ILPC 2027

In the aftermath of the economic crisis in 2007, non-standard employment forms among young people are increasingly widespread. Most young adults in Europe are employed on a fixed term basis, increased has the number of agency workers and self-employed, while also the number of young people suffering from unemployment, or being in transitional programmes preparing them for the labour market is high. While this is a rather gloomy picture of exclusion often portraying the young generation as a lost generation, our paper investigates empirically the life of young adults in precarious life and working conditions in two countries. The paper compares how precarity is shaped in Poland and Germany, and looks in a set of different explanations to understand the differences in both countries. We start with a critical examination of current understandings of precarity, questioning if precarity as a concept does work as an analytical tool in different national settings or just as a political (mobilising) concept. To answer this we investigate both the life worlds of young people as well as institutions and the socio-political reforms affecting young people.

We argue that while labour market policies and welfare state arrangements and industrial relations present the institutional framework that shapes the experience and different accounts of precarity, also cultural explanations and socio-political arguments need to be taken into account. Among the cultural explanations, we look into the effect of attitudes, socialist legacies, social capital and the role of family. Further we look for the different effect that the position in the global market as core and semi-periphery has on the outlook of precarity.

The paper is based on a comparative project conducting 120 biographies with young people under 29 years as well as a survey among this age group particularly looking into socio-economic attitudes. The paper proposed represents the first analytical outcome of joint analysis, the wider project seeks to propose new theoretical insights into the extent in which precarious working and living conditions influence the emergent forms of social, class and political consciousness, individual life strategies and collective civic engagement of young workers in Poland and Germany.

The project is funded by the Polish National Research Centre and the German Research Council (UMO-2014/15/G/HS4/04476 and TR1378/1-1).