ILPC 2026

The aim of the paper is to discuss the biographical conditions, properties and consequences of coping practices developed by young precarious workers in Poland and Germany in the contexts of two distinct political-economic regimes, the former representing a semi-peripheral embedded neoliberal economy and the latter the coordinated economy type.

Despite political-economic differences, in both countries young people tend to be systemically disadvantaged in terms of greater risk of poverty, temporary employment and unemployment than general population. Simultaneously, regardless the objective changes in life and labour market conditions, young people in both countries tend to be satisfied with their lives and surprisingly optimistic about their future and rarely engage in conventional protests and collective actions. Exploring this potential paradox and the conditions under which we still find attempts to contest the impositions of precarisation, this paper is based on the results of ongoing research on young precarious workers within the NCN-DFG funded PREWORK project. The qualitative module contains 120 biographical narrative interviews with young people (18-30) in low-paid temporary jobs, low-paid open-ended contracts, traineeships and unemployed, differing from each other in terms of educational resources, sector and types of jobs performed, which are collected in economically diversified urban contexts in East and West Germany and Poland. The quantitative module is based on the representative CATI survey of young people in both countries (N=1000).

The first results of comparative analysis of the biographies collected will be presented in the form of a typology consisting of four types: precarious working-class type, precarious bureaucratic type, precarious creative type and precarious entrepreneurial type. These types are linked with diversified forms of mobilisation and demobilisation in both countries.  It is concluded that inconsistences and contradictions both at the level of economic consciousness and life strategies of workers present some space for resistance against the precarity. The latter is more present in Poland than in Germany in which the tendency of reproduction and normalisation of social order seem to prevail despite precarisation.