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The purpose of this paper is to verify whether higher education increases the likelihood of young Italian workers moving from non‐standard to standard wage contracts.

The authors exploit a data set on labour market flows, produced by the Italian National Statistical Office, by interviewing about 85,000 graduate and non‐graduate individuals aged 15‐29 in transition between five labour market states: standard wage employment; non‐standard wage employment; self‐employment; unemployment; inactivity. From these data, an average six‐year transition matrix was constructed whose coefficients can be interpreted as probabilities of moving from one state to another over time.

As the authors find evidence for the so‐called stepping stone hypothesis (that is, a higher probability of moving to a permanent job for individuals starting from a temporary job), the authors expect graduates to be more likely to pass from non‐standard to standard wage contracts than non‐graduates, because the signalling effect of education is enhanced by the stepping stone effect of non‐standard wage contracts. Nevertheless, the authors find that non‐standard wage contracts of graduates are more likely to be terminated as bad job/worker matches.

This paper adds to the empirical literature on the probability of young workers moving from non‐standard wage contracts to a permanent job. By separating graduates from non‐graduates, it was found that education reduces the likelihood of passing from non‐standard to standard wage contracts. The authors interpret this result as evidence of the changing labour market that makes it more difficult to infer the productivity of graduates as opposed to non‐graduates.

Non‐standard forms of work figure prominently in debates about the flexibility of the labour force. Non‐standard employment, in the form of part‐time jobs, own‐account self‐employment, temporary working and multiple job holding has been increasing in many industrialized countries. Contrasts its prevalence in 1989 in Canada and the UK, through a systematic secondary analysis of the Canadian General Social Survey and the UK Labour Force Survey. While the overall frequency of non‐standard work is the same in the two countries, notable cross‐national differences are observed when age, gender and industry are introduced, and when the different forms of non‐standard work are examined separately. Among the more noteworthy differences is the higher proportion of employed British women in non‐standard jobs.

Currently, a much-debated issue concerns the social and political significance of the emergence of the precariat, a social class consisting of people for whom uncertainty and unpredictability of life circumstances and employment relations make it impossible to plan for the future, forcing them to live on a day-to-day basis (Standing, 2011). However, it remains unclear how the precariat may be defined and operationalized. On the one hand, treating non-standard employment arrangements (fixed-term contracts, temporary agency work, etc.) as a basis for identifying precarious jobs is likely to be misleading, as research has shown non-standard employment to be heterogeneous with respect to working conditions and chances for achieving stabilization. On the other hand, subjective perceptions of security may also be misleading as indicators of precarity, as they are compounded by psychological coping mechanisms and perceptions of reference group status. This analysis attempts to disentangle the complex relationships between non-standard employment and perceived insecurity in order to provide grounds for a more adequate conceptualization and measurement of job precarity. Specifically, I assess the extent to which the relationship between worker contractual status and perceived job, labor market, and employment insecurity is conditional on various characteristics of workers, their jobs, and their households, taking into account the country-level economic and institutional context. The analysis is based on multi-level regression models using data from the 2010 European Working Conditions Survey.

How to get people working longer and retiring later is a new research topic for contemporary social policy. Flexible work options could be one possibility, but are special shorter‐working‐hours‐for‐elderly workplaces really important in order to increase employment among the 65+ age group? The purpose of this paper is to argue, in the case of Japan, that increased availability of non‐standard work formats would not improve labour force participation among the elderly when it is driven by corporate objectives to reduce labour costs. On the contrary, supply‐driven increase in flexible work formats sends a signal of unfavourable labour market conditions and causes the elderly to stay out of labour.

The paper utilizes the Labour Force Survey, a nationally representative data set showing labour force participation and employment formats across all age groups.

It is true that non‐standard work formats are being progressively more used among elderly workers. However labour force participation rate has increased only in cases where the increase in flexible work formats was demand driven, meaning only to the point where both standard and non‐standard work options were equally available to the whole population. When economic conditions force companies to offer more non‐standard work options, increase in supply side takes place. This sends a signal of unfavourable labour market conditions to the elderly population, who are more elastic to labour market changes and by using a pension can easily withdraw from the workforce.

This analysis suggests that policy objectives to create flexible‐elderly work formats in order to increase the employment rate and reduce costs for the retirement system will not bring expected the results.

Although policy objective is to increase the employment rate among the elderly, focusing only on elderly will provide moderate results. Elderly population would come along, but only with the working age population. The first point of reform should be placed on the overall labour market, by diminishing major differences between standard and non‐standard work formats. One way could be the act of applying social security and company benefits to non‐standard work formats. Or opposite to that, the act of diminishing social security and company benefits to standard work formats.

This paper contributes to the literature by broadening understanding of elderly population behaviour in the labour market. With the increasing number of elderly people, retirement systems are looking for methods to postpone full‐retirement. Through analysis, the paper seeks to understand if and when flexible employment formats among the elderly are demand or supply driven.

In this study the authors examine whether bridge employees tend to hold non-standard jobs, and if so, whether non-standard job choice is deliberate. Moreover, the authors examine whether fulfillment of employment expectations affects the personal and work attitudes of bridge employees.

The authors' research and hypotheses are supported and developed through psychological contract theory. The authors collected data from 195 bridge employees, employed in a variety of jobs, through an online survey. Hypotheses were tested using hierarchical multiple regression.

This study suggests that some bridge employees may engage in non-standard employment deliberately. Moreover, we show that fulfillment of perceived obligation by employers (psychological contract) is associated with personal and work attitudes (life satisfaction, job satisfaction, affective commitment, normative commitment and intentions to stay) of bridge employees.

While this study supports psychological contract theory as an important framework for understanding bridge employment, sample size, cross-sectional data and a lack of diversity in the sample limit causality, generalizability and data robustness. Future research should strive to replicate and extend the current findings.

The present study underlines the importance of designing jobs to meet the expectations of bridge employees. Also, it highlights the preference of bridge employees to engage in non-standard employment.

The authors extend bridge employment research by empirically examining the relationship between unmet employment expectations and the personal and work attitudes of bridge employees.

While forms of non‐standard employment (which include part‐time work and temporary employment) have received active promotion in recent years, possible negative effects emerging from these forms of employment have not been high on the agenda. This paper, accordingly, aims to compare workers with non‐standard contracts and those with standard contracts in relation to transitions out of employment into unemployment, inactivity, household/care activities and education/training. Country differences in outcome are expected due to varying regulations of standard and non‐standard employment and different reasons for resorting to forms of non‐standard employment.

The comparison covers four countries, namely Denmark, Germany, the UK and Spain. The segmentation theory is tested by analysing mobility patterns on the basis of the European Community Household Panel data. Event history analysis methods are used. Maximum likelihood multinomial regression models are calculated on the event history data in order to assess competing exits (unemployment, inactivity, household/care and education) between non‐standard and standard workers.

The risk of temporary workers exiting employment is greatest by far in Spain, but also evident in the other countries: casual employment is even more volatile than fixed‐term employment. Concerning part‐time workers, downward transitions to inactivity and/or household/care are much more frequent than among full‐time workers, and this is true even in Spain and Denmark where part‐time employment is not traditionally used to combine work with family activities. The expectation that there would be no differences in exits to unemployment – insofar as employment protection legislation applies to both full‐time and regular part‐time workers – proves true only for Denmark and Germany.

In contrast to most papers on the segmentation potential of non‐standard employment this paper is comparative. Furthermore, it uses event history methods and places a special focus on potentially employability‐enhancing “sideways transitions” to education/training measures.

The purpose of this paper is to review “institutional experimentation” for protecting workers in response to the contraction of the standard employment relationship and the corresponding rise of “non-standard” forms of paid work.

The paper draws on the existing research and knowledge base of the authors as well as a thorough review of the extant literature relating to: non-standard employment contracts; sources of labour supply engaging in non-standard work; exogenous pressures on the employment relationship; intermediaries that separate the management from the control of labour; and entities that subvert the employment relationship.

Post-war industrial relations scholars characterised the traditional regulatory model of collective bargaining and the standard employment contract as a “web of rules”. As work relations have become more market mediated, new institutional arrangements have developed to govern these relations and regulate the terms of engagement. The paper argues that these are indicative of an emergent “patchwork of rules” which are instructive for scholars, policymakers, workers’ representatives and employers seeking solutions to the contraction of the traditional regulatory model.

While the review of the institutional experimentation is potentially instructive for developing solutions to gaps in labour regulation, a drawback of this approach is that there are limits to the realisation of policy transfer. Some of the initiatives discussed in the paper may be more effective than others for protecting workers on non-standard contracts, but further research is necessary to test their effectiveness including in different contexts.

The findings indicate that a task ahead for the representatives of government, labour and business is to determine how to adapt the emergent patchwork of rules to protect workers from the new vulnerabilities created by, for example, employer extraction and exploitation of their individual bio data, social media data and, not far off, their personal genome sequence.

The paper addresses calls to examine the “institutional intersections” that have informed the changing ways that work is conducted and regulated. These intersections transcend international, national, sectoral and local units of analysis, as well as supply chains, fissured organisational dynamics, intermediaries and online platforms. The analysis also encompasses the broad range of stakeholders including businesses, labour and community groups, nongovernmental organisations and online communities that have influenced changing institutional approaches to employment protection.

This introductory chapter surveys institutional experimentation that has emerged internationally in response to the contraction of the traditional model of employment protection. Various initiatives are discussed according to the particular challenges they are designed to address: the emergence of non-standard employment contracts; increasing sources of labour supply engaging in non-standard work; intensification of exogenous pressures on the employment relationship; the growth of intermediaries that separate the management from the control of labour; and the emergence of entities that subvert the employment relationship entirely. Whereas post-war industrial relations scholars characterised the traditional regulatory model as a ‘web of rules’, we argue that nascent institutional experimentation is indicative of an emergent ‘patchwork of rules’. The identification of such experimentation is instructive for scholars, policymakers, workers’ representatives and employers seeking solutions to the contraction of the traditional regulatory model.

The international trend in the growth and incidence of “non‐standard employment”, and its highly gendered nature, is well documented. Similarly, interest in employee involvement or participation by academics and practitioners has seen the emergence of a rapidly growing body of literature. Despite the continued interest in each of these areas, the literature is relatively silent when it comes to where the two areas intersect, that is, what the implications are for employee participation in the growth of non‐standard employment. This paper seeks to redress this relative insularity in the literature by examining some broad trends in this area in Australia. The literature lacks one clear, accepted definition of “non‐standard” employment. For ease of definition, and because of the nature of the available data, we focus on part‐time employment in this paper. The paper analyses data from the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey of 1995 (AWIRS 95). It tests the hypotheses that part‐time employees enjoy less access to participatory management practices in the workplace than their full‐time counterparts, and that this diminishes the access to participation in the workplace enjoyed by female workers in comparison with their male colleagues, since the part‐time workforce is predominantly feminised. These hypotheses were strongly confirmed. This has major implications for workplace equity, and for organisational efficiency.

This paper analyses the relation between occupational characteristics and the probability that a worker in the Netherlands has a false self-employed arrangement instead of an employee arrangement. These are arrangements in which self-employed workers perform tasks in the hierarchy of the firm as if they were employees.

Data from the Dutch Labour Force Survey is used to analyse the relationship between occupational skill, routine and wage level and the probability to be a false self-employed or a standard or non-standard employee.

The results show that the probability to be false self-employed decreases slightly with the skill level of the occupation, but there is no evidence that false self-employment is more likely in low paid, routine occupations. Workers in the lowest paid occupations are more likely to have a non-standard contract as an employee. False self-employment arrangements are more likely in the (lower) middle paid occupations. Finally, the results show that working in the highest paid occupations increases the probability of being in a false self-employed arrangement, but only in arrangements that are characterised by economic and organizational dependency. These are arrangements with financial dependency on one client for income combined with dependency on this client on when and where to work.

This study makes an important contribution to the literature on identifying vulnerable self-employed workers as well as to the literature on mechanisms behind the growth of solo self-employment.