The book at hand critically surveys the major (more precisely, tectonic) transformations and prevailing trends in the labor market in recent years, with an emphasis on exploring the phenomenon of job insecurity and its relationship with social vulnerability in the new generation, in Europe and Greece today. The effects of the pandemic on the aforementioned issues and the challenges for the framework of public policies are also examined. The focus is on the Greek context.
The book draws on the main findings (which it updates and extensively analyzes) of the Research Project titled “Precarious Work and the New Generation in Greece Today.” This particular Research Project (code OPS MIS 5048510) was implemented by a research team from the KEPE (Center for Planning and Economic Research) of the Department of Political Science at the University of Crete. It was co-funded by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund), through the Operational Program “Human Resource Development, Education and Lifelong Learning”...
From our triangulated research, it emerges that the (quantitative and qualitative) urgent expansion of precarious forms of employment results in a (often) coercive, newly constructed labor “normality,” with the (not infrequent) violation of the labor rights of precariously employed youth and, consequently, with serious implications both for their life trajectory and for labor relations, leading to an evolutionary reconstruction of the “work ethic”...”. from the Authors' Introduction
“The rich and highly revealing findings regarding the Labor Market, Precarious Employment, and its relationship with Social Vulnerability in this book are based on the exemplary use of a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodology… Thus, the authors statistically connect data and correlations with the micro-processes that frame their subjective meanings…”
This Book fills a significant gap in the Greek literature, revealing the dimensions of precarity in the Greek reality compared to what is happening in the European context, highlighting the effects of the pandemic on the labor market, and significantly contributing to our “bottom-up” knowledge of precarious work, particularly for an important segment of the workforce, the youth. It also advances policy proposals that precisely interpret the actual needs of individuals in the necessary application of these measures.
Thus, it transforms the query into a key concept for its comprehensive and multifaceted addressing. However, it also arrives at the implicit-hopeful conclusion that individuals are not passive recipients of an invisible hierarchical mechanism. Therefore, the “degree of despair” is perceived as negotiation, lukewarm consent, latent opposition, overt hostility, conscious negotiation, and purposeful manipulation of available possibilities for improving the terms of their social existence, or otherwise as a “degree” of power for those who do not have power.
from the Foreword of Professor Manos Spyridakis
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