A New Multidimensional Approach to Measuring Precarious Employment

Abstract

This article proposes a new methodology to measure precarious employment with a multidimensional approach. The adjusted multidimensional precariousness rate employed to measure job precariousness is calculated on a counting approach and exhibit several advantages, including its decomposability according to the relative contribution to total precariousness of different dimensions and sub-populations. For illustrative purposes, the methodology is applied to the Spanish case using microdata from the Encuesta de Estructura Salarial (Wage Structure Survey) and considering three precariousness dimensions of jobs (low wages, fixed-term contracts and part-time work). The evidence obtained shows that at the beginning of the economic crisis there was an increase in the incidence and intensity of precariousness for new jobs created in the Spanish economy. Moreover, obtained evidence shows that the incidence of precarious employment is particularly high in certain economic sectors and for females.

Measuring Economic Insecurity Using a Counting Approach. An Application to Three EU Countries

“…The counting approach method (Atkinson, ) is commonly used in multidimensional poverty analysis (Alkire and Foster, ) and has been adapted to other fields, such as labor precariousness (García‐Pérez et al , ) or multidimensional affluence (Peichl and Pestel, , ), among others. In line with Bucks (), we adapt this strategy to produce an economic insecurity index.…”

Examining the Impact of Two Dimensions of Precarious Employment, Vulnerability and Insecurity on the Self-Reported Health of Men, Women and Migrants in Australia

“…to less standard or more flexible terms of employment, with increased casualization of the workforce, fixed-term contracts and part-time work, low wages, limited workplace rights and protection and individual-level bargaining over employment conditions [ 1 ]. The term precarious employment has increasingly been used to describe this less stable, and often detrimental, employment form [ 2 ]. However, the definition of precarious employment is broader than the contractual features of precarious employment and also encompasses the social aspects of precarious employment relationships and, specifically, workplace power relationships, e.g., powerlessness to exercise workplace rights or helplessness against workplace authoritarianism [ 1 , 3 , 4 ].…”

The dimension, nature and distribution of economic insecurity in European countries: A multidimensional approach

“…Additionally, subjective indicators of economic insecurity are based on the household's inability to face unexpected expenses, a measure of financial dissatisfaction and an indicator of any changes in the ability to go on a holiday. Subsequently, we aggregate these simple indicators using a counting approach (Atkinson, 2003;Alkire and Foster, 2011) traditionally used in multidimensional poverty analysis but useful in measuring economic insecurity (Bucks, 2011) and other phenomena, such as multidimensional affluence Pestel, 2013a, 2013b) or labor precariousness (García-Pérez, Prieto-Alaiz and Simón, 2017). We believe this is a comprehensive method with a simple implementation that has several advantages: it is more robust to the way we define dimensions and to the presence of outliers (in comparison to other aggregation methods as principal components analysis (PCA) or a simple mean of dimensions), and it allows us to compute a series of aggregate indicators that facilitate the analysis of insecurity in time and to compare insecurity levels and nature between regions, considering both incidence and intensity in a single measure (the economic insecurity adjusted rate,…”