Social inequalities in the impact of flexible employment on different domains of psychosocial health

Abstract

Study objectives: (1) To analyse the impact of flexible employment on mental health and job dissatisfaction; and (2) to examine the constraints imposed by flexible employment on men's and women's partnership formation and people's decision to become parents. For the two objectives the potentially different patterns by sex and social class are explored. Design: Cross sectional health survey. Multiple logistic regression models separated for sex and social class (manual and non-manual workers) and controlling for age were fitted. Four types of contractual arrangements have been considered: permanent, fixed term temporary contract, non-fixed term temporary contract, and no contract. Setting: Catalonia (a region in the north east of Spain). Participants: Salaried workers interviewed in the 2002 Catalonian health survey with no longstanding limiting illness, aged 16-64 (1474 men and 998 women). Main results: Fixed term temporary contracts were not associated with poor mental health status. The impact of other forms of flexible employment on mental health depended on the type of contractual arrangement, sex, and social class and it was restricted to less privileged workers, women, and manual male workers. The impact of flexible employment on living arrangements was higher in men. Among both manual and non-manual male workers, those with fixed term temporary contracts were less likely to have children when married or cohabiting and, additionally, among non-manual male workers they also were more likely to remain single (aOR = 2.35; 95%CI = 1.13 to 4.90). Conclusion: Some forms of temporary contracts are related to adverse health and psychosocial outcomes with different patterns depending on the outcome analysed and on sex and social class. Future research should incorporate variables to capture situations of precariousness associated with flexible employment.

Is temporary employment damaging to health? A longitudinal study on Italian workers

“…Substantial international literature exists that has attempted to investigate the consequences of job precariousness, whatever defined, on individual well-being by using several outcome indicators, from Europe (e.g., Gash et al, 2007;Virtanen et al, 2005;Laszlo et al, 2010;Artazcoz et al, 2005) to the U.S. (e.g. QuesnelVallee et al, 2010) and Eastern Asia (Kim et al, 2008).…”

“…These differences may be outcome-specific (e.g., Bardasi and Francesconi, 2004;Rodriguez, 2002;Artazcoz et al, 2005) or may depend on the context, i.e. the labor market arrangements (Ehlert and Schaffner, 2011), the health and safety regulations (Cottini and Lucifora, 2010), or the level of welfare state or unemployment protection (Scherer, 2009).…”

“…Moreover, in line with the advices of Artazcoz et al (2007) and Benach et al (2014), gender differential could be interpreted in the light of the interactions between job, family life and domestic labor. It is not surprising that, among high-middle-income countries, gender differences have been found mostly in Southern European countries e Italy and Spain in particular (Artazcoz et al, 2005;Callea et al, 2012;Campos Serna et al, 2013) e where gender inequality is still pervasive in both work and family arrangements (Del Boca et al, 2012).…”

“…As for part-time contracts, we include them in the definition of temporary employment only when the condition of fixed duration is met. In order to precisely and unambiguously identify the type of contract in our analysis (Artazcoz et al, 2005;Virtanen et al, 2005), we exclude selfemployed people. This exclusion is often made in this kind of studies (e.g., Bardasi and Francesconi, 2004;Caroli and Godard, 2013) and it is driven by two considerations: first, self-employed people may have individual characteristics that differentiate them with respect to fixed-term workers e e.g., entrepreneurship, managerial skills, higher wage aspirations (Kalleberg et al, 2000); second, the nature of self-employment is profoundly different with respect to temporary contracts stipulated with an employee.…”

Employment insecurity and mental health during the economic recession: An analysis of the young adult labour force in Italy

“…Virtanen et al's (2005) meta-analysis of 27 studies found an association between temporary employment and psychological morbidity, although the magnitude of the health risk depended on the degree of instability of the temporary employment, as well as on the context. Similarly, Artazcoz, Benach, Borrell and Cortes (2005) reported that the strength of the association increased with the degree of insecurity of the contractual arrangement, and varied across gender and social class. More recent studies also showed that temporary contracts were associated with negative psychological outcomes, even after accounting for potential selection effects (Cottini & Lucifora, 2010;Pirani & Salvini, 2015;Quesnel-Vallée, DeHaney, & Ciampi, 2010;Waenerlund, Virtanen, & Hammarström, 2011).…”