Temporary employment boom in Poland – a job quality vs. quantity trade-off?

Marek Góra, Piotr Lewandowski and Maciej Lis

No 04/2017, IBS Working Papers from Instytut Badan Strukturalnych

Abstract: Between 2002 and 2015, temporary employment in Poland more than doubled. Poland became the country with the highest share of temporary jobs in the EU. In this paper we study this process from the job quality vs. job quantity perspective. We analyse gaps between temporary and permanent workers in six dimensions of jobs quality, adopting measures proposed by the OECD and Eurofound. The gaps in earnings quality, job security and work scheduling quality were the most pronounced. Job quality has improved for both groups of workers but the gaps have not closed completely. Firms in Poland prefer temporary contracts because of lower firing cost, tax wedge and wages. We use a stylised labour demand model to quantify the upper bound of a potential job creation effect due to lower labour costs incurred by temporary contracts. We find that this effect doesn’t exceed 4% of dependent employment in 2015. We cannot rule out that the net employment effect was 0. Our findings show that even if cheaper, temporary contracts might have induced some job creation, workers suffered from lower job quality in several dimensions.

Keywords: job quality; temporary employment; segmentation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J28 J41 J81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Temporary Employment Boom in Poland: A Job Quality vs. Quantity Trade-off? (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ibt:wpaper:wp042017

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