ILPC 2026

Against the background of a general expansion of precarious employment in Europe, the paper focuses on the how employment instability is perceived and lived by workers and how it affects the representation of their economic and social situation.  Indeed, the subjective perception of job uncertainty is a key factor, even more than the objective perception, for defining opportunities and constraints within which individuals make their work and family decisions. The few studies that have addressed the issue have first of all revealed that the meaning and perception of insecurity depends on the type of welfare state regime and the national regulation of labour markets [Pochic, Paugam, and Selz 2003, 8]. So, both the local labour market conditions and the institutional environment play a strong role on the perception of work instability and representation of individuals that influences their choices.

In this framework, focusing on young people's perception of job instability is particularly important for the impact that it has on their transition to adulthood (housing independence, family formation, etc). Indeed, for young people in Europe, entry into the labour market mainly occurs through flexible contracts, which do not apply the protections of the insiders. In addition, those with temporary contracts have greater difficulty in going on to the protected segment of the labour market, and can fall into a situation of unprotected unemployment.

This study is based on cross-sectional data from the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS, wave 2011), on a sample of young workers (aged 18-34) and adults (35-54) from 28 European Union Member States. Data are analyzed using logistic regression models.

The study has two main research questions:

a)      To what extent the spreading of subjective job insecurity (Anderson and Pontusson, 2007; Hipp 2016) varies in the 28 European countries according to:

- macro-level factors: welfare state regime

- micro-level factors: age (young workers vs. adult workers) and other characteristics as the type of contract and the occupational class;

b)     Which is the relationship between the objective and subjective dimensions of insecurity? Namely, how subjectively insecure individuals feel, despite holding an objectively secure position and vice versa?

Preliminary findings have shown that temporary and agency contracts are associated with higher insecurity, while informal labour forms do not seem to be associated to higher insecurity than permanent positions. Souther-European and Post-socialist countries are the least protective against job insecurity, together with the Anglo-saxon cluster for adult workers (compared to the Scandinavian). On the contrary, the social-democratic cluster emerges as the least insecure in terms of re-employment, as well as the conservative cluster. As far as the cross between subjective and objective job insecurity, the analyses show that individuals who perceive job insecurity, despite being in an objectively insecure position are more often living in the Post-Socialist and Southern European clusters (as well as Anglo-Saxon for adults), being females, living in families with poor economic situation and working in the private sector. A further focus on the role played by the occupational class in the different welfare regimes will be developed for the conference paper.