Suchergebnisse

This article aims to investigate how job satisfaction varies for different types of self-employment classified on the basis of working conditions – genuine vs. dependent – and the motivation to enter self-employment – voluntary vs. involuntary – in different institutional contexts. First, it analyses how job satisfaction is affected by the cumulative experience of different forms of economic and operational dependency, and by the involuntariness of entering self-employment. Second, it studies how differences in job satisfaction between types of self-employment are modulated by the country's entrepreneurship support environment. The analyses are based on the 2017 ad-hoc module on self-employment of the EU-LFS. Results show that the negative consequences of being self-employed on an involuntary basis, the accumulation of forms of dependency, and the lack of business opportunities all influence the job satisfaction of the self-employed without employees and small entrepreneurs.

In the studies on labour market change and transformation of employment relations, the growth of new forms of self-employment, including platform work, has raised a broad debate about how to define, classify, and analyse the wide range of positions within the heterogeneous category of self-employed workers. This article analyses the emergent methodologies used in European comparative labour statistics to identify forms of dependency in self-employment. Using the 6th wave of the 2015 European Working Condition Survey and the 2017 ad hoc module on self-employment from the European Labour Force Survey, this article discusses how the representation of dependent self-employment changes by adopting a different operationalization of economic and operational dependency. Findings show how different indicators of dependency change the representation of self-employment in different economic sectors, affecting our understanding of the transformation of working arrangements within self-employment and the boundaries between employment and self-employment.

This article deals with families' risk of entering poverty as a consequence of childbirth in four European Union (EU) welfare clusters. Poverty risks around childbirth are institutionally stratified according to specific characteristics of national welfare systems and the value they assign to family policies as well as the kind of labour market deregulation. While southern European countries are known for having welfare systems that make few provisions for 'the future generations of citizens', conservative and social-democratic countries differ significantly in the amount of their investments in family policies. We compare households' risks of entering poverty at childbirth between Southern Europe and the rest of Europe using pooled longitudinal European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data and applying panel models and propensity score matching. We show that childbirth is very poverty inducing only in southern Europe, especially for the less 'labour market–attached' households (precarious worker families, the unemployed) and traditional single-earner families, thereby pointing out the under-protectiveness of the Southern European systems of family and social policies. This situation is exacerbating additional inequality as families' well-being largely depends on the previous unequal social stratification of resources.