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Safety stewards are an important part of the events sector, providing a supplementary pool of casual workers to support event operations, but there has been limited attention paid to their work experiences, aspirations, training and progression opportunities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 safety stewards to begin to understand the lived experiences of these precarious workers. Findings indicate that stewards do not follow a traditional career trajectory. They are required to be continually flexible, both in their availability to work and in the type of work they do. Participants report feeling compelled to accept work offered, often beyond their usual area of expertise and without additional training or support and may feel that stewarding does not offer a viable career path. Without addressing some of these negative consequences of precarity, which do not lead to decent work, it is likely many stewards will leave the sector for other roles, thus undermining the future of the industry.

This review examines precarity through two foci. First, I focus on related terms of the lumpenproletariat and informal economy, each of which have left their mark on the notion of precarity as a bounded historical condition, and its related notion of the precariat, a sociological category of those who find themselves subject to intermittent casual forms of labor. I explore the ways in which these terms offer pictures of politics and the state that are inherited by the term precarity, understood as the predicament of those who live at the juncture of unstable contract labor and a loss of state provisioning. I then turn to the second pole of precarity to chart a tension between asserting a common condition of ontological precarity and the impulse to describe the various ways in which vulnerability appears within forms of life.

Featuring numerous moments of close survival, J.M. Coetzee's novels display a double concern with precarity—the economic, social and political uncertainties suffered by disenfranchised and marginalized characters—and with the precariousness of life, i.e. the vulnerability and fragility of the body. The significance of the moments of close survival consists in the tension between the religious sense of the precarious as that which is undeservedly given and can be revoked at any time, and the purely man-made, political nature of precarity. Barely surviving, the privileged survivors of Coetzee's fictions are reminded that they owe not only their life to luck but also their privilege of being shielded from most threats to life.

Following the financial and economic crisis, welfare policies across the EU are increasingly becoming instruments for limiting the mobility of certain EU migrants. In this article, we focus on EU citizens who see their freedom of movement in the EU being restricted after they have applied for social assistance or unemployment benefits in their country of residence. Doing so, we conceptualize undocumented EU migration by means of the concepts of ‘non-deportability’, ‘deservingness’ and ‘precariousness’. Overall, this article – based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Italian migrants in Belgium – expands our understanding of undocumented migration by demonstrating how arbitrary and intimidating bureaucratic processes undermine the exercise of EU citizenship.

This article presents an overview of the recent work on precarious employment and employment quality in relation to workers’ health and well-being. More specifically, the article mainly reviews the work performed in the E.U. 7th Framework project, SOPHIE. First, we present our overarching conceptual framework. Then, we provide a compiled overview of the evidence on the sociodemographic and European crosscountry distribution of employment quality and employment precariousness. Subsequently, we provide the current evidence regarding the relations with health and broader worker well-being indicators. A final section summarizes current insights on the pathways relating precarious employment and health and well-being. The article concludes with a plea for further data collection and research into the longitudinal effects of employment precariousness among emerging groups of workers. Based on the evidence compiled in this article, policymakers should be convinced of the harmful health and well-being effects of employment precariousness and (further) labor market flexibilization.

This article uses a new multidimensional indicator to measure precariousness among young workers across all EU-28 countries. This indicator measures both the incidence and intensity of precariousness. The analysis has involved five dimensions: wages, type of contract, type of working day, disempowerment, and job insecurity. Our database is the European Union Labour Force Survey for the period 2009–2016. The main indication of precariousness is low wages. We find high rates of precariousness for Mediterranean countries (because of low wages and temporary contracts), Denmark (low wages), and the Netherlands (expansion of involuntary part-time jobs). Central European countries have moderate rates, and most Continental and Eastern countries have low rates. We also find that a higher level of education is related to a lower probability of having a precarious job. Finally, we find a greater probability of having a precarious job among women in most countries, and non-statistically significant differences by country of birth.

Digital platform capitalism, as exemplified by companies like Uber or Lyft has the potential to transform employment and working conditions for an increasing segment of the worforce. Most digital economy workers are exposed to the health damaging precarious employment conditions characteristic of the contemporary working class in high income countries. Just as with Guy Standing or Mike Savage’s “precariat” it might appear that digital platform workers are a new social class or that they do not belong to any social class. Yet the class conflict interests (wages, benefits, employment and working conditions, collective action) of digital platform workers are similar to other members of the working class.

In view of the difficult period professional journalism is going through and the challenges facing journalists in their day-to-day work, this paper seeks to identify the main problems affecting professional Spanish journalists from the perspective of journalists, citizens and experts. To this end, the research presents results obtained through surveys of Spanish journalists, citizen focus groups and in-depth interviews with experts. The findings derived from the survey of journalists conducted in 2018 are compared with those from a survey of Spanish and European journalists conducted in 2012, both of which used the same parameters. The inclusion of findings from an additional survey carried out in 2008 by the researchers of this paper allow us to plot the evolution of the problems faced by the profession in Spain, highlighting those that have remained unchanged and become more deeply entrenched over a decade marked by the global economic crisis. The results show that Spanish journalists identified job insecurity as the main problem of their profession, while economic and political pressures came in second and third place respectively.

In the logic of neoliberal managerialism, the intensification of work, the cult of performance, and the pursuit of productivity and profit at the expense of labor rights and workers’ health exacerbate abusive management practices such as moral harassment. This study investigated whether different dimensions of precarious work would predict moral harassment in a sample of 747 SUAS workers, with a mean age of 38.34 years (SD = 8.22) and predominantly female (88.6%). A sociodemographic questionnaire was used, along with the Moral Harassment Workplace Scale (MHWS) and the Perception Scale of Work Conditions Quality and Employment Bond (PSWCQEB). “Quality of Employment Bond,” “Quality of Interprofessional Relations and Workplace Equality” and “Precarious Work” were significant predictors of this type of harassment, explaining 35% of variance in moral harassment due to labor conditions. “Quality of Interprofessional Relations and Workplace Equality” and “Healthy and Safe Work Environment” explained 13% of variance in moral harassment due to prejudice. “Quality of Interprofessional Relations and Workplace Equality” was negatively associated with moral harassment in situations involving humiliation, explaining 32.3% of variance. The study concludes that moral harassment and precarious work are interconnected phenomena that impact SUAS workers and reflect the logics of capitalist social relations of production and neoliberalism, even in the context of public management. Keywords: Moral harassment; precarious work, Unified Social Assistance System; multiple regression analysis; workers.