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The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special issue volume on vulnerable work and strategies for inclusion. Definitions, measurement, analysis and policy responses to vulnerable work and strategies for inclusion are addressed before the key aspects of the nine papers included in the special issue are summarised.

The topic of vulnerability at work is explored, before the distinguishing features of jobs that generate vulnerable conditions and the characteristics of vulnerable workers are identified.

Vulnerable work is insecure and irregular with few protections accorded to the vulnerable workers who are often characterised by their age, ethnic status, gender and skill profiles. The consequences include: poor job quality, low and irregular incomes and personal/family hardship. Vulnerability is widespread across the workforce, with workers subject to work intensification, employment insecurity and poor work-life balance.

Vulnerable work and workers constitute a growing and global phenomenon. Consequently, governments and employers need to work together on programmes, such as the ILO’s decent work agenda, to ensure that basic human rights at work are widely recognised and provision to ongoing employment, safe working conditions and regular hours are offered across a variety of industries/sectors.

This volume examines the conceptual, empirical and policy aspects of vulnerability in employment. It documents the international dimensions of vulnerability, the different forms it takes, those groups that are at risk of vulnerable employment and the underlying factors that generate and support vulnerability.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prevalence and drivers of employment vulnerability among youth in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia, and their propensity to transition to better jobs over time.

The analysis is based on longitudinal data from Labor Market Panel Surveys spanning 6–20 years. The authors use transition matrices to examine the prevalence of transitions between labor market statuses for the same individuals over time, distinguishing between youth and non-youth, and men and women, as well as multinomial logistic regressions that control for individual and family background, including previous labor market status, family wealth and parental education.

The paper finds that youth in all three countries were disadvantaged in terms of labor market outcomes with most young men in particular ending up in vulnerable jobs while women of all ages were most likely to exit the labor market all together, unless they had formal jobs. Moreover, youth who started out in the labor market in a vulnerable job were unlikely to move to a better-quality job over time. Family wealth, parental education and father's occupation were found to be important determinants of labor market outcomes and vulnerability, even after a long period of work experience.

The paper finds that wealth effects, parental education and occupation effects follow workers throughout their careers, implying low equality of opportunity and inter-generational and lifetime mobility.

The findings indicate worsening labor market outcomes over time, heavily influenced by family background. High levels of vulnerable employment persistence, regardless of skill and experience, reinforce the importance of initial labor market outcome on the quality of lifetime employment prospects.

Contemporary interest in vulnerable employment groups has focused on women, ethnic minorities and the secondary labour market. Social discrimination, marginal employment and low pay are the badges of vulnerability of these groups. As Section 2 shows, labour law's response to employment vulnerability has been piecemeal and tangential with the result that progress towards the enjoyment of basic employment rights by vulnerable workers has been slow and fortuitous. People with disabilities possess many of the traits of vulnerability shared by other disadvantaged groups but receive only a footnote in the pages of labour law. This article records the developing debate on the employment rights of disabled people and places it in the context of the current analysis of employment vulnerability.

This paper studies social inequality in the vital field of employment in Spain during the crisis period 2009-2014.

Factor analysis is used to build a synthetic index of employment exclusion. The starting information matrix collects data from a wide set of employment variables for all 17 Spanish autonomous communities and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Based on this information, four factors are extracted which explain employment exclusion in different situations of vulnerability, such as unemployment, temporality, poverty or low pay.

In the territorial ranking, Madrid, Basque Country, Aragon and Catalonia show the lowest risk of employment exclusion, whereas Ceuta, Andalusia, Extremadura and Canary Islands show the highest ones.

The main value of this research is that it confirms the need for coordination of public policies in order to foster social and territorial cohesion in Spain.

In a modern world increasingly perceived as uncertain, the mere purchase of a household cleaning product, or a seemingly harmless bottle of milk, conveys interrogations about potential hazards, from environmental to health impacts. The main purpose of this paper is to suggest that risk could be considered as one of the major dimensions of choice for a wide range of concerns and markets, alongside aspiration/satisfaction, and tackled efficiently by mobilizing the recent findings of cognitive sciences, neurosciences and evolutionary psychology. It is felt that consumer research could benefit more widely from psychological and evolutionary-grounded risk theories.

In this study, some 50 years of marketing management literature, as well as risk-specialized literature, was examined in an attempt to get a grasp of how risk is handled by consumer sciences and of whether they make some use of the most recent academic works on mental biases, non-mainstream decision-making processes or evolutionary roots of behavior. We then tested and formulated several hypotheses regarding risk profiles and preferences in the sector of insurance, by participating in an Axa Research Fund–Paris School of Economics research project.

It is suggested that consumer profiles could be enriched by risk-taking attitudes, that risk could be part of the “reason why” of brand positioning, and that brand, as well as public policy communication, could benefit from a targeted use of risk perception biases.

This paper proposes to apply evolutionary-based psychological concepts to build perceptual maps describing people and consumers on both aspiration and risk attitude axis, and to design communication tools according to psychological research on message framing and biases. Such an approach mobilizes not only the recent findings of cognitive sciences and neurosciences but also the understanding of the roots of risk attitudes and perception. Those maps and framing could probably be applied to many sectors, markets and public issues, from commodities to personal products and services (food, luxury goods, electronics, financial products, tourism, design or insurance).

Globally, a myriad of floating workers is in grave jeopardy due to the ceasing of employment opportunities that resulted from the mobility restriction during the Covid-19. Despite the global concern, developing countries have been suffering disproportionately due to the dominance of informal workers in their labour market, posing the necessity to campaign for the immediate protection of this vulnerable population. This paper analyses various dimensions of the vulnerability of urban floating workers in the context of Covid-19 in Bangladesh. In reference to International Labour Organization's (ILO) “Decent Work” concept, this paper endeavours to examine floating workers' vulnerability using the insider-outsider framework in context to Covid-19 pandemic.

The study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, data were collected before the pandemic to assess the vulnerability of the informal floating workers. Later, we extended the study to the second phase during the Covid-19 pandemic to understand how pandemic affects the lives and livelihood of floating workers. In phase one, data were collected from a sample of 342 floating workers and analysed based on job security, wages, working environment, psychological wellbeing and education to understand the vulnerability of floating workers. In phase two, 20 in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted, followed by thematic analysis to explore how the pandemic affects the existing vulnerability of floating workers.

Various social protection schemes were analysed to evaluate their effectiveness in reducing the vulnerability of floating workers facing socio-economic crises. The study has found that the pandemic has multiplied the existing vulnerability of the floating workers on many fronts that include job losses, food crisis, shelter insecurity, education, social, physical and mental wellbeing. In response to the pandemic, the Government stimulus packages and Non-government Covid-19 initiatives lack the appropriate system, magnitude, and focus on protecting the floating workers in Bangladesh.

This paper outlines various short-term interventions and long-term policy prescriptions to safeguard floating workers' lives and livelihood from the ongoing Corona pandemic and unforeseen uncertainties.

This paper is the first of its kind that aims at understanding the vulnerability of this significant workforce in Bangladesh, taking the whole picture of Government and Non-government initiatives during Covid-19.

This explorative study aims to investigate work precariousness (WP) among EU27-based economically dependent solo self-employed, i.e. those with no employees and usually relying on just one client.

Univariate and multivariate analyses of European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) (2015) and Eurostat data.

The analyses yielded Disempowerment, intended as lack of job autonomy and money-induced Vulnerability as the dimensions of WP. Disempowerment was found positively influenced by workers' threat of losing the job and negatively by the enjoyment from being their own boss. Vulnerability was negatively influenced by workers' age, perceived easiness to find new customers, household's financial well-being as well as the country's employment rate.

The study represents pioneer exploration of the phenomenon's dimensionality and main determinants.

This article examinees how vulnerability operates within the intimate economy in Hong Kong’s prominent entertainment district of Wanchai. Best known in its portrayal of The World of Suzie Wong, Wanchai’s historicity is anchored in a legacy of colonialism, orientalist imagination, and Western militarization. Presently, the area continues to cater to Western expatriate men, foreign travellers and the US Navy. An influx of Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers to Hong Kong in recent decades has led to the rise of new intimate relationships fostered in the bar district. While Wanchai is renowned as a red-light district celebrating white Western masculinity, a complex portrait emerged after a year of ethnographic fieldwork observing the intimate exchanges between Western expatriate men and Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, as two groups who are positioned on opposite ends of the city’s socioeconomic spectrum. Contrary to recurrent portrayals of female victimhood in commercialized sex industries, this article illustrates how other experiences of vulnerability, particularly those of the Western male expatriate partner, also deserve critical attention. By exploring the decommercialized transactions within Wanchai’s intimate economy, this piece demonstrates how the intimate relations forged between Western expatriates and Southeast Asian migrants can help negotiate longstanding gendered relations of power and shared senses of structural precarity.

This paper aims to explore how service organizations can improve the effectiveness of well-being creation efforts given the pressing societal issues and global crises. In this paper, the authors examine two essential dimensions (dignity and vulnerability approach) to develop a theoretical framework. This framework can be used to increase the effectiveness of well-being outcomes created by transformative service initiatives (TSIs) and minimize their negative unintentional consequences.

Drawing on social marketing and humanistic management literature, this paper develops a framework for TSIs based on whether human dignity is recognized or ignored and whether a deficit-based or strength-based approach to vulnerability is used. This framework explains different types of TSIs and provides real-life examples.

The framework developed in this paper discusses four different types of TSIs: (1) exclusionary, a deficit-based approach where dignity is ignored; (2) opportunistic, a strength-based approach where dignity is ignored; (3) paternalistic, a deficit-based approach where dignity is recognized; and (4) humanistic, a strength-based approach where dignity is recognized. The paper also identifies five pathways that service organizations could use to implement these approaches, including two traps (utility and charity) and three opportunities (resourcing, humanizing and full awakening) embedded within these pathways.

This paper provides examples of service industries and specific companies to exemplify the framework developed. Also, it discusses the well-being implications and potential well-being outcomes associated with each type of TSI.

This paper offers a novel framework based on two dimensions that are relatively new to the service literature, i.e. dignity and vulnerability approach. This paper also highlights the importance of including these two dimensions in future service research.

This paper offers a novel framework based on two relatively new dimensions to the service literature: dignity and strengths-based approach. This paper also highlights the importance of including these two dimensions in future service research.