Extended Summary

The nature of welfare capitalism has been changing since the end of the so-called golden age and one of the most prominent transformations occur in the structure of employment. In many national labour markets, atypical forms of employment become widespread and the share of standard employment declines. The standard form of employment refers to full time, permanent employment whereas atypical form refers to all non-standard working relations such as in part-time or temporary contract jobs. Meanwhile, the level of precariousness has also increased, mostly due to the increased in-work poverty, rising unemployment, employment insecurity and abating social security coverage. The increasing numbers of non-standard forms of employment brought flexibility to the labour markets, however, at the cost of low social protection and earnings, and job security deprivation.

Although usually non-standard forms of employment are perceived to be precarious, the state of precariousness is not restricted to non-standard forms only. The policy department of the EU Parliament’s Directorate-General for Internal Policy prepared a report in 2016 regarding the precarious employment in Europe, grouping various types of contracts according to their risk of precariousness. Among the criteria used to determine the risk of precariousness are low pay, in-work poverty, low job security, health risks, lack of progression, lack of training, stress, lack of financial stability. Based on these criteria, the standard form of employment and part time employment are observed to have low risk of precariousness while marginal part time, involuntary part time, self-employed, and fixed term work are associated with medium risk of precariousness. Informal employment and zero-hour contracts are reported as a type of employment with highest risk of precariousness.

Our aim in this study is to construct a composite precariousness index to assess risk of precariousness associated with both typical and atypical forms of employment within a labor market. We compare the risk of precariousness of different employment categories of Turkish labor market by using 2006, 2010 and 2017 Income and Living Conditions Survey conducted by TUIK.

The contribution of our precariousness measure to the literature is that it allows us to rank different employment categories according to their risk of precariousness within a country. The precariousness index we propose in this study has a composite nature. It evaluates the risk of precariousness of employment types in three equally weighted dimensions: social security, in-work poverty and duration of unemployment. The duration of unemployment is approximated by workers who were unemployed more than nine months in the previous year.

Our initial task is to determine the standard and non-standard forms of employment for the working age population (15-64) who are currently in employment based on questions concerning the work status, working hours and contract type. That is we group employment types according to individuals’ (1) social security status: (i) formal workers; (ii) informal workers, (2) job status: (i) wage and salary earners; (ii) casual workers; (iii) own account workers and (3) according to individuals’ working hours: (i) full time employment, (ii) part time employment, (iii) marginal employment, (iv) involuntary employment. The data set also enables us to detect the contract types of the regularly paid and the casual workers: (i) permanent contract workers, (ii) temporary contract workers, (iii) no contract workers; (iv) internships. So we have three standard employment categories (wage earners, full time and permanent contract workers) and seven atypical job categories. The categories are not exclusive; for example, casual workers category includes temporary or no contract workers, or most of the categories contain part-time workers.

Our precariousness index (PI) is constructed as the sum of three components that approximate these two dimensions:

where

The results suggest that precariousness associated with atypical forms of employment is higher than standard forms in all years as expected. The involuntary part time and no contract workers are the groups of highest precarious work. Moreover, the risk of precariousness has been increasing over time for all the employment forms