Underemployment
Report
Independent work: choice, necessity and the gig economy
A full-time job with one employer has been considered the norm for decades, but increasingly, this fails to capture how a large share of the workforce makes a living. A narrow focus only on traditional jobs ignores tens of millions who put together their own income streams and shape their own work lives. Although independent...
Report
Working by the hour: the economic consequences of unpredictable scheduling practices
Many workers in the United States are at the mercy of unpredictable scheduling practices, often facilitated by new technologies where computer algorithms create employee schedules based on projected consumer demand. Unpredictable schedules can be found in many occupations but are most common in retail and service industries—the very industries in which workers also face a...
Report
Wage insurance in an era of non-traditional work
As inequality has markedly risen over the past few decades, so has economic volatility. Abundant research demonstrates that both individuals and households have faced much greater instability in income since the 1970s – a trend dubbed by Jacob Hacker as the “Great Risk Shift.” Income insecurity can lead to problems and crises like bad credit...
Report
Understanding insecure work
This report examines insecure work in NZ from four perspectives. It is a collaborative effort to increase our understanding of the insecure work landscape in NZ by utilising two waves of the Survey of Working Life (2008 and 2012). While we acknowledge that the perception of job insecurity and precarity in general could also apply...
Report
Future working: the rise of Europe's independent professionals
By the beginning of 2013, five years since the onset of the recession, there had been a loss of around seven million jobs across the European Union. On average, one in ten people were left without work, with countries such as Spain and Greece facing much higher unemployment rates. Yet one part of the labour...