic business model. In a crude way, MCNs transformed digital entrepreneurs who previously relied on self-promotion into aesthetic laborers in front of the camera. At the same time, laborers behind the camera are a group of playful workaholics at great risk of being exploited for free. They are compelled to involuntarily internalize the pressures of hyper-productivity and undertake trivial emotional labor. Beyond the risks of the platformed digital economy, I argue that digital laborers of MCNs have become a form of state labor that is expected to contribute to national development agendas while embodying the national character that the state promotes.

Work sucks, I know: Instagram as a platform for young people's labour grievances

In Summer 2020, young workers from prominent Vancouver, British Columbia-based cafes, restaurants and breweries took to Instagram to air grievances about their workplaces. Precarious and violent working conditions in the food industry are business as usual in BC, which is reflected in the stories these workers shared of wage theft, unsafe workplaces, erratic scheduling, harassment and sexual violence. Held within the context of widespread layoffs in the industry due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these workers built communities of complaint and, in some cases, fundamentally changed the ownership and operations of their workplaces. To do this, these young workers navigated a complex web of digital/physical spaces and relationships to challenge abuses in their workplaces. By centering their complaints in the interrelationship between complaint, digital political protest, economic grievance and known forms of worker organizing, this paper explores how young people leveraged their grievances through their digital networks to influence their economic relationships and create safer workplaces for themselves and other workers.

Sex Work Policy in Poland and Its Impact on the Lived Experience of Sex Workers

This article discusses the model of sex work regulation in Poland. Officially ‎being an abolitionist one, it criminalises directly third parties, while in practice the whole working environment is criminalised, pushing sex workers into ‎shadow economy and precarious working conditions, and exposing them to ‎heightened risks of violence. At the same time, the Polish state does not provide any support programmes for sex workers. As such, it misrecognises sex ‎workers, who are not seen as workers or victims. This article looks at the prostitution policy from the perspective of sex workers’ rights. It also shows how ‎complicated sex work policy is, since the law includes contradictory rules and ‎values, which all have a negative impact on sex workers’ lives, and how these ‎contradictory rules contribute to misrecognition of sex workers, as workers, ‎subjects of rights and citizens, and to their stigmatisation.