Precarious Employment and Well-Being: Insights from the COVID-19 Pandemic.

While precarious employment is not a new concept, it has been brought to the center of scholarly and public discourse worldwide by the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. This essay delineates how precarious employment shapes well-being and situates that relationship in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The essay also provides an overview of how the nine articles boldly investigate how these two layers of global risk-precarious employment and the pandemic-interact to shape individuals' well-being. In addition to advancing theoretical and empirical knowledge by analyzing timely data from diverse sources and populations, these articles call for more efforts on worker protection reforms and government financial support.

Employment insecurity and sleep disturbance: Evidence from 31 European countries.

For nearly half a century, jobs have become increasingly characterized by employment insecurity. We examined the implications for sleep disturbance with cross-sectional data from the European Working Conditions Survey (2010). A group of 24,553 workers between the ages of 25 and 65 years in 31 European countries were asked to indicate whether they suffered from "insomnia or general sleep difficulties" in the past 12 months. We employed logistic regression to model the association between employment insecurity and sleep disturbance for all countries combined and each individual country. For all countries combined, employment insecurity increased the odds of reporting insomnia or general sleep difficulties in the past 12 months. Each unit increase in employment insecurity elevated the odds of sleep disturbance by approximately 47%. This finding was remarkably consistent across 27 of 31 European countries, including Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and UK. These results persisted with adjustments for age, gender, immigrant status, household size, partnership status, number of children, child care, elder care, education, earner status, precarious employment status, workplace sector, workplace tenure and workplace size. Employment insecurity was unrelated to sleep disturbance in four European countries: Malta, Poland, Portugal and Romania. Our research continues recent efforts to reveal the human costs associated with working in neoliberal postindustrial labour markets. Our analyses contribute to the external validity of previous research by exploring the impact of employment insecurity across European countries.

Precarious sleep? Nonstandard work, gender, and sleep disturbance in 31 European countries.

Despite the advent of precarious work, little is known about how this form of employment can generate disparities in sleep outcomes. We extend existing work by providing a theoretical framework linking different measures of work precarity to sleep problems. We argue that the association between objective precarious working conditions and sleep disturbance is channeled through and mediated by subjective work precarity. We further argue that gender moderates the relationship between objective and subjective work precarity. We test this theoretical framework using the 2010 European Working Conditions Survey. Our results indicate that objective precarious working conditions undermine sleep by promoting the subjective experience of insecurity. Furthermore, the indirect effect of objective precarious work on sleep disturbance through subjective employment insecurity varies by gender: compared to women in similar working conditions, men report higher levels of subjective precarity. This research makes important contributions to the literatures on the health consequences of nonstandard work and social determinants of well-being.