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    • To our knowledge this is the first study to

    2018-11-05

    To our knowledge, this is the first study to empirically test the claim that flexicurity policies have the capacity to attenuate the adverse health consequences of temporary employment across a large sample of advanced capitalist countries. Prior studies have challenged the notion that flexicurity can serve as a panacea for contemporary labour market woes (Afzal et al., 2013; Berglund et al., 2014; Burchell, 2009; MacAllister et al.,2016). Our study contributes novel empirical evidence to this broader literature on the troublesome relationship between labour market flexibility and the welfare of workers (Kalleberg, 2009). There are at least two explanations for our findings. First, it is theoretically plausible that there is a threshold of social protection below which the moderating effects of flexicurity policies cannot be meaningfully observed (Afzal et al., 2013). In other words, our results may reflect the fact that few, if any, of the countries included in our analyses have social protection policies that are generous and comprehensive enough to act as effective LDN 209929 dihydrochloride against the experience of temporary employment. It is worth noting that European welfare states have experienced significant retrenchment and recommodification in recent decades (Bambra et al., 2010). The institutions responsible for providing protection against socio-economic risks associated with the operation of markets under capitalism have become less generous and less comprehensive during the same period of time that dramatic changes in employment relations have intensified workers’ exposures to such risks. In fact, rather than flexicurity, the trend in most European countries has been towards greater insecurity (Burroni & Keune, 2011; Heyes, 2013). Moreover, the 2008 economic crisis and its associated aftershocks have generated significant imperatives for further retrenchment and reform (Karanikolos et al., 2013). The intersection of work and welfare—and the flexibility-security nexus in particular—is a principal terrain upon which contemporary austerity reforms are unfolding (Heyes, 2013). This disjuncture between the growing need for and declining supply of social protection has severely undermined conditions for the successful implementation of flexicurity policies (Afzal et al., 2013). These empirical developments may explain why our analyses have failed to find evidence in favour of the theoretical claims of the flexicurity approach. A second explanation for our findings—one that is not mutually exclusive with the first—may be that the relationship between temporary employment, employment precariousness, and health is fundamental in its nature. By fundamental, we mean that the relationship influences multiple disease outcomes through multiple causal pathways involving a complex array of resources that are implicated in the social production of health and illness (Link & Phelan, 1995). From this perspective, we should expect the association between temporary employment and health to persist, even when we address one or another of the pathways involved in that association. As we have already noted, temporary employment is characterized by multiple dimensions of precariousness (Benavides et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2012). While flexicurity policies aim to overcome a key dimension of precariousness associated with the experience of temporary employment (i.e. inadequate access to training and unemployment benefits), they do not account for many of the putative mechanisms underlying its association with health (Muntaner et al., 2010b). This may explain why flexicurity policies fail to exhibit a meaningful capacity to attenuate employment-related health inequalities (Burchell, 2009). This may also explain why employment-related health inequalities are pronounced even in countries with strict labour market regulations. In contrast to those searching for an institutional basis for non-precarious forms of temporary employment, tackling the fundamental causes of these inequalities may require a sharp reversal of recent trends towards greater labour market flexibility and, by extension, towards greater employment precariousness.