Normalizing Precarity? Youth Unemployment and Employment Instability in Poland

In the last decades, there has been a heated debate concerning the consequences of employment flexibility in many European countries. Concerns have been raised that flexibility may foster a two-tier labour market, where highly protected insider jobs coexist with unstable employment, offering inferior working conditions. Substandard employment is concentrated among young school leavers. In this context, Poland is an interesting case: although the Polish economy has done quite well throughout the current economic crisis, the rates of youth unemployment and temporary employment remain disturbingly high. Precarity for young workers appears to have become the norm, with more than 25% of economically active 15-24-year-olds in unemployment, and 66% of employees working fixed-term (EUROSTAT, 2012). This paper presents the results of an analysis of the distribution of various aspects of labour market precarity for the Polish youth: not only unemployment and temporary employment, but also unstable employment histories signifying a weak attachment to the job market. The quantitative analyses are conducted on subsamples of the youngest cohorts of respondents (aged 21-25) from two most recent waves of the Polish Panel Survey (POLPAN), 2008 and 2013. POLPAN data include detailed information on the respondents' employment history, enabling a dynamic analysis of young peoples' early labour market trajectories. The quantitative results are supplemented by a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews, reconstructing the ways in which the young define their own experiences of unemployment and precarity. Paradoxically, it appears that even as young underemployed Poles tend to regard their current employment situation as unsatisfactory, psychological coping mechanisms lead them to legitimize existing labour-market inequalities.