Increasing flexibility at labor market entry and in the early career: a new conceptual framework for the flexCAREER project

Abstract

"Continuous full-time work is becoming less frequent in modern societies. Instead, flexible forms of employment such as part-time work, fixed-term contracts, and self-employment as well as phases of unemployment are gaining importance. These trends are supposed to be more pronounced at labor market entry, leading to a prolonged entry process and increasing difficulties in becoming established on the labor market. However, there are vast differences between countries with regard to forms of labor market flexibility and the degrees of uncertainty young people have to face. This working paper provides a theoretical framework for the empirical studies within the flexCAREER research program. The aim of flexCAREER is to study the consequences of employment flexibility strategies on labor market entries and early careers as well as their impact on structures of social inequality in a cross-country perspective. We explain the reasons behind the rise in employment flexibility and develop hypotheses with special regard to nation-based institutional differences. In particular, we describe which role institutional settings such as the educational system, production regimes, employment protection legislations, and labor market policies play in determining the consequences of employment flexibility strategies. We focus on the institutional contexts of Great Britain, the USA, Germany (East and West), France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, and Hungary, which are the countries under study. The hypotheses in this working paper concern the following aspects: 1. the phase of labor market entry in terms of a) the duration of search for the first job and b) the quality of this first job (with regard to the flexibility of the employment contract and the 'adequacy' of the job with respect to the employee's educational qualification). 2. In view of the early career, we outline our expectations in terms of a) the risk of unemployment, b) the chances of reentering the labor force when unemployed (e.g., with regard to the duration of unemployment until finding a new job), c) upward and downward mobility, d) the chances of leaving precarious work at the beginning of the career, and e) the risk of making a transition into a precarious form of employment." (author's abstract)