Modern working life: A blurring of the boundaries between secondary and primary labour markets?

Fabian Dekker and Romke van der Veen

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2017, vol. 38, issue 2, 256-270

Abstract: Today, there is a widespread suggestion that permanent workers are increasingly subject to precarious working conditions. Due to international competition and declining union density, job qualities of permanent workers are assumed to be under strain. According to proponents of a democratization of risk rationale, low job qualities that were traditionally attached to secondary labour markets are transferred to workers in primary segments of the labour market. In this study, the authors test this theoretical rationale among workers in 11 Western European economies, using two waves of the European Working Conditions Survey. The results do not confirm a democratization of labour market risk. Lower job qualities are highly associated with flexible employment contracts and highlight a clear gap between insiders and outsiders.

Keywords: Atypical employment; dual labour market; flexibility; job quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X14563946 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:38:y:2017:i:2:p:256-270

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X14563946

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().