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This paper aims to explore narratives of insecurity to understand how the casualisation of the employment relationship makes life more fragile and precarious. The authors engage in an inquiry about how multinational enterprises (MNEs) structure precariousness for workers in emerging economies. The authors attempt to understand how workers analyse their experiences of precariousness and what form their resistance takes as a result of their analysis.

The authors engage with the narratives of eight Indian workers/trade union activists working in different marginal spaces of the Indian economy to uncover a commons where we are the multitude. By commons, the authors imply shared forms of property, which stand against the concept of private property that is central to the social relations of capitalism. The authors are performing the data of workers by interspersing them in an analysis of angst and hope.

Workers understand their experiences of precariousness as emerging from a complex political economy structured by MNEs, which involves multiple fronts of marginalisation. Workers realize that they need to engage in comprehensive forms of resistance to undo the regimes of precariousness. Workers create shared universes of grief to relate to each other’s experiences of precariousness. The unfreedoms experienced by workers lead to a sharing of the social relations of commons where workers can resist by expressing solidarity with each other.

The authors contribute to practice by arguing that workers’ collectives should not accept the naturalisation of precariousness. By staging a dialogue about the injuries of precariousness, they can craft a politics of resistance that begins the process of commoning.

Workers’ politics of resistance can significantly democratise the global political economy in important ways by advancing the potential for commons.

The authors make an original contribution to the study of precariousness in the context of international business by arguing that the experience of precariousness can lead to a commons where workers resist structures of injustice.

The purpose of this paper was to establish whether precariousness of life as determined by temporary employment contributed to anxiety and depression and whether its consequences on daily life were differentiated in relation to gender.

A structural equation analysis of anxiety and depression with aspects of precariousness of life as model predictors was explored with t‐test and correlation analyses used to explore gender differences in the study variables.

The structural equation model produced strong evidence to suggest that precariousness of life was a significant predictor of both anxiety and depression. Women reported significantly higher scores than men on distrust toward the professional future and the emotional consequences on everyday life, anxiety and depression. As hypothesized, the negative consequences of temporary work in personal and family life appear more evident in women.

The results suggest that organizations should promote training courses on coping strategies to prevent the negative impact of precariousness of life aspects on anxiety and depression.

This study provides evidence supporting that temporary employment contributes to health consequences, which apply differently by gender. The study broadens understanding of temporary work management especially in regards to its health impact on female temporary workers. Furthermore, the Precariousness of Life Inventory has demonstrated an ability to tap into the latent factors of precariousness of life, revealing important gender differences and an ability to contribute to anxiety and depression.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent and determinants of the so-called precarious employment across Europe and using different measures and based on individual’s self-assessment.

Data on over two million workers across Europe (EU-15) from the European Union Labour Force Survey are utilised and a Heckman selection approach is adopted.

About one tenth of the total European workforce is in employment relationships that could be related to precariousness. The sources of precariousness are mainly involuntary part-time and temporary work. Less prominent as a source of precariousness is job insecurity related to fear of job loss. Vulnerable groups are found to have a higher risk of precariousness while significant country variations indicate that precariousness cannot be examined in isolation of the national context. Finally, signals of previous employment inability, such as lack of past working experience, as well as the state of labour market significantly increase the risk of precarious work.

The present study utilises a large-scale survey in order to investigate the incidence of precarious employment in a harmonised way and produce results that are comparable across EU-15 countries.

The object of this research is the reconstruction of the existing legal response by European Union states to the phenomenon of immigration. It seeks to analyse the process of conferral of protection.

One main dimension is selected and discussed: the case law of the national courts. The study focuses on the legal status of immigrants resulting from the intervention of these national courts.

The research shows that although the courts have conferred an increasing protection on immigrants, this has not challenged the fundamental principle of the sovereignty of the states to decide, according to their discretionary prerogatives, which immigrants are allowed to enter and stay in their territories. Notwithstanding the differences in the general constitutional and legal structures, the research also shows that the courts of the three countries considered – France, Germany and Spain – have progressively moved towards converging solutions in protecting immigrants.

The research contributes to a better understanding of the different legal orders analysed.

The labor market responds in a differentiated manner during recessions and expansions, and it is of vital importance to know the magnitude asymmetries. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effects of the disinflationary monetary policy (2005Q1–2022Q4) through the sacrifice rate measured in terms of unemployment and rate of critical labor conditions (RCLC) with nonlinear auto regressive distributed lag (NLARDL; Shin et al., 2014), which allows to efficiently estimate asymmetric effects in short and long terms in the presence of variables of different integration orders.

The authors estimate an asymmetric accelerationist Phillips curve, augmented with labor precariousness for Mexico (2005Q1–2022Q4) following the NLARDL approach (Shin et al., 2014).

The authors prove that the increase in the unemployment gap has greater disinflationary effects than the RCLC in both the short and the long term; the expansionary phases of the business cycle, which reduce U^Gap, do not have inflationary effects either in the short or in the long run, but improvements in the labor market do, when RCLC is reduced; raising RCLC appears to have been the companies’ main survival strategy since 2015; and these asymmetries can generate a low unemployment trap with high and growing precariousness, with huge dynamic costs for well-being, economic growth, inequality and poverty.

As labor precariousness grows, the implications are several both in the short and long run. In the short run, the most notorious example of the effects on workers has to do with unstable and insecure situations, that disrupt all their life planning options, and health issues. Bohle et al. (2004) found in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries that casual employees had less desirable and predictable working hours, greater work–life conflict and more associated health complaints than people with permanent jobs.

The approach includes the labor precariousness variable, which describes a new phenomenon in the labor market. Nowadays, workers are facing a new threat since firms are employing a new labor cost reduction strategy in which they do not lay off workers but rather paying them less, working them more hours, or reducing benefits. The asymmetries between the effects of precarity and unemployment can generate a poverty trap in the long run. This problem is, once again, of great relevance in the context of global high inflation.

The paper aims to explore the value of various notions of precarity for the study of information practices and for addressing inequities and marginalization from an information standpoint.

Several interrelated conceptualizations of precarity and associated terms from outside of library and information science (LIS) are presented. LIS studies involving precarity and related topics, including various situations of insecurity, instability, migration and transition, are then discussed. In that context, new approaches to information precarity and new directions for information practices research are explored.

Studies that draw from holistic characterizations of precarity, especially those engaging with theories from beyond the field, are quite limited in LIS research. Broader understandings of precarity in information contexts may contribute to greater engagement with political and economic considerations and to development of non-individualistic responses and services.

The presentation of a framework for an initial model of information precarity and the expansion of connections between existing LIS research and concepts of precarity from other fields suggest a new lens for further addressing inequities, marginalization and precarious life in LIS research.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue by problematising labour agency, precariousness, and labour fragmentation as defining themes of the interplay between employment relations, migration and mobility.

Drawing from discussions about the impact of globalisation on changes in features of work and employment, and bringing together theory and research on employment relations and labour migration, the paper discusses the relational spatial and temporal nature of agency, the diverse features of worker experiences of precariousness, and the resulting fragmentation in labour solidarity.

Labour agency, precariousness and labour fragmentation intersect to create the axis of dynamics of hardship and abuse that dominate work experiences of migrant workers in the global labour market. Globalisation has a pervasive impact in articulating and perpetuating systemic processes of closure, entrapment and containment, which are triggered by migration and legitimised by dynamics of employment relations.

The paper contributes to current discussions about the interplay between migration, mobility and employment relations and sets out future directions of research to enhance our understanding of the role of employment relations to perpetuate, legitimise and normalise dynamics of globalisation that promote the migrant division of labour and create contradictory labour demands and displacements in the global labour market.

This study aims to understand the production of consent to precarious working conditions in administration students' internship experiences.

A total of 13 students of an undergraduate program in Business Administration in a private university were interviewed. The students' perceptions about the dynamics of the internship and their engagement in this experience were explored through thematic analysis.

Internships became more than spaces to learn about the world of work. They are also the locus of professional socialization toward precarious work. The detachment of internships from their educational scope is mediated by neonormative control mechanisms that subjectively mobilize the interns, producing the institutionalization and appreciation of the precarious experience, resignified as something that leads to autonomy, learning and a job position.

The article can help students, universities and companies to assess the role of internships in training future professionals.

The research problematizes the internship as a form of professional socialization toward precarious work and its detachment from the original educational purpose. The article critically contributes to the debate about the current professional socialization process of young students.

The article highlights the subjective dimension that supports students' consent to dysfunctional internships, discussing both the experience of work precariousness and exploitation, and the terms of the students' engagement in such dynamics, bridging consent to neonormative controls.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that: in a context of global labour market competition and in the absence of new strategic repertoires, class trade unions are progressively becoming “managers of precariousness”. Thus, the paper challenges the compromise logic as the unique solution to corporate threats to relocation, since it undermines trade union power resources, mainly discursively and organisationally, and hinders trade union capacity to transform the balance of forces to their favour later, when the hegemonic discourse can more easily be challenged in periods of crisis.

The paper draws upon the doctoral fieldwork the author undertook in the city and province of Barcelona during Spring–Summer 2015. More than 30 semi-structured interviews to various union delegates and regional metal officials have been accompanied by an exhaustive review of primary and secondary documentation. In so doing, this paper gives a rich and nuanced account on the different “world-views” and strategies that union delegates pursue when bargaining against transnational corporations.

This paper shows how the conservative position that Spanish trade unions adopted to the 2008 financial crisis in the automotive industry is path-dependent to dynamics established during the 1990s when lean production techniques were implemented in exchange for higher salaries. It draws upon the collective bargaining history of the Nissan–Zona–Franca assembly factory in the outskirts of Barcelona to, crucially, explain how signing micro-corporatist pacts and portraying them as the unique solution to corporate threats to relocation undermines trade union power resources, and has two important drawbacks: that micro-corporatist pacts only postpone the recurring threat to relocation to the future by eroding, not improving, the conditions of the workforce, accepting corporate discourse erodes the solidarity among workers, and it also allows yellow unions to displace class unions.

This paper enriches and updates the literature on micro-corporatism, collective bargaining in transnational corporations, and the erosion of trade union power resources which dates back to the 1990s and early 2000s. Whilst the negative aspects that competitiveness pacts have on workers’ salaries and conditions have been widely reported, this paper provides a rich and updated explanation of how such pacts have negative repercussions on the discursive and organisational power resources that unions have at the workplace level. In that sense, the originality of this paper rests on engaging into a substantiated historical analysis on how trade unions change throughout time as a result, at least partially, of their own strategic choices. Moreover, this paper clearly shows that concessionary positions towards collective bargaining are self-undermining.