Precarious employment and workplace health outcomes in Britain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
RATIONALE: The world of work is changing rapidly, and precarious employment is becoming more prevalent in Britain and elsewhere, particularly since the 2008 financial crisis. This is despite the evidence linking employment precarity to adverse health outcomes, and the policy discourses advocating for high-quality jobs. OBJECTIVE: I seek to establish empirically the extent and nature of the potential link between employment precarity and health outcomes, which is done chiefly at the workplace level. The research can be vital from the perspective of informing policy, given that the workplace represents the level where key policy levers operate. METHODS: I use nationally representative data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey. Four workplace health outcomes (WHOs; viz., injuries, illnesses, job satisfaction, and job anxiety) have been used to examine if organizations with precarious employment arrangements are likely to experience adverse health outcomes. I use alternative econometric approaches to compare organizations that reported to have three types of precarious employment arrangements, viz., shift working, annualised hours, and zero-hours contracts (ZHCs), vis-à-vis their counterparts without such arrangements. RESULTS: The results obtained reveal that workplaces with precarious employment arrangements are significantly unhealthier, and those with the most insecure form of precarious employment perform particularly worst in this respect. CONCLUSIONS: Precarious employment may become ever more prevalent as organizations contend with economic fallouts from shocks such as Brexit or Covid-19. This may lead to sub-standard health outcomes. The positive influence of trade unions on working conditions has largely been decimated and the workforce in Britain is ageing. These combinations may pose significant challenges to public health including mental health crises. Public policy ought to help minimise adverse health outcomes linked to employment precarity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".