SOEP Brown Bag Seminar

Using panel data from Understanding Society, this paper presents a methodology for conceptualising and measuring poor-quality employment in the UK as a distinct concept from job quality. This allows us to identify the most vulnerable employed workers in the UK. Key to this approach is the recognition that poor employment conditions exacerbate each other leading to more intense levels of deprivation and frequently leading to workers becoming “stuck” in poor-quality employment. This situation is potentially reinforced by existing welfare state policies and conditionalities, leaving workers in a situation in which they become trapped.
This article will answer these questions and thus makes three key contributions to the literature on employment: first, it conceptualises poor-quality employment as a distinct concept from job quality or in-work poverty in a way that takes account of its multidimensionality. Second, based on Sehnbruch et al., (2020), it considers the distribution and joint distribution of deprivations in the labour market thus establishing how intensely workers are deprived. And third, whether this affects their likelihood of finding pathways out of chronic poor-quality employment. The paper concludes by discussing the relevance of this approach and its findings.