Polarisation of Non-standard Employment in Europe: Exploring a Missing Piece of the Inequality Puzzle

Jeroen Horemans ()

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2016, vol. 125, issue 1, 189 pages

Abstract: The rise in non-standard employment inspired many scholars to study the social consequences of these new employment forms. Most research focusses on individuals working non-standard. With the increase in dual earnership, however, we need a household perspective. This study therefore develops the notion of household non-standard employment and applies a polarisation index to examine the distribution of non-standard work over dual earner couples. This polarisation index compares the actual rate of household non-standard employment with a counterfactual rate when non-standard employment would be randomly distributed over households. Drawing on EU-SILC 2011, we define non-standard workers as individuals who worked during the previous year, but not full-year full-time. The results indicate that the levels of polarisation vary considerably across countries. Because especially women do not work full-time, polarisation is highly negative since it is less likely to find clustering of non-standard work within households. This pattern is dominant in Continental European countries, but also observable in Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon countries. On the other hand, in Eastern and Southern European countries, non-standard employment is concentrated in some households, mainly because of the inability of its members to work full-year. Common characteristics of household members known to be associated with non-standard employment, like age and education, explain little of the levels of non-standard employment polarisation. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Keywords: Non-standard employment; Polarisation; Inequality; Household employment patterns; Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:125:y:2016:i:1:p:171-189

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DOI: 10.1007/s11205-014-0834-0

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