Documents Antonucci, Lorenza 4 results

"The recent literature on platform work and the welfare state has stressed that, despite being affected by high-income insecurity, platform workers cannot easily access social protection. However, it is unclear why platform workers encounter such barriers. This article offers an inductive and empirically based theoretical framework to investigate the obstacles faced by platform workers. It shows that the barriers experienced by platform workers depend on the eligibility criteria, the assessment criteria and the trade-off between taxation and social protection. The article substantiates these claims by offering both a policy analysis of formal arrangements and a qualitative analysis of the lived experiences of welfare of 101 platform workers in Italy, Sweden and the UK during COVID-19. The research found that, while many platform workers attempted to access social protection during COVID-19, platform workers' access to social protection was affected by their positionality as outsiders, which clashes with the eligibility criteria (in Sweden and Italy); by the irregular nature of platform work, which contrasts with the rigidity of the assessment criteria (in the UK, Italy and Sweden); and by the implicit trade-off experienced by platform workers between minimising taxation and accessing to social protection (in the UK and Italy)."

"Precarity is often evoked in discussions about the rise of populism, but there is a dearth of systematic operationalization of the sociological concept of insecurity in populist research. This study fills this gap by theorizing about and empirically linking work-related and financial insecurity to populist outlook and voting in ten European countries. We propose a theoretical framework that links insecurity, respectively, to populist attitudes (symbolic link) and to populist voting (instrumental link). Our empirical investigation of 10 European countries finds a positive association between work and financial insecurity and populist outlook (people-centrism and anti-elitism, in particular) in all our case study countries. Precarity explains votes for Radical Populist Right and Radical Populist Left in all cases except populist right voting in Poland, Hungary, and Italy. Among the dimensions of precarity, financial insecurity and insecurity of work conditions show a particularly significant association with populist attitudes and voting, while the insecurity of tenure provides mixed results. These results suggest that insecurity may have an effect on the diffusion of populist attitudes and populist voting. It also indicates that populist outlook and voting should be investigated by not simply examining the insecurity of tenure but also using measures of insecurity that capture the conditions of work and financial insecurity of individuals."

"In Europe's current economic and socio-political climate, young peoples' exposure to social risks is escalating. This edited collection provides the first in-depth analysis of youth as an important case for contemporary social policy. By combining social policy and youth studies, the book explores the effects of both the economic crisis and austerity policies on the lives of young Europeans. This timely publication focusses on two fundamental contemporary challenges for European welfare states: the changing conditions faced by young people, characterized by precarity and social exclusion; and the role of social policies and welfare sources in shaping youth transitions. Through a unique combination of comparative studies and case-studies studies conducted across Europe by leading experts, the book covers a number of policy areas relevant to youth transitions including education, labour market, housing and social security policies. This book will be essential reading for academics, policy-makers and students interested in understanding how welfare states are responding to the challenges faced by young people."

"This Opinion paper has two aims: first, it discusses the limitations of the proposed EU Directive on Improving Working Conditions in Platform Work; secondly, it indicates the areas to improve in the Directive, considering the existing literature and the emerging findings of comparative research on the work and financial insecurities experienced by platform workers, and their social protection needs (GIGWELL). EU policy debates have centred on employment status and algorithmic control. In contrast, the existing literature and our emerging findings offer important insights into the relationship of platform work to wider labour market insecurity, the financial burden placed on gig workers operating as self-employed contractors and the social protection exclusions workers face across different welfare models. We conclude by discussing how this emerging research evidence could be used to improve how the EU Platform Work Directive responds to gig workers' social protection needs"