Job Insecurity, Parenthood, and Life-Satisfaction: Do Jobs at Risk Hurt More If You 'care'?

The growth of job insecurity since the 1970s has emerged as a core to contemporary concern within politics, in the media, and among researchers. In contrast to the relative security that characterized the three decades following World War II, insecure work represents a global challenge with wide-ranging consequences on people’s lives (Kalleberg, 2009). Almost all empirical studies on the association between insecure work and subjective well-being, have ascertained that uncertain and unpredictable work makes people substantially less happy the higher the insecurity is and the longer it lasts. Yet, evidence about whether job insecurity hurts more the longer it lasts and the more family demands you have is scant. The aim of this contribution is to estimate whether job insecurity may perpetuate through the family domain: if job insecurity hits people with family demands, the psychological burden of worrying about loosing one’s job or finding a new one increases. We analyse effects of cumulative unemployment and rising and extended perceived job insecurity with individual-level data from the German socio-economic panel (1992-2014) and the Swiss household panel (2000-2014). Our fixed-effects estimates show evidence for two effects of job insecurity on the subjective well-being of the employed and the unemployed. First, an increase in perceived job insecurity hurts both sexes in both countries and this harmful impact of insecurity does not wear off over time. The stepwise inclusion of cumulative unemployment and perceived job insecurity reveals an extraordinary 10 per cent rise in the explanatory power of our FE-models. Second, family demands alleviate in some cases the mental burden of job insecurity for employed men and unemployed women. These findings remain robust after controlling for regional unemployment, equivalent household income, age and number of children.

Main implications of this research are as follows: People do not adapt to increasing and longer-lasting job insecurity, even if they only fear rather than actually confront a job loss. These results support the argument that job insecurity is perpetuated in a risk society due to the fact that higher and extended job insecurity increases the psychological burden, and thus may transform job insecurity into a state of mind. For society at large, our results imply that the internalization of job insecurity may create sub-cultures within the workforce. By trying to fight their powerlessness they deplete their own resources thus resulting in decreased subjective well-being. One of the main policy approaches may consist in the combination of minimum wages and modes of collective self-organization that help maintain people’s ability to be active and empowered members of the labor force (Dörre, 2011). Based on the evidence of people’s well-being, these approaches seem more valuable as policy strategies than efforts aimed at further pushing work-family compatibility separately from employment quality and security.