Non-Standard, Contingent, and Precarious Work in the "New Economy"

Abstract

Non-standard, contingent, and precarious employment relations - part-time work, temporary employment, skills underemployment, on-call work, and independent contracting - have become a cornerstone of the "new economy." This dissertation takes seriously the consequences of these changes in employment relations for both workers and business organizations while filling important gaps in the literature.

The first part of the dissertation (Chapters 2 and 3) investigates the impact of non-standard employment histories on workers' future labor market opportunities and addresses how these consequences vary by the race and gender of the worker. To shed light on this set of issues, I analyze data from an original field experiment - sending fictitious applications to apply for real job openings across five U.S. labor markets - and a complementary survey experiment with hiring decision-makers at U.S. firms. In both experiments, the primary manipulation was the most recent employment experience of the job applicant - full-time, part-time, or temporary agency employment, a job below the applicant's skill level, or a spell of long-term unemployment. I also manipulated the race and gender of the applicants using racialized and gendered names. By tracking employers' responses to each employment history in both the field experiment and the survey experiment, I am able to generate causal estimates of the consequences of non-standard work histories for individuals as they move through the labor market as well as probe the mechanisms underlying these consequences. The findings provide insights into how non-standard employment, race, and gender intersect in the production of labor market opportunities.

The second part of this dissertation (Chapter 4) explores the consequences of business establishments' use of non-standard workers. Drawing on employer-employee matched data in the United States, I examine how employers' use of temporary workers, on-call workers, and independent contractors is related to the attitudes and outcomes of the standard employees in those workplaces. After adjusting for key organizational and individual factors, I find that employers' use of temporary workers, but not their use of on-call workers or independent contractors, is associated with standard employees reporting lower levels of perceived job security and organizational trust as well as worse relationships with managers and co-workers.