From precarious work to precarious lives: managing and navigating uncertainty at the intersections of employment, households and the state
Herman, Eva ; Hebson, Gail ; Rubery, Jill
2025
Early view
1-22
precarious employment ; social protection ; child care ; work-life balance ; care work ; welfare state
Employment
https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170251359125
English
Bibliogr.
"This article investigates the intersection between precarious work and precarious lives through interviews with workers in the care, hospitality and art sectors. These revealed that workers experienced precarity as a double-edged sword of time and income uncertainty shaped by the context in which they were embedded – namely their employment, their household and their relations with state welfare and care systems. These three domains shaped both the constraints they faced and the buffers and resources available to them as they managed these time and income uncertainties. A dynamic work–life articulation framework is developed that embeds the strategies workers deploy to mitigate uncertainty within these three domains and their intersections. These strategies may still only result in the least bad and often far from sustainable outcome due to changing contexts and trade-offs between time and income uncertainty."
This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Digital
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